All Our Yesterdays
- Daniel Sheridan
- Aug 23
- 9 min read
Aidan foams the sea with his paintbrush, flecking the waves with white froth. He takes a step back from the canvas. The sky was lighter, the client said – a sun-bleached sky. He mixes more white with the cerulean blue.
Aidan’s phone buzzes in the pouch of his overalls - an incoming call. He places the brush and palette on the wide desk, careful not to wipe paint against the easel or the wall. He only recently tidied the studio: oil paints, palette knives, sketchbooks, all neatly arranged on shelves or packed away in cupboards. The phone vibrates against his stomach as he quickly scrubs his hands over the stainless steel sink. It could be a fresh commission. Once this work is complete, he’ll have nothing.
‘I’m after the painter of memories.’ Aidan turns up the call volume; the voice sounds distant.
‘Yes, Aidan Everett speaking.’
A long ‘Umm…’ thrums through the phone. ‘I’ve seen one of your paintings. In Beanie Weanie, the café in Hackney Wick. A funny-looking bloke. With a scarred face.’ The low voice is slow and somewhat halting.
‘Yes, that’s one of mine.’
‘You’ve got talent.’ A brief swell of pride.
Marya, a barista at the café, commissioned a painting of her husband ‘at his most beautiful’. A difficult task, based on the photographs. Aidan enjoys painting unusual faces, a bit like Rembrandt, he often thinks; Rembrandt loved painting the old. But in the niche he’s carved out for himself, what often pleases his clients is the saccharine sheen of nostalgia. They hint at the desired rose tints without realising it. Curious, how memory works. As if it has its own agency, seeking its own retelling.
Marya hadn’t wanted that confectionary gloss. He sends his clients updates as he works, altering the pieces based on a flow of feedback. She asked him to make the pink-white scars more stark. His face had to be less symmetrical, his teeth more crooked. He feared she might reject the work by the time he’d finished disfiguring it. But when he showed Marya the final rendering, scarred and dewlapped, reading a book in bed, she stood before the painting with damp eyes and a ‘Thank you, it’s him, oh thank you!’ At his most beautiful.
‘Umm… there’s someone I’d like you to paint for me.’ Thank Christ. With any luck Aidan won’t have to try and find a way of squeezing his bed into the studio just yet. The caller’s name is Matthew. Apart from a couple of curious details, his request is a conventional one: a sweetheart gazing adoringly at the viewer. ‘Nearly fifteen years ago.’
‘Can you send across a few pictures from around the time of the memory, Matthew, of your girlfriend– or, presuming you’re still–?’
A quiet little laugh. ‘I was engaged to Michelle for a time actually, but umm…’
Aidan has received a lot of photographs over the years, some digital, others curled and sun-yellowed, dates scrawled on the back:
feb 1994
1972
summer 2008, before the diagnosis
They give him locations – video if they have it – though he draws mostly from their words.
– In The Queen’s Head with Diane, two pints of stout on the table, a soft sort of gold glow to everything.
– Sitting on the rug with Jude and Ian in the old house. Our first house, in Stoke Newington. We were leaning against the bottom of the sofa.
The emotional timbre of his clients’ voices is a guide, helping him to inflect the paintings with the desired tone. Some compositions are pieced together solely through description.
– An oak tree with a tire hanging from it, can’t remember where, a park in Devon somewhere. There were wild foxgloves.
A memory isn’t a time capsule. Aidan has learned that his clients want something more vivid, more voluptuous than mere fragments of the past, something possessable. An image which doesn’t perpetually threaten to slip from the mind, which won’t falter or reshape itself. A fixed artefact.
He accepts the commission from Matthew and ends the call. He adds the finishing glare to the current work, the sun-whitened beach scene, legs and arms made half-translucent against the bright sand. As the paintings take shape, the clients themselves become more creative. They begin with extensive detail, before paring down their descriptions into more precise, often startling observations:
– The sun bleached half the colour from the sky and the sand.
Aidan leaves the painting to dry and reaches for a sketchbook. He begins to scratch out a composition, drawing from scribbled notes taken from Matthew’s verbal tableau; the beginnings of a figure, large in the foreground, to be filled in when he receives the photographs. He sketches somebody in the distance: a man with marks on his face. He puts down the pencil and checks his notes.
– To the left, a little in the distance by the fire, there was a man all covered in strange bruises.
An odd detail to want to include. His clients usually tend to forget any background figures, mere extras in their dramatizations of the past. The severe bruising must have stayed with Matthew, punctuating the memory.
There’s something about this man. Aidan wants to paint him right away.
– Large, purplish shapes across his cheeks and nose.
He stares at the little pieces of graphite and eraser dusting the sheet laid over his desk. He brushes the bits into his palm, emptying them into the dustbin. Above the bin is a shelf containing a selection of oil paints. He arranges the colours into a spectrum.
The studio looks brand new, almost unworked in, though he’s been here for nearly a decade. Sheets are placed beneath easels, across tables; turpentine and varnish – for removing stray splatters – all neatly stored. He sweeps pencil shavings from the floor daily. Aidan can’t abide the debris of his own creativity.
He often tidies instead of painting. A bad habit. Tidying keeps him from painting. Painting, from thinking. Not that he isn’t anxious for more work. He has been in the red for years. He’s probably technically below the poverty line; a starving artist – terrible cliché.
– All covered in strange bruises.
Behind Aidan’s eyes a headache starts to simmer.
He paints the flames. Bright, bright flames, Matthew said. Tongues of cadmium yellow mixed with white, like molten light. Make sure to make it bright as the sun, like staring right into the sun, he said. He goes whiter, white-yellow eclipsing the cadmium orange and red, like molten light. The headache burns inside his skull.
It’s a common theme across Aidan’s work: bright lights. Looking back, seeing the light. You see a bright light at the end too, they say, the present haloed by imagined yesterdays and tomorrows. All our yesterdays. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. A roaring bright fire.
Streaking the canvas with flames, paintbrush darting frantically, Aidan feels the back of his neck begin to prickle: the electric current of hyperfocus. He mixes blooms of burning colours on the palette. In the red. No desire to tidy now, to retouch the walls, to put his paints and brushes and palette knives in order, thoughts of nothing but fire. The sense of familiarity grows.
Yes. Aidan was there, at the bonfire. The man with the bruised face.
Not bruises. Birthmarks. A port wine stain, mottling the nose, livid across the cheek in the flash of a firework. Aidan saw this. He was seventeen. Bonfire night, Gravesham fireworks display. Something almost happened. The white and red of the man’s flashing face.
– A splotch on the white sheets, the colour of wine in the half-light.
Aidan lives in a tapestry woven from other peoples’ memories. But the man with the port wine stain – this is someone from his own past. He tries to bring him to mind, finds himself painting Marya’s husband again, his scarred face. He layers a new face over the top. Layers of a person, layers of skin. He dabs on the bruising described by Matthew. Then a new layer, the port wine stain. Beneath the stain the bruises, beneath the bruises the scars. At his most beautiful.
Michelle is more or less complete, tight curls burnt umber and black, face reflecting the orange fire.
He closes his eyes.
Beside the bonfire, hand gripped by the man with the birthmark, pulling him up from the ground. An endless space, darkness stretching out on all sides, black between the flash-bang-flashes, the varicoloured flowering of each firework. Where is everyone else? Before we left for the bonfire, the three of us were watching Occupy Wall Street in full swing on TV. We listened to her parents’ record collection, getting into vinyl. I can remember standing by the wall. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. We can be heroes just for one day. Psycho killer qu’est-ce que c’est? Something almost happened on bonfire night, the fifth of November. Remember, remember.
The composition is illogical. Michelle is backlit by the bonfire, but her face reflects a red-gold light, as if the bonfire is simultaneously behind her and in the place of the viewer. This was what Matthew wanted, what he remembers. The photographs of Michelle are a series of rehearsed smiles. I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you that I almost believe that they’re real. The smile is easeful in the painting, warm, teeth flashing love-making words, told in Matthew’s strange, halting voice, the thrum of his memories through the phone.
Aidan messages him with updated images:
Matthew: You’ve really got her mate. Beautiful. And the fire is better but it was even brighter. In my memory it’s like sunlight. Sunlight at night.
Aidan: Okay no problem. But with the man behind Michelle, are you sure it was bruises and not a port wine stain?
Matthew: What do you mean a port wine stain??
He opens the cabinet beneath the sink, clinks out a bottle of Bells. It’s after two pm, no crime in it. Shift this headache, sharp pressure against the backs of his eyeballs, stabbing pains. Like something trying to get out through the sockets. He thinks about the classical understanding of vision, pre-Renaissance artists. They’d thought that sight was a product of eyebeams of elemental fire. If something was too distant to see, it was because the eyebeams couldn’t shoot far enough.
He pours a generous double, drains it, preferring the burn of whiskey down his gullet to the fiery pain shooting from his eyes.
He brings the bottle and tumbler with him. Drinking and painting. Got to get this fire right. A memory is a mere abstraction until Aidan paints it, makes it tangible. He brightens the blaze; the bonfire outshines Michelle, becoming more the centrepiece. He steps back, takes a swig from the colour-swirled water pot instead of the tumbler, spits it, spluttering. He wipes his mouth and takes in the white-hot fire.
– Fighting over a girl. A bloody nose. Proper decked him. Blood on our faces.
– Doing shots from white plastic cups, crumpled in her hand, splash of red aftershock.
Caroline says, as she gets up off the floor. Vinyl records spinning. Aidan’s memories and past commissions are becoming confused. He remembers the rushing sting of a punch to the nose. He puts down the water pot and grabs the Bells. The whiskey had deadened the headache for a time, now it’s pushing against his eyes again. He drinks from the bottle, winces, examines his work, eyebeams bursting the picture into white flame.
– He handed me a tissue. Spots of blood black in the dark. ‘He caught you a nasty one, didn’t he son. You gotta risk getting banged out once in a while, though. Better than walkin’ away. You can get at them, you can make it difficult for a bastard to be a bastard.’ The firelight made the marks on his face dance.
The sun-scorched beach, translucent legs and arms, the sea, tide coming in fast, a frothing boiling maelstrom, in the red – a concatenation of memories and paintings, visions – ghostly bodies in the flood, waves crashing into a fire on the beach, I want to break free, the boom of a red rocket, remember, remember the fifth of November, steaming hissing plumes, the fire extinguished. All our yesterdays. Out, out, brief candle!
He washes his brushes, tidies away the sheets, scans the floor for flecks of paint Out, damned spot! Through the window, clouds darken the afternoon. He turns on the lights, chasing out the premature dusk.
Matthew transfers the fee, explaining that a friend is coming to collect the picture. Aidan texts across the studio address and wraps the canvas. Before he folds the remaining edge of brown paper, a window of canvas remains, revealing only Michelle’s face. Sunlight at night.
A knock at the door. He hands over the painting. The friend – a hipster haired somebody, greying beard – smiles flatly, takes the wrapped painting and departs, like a courier. Aidan had been hoping to meet Matthew, see what he looks like. Does he even want to know– Were we at that same bonfire? There is a light and it never goes out. Gunpowder, treason and plot. Occupy Wall Street. Remember, remember, standing by the wall. Caroline says. I see no reason … should ever be forgot.
References
“I can remember standing by the wall” and “We can be heroes just for one day” are lines from ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie.
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is the title of an album by The Cure, and “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you that I almost believe that they’re real” is from the Cure song ‘Pictures of You’.
“Psycho killer qu’est-ce que c’est” is from ‘Psycho Killer’ by Talking Heads.
“Caroline says, as she gets up off the floor” is taken from ‘Caroline Says II’ by Lou Reed.
“I want to break free” is a reference to the Queen song of the same name.
“There is a light and it never goes out” is from the Smiths song.
I make references to the rhyme ‘Remember, Remember the Fifth of November’: Along with the first line, in the final paragraph are the fragments, “Gunpowder, treason and plot”, “I see no reason” and “should ever be forgot.”
“All our yesterdays”, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, “Out, out, brief candle!” and “Out, damned spot!” are all quotations from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal-Hodson and Hania Ahmed
Comments