CHAPTER ONE
The client shifted in his chair, the creak loud in the room and Kiran tried to hide her worry; she wasn’t sure she could afford a new chair. He tapped the pen against his teeth and stared at her. His expression was blank. She sighed inside. Why did people come to her before they had worked out what they wanted? They had one session. Only one. Those were the rules. But that session could last the day if, like this client, they didn’t bloody well think it through before taking up her time.
But then clients weren’t exactly camped outside her door. And she was supposed to be the caring, sharing, healing Indian type. She wondered if he had absorbed the payment details. They usually did. While they were at the session. They were thrilled to discover that they couldn’t pay. Not with money. And not immediately. They had to wait for the vision to materialize and then paint in their gratitude to her. She was beginning to think that Ireland was either full of very forgetful people or bad painters.
The client was finally scratching his pen across her Vision Painting Application Form. She’d been bored and had used a graphics package to design a text logo and a few empty boxes. She couldn’t use images; she wasn’t allowed to influence their visions, not by words, deeds, images. Most times, as she gazed at the forms after the clients left, she wished she could change the images as she painted, adjust a little hope here, add a dream there. But the punishment for breaking any one of the myriad rules was the failure of the visualization. And who was she to design a life; hers was not a pretty picture.
His stubby fingers gripping the pen produced a floral script that remained neat and within the lines. His forehead glistened as he wrote. Kiran was glad the heating was off. It was still technically summer in Connemara in August but the house could get cold if she didn’t leave the boiler on. She wondered whether she had enough kerosene in the tank; another worry that she would have to put off until the winter.
He had finished applying for his dreams and the chair squealed loudly this time, the soft leather seat fluffing itself back out with an indignant puff when he raised himself out of it. He handed her the form and smiled and her heart burned at the hope in his eyes. The energy would come and she would paint him a powerful picture; she prayed he had made the right choices.
Kiran saw him to the front door and watched as he climbed into a grey middle-aged car. The car crunched over the gravel driveway as he struggled to get the seatbelt around his torso. She smiled and waved back as he tooted the horn and waved at the rear-view mirror.
She wandered back into the office that doubled as a studio. The shine off her well-used desk was dulled by stacks of papers but they were bills, not completed Vision Painting Application Forms. A screen cordoned off half of the room that included the area in front of the large bay windows which was reserved for her easel, a battered pine table, a second-hand armchair, and a bookcase that held her paint supplies.
She examined the form. Great! Again! How the hell was she supposed to paint ‘mortgage debt forgiveness’ and ‘happiness’? They were concepts, people, not visions. All he’d had to do was figure out what would make him happy and write that down. Well, at least she had some physical features to paint. He wanted to be tall, with broad shoulders, a slim tapered waist and the profile of a Roman God. Lovely, now she’d have to research what Roman Gods looked like, she had a vague feeling they just had prominent noses. Or was that Greek Gods?
He had of course written down the word ‘money’, but again, there wasn’t all that much space on a canvas and she couldn’t draw out each banknote. She’d solved that problem before by drawing out 500 euro notes in stacks but she was getting fed up of the effort and since they didn’t have the courtesy to get back to her, probably now too rich she assumed, she didn’t know if was only the top notes that materialized.
Kiran pulled out a blank canvas from a stack of 1m x 1m canvases lying in the corner of the room. Another rule. She wondered if her father had made up some of the rules or whether they had actually been passed down to him as he insisted. The last time her parents had visited from their retirement home in Kerala he had explained, again, that the rules were out of his control. That things worked better in India because people remember to paint in the gratitude. That the vision painters there lived comfortable lives. And, of course the usual scolding, why had she chosen to stay on in Ireland where there were no vision painters. Only a few worked in the UK, not even enough for an Association or Union. Here in Ireland, for some reason, people seemed to think she was an Art Therapist.
They’d been sitting in the Roisin Dubh, her unfulfilled potential laying heavy on the table between them, and he had patted her hand and they both knew the rules meant no vision painter could paint for another. So they didn’t talk about her dreams. Which she couldn’t paint either. Onto any canvas. This was the only rule that, if broken, led to the immediate loss of the vision painter’s talent. Her father was halfway through his spiel on the mythic qualities of the latest tubes of paint that he was developing with an American manufacturer, the cream and black Guinness sliding in between the white hairs on his upper lip, when she’d sighed and told him to cut the Indian Swami shite. Fair play, he had stopped with a grin, and had left some of the test tubes of colour for her when they left.
Kiran set up the studio, turning on the heat and the lights even though the sunlight streaked in through the glass. While she painted, nothing else existed, and when she finished the room would be dark and cold if she didn’t prepare it.
She placed the blank canvas on the easel and laid out the tubes of paint on the pine table beside it. She unfolded a white cotton sheet, stained with the dreams of her previous clients, and arranged it on the floor; lifting the easel and resting it back down so that any stray paint would not mark the old oak wood floors. She caressed the paints onto the palette and lined the brushes in readiness.
Kiran curled up in the armchair and stared at the form, stroking the paper, absorbing every word, imagining pictures of his vision. For the next few hours she would be immersed in his dreams and she needed to empty her mind of her thoughts, to empty her heart of her desires, to focus solely on this person who had come to her, to justify his faith. When she was ready, she moved to the easel and picked up her favourite brush.
When she came out of the trance, the life she had breathed on to the canvas hummed behind her. She crawled onto the armchair and tried to regain her own.
∞ ∞ ∞
The sunlight wandered through the window and settled on her face and, despite her exhaustion, Kiran smiled as she blinked her eyes open. She remained in the depths of the armchair allowing the heat to seep through her skin. She was drained and while it took a few days to fully recover from each painting session she had to be at the restaurant the next day for the afternoon shift.
The doorbell pounded in her brain and Kiran put her fingers in her ears and buried her head further into the armchair. The noise didn’t stop so she rolled herself onto the floor and crawled to the front door. The caller had now stopped pressing on the ringer. Instead, a shaft of daylight slanted a line through the gloom of the hall as fingers propped open the letter-flap. Kiran knelt and looked out the flap. The light was sharp but the eyes that stared back at her were sharper. The angle of the light revealed the surface of a planet, a tan and shadow striated volcano that shrank into the encircling bands of gold as the pupils dilated. Kiran realized she was on her knees in her hallway staring through the letter-flap at a beautiful woman. And she hadn’t even combed her hair yet. She jerked to her feet and ran her fingers through her hair, cursing her luck.
The flap sprung back with a metal clang. Kiran took a deep breath, placed a smile on her face, and opened the door. She stood staring at the woman standing there. She needed to say something; it didn’t look good for her to be wordless in front of her clients no matter how cute they were. How insipid a word for a vision painter to find in her vocabulary? Cute! This woman was a fire walking around in human form.
Oh no, how long had she bee
n staring? The woman was looking at her, a glimpse of a smile lurking on her lips which was where Kiran’s eyes were now drawn. Kiran closed her eyes. That was better. She was a Professional. The capital letter was important. Great, this Professional was standing in her hallway with her eyes closed, her hair falling in black shades with the occasional tuft freewheeling away from the crowd, her face devoid of decoration, looking like she had spent the night on the floor after a mad session at the world’s liveliest nightclub. And she had that inane grin still welded on her face.
Kiran opened her eyes as the woman spoke.
“Hello, I saw your card at the restaurant. I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this. I couldn’t get through on the phone number and I didn’t want to put it off in case I backed out.”
The timbre of her voice was the perfect shade of autumn. Her hair rustled with red and gold, dropping leaves onto her shoulders.
Kiran cleared her throat. Her voice still emerged as a croak. “It’s no problem. Come in. Sorry, I just finished a painting and that always lays me out for a while.” And I wouldn’t normally take on a client the next day but Mother, may I?
Kiran turned back into the