How to Be Luminous Read online

  Felix tips his chair forward, scuffing his boots on the floor. “Look. I don’t know London,” he says. “I can google a gallery, but you’ll know where the good stuff’s at. All I know is your mum’s sculptures in the park.”

  Ugh. I recall his super-mourning at the walled garden. There’s no way I’m drawing the Rainbow Series I with Felix. He’d probably invite himself to Mum’s studio for a behind-the-scenes tour.

  “I don’t—”

  “You don’t what?” Felix interrupts. His face is a thunderstorm. Then he shakes his head, looking away and ducking to peer into his mirror. “Never mind.”

  He grinds his jaw as he starts sketching gridlines on his paper. I catch myself examining his profile in detail, as if I’m trying to work out how to draw him instead of myself. The coal-dust curls he mostly keeps stuffed in a beanie. His face is all angles, perfect for a sculpture: straight nose and forehead, high cheekbones and narrow chin, downturned mouth.

  He glances at me and I look away abruptly, grabbing a brush and daubing on a color at random.

  “Can you choose a place,” he mutters, “and we’ll go and get this over with?”

  “Fine.” I remind myself of Emmy-Kate at her most mutinous.

  “Fine,” Felix mimics.

  We’re both bristling.

  Then it’s as if he teleports somewhere else. Blink, and he’s in the art zone—prepping his palette, plopping down the paints in a messy cacophony that’s in total contrast to his dour demeanor. He doesn’t bother with an apron. His clothes are already bespattered. He leans close to his easel, the brush caressing the paper with a strange intimacy that makes me look away.

  I stare past my painting to a day from a few years ago, when the three of us were hanging out in Meadow Park with Mum. This was before she returned to art, when she lectured at SCAD and had sinkholes but at least she was here.

  It was cool and spring, daffodils popping up Whac-a-Mole all over the park. Despite the chill, we bought ice-cream cones from the pool café and ate them spread-eagled in the wildflower meadow, with its overarching sky and church-spire view. From the ponds, nesting ducks were quacking happily.

  Niko was telling us about crop circles, and when Emmy-Kate finished her cone, she began making snow-angel movements in the long grass. Tendrils of her strawberry-blond hair, already growing lighter now that winter was behind us, caught on the stems.

  “You look like a Frida Kahlo painting,” Mum told her. She stretched, peeling off her sweater and balling it beneath her head for a pillow. Underneath, her floral tent dress looked like she’d parachuted to earth.

  “What painting?” Niko asked.

  We all shuffled a little closer to Mum. Winter had been sinkhole central, but mentioning art—and finishing her ice cream at a normal speed—suggested she was emerging.

  “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair,” she told us, her hands moving in and out of the wildflowers like butterflies. “The one with the song lyrics painted on the canvas. They go like this.” She started swaying: “‘Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.’”

  “No way.” Emmy-Kate cackled, sitting up and throwing her hair over her shoulders like a shampoo ad. “You’ll always love me,” she added, preternaturally confident.

  Mum hooted with laughter, grabbing Em around the waist and tickling her to death.

  I reached for my sketch pad and felt-tips; Niko too. Emmy-Kate wriggled free so she could sign, “I’m going to draw Self-Portrait with Amazing Hair.”

  Mum laughed softly again, resting her arm across her eyes. Gradually, she fell asleep and time lapsed into birdsong. And without any discussion, the three of us merged brains, all sketching the same thing. Her.

  Later, we compared drawings. I still have mine, pinned to my corkboard. In it, Mum has her eyes closed and she’s lying down. Her dress is purple, spread out like a tablecloth. And she’s in the air, not the grass. Floating halfway up, caught between Poets Corner and the sky.

  Back in Ms. Goldenblatt’s classroom, the bell rings. I put down my brush.

  “Meet you on the steps after school,” Felix says, shouldering his satchel. He pauses, looking at the self-portrait on my easel and raising his eyebrows, dark eyes glinting. “That’s … That’s really cool.”

  Look, if I loved you …

  I examine my work. It’s a true self-portrait this time: me, not Mum. Only I’m out of focus. Because maybe it’s impossible to see myself clearly, when all I think about is her.

  Turquoise

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Plastic school aprons. The Victoria line and the biggest bubble in the Rainbow Series I. The sky the morning Mum disappeared, with no hint of the storm to come.

  CHAPTER 11

  Much Longer Without Color, Minnie Will Freeze

  I’m on the bus with Felix Waters.

  We’re traveling a few neighborhoods south of Poets Corner, our silent journey enlivened only by the gathering clouds. By the time we reach our destination, the day has turned squally, rain spitting down in occasional sporadic drops. We get off the bus and my hair instantly frizzes.

  “Another park,” says Felix, jamming on his beanie and squinting from me to the gates in confusion. It lends him a shy look instead of his usual arrested-in-a-pool-hall expression. For someone who doesn’t wear a leather jacket, he has the motorbike-gang vibe down. “Aren’t we supposed to go to a gallery?”

  “Trust me, this is better,” I say, leading him through the gates. This space is even bigger than Meadow Park, but flatter and more tree-filled, sheltering us from unexpected flurries of rain. “Follow me.”

  Felix stuffs his hands in his back pockets as we walk, so his elbows stick out when he twists to talk to me. “Another of your mum’s pieces?” he asks.

  I don’t answer. We walk between an avenue of trees, the asphalt path littered with the first of autumn’s shiny chestnuts, and emerge in front of an artificial lake—filled with dinosaurs.

  Seriously. Life-sized ones. Thirty hulking concrete giantosauruses prowling through the shallow water, rustling ferns and terrorizing the ducks. Twenty-foot-tall prehistoric beasts, deep in London suburbia.

  “Holy shit,” says Felix, faintly impressed. “Welcome to Jurassic Park. Okay, better than a gallery,” he admits, glancing at me. “What is this place?”

  “They’re Victorian,” I explain. “From the Great Exhibition. The very first dinosaur sculptures in the world. They’re hollow inside, like houses.” We lean against the railing, watch the beasts. “One time, people had a New Year’s Eve party in the Iguanadon.” I point across the lake to a colossal, fat crocodile-y thing with hundreds of teeth. “When I was little, I wanted to move inside it and make it my bedroom.”

  I’d forgotten about that until I said it. Mini-Minnie, tucked inside a dinosaur house, no Niko or Emmy-Kate allowed. The same way I hid under the bed when Ash came round yesterday, or how I frequently slide myself under the bubbles of the Rainbow Series I. Huh.

  “Careful,” says Felix. “I think that one might actually be alive.”

  “They had dinner in it,” I tell him. “Mock turtle soup, hare, pigeon pie, orange jelly.”

  “Okay, now I know you’re inventing things.” Felix straightens up—and looms. It’s like standing next to Godzilla. He blinks down at me, face beaded with rain, bobbing his head to a nearby bench. “Shall we get on with it?”

  We get settled with our sketch pads, the wind sending ripples across the lake, blurring the Megalosaurus and Ichthyosaurus behind waving ferns.

  Felix fiddles with his phone. “Setting a timer,” he explains. “It should keep going off at intervals. New drawings whenever it beeps, I guess.”

  I shrug. “Okay.”

  Ten seconds pass with my hands frozen over the page while Felix whips thick marker-pen lines across his paper. His phone beeps. I take a deep breath, trying to recall how it felt to draw the flowers in my room yesterda
y, but the phone beeps before I can relax into it. I make tiny scratchy marks on the page, but—beep.

  I give up and watch Felix instead. For once he’s not scrunched up. He’s looking at the dinosaur, not the paper, flicking his wrists in loose, light movements.

  I drag my finger through old raindrops on the bench, writing sentences that dissolve the moment they’re formed.

  WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU?

  “Listen,” says Felix without looking away from the dinosaurs, or ceasing his hands’ endless roaming. His words come out one by one, between the distractions of the drawing. “But”—pen swipe—“Okay, so”—crosshatch—“here’s the thing”—new page—“about your mum.”

  Ugh. I huddle inside my coat, wishing conversations had an ejector seat. I don’t want to hear his condolences, how sad he thinks it is. The world lost such a great artist, robbed of her potential, blah blah effing blah.

  “Mine too,” Felix says in such a low voice I almost don’t catch the words. “Last year. Drunk driver. I was in the car. She died. I get it.”

  Beep.

  Felix stops drawing and looks at me.

  I look back.

  Beneath his beanie, Felix’s curls are getting darker and thicker instead of frizzing out the way mine do in this damp air. It makes him look Greek or Italian, like he should be climbing out of a lake in baking sunshine. But his sorrowful expression matches mine so closely we might as well be identical twins. And, oh, I see: It wasn’t my mother he was mourning at the Rainbow Series I. It was his own.

  So he does get it. Grief is a language that Felix speaks. Here in this cold park, with this unhappy boy, I can sink into my sadness like it’s a feather duvet. My whole body sighs in succor.

  “Anyway.” Felix shrugs. His phone doesn’t beep, but his hands return to his sketchbook anyway, start moving so fast they’re a blur. The drawing seems to emerge of its own accord on the page, as if it already existed and time is catching up. This makes sense: The one person who gets me is another arthead.

  Let’s fill this town with artists …

  “Let’s what now?” Felix flicks his eyes to me briefly, then back to the dinosaurs.

  Apparently, I’m now thinking out loud. Along with seeing Mum everywhere I look, losing all my colors, and drowning in the school cafeteria. I think of The White Album. I think of sinkholes. I think of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter, which begins: Dearest. I feel certain that I am going mad again.

  I’m not certain if this is madness or grief.

  I tilt my head back, letting the occasional rain freckle my eyes and face and lips.

  “You know, I had the same thing when my mum … Back then, anyway. Artist’s block.” Felix gestures to the pad on my lap. I look down, seeing the streak his pen leaves on the dampening paper.

  The ink bleeds across the page. I watch it blob and leak and form a flower, then say, “You think I have artist’s block?”

  “Don’t you?”

  I can see why he thinks that—my artist mother disappears and I stop creating. But it’s not true. Toward the end of last year, when I got super-obsessed with those stupid tiles, I was already having dreams of the kiln not firing, pots shattering, glazes turning to air in my hands. Every time Ms. Goldenblatt pushed me to apply to SCAD, I wanted to turn inside out. When I walked down Full Moon Lane to the studio, I’d keep my eyes averted from the campus.

  How can you want something so much but be afraid of it at the same time?

  Wind gusts, splashing the lake all over me, and the rain finally begins to fall for real. I feel like a chalk sidewalk drawing, that I’ll be washed away by morning. I put my sketchbook down and rest my chin on my knees.

  Next to me, Felix has forgotten my existence again. He moves his pen in bold slashes, like a sword fighter, not noticing the rain. It’s as if he’s scooping up handfuls of it and smearing and smudging them, reshaping the weather into art, not caring that it’s staining his skin, his clothes, until it’s impossible to tell Felix from ink from rain.

  I’m not sure whether he’s painting the world, or the world is painting him.

  And suddenly I know that I want to do that.

  I don’t want to be the girl who plays second fiddle to her sisters; who hides beneath clay bubbles and has all these colors trapped inside her heart.

  I want to be the girl who lives in full effing color.

  Burnt Orange

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Chestnuts, like giant marbles scattered on sidewalks from Crystal Palace to Poets Corner. Leaves preparing to tumble from trees. The way autumn is crunching quickly through time, and there are now so many days between her and us.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Color of Alabaster

  I’m going to unlock the colors.

  After school on Wednesday I’m alone in the house, for once. Heart going full brass band, I slip inside Mum’s bedroom for the first time since spring, and go in search of her secrets.

  The room is a museum. A mausoleum. The air is wreathed in her perfume and stale cigarettes—another ashtray overflows on her nightstand, next to a stack of art books. Evidence of a final all-night inspiration session, probably research for the Schiaparelli series. There’s a lipstick-marked wineglass, and her duvet is balled up, as though she recently leaped out of bed.

  It’s obvious that Niko hasn’t yet embarked on her threatened clear-out. It might make sense to wash the bedclothes, tip away these ashes, but it’s so final. I’d preserve the whole room in resin if I could.

  Dust swirls as I creep across the room, floorboards creaking gently beneath my bare feet. An evening dress is discarded across her chair; a pair of high-heeled sandals toppled underneath.

  Her dressing table is the worst part. There’s a pot of moisturizer with its lid off, dust gathering on the surface that still holds her finger marks. I screw the lid back on, then, irrationally, take it off again. Strands of pale hair trail from her hairbrush. A thickly glazed ceramic bowl is filled with silver earrings; another holds lipsticks in every shade of pink. Fuchsia, coral, Mexican, French, Barbie, shocking, carnation … I lift up her bottle of Noix de Tubéreuse and inhale, instantly regretting it when I’m hit by amber-and-violet her.

  I swipe a finger through the dust on the mirror and write:

  I MISS YOU. COME BACK.

  “What am I doing?” I ask my wide-eyed reflection. Mirror Minnie has no answer. We turn away from each other, scanning the room for big honking clues. Something more than a goodbye letter and a kiln I don’t yet dare open; something to tell me that Mum and I share a brain. That I’m right: She lost her colors too.

  I skirt around the bed, not yet willing to touch the place she last slept. And I know that there’s nothing underneath it but a plain, unlabeled shoebox, probably swathed in dust. My sisters and I discovered it a few years ago—Mum’s room has never been part of the no-snooping agreement—tucked down in the dark. The only item in the house that doesn’t match up to the Rachael Sloe aesthetic.

  It’s also another Sloe sister pact, an unspoken one this time: None of us open the box. Ever.

  Pulse thumping in my ears, I hurtle to the bookshelf in the corner, which is stacked two-deep with research notes, old magazines in which she was interviewed or featured, folders of press clippings, exhibition catalogs, auction listings … The library of a life, lived. Somewhere in all this will be the origins of The White Album.

  Grabbing a stack of ring binders, I perch gingerly on the arm of her chair, trying not to disturb the dress. I don’t want to undo the folds she left in the fabric.

  I start with an exhibition catalog from last year’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’ve never seriously studied her work before, all the pieces at once, but as I flip through the pages, holy supersized, Batman.

  I’m blown away by the epic scale. Seeing her whole output—even on paper, even in black and white—there’s no escaping how bold and bodacious her work is. Every
piece is a ten-ton, Stonehenge behemoth, fired in industrial kilns or made in several separate pieces at the studio and assembled with cranes.

  The biographical snippets in her press cuttings are equally larger than life. Mum was accepted at every art school in London. She made the Rainbow Series I in her final year at SCAD, won the Turner Prize six months after graduation—when she was six months pregnant. She was only four years older than I am now. My heart sinks a bit. I can’t imagine myself winning prizes and making art in four years’ time. I can’t imagine myself in four years’ time, period.

  Mum lived at the speed of light, trying to cram in all her experiences at once, as if she knew her life wasn’t going to last long. But how could she have known at seventeen, at twenty-one? Unless the sinkholes started when she was as young as I am now. Perhaps that’s why she hurtled full-tilt toward art: She craved color. Her life depended on it.

  Only one profile comes close to identifying the sinkholes. I come across the paragraph in an interview from a couple of years ago:

  Sloe starts talking at a rapid clip—so fast the recorder barely catches it—alluding to her synesthesia as a living thing, the closest most modern artists come to the nineteenth-century concept of muses. “I call it the madness gene,” she says, amid edgy laughter. “It’s living with all your senses turned up. But if I lost it … I wouldn’t survive.” She blinks, those blazing blue eyes looking a little lost themselves, for a moment.

  I know the exact expression the journalist is talking about. When she would blink, slowly, more and more; her batteries beginning to shut down.

  I check the date of the interview. Two summers ago. Was she already lost, back then? I don’t remember a hint of a sinkhole. She showered every day. Sang along to the radio when I visited the studio on Saturdays. If anything, her superhuman consumption of coffee and cigarettes and wine increased. She filled the house with flowers. Drank too much each night and clutched the Professor’s arm while shrieking with laughter so often, Emmy-Kate began to theorize that they would get married. That summer she was so starlit, she was celestial.