Beginnings

Rhys isn’t much of an artist. He usually leaves all that creative stuff up to his friend Faris. Rhys studied fashion in uni, but he got away with shitty drawings, so long as they weren’t actually half-arsed. But he’s bored, and there’s a few random sheets of notepaper and a ballpoint pen, staring at him from the coffee table, and he picks them up, leans on the cover of the book Gravity’s Rainbow, and starts doodling.

He starts with black lines, that kind of represent hair, if you squint, and then he draws a face shape, and if he were drawing in led, he’d probably erase the chin and fix it up, but he’s not, so he doesn’t. He fills the face in with eyes, which he covers with sunglasses, then a nose and little pouted lips. He laughs a little, because okay, he’s never really drawn faces before, and it doesn’t look that bad.

Next, he draws thin little lines for a neck, and then down shoulders and arms and hands and a torso, and he doesn’t draw tits, because he decides that it’s a boy. And he draws a coat, which reaches to where the knees would be, and adds thin legs, covered by black jeans and then black winklepickers, much like his own.

And Rhys smiles, because wow. He sits and looks at the boy for a few moments longer, before writing ’Joseph’ in messy writing at the bottom.

He sets the drawing down and goes to make tea, smiling all the while.