Time For A Performance Artist

“What’s the time?” Mary whispers through unmoving lips, skilled as a ventriloquist.
My sodding hand is killing me, she thinks.  Why on earth would you hold a spoon like this?  Frederick Cayley Robinson, sounds like he must have been a posh boy, with a name like that.  What was he thinking of when he painted those Acts of Mercy?  Hope his subjects didn’t have to pose for long like this, more like Acts of Cruelty if they did.  
Mary’s neck was stiff and on the verge of going into spasm, she had been sat, frozen, for the last, how long? She wasn’t sure
“Come on Meg, you can see the clock, what’s the time?” the unmoving lips ask again.
“Twenty past two,” the equally invisible reply.
Forty minutes to go she muses. Still, I suppose its better than being painted gold and standing in the rain for hours. No chance of being peed on by some mangey dog in here, and then she remembers the cat.
How do they keep the cat so still she wonders, and hopes it is still where it should be. Oh stuff it who cares.  But she involuntarily ruminates on the matter of the static cat and finally concludes that ‘stuff it’ is probably the answer.
“Meg, what’s the time now?”