Page 4 of Someone in the Water

Frankie

I tip my head to one side and assess the canvas.

I don’t often paint landscapes, but the view from this place is so stunning that it has inspired me to give it a go.

I don’t think my new watercolour will win any awards, but I’m grateful for how it has distracted me this afternoon, and I like the sense of tranquillity that the painting radiates.

Especially when I know it’s the calm before the storm.

My stomach growls, and I remember that I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I take a pasta ready meal out of the fridge and put it in the microwave. As I wait for it to heat up, I start making the familiar deals with myself.

If I don’t force sleep, the nightmares won’t come.

If I accept the insomnia, my body will find a way to rest when it needs.

If I give my imagination an outlet by painting the mazzeri, I won’t start to believe they’re real.

The microwave pings. I slide the pasta onto a plate and take it outside.

The sun is setting, wispy clouds lit up orange against the darkening blue sky.

I sink into the soft bucket chair and watch dusk float towards night as I chew.

By the time I’ve finished my meal, the sun has disappeared over the horizon, so I take my plate back inside and open up Spotify on my laptop.

Five minutes later, I’m back behind my easel with a fresh canvas resting on its ledge.

Music spills out of the portable speaker.

I always listen to the same playlist when I hide away from the world every summer.

Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’. Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Where Is the Love?’ Kelis’ ‘Milkshake’.

Hits that take me back twenty-one years, like an act of self-harm.

I haven’t heard from Lola since I sent her that message, but I can’t let myself worry about that.

She’ll be in a bar by now, I imagine, or maybe a nightclub, drinking and dancing with Tamsyn, Martha, and Ruby.

Four girls enjoying their post-college summer holiday without a care in the world.

Just as I thought it would be for me that same summer.

I turn up the volume and focus on the white square in front of me.

And I paint. Scenes that I have grown to hate, but that seem to live inside me.

Corsican mountains at night, cedar and fir trees glowing in the moonlight.

Spiky white asphodels – known by the locals in Corsica as flowers of the dead.

Red deer hiding in the shadows, golden eagles roosting on rocky ledges with watchful eyes.

And men with hoods, their faces obscured, prowling through the undergrowth with weapons.

The mazzeri dream hunters.

I would never let my students paint onto canvas without a sketch to follow, but this is more about survival than art.

Exposure therapy maybe. The mazzeri story is a mythical legend distinct to Corsica, the island where my dad was born, and where I spent that terrible summer, and for centuries it was considered as real as Catholicism by the locals.

Of course it’s not real – all myths are just stories – but that doesn’t make the dreams any less scary.

As I have discovered for myself. Especially when … but no, I won’t go there tonight.

At around 3 a.m., my eyelids start to grow heavy, but instinctively I know it’s too early to lie down.

That if I try to sleep, my brain will fill up with a toxic merging of real memories and crazy fantasies.

I need to finish the painting first and be so tired that I can barely stand.

At that point, if I help things along with a sleeping pill, I’ll black out rather than sleep, and the nightmares should stay away.

Two hours later, with dawn rising, the picture is finished.

I stand back to study it. Art was my favourite subject at school, and I was good at it, but it wasn’t a passion, not when I had the beach as my playground.

But that changed during my first stay in hospital in London.

Art therapy was offered every other day, and after my first session, I found myself waiting impatiently for the next time I could pick up a paintbrush.

When I was discharged, Mum encouraged me to keep going with it, so I signed up for lessons at Putney Art School.

It wasn’t meant to lead to a career, but my teacher, Becky, said I had great potential. And that stuck with me.

I couldn’t become an art teacher the conventional way because I didn’t have a university degree, but I got a job as a part-time art assistant in a private school in Bournemouth when Lola was two and slowly worked my way up.

I started a full-time position at Lymington college three years later, and now it seems my decade and a half of experience counts for more than a piece of paper, because I teach art to both sixth-form students and adults on evening courses.

With the sun sneaking over the horizon, I finally turn away from the easel and walk inside. I’ve been standing up for nearly nine hours and my legs are exhausted, so I grab my laptop from the table and lower into the small, plump sofa.

When I first started painting these pictures, I would throw the canvases away at the end of my stay.

But they’re expensive and it always felt like such a waste, so after a few years, I set up a small online business, and called it Imitating Art.

I got a business email address and bank account, and only put my initials on the paintings, so they couldn’t be linked to me.

Then I signed up with Artfinder and Etsy.

Gradually the sales crept up, and by 2016 I was even making a small profit.

A couple of years later, I was interviewed – anonymously, I made sure of that – by an obscure online art magazine, and soon after, an art dealer got in touch via the website.

Nick Daniels. He told me that he specialises in Corsican art and had come across Imitating Art via the article.

He said that he loved my paintings, and that he could sell them for a lot more than I was charging.

My relationship with these pictures is complex – fear, yes, but intimacy too, and veiled pride – and I couldn’t help feeling flattered by his compliments.

I gave him the following summer’s stock as a trial, and over the next few months, a steady stream of transfers began arriving in my business bank account.

It was proper money too – enough for Lola and me to go on our first overseas holiday – and Nick Daniels has been selling my mazzeri paintings ever since.

I don’t know much about him – in fact, Nick might even be short for Nicola, although I’ve always sensed that it’s a man – but we’ve built up a weird kind of friendship over the years.

Nick is the only person I’m in regular contact with while I’m away on these sabbaticals from normal life, so I have to really concentrate on not appearing crazy when I’m dog-tired from lack of sleep, or wired from too many pills.

I know I’ve let my mask slip on a couple of occasions, confided secrets even my mum doesn’t know, but I tell myself it doesn’t matter, because he’s got no idea who I am.

I open a new Imitating Art email and add his address. The first one is always the most nerve-racking – the chance he’s lost interest in my paintings over the year – and I can feel my heart rate tick up as I type.

Hey , hope you’re well.

It’s that time again. I have another picture for you and there’ll be more over the next couple of weeks. Are you still interested?

Even though it’s six in the morning, an email comes back almost instantly.

Ah, my favourite mystery client returns!

And I hope you’re joking? Your paintings are amongst my most popular sellers – people particularly love the anonymity element (thank you, Banksy!) They’re going for over a grand each now, so you can expect a boost to your bank balance too.

If you can confirm that you’ll send them to the same storage facility, I’ll arrange collection.

Good to have you back online.

Relief and shame penetrate my tired body.

It’s good to hear from Nick again, and to know my pictures are selling well.

But the growing price makes me feel uncomfortable.

Like it’s blood money, even though that makes no sense.

Maybe I’ll donate it to charity this year.

Share it between the RNLI and the Samaritans.

I send a quick acknowledgement – there’ll be time for longer emails over the next few days – then close my laptop.

I lay my head on the table and stare at the view.

It’s going to be another sunny day here.

But not as hot as it will be in Ayia Napa.

I guess Lola will still be in bed now, sleeping off the excesses of her first night out.

I hope it’s not giving her nightmares.