ART THERAPY

‘Have you thought about the background, Michael?' the teacher asked. ‘If you lighten the dark you'll take away from the impact you've created here...'

     He waved a hand three or four inches in front of the canvas taking care not to touch the oil but unable to hold still as impatience drove him closer and closer to the boundary between assistance and interference.

     Michael would have sympathised with him even as recently as last year. What could it be like faced with a recalcitrant, jailbird student making life difficult? How did he explain it to his wife, partner, lover when he got back at night from the charitable stints in the nick where week after week Michael defied him, riled him with silence to the point of rudeness? Michael knew he was pushing him with dumb insolence to that edge of endurance when it would be a relief to slap the offender, good pun that, and be excluded from charitable work in any nick forever.

     He stopped mixing white paint into black and stepped away from the easel. The teacher watched. The rest of the art therapy group watched. Michael did that thing in his head where he detached from himself and watched too. Would he leave the black dark or would he try for a shade, a shade of grey?

     His QC had gone for grey and it had worked in Court, hadn't it? The Judge had looked down from his dais and sniffed. The tabloid court reporter had screamed: "I've never seen a case so clearly defined in black and white. The defendant was found with his hands around the neck of his wife."

     Michael looked at the painting where the two figures formed a central arresting interest. Another good pun, he was firing on all cylinders today. Hands around the neck, check.

     "The only question," that reporter had thundered on, "is whether he murdered her or not. Will the judge allow a plea of manslaughter? Will the Scottish Crown Office cave in?"

     He had.  They had. Not that Michael had said anything. All his pleas had been entered for him. He hadn't spoken since that night. The night he was painting every week in art therapy trying to make some sense out of the chaos.

     In the picture beyond the pool of light shining into their faces, his face and his dead wife's face, lay a drawer. Papers spilled from that drawer. Bills, demands. His life's work spent by that bitch woman on her young lover. His savings plundered. His pension in jeopardy. His sons homeless and at the mercy of social services because his house was re-possessed.

     The boys had been taken in by his sister.

     Michael reattached to himself and inhabited his brain. He stepped towards the easel. He drew a cartoon house in the top right hand corner of the canvas. It was grey but he daubed white into the windows.

     The boys were safe.

     The older one had written him a letter. Michael had it inside his uniform shirt pocket. He read it over and over. The paper was thinning along the fold lines. He would need to be careful with it. "Dear Daddy, Please come home to Aunty Kate's house. Me and Liam both miss you. I am doing the castles stuff at school. Love and kisses, Ted."

     They would be adults before he went home to Aunty Kate's house because he had to speak to the Parole board to get out on parole. He had to say, "I killed my wife but I regret it."

     That was true. He did regret it. He should have killed the toy boy too. He regretted not killing both of them. Did that count for parole? Probably not. You probably had to regret the crime committed and not that you realised you could have committed another better crime. A crime more worthy of the provocation you'd suffered.

     His sons were growing up without him but they were safe. His sister Kate would not let anything bad happen to them and she would make them do the things he should be making them do. Things like homework and football and cleaning of teeth. She said in her letters, which were longer than Ted's, that she was attending to homework and football and cleaning of teeth. She was no expert because she didn't have children, hadn't expected to have children but now she had, she was attending to what needed to be attended to.

     She meant, didn't she, that Michael should be attending to these things as far as he could. Michael had had many months of silent reflection and now it was time. Kate had given up her life for his boys. Now it was time he took his back.

     He stretched out a tentative hand and drew a figure into the dark background of his painting, it was a matchstick child, and then he drew another smaller one clutching the first one tightly by the hand. He plundered the white and drew in Kate.

     ‘You're losing the composition, Michael,' the teacher said quietly. He came up close behind him and Michael could feel his breath on the back of his neck as he studied the figures forming in the darkness at the edge of Michael's life.

     "Losing the composition." In his silence, Michael pondered the words. No, he was finding it. He would write a letter to Ted about castles. He was an architect. He could draw a castle for Ted to copy into his homework jotter.

     Michael had one more figure to draw on the canvas. He chose green because snakes were green. He drew a matchstick youth with a holdall creeping away from the murder.

     The teacher gasped.

     ‘Art is therapeutic,' Michael said.

THE END