The Art of Deception

Chapter 3

‘What the …?’ I raise my voice, but as I see Müller jump guiltily back from my desk, I clamp my mouth closed. She’s a guard after all. But I still wonder what the hell she’s doing in my cell.

I’m clean. I have nothing to hide, have been the model prisoner. There’s always a worry someone might plant something to get another inmate in trouble, usually to remove suspicion from themselves. We all have single cells, and they’re locked when we’re not there, so Müller has let herself in with her key. But this is one of those tiny borderline infringements, unless she’s been instructed to search for something specific.

I’ve come back early from work because of the bad weather. I take my rain cape off and fling it over the radiator. Running water into the sink, I pick up the nailbrush to clean the loamy soil of the garden from under my fingernails, and wait for her to tell me why she’s here.

‘Be careful, it might melt,’ she says, pointing at the cape, and I shrug.

I don’t care. The head gardener can give me another one. The smell of the steadily warming synthetic material evokes an unidentifiable comfort memory from childhood.

I dry my hands on my towel, walk towards the desk, and see she’s been studying a coloured pencil sketch of an alpine scene I drew from memory.

‘They told me you are an artist. You have talent.’ She nods towards the picture.

Müller is one of the more amenable guards, one of the few who speaks passable English. She even takes part in a Wednesday conversation group, the only time I openly speak to the others. She’s a tough-looking middle-aged woman with broad shoulders, but she has a gentle demeanour. She wears her greying hair in a messy bun, a schoolmarm-gone-wrong look.

‘You like working there?’ she asks, looking through the window.

The rain against the pane has eased. I take a step towards her, still drying my hands, but keep my distance as much as one can in this confined space. We both look down at the garden. It has been flattened by the chill dampness. Half the beds contain overgrown vegetable tops, extended seed-heads and the random mess of items ignored during harvest. They have faded from green to dark grey under this heavy humidity, collapsed with the putridness of gradually rotting foliage.

The other flowerbeds have now been cleared and freshly turned. The evidence of our hard work is strewn across the field on the far side of the courtyard like a freshly knitted quilt. Straight dark rows of rich earth shaped into corduroy furrows are ready for planting. A corrugated canvas prepared for some colour, after the slumbering weight of the winter has passed.

‘Your days of labour outdoors are not so many now. When the clearing is finished, we find you new work,’ she says.

I don’t need to be reminded I will soon be without the distraction of cultivation. Most of us who work in the garden will be assigned alternative jobs for the winter months. Only a few will be kept on to work in the greenhouses. It saddens me to think I will have to work indoors.

‘Do you know yet what your job will be? Or do you let them put you in the laundry?’ she asks as I shrug again. ‘You can choose, you know. You do not need to keep silent. You cannot close yourself off, cannot forever be so angry with everyone. It is not our fault that you are here. You can make your life easier.’

‘You sound like the shrink,’ I say not unkindly, and she’s surprised to hear me speak, always expects silence, unless I have a teacher’s book in front of me. ‘Are you looking for something?’

‘I want to find out whether you will think about working in one of the more creative work stations.’

‘Jobs? I’m not bothered. We all get the same wage. I guess I’ll let you lot decide.’

Müller turns back to my drawings. ‘But you could use your skills, perhaps even enjoy what you do,’ she says, and I snort.

‘May I?’ she asks, and waits for a tilt of my head before sifting through my sketches, devoting time to a few that interest her, while I think about what she has said about the job assignment.

Most of the women here used to fight for work that paid the best rates. Now everyone gets paid the same. It’s not much, but at least there’s less of a dispute.

Fatima and Dolores work in the pottery studio in the west wing. They have turned some beautiful pots. It’s hard to believe that these angry, volatile women create pieces decorated with such delicately fashioned and carefully glazed porcelain petals and leaves. When I first came here, I visited the studio, admiring the rows of pots waiting to be fired in the kiln. But I snapped up the job I was offered in the garden to be outside in the fresh air. The regimental attention to detail of planting seeds, row upon row, helped to settle my mind. Nurturing a new generation of plant life, watching things grow. I forgot that by autumn everything would be dead.

We grow things for the community. Our goods are either used in the prison kitchen, or taken to local markets. And there’s a shop inside the prison gates where locals come from the surrounding villages to buy our organically grown produce.

By Müller’s reckoning I may automatically be assigned a job in the laundry for the winter, but I can see something ticking away in her mind, and I begin to think this is not the first time she has looked at my art. The more creative jobs of weaving and mandala design nevertheless incite a feeling of monotony in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that everyone has a job, but I’ll let them decide where to put me.

I look at JP’s picture on the wall. My personal little icon. Something to worship. God, I miss him so much. I wonder if JP has inherited some of my artistic leanings. At this stage in his stick-man art, it’s hard to tell. By his age I was drawing ponies at the kitchen table from morning until night.

Müller puts her hand on top of the pile of sketches.

‘These are really good, Frau Smithers. It is pleasing to see you use your creativity.’

There she is again, going on about my creativity. But I nevertheless lap up her compliment, knowing it’s a rarity between guards and inmates, and I award her the slip of a smile. She turns to leave.

‘Take raincoat off heater. Es schmilzt,’ she says gruffly, and I listen to her footsteps retreat down the corridor.

I glance at the pile of drawings and consider that they are hardly my best work. When I run out of reading material, it’s the drawing that keeps me occupied. I have to fill my free time with something. To stop the chimera of bitter revenge raising its ugly head. The demons of injustice are still present, and it will be a while before I manage to exorcise them all. Probably not until the day I leave this place.

I sit at the desk and tear another sheet of A4 from my pad. It’s not great quality paper, but at least I have something to draw on. I put in an order for some paper a while ago from an art shop in Lausanne, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Pencil poised, I breathe deeply, relishing the smell of melting plastic on the radiator behind me, and prepare to create another illusion.

* * *

Seven years ago

My beach in Greece could wait. The wistfulness of saying farewell to those leaving for the summer, and the uncomfortable feeling that I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle, lessened each day. Anne’s wise advice ignored, I was a bona fide love-struck teenager.

I didn’t confront Matt with the story Anne and Terri had told me about Leila, not then, but kept it to myself. Instead I turned his unspoken confession into my own goal of healing his supposedly broken heart, without pressuring him into any kind of a relationship. I had no intention of tainting our courtship with questions about past girlfriends, painting myself as the jealous successor. If he considered his association with Leila unfinished, then I would wait for him to divulge it to me in his own time, would expect him to offer his honourable confession. But if he remained silent about her, then in my mind his liaison with her was over, finished. I was his new horizon. Ignore a smug cat for long enough and it will eventually crawl into your lap.

And the other rumour? I put it down to jealousy. Others will often find fault with someone they wish they could be like.

One day when the snow had melted, Matt and I hiked through the forest to a viewpoint known as the Eagles’ Nest, high above the Rhône Valley. Perched on a boulder, we admired the view across to the French ski resorts. The cliff dropped a thousand metres vertically, a stone’s throw from where we sat. Through the haze, Matt pointed out a village below us in the distance on the grey smudge of Lac Léman, and told me it would soon be time to put his boat back in the water.

‘You fascinate me, Lucille. Most girls I meet want something more. They’re always working a game to get a part of me, but you’re so free and easy. You weren’t looking for anything when you turned up on my mountain, and you haven’t expected anything of me. I appreciate that.’

‘I’ve enjoyed our time together so far,’ I offered timidly.

I knew by not defining our relationship, he was under no pressure to categorise it himself. ‘And maybe I’m happy to stick around. I have no plans, no obligations.’

‘That’s it, I think. The no obligation bit. It makes me want you to stick around.’

Matt put his arm tightly around my waist. I was impressed with his honesty. He surely wasn’t hiding anything.

‘Anne is letting me stay on her sofa while I look for work. She’s now renting a place of her own.’

I winced inside with the memory of my conversation with Terri and Anne.

Matt and I leaned in to each other, enjoying the view. He took off his shirt in the unexpected warmth, the sun shining on the niche where we sat on the rocks, our bodies protected from the wind by the granite at our backs.

‘You must let me draw you one day. You have perfect muscle form for the artist’s eye. I could do you in pastel, charcoal, even acrylic.’

I ran my hands lightly over his broad shoulders. He leaned forward slightly, a small shrug away from my fingers.

‘No, you will not draw me, Lucille. No drawings of me.’

I frowned. His sudden mood change confused me.

‘Okay,’ I said slowly. ‘No sketching. But it’s what I love to do, to express my appreciation of perfect form.’

I laughed playfully and trailed a finger down his bicep, but he didn’t smile. Face still turned away, a muscle ticked at his jaw.

‘Stick to drawing that,’ he said, pointing at the view. ‘Landscapes, mountain scenes. Let’s not talk about painting any more,’ he said abruptly.

Anger flared briefly, eclipsing the hurt at his initial shunning of my touch. I realised he’d never really asked me about my art.

‘But it’s what I love to do. You think cleaning toilets in a shitty hostel is enough to satisfy me?’

He turned to me, and in a flash, his dark demeanour changed to playfulness, with that hungry look in his eyes I recognised. My irritation softened, and I moulded my hands around the shoulders I had, moments before, imagined drawing. As he began removing articles of my clothing, I panicked. Ignoring any negative signals, I put my niggling angst down to worrying whether our situation on the footpath was too exposed.

* * *

A few days later a flyer appeared in Anne’s mailbox announcing a local art exhibition organised by a group of students at the international college. A series of personal interpretations of the modern masters would be on display. Intrigued, the two of us went along.

‘I’m not really a fan of modern art,’ she said as we walked past colourful renditions of Picasso, Kandinsky, Braque and Matisse. ‘But these are pretty good.’

‘Who’s in charge? Who’s their teacher?’ I asked, studying a bold still life, in acrylic greens and blues. ‘This is the kind of stuff I was doing at university. Hard to believe a little college in the Alps has students turning out this kind of work.’

‘That’s the professor over there.’

Anne pointed to a portly-looking gentleman at one end of the hall, his sparse white hair in disarray. He seemed a little awkward, seeking solace in a glass of wine the students were offering for their vernissage. He reminded me of an Oxford don, a tweedy mussed look. But nevertheless approachable. On the spur of the moment I introduced myself.

‘Patterson, Iain. How do you do?’

His boisterous handshake rattled the bones in my arm. I introduced myself, likened the work his students had exhibited to a project my class had participated in during my first year at university. It turned out we had a connection. One of my mentors at Leeds was an old colleague of his.

‘Haven’t heard from old Hibbert for a while. Multi-talented chap. Great artist, but also wrote some excellent plays in his time.’

The professor waffled on, his tone wavering somewhere between didactic and aristocratic. The plum in his mouth, rather than marking him as pompous, suited his eccentric demeanour. I didn’t want him to think I was another college dropout, but the association with my old professor made me wonder if I hadn’t done something unwise by giving up my studies in a subject where my skills truly lay.

‘So it must be half-term. You’ll be going back for the end of the semester soon, won’t you? Spring ball next month. Always a hoot.’

‘Actually, no … I’m not going back.’ Then thinking this sounded like I was a failure: ‘I’ve taken a break from my studies. I’m on a cultural tour of Europe.’

Patterson cocked an eyebrow, and changed the subject. He’d heard that one before.

‘What do your people do?’

It amused me to hear him refer to my parents in such an old-fashioned way, especially as my relationship with them was somewhat strained with my unexpected voyage to the continent.

‘My father is an ex-naval officer. My mother’s a nurse. She used to be an expat locum, Middle East mainly. I suspect I have a genetic predisposition for travel. Which is why I’ve … delayed my studies for a year,’ I said, twisting the truth.

‘Nothing wrong with a journey of self-discovery, throwing a few wild oats.’

I smiled, the misquoted idiom making him appear suddenly naive.

‘You should come and visit the studio sometime. Pop by next week – we won’t be too busy when this exhibition is out of the way.’

* * *

I wasted no time taking the professor up on his invitation. By the following week I hardly had two centimes to rub together. The few francs I had earned were long spent. I’d sold my Eurorail ticket to a departing backpacker when the hostel closed. But that money was rapidly running out, and Anne, although a generous hostess, must have been getting tired of my presence in her home. Her relationship with François was getting serious, and I could tell she wanted her space to herself.

‘I was Professor Hibbert’s assistant for a term in my first year,’ I told Iain Patterson when I visited his studio.

I was trying my best to both charm and maybe impress the old fellow.

‘A Hibbert protégé! I could do with an assistant in the studio. Are you looking for work?’

Yes, yes! I wanted to shout. Everything was falling conveniently into place.

Iain Patterson, self-professed artist and wine connoisseur, flaunted an ample belly upon which he would amusingly rest his brushes as he painted, tucked between the buttons of his brown smock. I had never seen anyone paint with so many brushes at once. He balanced the smaller ones over his ears. They even protruded from his mouth, a substitute for the tortoiseshell pipe his long-suffering wife insisted he smoke outside the studio, to avoid bringing home the cloying scent of Latakia smoke on his hair and clothes.

Patterson, as he preferred to be called, had enough seniority to secure me a job as his assistant, and although he was past retirement age, it was evident his teaching was highly valued.

I was unable to obtain official working papers, but the college secured me a study permit, to fool the authorities into thinking I was a full-time student. I was even able to earn one credit a term in Patterson’s classes, which marginally satisfied my parents’ concerns about taking up the reins of an education I had left behind in England. Although it was unlikely I would ever fulfil enough credit requirements for an undergraduate degree.

I soon blended into the village and local life, and after a slow start, learned to speak French. Not that it mattered in a resort where so many foreign tourists passed through, and given that non-language courses at the college were all taught in English.

Being seen at Matt’s side, a local boy, should have made me feel secure, knowing the authorities were always on the search for illegal workers without permits. The news about my semi-legal permit status quashed his hesitancy about me finding a job at the same college where he worked. And my love for him eclipsed the feeling of unease everyone else seemed to have when I was in his company.

* * *

We are sitting at a table in the cafeteria when Fatima comes in with Adnan bound to her in a perplexingly fashioned wrap, resembling a haphazardly knotted sari. She moves along the canteen counter, collects random items of food for her tray. As she comes to sit near us I wonder how she can place so many opposing food groups together on one plate. Perhaps she still has the disturbing gastronomic leanings of an expectant mother in her third trimester, and yearns for unidentified chemicals her body is missing. I vaguely remember a craving for horseradish and caramel fudge.

She starts plucking morsels off her tray and pops them into her mouth before she has even reached the table. She looks slightly manic. Adnan whimpers and squawks quietly in his sleep at her chest.