She rolled onto her side, her pretty face against her palm, her eyes staring sadly towards the camera.
“Art is everything. Without creativity I’m nothing. Without expression my soul would shrivel and die, and I’d be an empty corpse… drifting through the motions. Without creativity there is no soul, but none of them see that. They think life is about work. They think I should sail my dreams down the river in favour of a real job, a real life, like it’s some silly phase I’ll grow out of, like I’ll realise art is a silly nothing pastime and settle down to an average, boring, mundane existence like everyone else. They think I should give it up. They’d never say that… but it’s true…”
Her eyes were watery lakes of hazel and earth. God, she was beautiful in her innocence.
“…they think I should give up on everything I care about. They think I should give up on my art. They think I should give up on you.”
My throat tightened.
She smiled at the camera. “Don’t worry, they don’t know about this coaching thing. They just know I like you. They think it’s some other silly pointless dream thing I have going on. I guess it is.” She sighed. “I’m supposed to be a woman, an adult, yet all the world sees is a stupid girl who doesn’t know anything. Who doesn’t know what she wants, or how she feels, or what’s important. I mean, sure, they humour me with the whole university thing, pretending like I’ll do a degree and get it out of my system and find some proper job to do when I leave, but I don’t want their normality. I don’t want to meet some okay guy and settle down to an admin job and knock out a couple of kids in my mid-twenties and forget I ever had a soul. I don’t want any of it.”
My stomach knotted.
“I want more than that… I want so much more than that…” She stared at me through the screen. “I have this… darkness… inside me… it’s more than a muse… it compels me, consumes me…” Another breath. “I’m not like other girls.”
A tumble of thoughts, all at once. Thoughts and memories. Of me, of Anna, of that wistful girl I’d met a lifetime ago, saying those exact same words before my lips pressed against hers and we found each other, truly found each other. I’m not like other girls. Helen’s eyes and her soft breath, wanting the same thing, needing the same thing, some validation, some other lonely ship on the waters. Needing someone, needing me.
A teacher. She needed a teacher.
I pressed my fingers to my temples. Focus.
“…can you see me? Do you see me? Sometimes it feels like you do, when we’re talking in class… or when you look at my work. Sometimes I feel like you see through my pictures and straight inside me. Like you get it. Not just the art, but me, too. That gives me hope, you know that? The hope that I can one day be myself, totally, not beholden to anyone or anyone else’s ideas of normality…”
She closed her eyes, and I watched her eyelashes flutter with her breath.
“…other times it feels like I’m all alone. I mean I have Lizzie, I love Lizzie… but…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It’s just one of those times. I guess I feel alone today.” A long breath and I couldn’t take my eyes off her soft lips. “I feel alone… in a houseful of people, in a world full of people… I still feel alone…”
And I felt alone, too.
Teacher and man collided. They knocked heads, and fists, and somehow they drew a truce, a middle ground. I opened the comments window, stared at the flashing cursor for seconds that felt like hours before I tapped out the words.
You’re not alone.
I pressed send as a knock on wood sounded through the speakers, and there was a sudden fear in me. As though those simple words had condemned me, doomed me to some terrible retribution I didn’t yet comprehend. I heard the ping of my message being received, but Helen didn’t look, she didn’t see. Her languid body jolted to life, her face disappearing off-screen, body tense at the creak of a door. “Helen, I just wanted to talk to you… about dinner… I’ve spoken to your dad about the panto… he says that…”
And the screen turned black. Disconnected.
I logged out and pushed the tablet aside. Professionalism, where the hell was my professionalism? Listening to the ramblings of a teenage identity crisis on webcam, pretending this was normal, that this was coaching, that this was in any way decent. But how could I not? Helen was my student, and she needed a sounding board, she needed a guide, a friend. She needed a teacher.
I would be that teacher.
Just a teacher.
But a good teacher. A great teacher. The teacher an exquisite soul like Helen Palmer deserved.
I turned Jagger back on and poured myself another wine.
***
Helen