Chartreuse

I stood in scrubs and visor above the body. Draped in white cotton, her first offerings were a yellow pair of thin ankles and a set of toes. The toes curled themselves back to a stretch, as if she was tiptoed, reaching for a vase above her head. Her tendons extended until her thick nails stood upright at ninety degrees to the arch of her foot. A neat fold to the right and she was naked. An old woman, much older than me, scarcely fat and tired. Her skin, from the pads of her feet up past the knots of her knees, the brackets of her hips, and the bowl of her stomach, rested like taffeta across her bones. Her hair was wisping. She was already embalmed, drained and refilled. Could you loosen her up a bit?

Look down at your wrists and realise how autonomous you are from your body. In primary school they would tell you to feel your tongue in your mouth. Look ahead, the portrait is failing categorically, capturing the inability of existence to compound moments and arrange them into narrative like so. Take a step back from the easel. Regret it all. Surely you can’t be that way. It was a dumb thing to do, in youth, to paint peachy skin instead of yellows and greens. That was the idiot child within you, using the seven colours that came in the box.

In Australia, we often don’t embalm and even rarer is an attempt to colour in. If they are asked to, however, morticians will colour in precisely, slow and then heavily down past the bones of the cheeks. They savour the rebuilt body, safely stuffed and plugged. They procrastinate the paperwork. This mortician drew the brush against the jaw and the chin, up the neck to the valley of the lip, but then she stepped back to regret. The glazing is wrong, too peachy, too bruised. That’s how it went. The mortician put down the brush and grabbed a towel. She rubbed back to the yellows and greens. I waited and watched how cautiously she painted after she had chosen again.

If you didn’t look and threw, violently, the gloopy paint across your shoulder maybe you could find yourself looking candid in the debris. The canvas chimera would be killed and a secret second you could rise spatter, spread wide and take its place. But inevitably you, standing in reality, would overwork it and your image would be lost. It was worth a shot, you had been sure you’d find your hairline at least in the disarray. Still, if you had reached out your hand and, with shaking digits, contacted the naked canvas it would have felt taut in its frame, but begin wobbling upon the easel. Once the tool was selected and the colour was drawn out across the plain, your self-portrait would be lost. You’re never delicate enough, the likeness would disintegrate away with the white on the page.

Morticians know that if the base foundation spread across face and down the body is wrong then the whole picture will become a caricature and for generations your work will be the favourite family joke. Their mourning will take on an aspect of the horrific as they look down at their mother, neighbour, friend, and stranger. They will realise how uncanny the body is, how grotesque a house can be. What a zoo. The memory of how their mother cried will become kitsch and throw off the balance of the whole room. Those who can move on will try not to laugh.

We looked for the colour somewhere between the navel and the chest, the thigh and her small breast. Then, the chartreuse gave way, under the earlobes. That colour, the appropriate tone of flesh, was applied to the cheeks and forehead, spread down the arch of the body’s nose, dabbed down the neck, brushed across the chest, her wrists, over the back of her hands, up the outstretched fingers and turned around to the palm. There was no moisture, the powder settled.

The portrait, in inks of one kind or another, should go. You needn’t come to terms. Let’s take what we’ve burnt and grind it to powder. Scatter it over the water. Make other people with their own betraying faces gulp it down. Down it in one. The body was dressed and casketed for good. I clicked your feet into black shoes myself. Then the body would gather all its living faces in the one room and pointed them towards itself. What an affair. Why would you look back across the crowded gallery to find your current face when, instead, you could turn away? Maybe, you would taste something sweeter than embalming fluids, as lively as chartreuse.

2016