To Paint the Wind

By Patricia Young

It's summer, and France opens her shutters on a seaside town in Normandy. Two women meet on the beach, one a talented street performer who can take any role she chooses and remain hidden behind her lifestyle. Seeming at ease with a rucksack on her back, she carries a disturbing past and an ugly scar across her shoulder.
Hannah is an art teacher who has fled from a horrendous confrontation with the death of a colleague. She flees from Houndstooth Academy, taking her savage creativity with her.
Both women would agree that 'art is the soul made public' yet hide their truths from each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: patriciayoungbooks
• Release date: Jul 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912924899

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© 2019 Patricia Young

Patricia Young has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by patriciayoungbooks

First published and printed in 2019

First published in eBook format in 2019

ISBN: 9781912924714

(Printed edition: 9781090198372)

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Injustice dogged her sleep with the surreal presence of vivid nightmares. It was no good engaging the quasi-reality of reason, it just entered like a bossy mentor with plenty of advice and no solutions. After three hours of meagre sleep, an intense beam of summer sun jolted her into preparation for the forthcoming discussion in the gymnasium between herself, Head of Arts at Houndstooth Academy, and Nick Hankin, Head of Sports. Hannah marched towards the gymnasium wearing a well-rehearsed expression of confidence, hoping to entice Nick from the dark corner into which he had been driven.

Hannah expected to find him at the desk, ready with his notes, instead he’d left a large sheet of white paper on which he’d scrawled ‘cancelled’ in thick black lettering. Close by, Nick hung from the wall bars with his neck broken and a pool of urine on the floor beneath. Stress and depression had finally bullied the life out of him and left his corpse suspended above it all.

Nick, Nick, Hannah whispered in the brutal silence, but Nick was dead, beyond recall. There was nothing that could be done. Soon paramedics would cut him down and despatch him on a stretcher with his face covered by a blanket. The only discernible movement beneath it being his head, wobbling, detached at the end of a short column of fractured vertebrae.

She slowly took her evidence for Nick’s innocence and laid it on the desk like a bizarre eulogy. Overwhelmed, horror and nausea sent her fleeing through the swing doors into the corridor where she stood with her arms out, as if crucified, not to protect any entrants from the ghastly sight but to protect it from further degradation.

Out of the silence in the corridor came Francis Carey, like a clown bursting from a paper drum. The sly triumph of the ‘good morning’ smirk caused Hannah’s hand to shoot out, grab the girl’s hair and send her face first through the swing doors, circling across the gymnasium to land on her knees under Nicks corpse.

Who’s that? Hannah demanded. Francis struggled to her feet, but her distress only served to make Hannah more disgusted so she raised her foot and kicked her. I said, who’s that? The vulnerable torso of the fifteen-year-old did nothing to evoke pity so she shouted at the top of her voice and kicked her again. I said, who’s that?!

Mr Hankin, Francis managed to gasp as she struggled to her feet again. Since she looked about to flee from the grim sight, Hannah grabbed her top by the neck and took to shaking her.

That’s right, it’s Mr Hankin. Say good morning, Mr Hankin. How are you today? Hannah’s knee rose and the pupil groaned with pain as it thumped the base of her spine. Go on, say Good morning Mr Hankin. Hannah tightened her grip on the neckline of Francis’s top and twisted it until she was barely able to breathe. You certainly succeeded in getting Mr Hankin suspended, didn’t you? Hannah knew that something insidious was taking over her common sense. If she gave the fabric another twist she would never return from the inevitable course she was taking towards the murder of a child. She gave Francis one last thrust towards the hanged man and sent her flat to the floor, where she lay with her face in his urine, sobbing as if in painful supplication.

Hannah burst through the swing doors and bolted along the corridor pursued by a girl’s shrill screams and the fixed image of Nick Hankins suspended body. Soon there would be a collision with the Head, his hands out, running towards the gymnasium, as if to catch whatever catastrophe might lie ahead. For Hannah, gruelling police interviews lay ahead, charges of assault on a minor, the disgrace of a custodial sentence and the end of her career. The future echoed a fearful nothingness, whilst the present boomed ‘flee, run, go, go, go.’

*****

Six black plastic bags, randomly stuffed with clothes, bedding and art materials, bumped down the steps from Hannah’s flat to the yawning boot of her car. Thereafter, the bricks and mortar of suburban streets and passers-by congealed into one entity. Nothing seemed to come into focus other than the need to keep going. But where? It couldn’t be an advance into the future, so it had to be a retreat into the past. The future was vacuous, but the past was full of memories, islands of experience, stop off points where she could land and take off again. She had a bank account and a credit card, she would keep going indefinitely until the money ran out, or when the police caught up with her. At that point the past and present would collide and her future would be in the hands of others, police officers, court dignitaries, prison wardens. Her inner self would disintegrate under a hail of charges and her persona reassembled as ‘the accused.’ The one person who could speak in mitigation was hanging from a wall bar with his neck broken. Poor Nick, poor, poor, dear Nick.

She clenched the steering wheel, tears blurring the way ahead. Somebody overtaking her thumped the horn and shook his fist. If grief and shock reconfigured itself as a deity that grasped the steering wheel to send her crashing into oblivion, she wouldn’t have given a damn. The instinct to live nagged like a terrier at her heels. Keep going, keep going, island hop, land, take off, land, take off. ‘I’m going to St Benault to paint the wind, so fuck off,’ she mouthed at the fist shaker in the lane next to her, whose fists would have been better employed on the steering wheel.

Hannah was taking off for a Normandy beach, where a mum and a dad and two children ran over the sand as if to entreat the tide not to go out. The wind emerged like a spirit, a huge rainbow beach ball took off, kites fluttered, dipped and dived, sun sparkled in sandy rivulets. The eight-year-old flung out her arms to embrace the joy of it all and shouted, I’m going to paint the wind. That must have been the day when the embryonic artist recognized that art was the soul made public.

*****

Heavy goods vehicles were the first to come bumping over the ferry’s ramp, lowered like a drawbridge, to discharge the titanic emissaries of free trade. Their drivers sat in pristine cabs delivering their global cargoes to the courts of imperious consumerism. They were followed by lesser vehicles, in size order, to escort them along Britain’s crisscrossing tarmac routes like a flotilla of tugs. At least that’s the way a child might perceive it.

The loading began into the huge self-contained world of the ferry, its agile staff securing vehicles with heavy chains. Hannah ascended the steep steps from the lower car deck to higher levels, escorted by safety precautions in French and English.

Above the digital commotion of gaming machines, she found a quiet lounge offering recliners and the comforting sensations of a pleasant journey. How bitter-sweet were these reminders of childhood holidays, haunted by the possibility that she would never see her family again. She would not, could not expect them to stand by her, not after the disgrace of what she’d done that morning. A teenage girl lay screaming, her blood streaming on the floor where she’d self-righteously thrown her, the victim of a major assault. She’d simply turned her back and flown from the scene. How could she expect anybody to excuse her? Teachers were supposed to be exemplars. But something conceived from flames and fury had flared up and consumed everything she was supposed to be. She looked back to the eight-year-old on a Normandy beach, as if at ashes, and knew she had killed the child within.

Hannah left the shores of her native land listening to details of weather and sea conditions ahead, the location of muster points and life jackets in the unlikely event of an emergency. Although the vessel rolled gently on the calm water of the harbour, the smell of fresh coffee and croissants made her feel nauseous. Anxious that she might vomit, she left the lounge for fresh air on deck. Looking back as the ferry left the port, the white cliffs of Dover impressed their chalky grandeur as if for the last time. How happily the child she’d once been had looked at them moving away thinking, ‘we’re off to France.’ It was more than likely that the next time she saw them