The Miracle Series
Pencil portraits
Miracle No. 2
| Her apartment was always real hot and while we watched TV shows she took cold showers with the door open so she could still hear the TV. I would try watch her reflection in the TV set as she undressed and stepped in and out of the shower, trying to make out her shape in the darker bits of the TV image. In bed she would hold me in her arms and whisper to me. I’d just lay there loving it, knowing it wasn’t wrong but at the same time knowing I wouldn’t tell my Mum because I had a feeling, like everything I enjoyed, that she’d try and stop it. She told me stories about her plans of leaving her job and breaking into the movie business. She’d always wanted to be an actress and had moved to the city nine months before. Her motto was that you always had to be ready to be discovered and she’d memorised lines from old movies that she would use to impress people she met. Her favourite ones were from films I’d never seen, old movies that weren’t on at the cinema, just late at night on TV. Sometimes she would dress up as her favourite actresses and mime scenes and pose like in photos she’d seen in old movie magazines. Once she told me about a gypsy fortune-teller that has visited her mother when she was pregnant with her. She told her that she expecting a ‘miracle child’ who would grow up to be a famous movie star. “See it’s in the stars,” she said, “It’s just a matter of timing and always being ready.” She played her records on a small record player with matching speakers. She had a great collection and had learned all the words to the songs by heart. She was the kind of person who danced with her eyes closed and cried at the sad ones. Sometimes if she’d had some wine she’d sing along to the whole song and sing it with so much real feeling it was as if she’d experiences those things for real. Maybe she had, or maybe there in the dark, with her eyes tightly shut and her skinny body swaying to the music she could also see into the future, but unlike her mothers gypsy tea-leaf prediction maybe she’d seen that she wasn’t going to be a famous movie star and that this was the closest she’d ever get to complete adulation. |