15. Bird-Ladies are from Venus

I shove Mac’s hand and the leering blunt away, crossing my arms in a manner that I hope depicts what a tosspiece he is. Still grinning, he says, ‘anyway, when I decided to leave the tube station, I didn’t realize that ahead of me there was a queue of people, equivalent to the population of India, waiting to get into the station and blocking the road. So when I finally made it out onto Oxford Street, I was still trapped in the same place for another twenty minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. It took me five whole minutes to get my arms free enough to raise them in the air and cry out for sweet Jah to rescue me from what was surely one of the portal entrances to hell.’

I roll my eyes because I don't doubt that this is actually what he did. ‘And were you rescued?’ I ask.

‘Well, sort of. After twenty bloody minutes of standing in the same place, I escaped the hell portal, but I was still in the middle of fucking Oxford Street, so of course, there were bloody tourists everywhere, using up all the taxis. I ended up walking around looking for one until I reached Piccadilly Circus, and there didn’t seem to be as many people going into the station—I mean you could go down the fucking stairs at a normal pace—but then, once I got down there, turns out it was just another minging hell portal. I mean, for fuck’s sake, where do they all come from? Eventually I got back to the surface and only when I saw an orange light coming towards me, did I know that sweet Jah had heard my cry and sent me an angel in the form of Don Lewis, London cabbie with empty taxi.’ He pauses and motions his head toward the painting. ‘That’s why I figure one of the devil’s names must be Piccadilly.’

‘Not Oxford?’ I ask.

‘Well I can’t bloody well call the devil Oxford, can I? “Oxford’s Circus.” Might as well call it Colonel Mustard’s Circus, fuck. I’d have the professor police all over me. Plus, I didn’t want to associate your uni with hell or anything.’

‘What are you talking about, “my uni”?’ I ask, ‘I went to UCL.’

As if I could get into Oxford.

‘Oh,’ Mac says with a shrug, and leans over to re-light his blunt, ‘I thought that’s where you were this past year.’

‘Seriously?’ I say, ‘I was in New York.’

‘Shit,’ Mac says with a laugh that causes him to choke on his weed smoke, ‘that’s all the way in America. What were you doing there?’

God, my brother can be such a jackass. I remind him that I went to do my art and gallery studies degree, but can’t help frowning because I’ve now been reminded of the secret-real reason why I was in New York. And this just ends up reminding me of my new-fabulous-life and the big fat rubbish bin that today chucked it into.

Actually, you know what? No. I will not let David chuck my new-fabulous-life into the rubbish bin. Not this time. He’s already chucked one version of my life into the bin; he’s not allowed to do it again. That’s just greedy. Not that I’m saying David isn’t greedy, because obviously he is the collective epitome of all negative words in the English language and also, every other language in the universe, including Martian and Venetian. Venetian from Venus, not Venice. Is there even a Venetian language in Venice? I feel like this is something I should know. Especially since I focused on the Italian renaissance painters in the art history concentration of my degree. My undergraduate degree, that is. So, almost two years ago. That’s long enough to give me an excuse for forgetting it, right? It’s not like my brain has an infinite amount of storage space or anything; bits of information will inevitably have to go at some point. It’s called natural selection. And the Venetian bit is unfortunately among the extinct.

Maybe there’s a Venetian dialect… Ugh, whatever, it doesn’t matter. The point is that David is all the negative words in all the languages, including both the planetary Venetian language and the Italian dialect that I may or may not have made up. And if I'm lucky, Venus is like Earth and has lots of different languages as well, since the more languages, the more negative words to describe David. And I think that was my point…

I might need to leave the room. I’m obviously second-hand high.

As I turn, I notice a colorful, little picture lying on one of Mac’s work tables. It’s of a lady wearing a dress covered in showgirl feathers, and instead of human legs, she has legs like an ostrich. The background is hot pink and the woman is wearing sunglasses. I know exactly why she’s wearing sunglasses too. It's not because it's particularly sunny in Picture Land. It’s because the artist didn’t know how to draw eyes but could manage a coloured-in black circle. I know this because Mac is not the artist of this particular piece. I am.  And by “artist,” I mean “18-year-old-scribbler”; and by “piece,” I mean “undergrad-art-class-doodle.” Let’s be real. I kept drawing bird-ladies over and over, for every assignment, because it was the only thing I knew how to do and the class was mandatory. But I did give them all a different outfit. That was the fun part. The not-fun part was the part where I was born without artistic ability and therefore, decided to do art history instead (for the sake of mankind), and somehow, still wound up being forced to take an art class.What the hell, UCL?

My parents kept trying to frame my bird-ladies and hang them up in the house. I knew their secret agenda was to convince their friends that these were new pieces of contemporary art, and then, when their friends started “ooh-ing” and “ah-ing,” my parents would slap, “our daughter is the artist” right across their ignorant faces. Then there would be a follow-up slap of “both our children are such talented artists, with such different styles,” and some feeding of bullshit that my art is cubism or something, and that’s why it looks like a 6-year old drew it. Next would be the “well done us, we’re so good at baby-making,” statements, as if they, too, are artists—artists of people—and actually designed Mac and I as humans. Then they would end with the obvious finale of “this calls for another bottle of Bernier Moscato,” and that would be that. Mission accomplished.

Naturally, I forbade it. There was no way I was going to let my parents parade my stupid bird-lady doodle art (truly, something only a mother could love) in the name of binge drinking. If they wanted to hang my pictures on the fridge with a magnet, then fine, because that’s what normal parents did when their children drew pictures—even if the picture was supposed to depict the family vacation at the beach, but looked more like a family of phallic-shaped water balloons with faces, standing on a blue rug, in the midst of an acid trip that has given all the inanimate objects around them the ability to smile.

Damn it, I really thought I had hidden away all my bird-ladies properly.

‘What’s it doing here?’ I ask, pointing accusingly at it.

‘Bird-Lady?’ Mac says, ‘Mum found it in a box in your room somewhere.’

‘What was she doing going through my room?’ I snap. This probably means she found the whole box. Fuck.

Mac shrugs. ‘They’re thinking about dedicating one of the rooms entirely to their gem sculptures or some bizarre shit. I guess she was considering yours—I mean, since you don’t use it anymore.’

Is that a joke? I am a human being. How ridiculously sad would it be if I lost my own bedroom to a bunch of gems in the shape of seaweed? They don’t even have faces, like the African masks. They’re just rocks. Literally. My parents are considering giving away the childhood bedroom of their only daughter to a bunch of faceless rocks.

I pick up the bird-lady picture. ‘Why do you have this one?’

‘I’m trying to match the shade of pink you used. I'm thinking you mixed a red and a yellow with a medium pink of some kind, but when I try, I can’t get my shade as bright as yours. You don’t happen to remember the brand of oil color, do you?’

‘Really?’ I respond, staring at my stupid doodle-painting, ‘You give me way too much credit. I’m pretty sure I just got a pot of paint labeled “pink” and stuck my brush into it—no creative mixology involved.’

Mac shook his head. ‘No—you don’t give me enough credit. I know mixed paint when I see it, fuck. Please, don’t question the professional.’ He grins and leans back in his chair again. ‘Also, when you go downstairs, will you take a look at the big, naked bird-lady that Mum and Dad hung in the dining room and see if you remember what shade of red the background is? Because that was definitely just an oil pastel...’

Hold on a minute. They hung the what in the where? Of all the bird-ladies they could have abducted, they chose the one that I was too lazy to come up with an outfit for? Ugh, for fuck’s sake.

I groan internally—and, it seems, also externally, because Mac releases a giant laugh, and once again starts choking on his weed smoke.

‘Trust me, the dining room looks phenomenal,' he says, once he catches his breath, 'very rustic, like a cave covered in drawings of ladies with chicken-legs and Star Trek costumes, and then one big, naked bird-slag.’

I glare at him. He's lucky I can't speak Venetian (from Venus), or he'd be the recipient of some atrociously vulgar cratered-street slang right now. My bird-ladies may be lame, but they are NOT slags, naked or not. They are simply comfortable living as mutant hybrids, clothing optional. As should we all. 
So there.