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Fred Johnston was born in Belfast in 1951 and has published seven collections of poetry, two novels, and a collection of short stories, Keeping The Night Watch (1998). In 1986 he founded Galway's Cuirt festival of Poetry (now Literature). In the mid-Seventies he was co-founder of the Irish Writers' Co-operative. He has also recorded two traditional folk albums with the group 'Parsons Hat' in the early 'Nineties.
This story was published in Albedo One issue 27.
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an Albedo One story
“There are hundreds of other gifts of painting which are not at all involved with moral conditions . . . .”
- John Ruskin: The Unity of Art
There is music in the way water bubbles in gutters and drains. The sort of music one finds in paintings, sometimes. No, not paintings of musical instruments, not like that. Natural and fixed. You know what I mean.
It was raining heavily, my pork-pie hat, my trademark to some, was drenched. Little globules of silver water had formed their own universes on the fabric. I’m a familiar figure. The odd wave here and there. The club foot is what they see first, or rather, my up-down hobble. The cane’s for show.
There’s been a lot of unnecessary, in my view, fuss, about this Bacon business. I knew him. Spent hours pissed in that refuse-tip mews kip; squatting, leaning, nothing to sit on. Brushes in butter bean tins, tripping over his enormous VAT 69 carton while he fondled his miniature David to illustrate some point or other. He was reading Nietzsche and trying to teach himself German to read him in the original, which I thought was daft and said so: German for Adults. He’d borrowed from me a rather heavy book on Velasquéz, whom some said he imitated, though I never could see it. I thought he’d leaned a bit much towards Picasso. The recurring naked light bulb motif is out of Guerníca.
Sometimes we’d just sit and listen to his transistor radio. He liked music. Once he told me that all his paintings were about himself. The light bulb was about illuminating the horror of our lives, he said. The false, fake Apollo casting his limp light over a catastrophic world.
Some say my style apes his. I dispute that, though of late I’ve begun to concentrate even more on the human form. This new show, for instance, is about human form and what happens to it. Corruption, if you like.
The good days in London didn’t last long, more’s the pity. London: the Grail, for some. And there was talk, a cottage in Cornwall, Goldsmith students. I think there was some idea of creating a second and decidedly half-arsed Camden Town Group, Lord help us, but there was too much drink and messing about. I ignored the gossip, let them get on with whatever they got on with. There were many crude attempts to discuss Francis’ art back then. And mine, which wasn’t as fiery or as mad. The head and sides-of-beef thing, though, had given some of them the opportunity to say he’d tied himself to outmoded notions about trauma and the last world war. Bollocks. His paintings are all about himself, even when they’re not.
I don’t think he was fair to those who loved him. I think he hated himself for this but was unable to do anything about it. Hence, the self-rage in his work. Anyway, if you want to hear any more about him and those days, read my memoirs.
I crossed this bridge once and asked a begging child if I could draw him. He asked me for money. I told him to piss off. He knocked the spontaneity out of it for me. Cheapened the business.
I remember when, underneath, the black Guinness barges blew thick brown smoke up into your face and the air was full over the river and the bridge of the homely smell of hops. Things have changed. I’ve changed. Can’t chase anymore, can’t run after anything or anyone. When that dies out of life, life implodes, like they say a TV set does. I long for the days, not always but now and then, when everything we did was illegal. Added spice.
Now it’s all young shaven-headed pretty boys dressed in black acting the artist for the columns of Saturday newspapers. No life, no violence, left.
You have to have a nail in your soul, the heart snagging on a rusty wire, as my old friend, bless him, John Noble, once said to me. John was a teacher, a good one, having done the decent thing and given up art when he couldn’t do it well. I held his hand as cancer dissolved him. He didn’t complain. He faded into the bedclothes and disappeared. It’s a long time ago now. The room was full of the sweet smell of flesh decaying, I remember that.
My scarf, wrapped around my neck, has become saturated with rain. It feels like a snake trying to strangle me. The light is beginning to go, the sky is the colour of tinned salmon. I’ve often thought of plunging headfirst into the old Plurabella. Tell me the man who hasn’t. Now I give the river a passing glance, as it were, a kind of side-of-the eye regard. It’s often been a comfort to me that I could take my own life.
Now some say that this sort of melancholy has taken root in some of my pictures. I hate the word root, it reminds me of illness, things going deep down and killing. There is, let me be clear, no room for sentiment in painting. At least, not any more. The age of sentiment is long passed. Perhaps it ended after the First World War, who knows, and I could drag up the names of painters, but I’m not going to bother. What I paint now is the most unsentimental subject you could imagine: the revenge of life on the body, the way we decay, all stops out, all systems go, over to the worm. In a way, that’s what Francis painted; the gape-mouthed dissolution of the body and the soul. Under a naked light bulb. Everything liquifying. Nothing solid, certain. He took out a plastic lighter once, a green one, and held it the flame up to my face. He could be frightening. In a loving sort of way.
No, I was never a lover there, not me. Perhaps could have been, I was a drunken Irishman like himself and he liked pissed Paddies. I remember a certain leprechaunish playwright whom I met, starkers, in that kip of a flat. Sings shtum, nowadays. Someone else mentions this in a book. I think he could fall in love but a painterly insanity made him break the love up into bits he could paint with. I’m only mentioning my preferences, as they’re called, because they’re old news anyway.
I’m walking now towards my doom. I’m always nervous at an opening. People have come to expect a certain darkness about my work and I sincerely hope they’ll not be disappointed. But there’s something extra in these works. The Table IV might make someone throw up, but that’s all right as long as nobody compares me to Francis.
Traffic at this time of day. No manners. There’s a rush on this city that’s not good for its heart. I hobble clubbily between cars and feel the heat come off the engines and out of the eyes of their drivers. I feel like a target. I’ve never driven, just as well, maybe. Terry offered to have someone pick me up, and I should’ve taken the offer, but that’s me. What I’m worried about right now, even as I see the yellow square of light from the big front window of the gallery reflecting, doing marvellous colour work, on the wet street, is to have some decent press. Critics I loathe.
One in particular, and he’s here, naturally.
I open the glass door, a drenched Claudius, remove my porky. The beetle-black tailored back of a decent critic shifts itself and he offers me his hand. More hands materialise, it becomes a Beckett play. The noise is conversation and music from the walls: Allighiero’s Artemis Concerto, First Movement, followed by Lotti’s Crucifixus and then Gesualdo’s Tenebrae factae sunt. All looped, as I’ve asked, the lighter Allighiero blending subtly with the darker others. There’s canapés and white and red plonk and pinky things on sticks. Redfaced men in various degrees of sweat smile and kiss the cheeks of women of a certain age who smell, as I squeeze past them, of talc and the process of drying out. Or is it up? All this is not for the young. Old age is not for the young, is it? Well, then. Neither are the painterly rantings . . . .
My hand shoots out like a predatory bird.
“Harry. Good of you to come.”
Harry resembles something by Beatrix Potter. His fat shape is cast in a Plaster-of-Paris-toned suit that clings to the fat folds of his legs and arms. He has charcoal eyes and a lizard’s mouth, always wet and red. Harry emerged from some hatchery in the Yank mid-west, did no good in a nameless university, ended up here and whipped onto a newspaper as a critic before the ink’s dry on his passport-stamp. As if the Yank drawl is what post-revolutionary Ireland respects in place of Oxbridge.You loathe Harry because he knows nothing about art and gets paid to ladle this vacancy back out to you. A dangerous nothing, let me add, because it’s a black and dark negative that can do damage. You may suspect, from the anger in his reviews by times, that he didn’t get on with his Dad. Or perhaps got on too well.
But it’s my opening and I shake his hand wetly. He’s cradling a gin and tonic. A soft-ground etching of a human being.
“Wouldn’t like to wake up to one of those on my wall.”
“You won’t, dear boy. I promise.”
I enjoy falling into the sad old queen routine for people like Harry. They expect it. It gives them a tale to tell.
“Bringing home the Bacon again?”
“Schoolboyish, Harry. Are we going to act the cunt tonight? Excuse me.”
I move through the sweat and talc. Give them what they want, John, bless him, used to say. Terry comes over. So thin. I think he was born sickly looking. Every time I shake his hand it’s like saying goodbye. But he’s the best. His thin grey face shatters into a smile of enthusiasm. His handshake is firm and he can look you straight in the eye.
“This is very good work.”
A camera flashed beside us.
“I hope I flog one or two.”
“Give me your hat. And the scarf. And the stick”
“The stick’s my prop, Terry.”
But sure enough, a red spot had appeared on a frame across the room. The only sort of red spots a painter wants to see - now who said that first?
Terry busies himself chatting people up. He’s good at that. You have to allow for his abrupt comings and goings. It’s the business end of things and it’s very necessary. I meanwhile hoke through the catalogues. The reproductions are decent. The Gothic print is a bit over the top, but there you are: The Arrogance of Flesh. So, I turn and view my own work, try to stand outside it, as it were.
The Table IV is a set of five humanesque figures, redly disembowelled, emerging tortuously from a dark background or space, all on unprimed canvas. There’s not much to be said about them beyond that, from my point of view. They never look quite so large hung as when they’re snug on the easel. But they are attracting red spots, or perhaps, growing them. Attitude is a tall work, virtually devoid of human shapes, but you can see them, as it were, bleeding into the bright foreground if you stand back a bit. Reclining Mask is a lovely macabre little thing, with two head-shapes, skulls more correctly, leering out, mouths open, from a dark background. Nasty young things in an alley? Scumble. I’m not a great acrylics fan, really. The effect is to make the skulls almost go in and out of each other, and the glazing is very light. Resurrection V is one of a series I’m doing, and I thought it would do no harm to bring out a finished piece here. The body shape, armless, split, is doing a chiaroscuro stretching trip upwards, imitating religious painting of a certain type that calls itself visionary. Now the background is not shaded, but deeply blued and greened, suggesting growth and emptiness, using the optical mixtures routine, so that it’s almost pointillism but not quite, though nothing much can be gained from the work by standing up close to it. The human figure is drawn first and I’ve left the drawn lines visible; they have become like whisps of smoke around the torso. I’m particularly happy with Christ Seized, a sort of yelling head with thorns dissolving behind bars. Bacon there, fair enough. But it’s a homage. The flesh-tones fade, my handling . . . .
“Ladies and Gentlemen, if we could have hush for one moment . . .”
Terry does the needful. Great em-cee. I’m squaring up to a bulbous G agus T and finding my form. Terry, back frail as the skeleton of something lying a long time underground, addresses the audience and sings my praises. A factotum turns off Lotti. I’ll add a few words. Do the needful. From nowhere appears an image of gentle John Noble, dying. I feel something swelling in my throat, seizing my voice. A cancer of loss?
“I’d like to remember a dear deceased friend in this show,” I say, “A great teacher and artist in the real sense, John Noble. Thank you.”
Terry hear-hears. He knew John. Terry’s wife came over to London when John was dying. John and I were not lovers, as some suggested, but we were friends from the Goldsmith days. He was the first artist I’d ever watch die, but not the last. I had thought we were immortal. Funny how the passing of years sometimes does not diminish some things, but rather enhances them.
“Bravo,” Terry says, and pats me on the back. “A lovely gesture. Is it his anniversary or something?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Bravo. Well done.”
He moves away. I’m left, for a moment, with my thoughts, which have turned a nasty shade of grey. I feel old, suddenly. Well, hardly suddenly. But I feel what it means now, its weight. The passing of something irretrievable. An energy going out of you, more than physical. A coming to terms which is a refusal to come to terms. Perhaps it’ll be quick, for me. Or slow, like John, silent, wordless, floating backwards and backwards until you fall off the earth with a sigh. You reach an age and you know you’ll die. You don’t know that at twenty. But at my age, you do. It’s all you have left to look forward to, in some ways. The end of all this, whatever it is.
I can’t remember sitting down, but I’m sitting down when old Harry drawls his way over. He stands over me fatly. I fake a grimace.
“Tell me you aren’t just doing your Bacon thing here. I need to know. Really.”
“Is this a recent Americanism, Harry, to say need when you mean want?”
“What? Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. You see what you see, Harry. It’s not up to me to guide you around my paintings.”
“I see Bacon, is what.”
“So you keep saying. Interminably. God forbid, you risk becoming a bore.”
A yelpish woman’s laugh cracks over the room. A photographer is scribbling names in his notepad. Terry is pouring wine. Drunkenness is taking over. The buying hunger is fading.
Harry won’t go away, he’s a tad unsober himself. His drawl is sheathing about my nerves like a disease. He moves closer. Intimacies, Christ? I can smell his aftershave, see the red welt where his white shirt is digging into his fat neck. A shirtmaker’s name; same place our better-class fake politicians go. It’s all fake now, a voice in my head, probably John Noble’s, tells me. Harry has taken up another gin and tonic and begun to sweat. I think of the last time I read his column, two brick-shaped lines of type under his grinning postage-stamp photograph. It reminded me of the images of the dead under glass I’d seen in village graveyards in France, the South, land of the Cathars, the sky blue and the earth yellow and the vines grey and sturdy-looking. A Toulouse hotel in the old red-light district; a woman, too old, in fishnet stockings scratching a Lotto card with a cognac in her other hand. The great walled towns, the heat, the coffees in the open air; en pleine air. Days painting life and light and colour and music down by the Garonne, in the reeds, naked sometimes. Slumbering heat. The train station at Toulouse with its iron raftering, its tracks running on and on so very lonely.
I’d come back that summer to a Dublin grey and torturous and the old crowd had asked me where I’d been, like mother hens. A photograph of Francis and John taken outside a bookshop in London that’s now a bloody take-away. Round-faced Francis, slightly sad always, cravatted. Sainted Francis-of-a-Cissy, as some adolescent giggly toilet-filth scrawled on the jacks of what pub was it? The rage in Spain, the illustrator whose work depicting Lope de Vega in a whorehouse had caused Franco to ban him from ever working in the country again. The rage, the anger, the holy violence of love-making. Lovers among the Arab boys in Paris. The rue de Rivoli in the heat, shimmering like a glaring shovel of concrete shoved into the furnace of the city. Too young, under the flowers and the sun, ever to think of death, ever to paint death of any kind or watch it paint over a loved life. Oh, I told them of the heat and wine and the gouts of energy and the paint-stained fingers scrawling over your wet back ...
“Can you just, like, elaborate your obvious need ...”
He’d made a move for his notebook. This was official Harry. I hated him, the sound and shape of him. Anger grew up in me and it had a salty taste. Had we painted our arses off to end up here under the Judgement of Harry? I’d actually bitten my tongue: was I taking fits now? Maddened, wounded, fed up, I shouted.
“I’ll elaborate all over your face, you fat little pork-plumber. Do you know, dear Harry, that we used to fuck Yank sailors in London in the good old days just to keep our hand in, so to speak?”
Knew I shouldn’t have said it, of course. Harry smiled, as he might well have done. I’d raised my voice, risen to his bait. But I was angry, for God’s sake. Rightly so. Though I didn’t want to acknowledge to myself that I’d faded in and then out of something, I’d been far away from Harry and the gallery and everything, drifting off somewhere. Terry was watching us.
I stood up, shakily, but with enough energy to have Harry step back a pace or two.
“You haven’t lived, Harry. You’ve seen nothing, been educated to nothing. Your arse-wipe newspaper needs you for show, everyone else has a Harry. Can I buy you in kit form?”
I’d lowered my voice, but Harry’s smile had disappeared. Dried up, I should say, it was rather like that. I hadn’t meant at all to say what I’d said, but there was no residue of guilt, thank God, no feeling that I should apologise or retract anything. I saw the little fat boy no one would talk to in the schoolyard pull his soiled Yankness over his head and his Mom said night-night and tucked him up. Harry wilted visibly, head down.
“Rude and vulgar,” he trailed after him. “The slip is showing.”
I barely heard him, I was drowning in my own shame.
The crowd was dispersing. I suppose I’d helped them along, come to that. The old crip getting stroppy again, time to leave. I huddled a bit myself, behind a dodgy damp canapé and a fresh big iced gin. Harry was talking to someone, keeping his dignity rather well, I should have said. I was a disgust - John’s use of the word. He used to describe Francis as a disgust, coining a noun, when in his more Bachanalian episodes. I felt, absurdly, like crying. Whenever I felt like this, painting helped. I wanted - Harry would no doubt have said needed - to get back to my studio. Terry was wandering around, happy with himself. I tapped his shoulder.
“Give my regards to your good wife.”
“Are you off? I thought we might have dinner later, a few . . . .”
“No thank you, Terry. I’m plunging rather nastily into my cups. Another time. And thank you most sincerely for everything. Wonderful.”
I held his hand and shook it vigorously. Terry knew me long enough to let me off when I wanted to go. I looked around and saw a generous rash of red spots. Terry said, looking with me:
“You’ve done well already. Will you come in during the week and we’ll run over some things?”
“I hate business, Terry. But I will, of course. I should say something to him, Terry, shouldn’t I? I insulted him, lost it. He hasn’t lived. Not like me, is it? Or is it?”
Terry, like the gent he is, didn’t play stupid and act as if he’d seen-no-evil-heard-no-evil. He raised his eyebrows. He looked like a brush handle with a worn layer of bristles on top. His breath smelled, oddly, of mint.
“He’s not the most loved, I know that. But he’s young.”
“Maybe that’s what I dislike about him. He’ll call me a prick in his column. I’ll sue.”
We both laughed. But I couldn’t rid myself of a gnat-like itch, an irritation of spirit, call it what you will. I shook Terry’s hand again and did the sort of social choreography that had me out on the street in the chill dry river wind alongside Harry, God love him, both of us goodnighting Terry with waves.
Porky on pate, Laocoon-ed by my damp scarf, stick conducting traffic, I stump-legged my way across the street almost by Harry’s wounded side. I walk fast. Harry wasn’t going my way. At length, I had to stop, pull myself up to a lopsided height and shout after him. An elderly queen shouting after a fat young man in a street gorged with sex-shops, as it happens. Very nice, visually.
“You have my apologies, Harry!”
He kept going. This was too ridiculous. Then he turned.
“Have a drink with me,” I said. Heads turned in the street. Very silly, all of it. But Harry hadn’t lived. That was all, curiously, I could think of. He walked back to me, rather tight-lipped and prissy, I might add. But he walked back.
“I was unconscionably rude,” I said. Harry, being American, would have trouble with unconscionably, I thought. I stuck out a hand. The cold air was full of fat white seabirds that should have been in their beds. Some of them circled us like angels and barked. Harry looked very small and lost.
“I don’t believe in keeping a grudge with artists,” Harry said. Nice of him, I thought, very uncharitably. “It’s not the first time someone’s taken a shot.” He was game, I’ll give him that.
We shook hands. That’s what gentlemen do. I offered him the drink again. He looked at me as if I’d propositioned him. Then I could see little gears cogging up behind his eyes, little men running backwards and forwards across his retina carrying messages, or votes perhaps, one way or the other. He’d boast that old whatsizface had tried him up. You know, the painter. Queer as a three-pound. Quasimodo, with a cane. Paints Bacon lookalikes and says he doesn’t. Him. Good for a tea-break giggle with the girls in the canteen, or wherever Harry sits at trough. He might even call in the rag’s brief and see if it’d be kosher to call me a queer. Which it wouldn’t these days. I hate the word Gay, myself. Makes it appear that all of us are happy. Which we are not. Harry yawned. He’d made a decision, or the little scuttling men had.
“Where?”
“My place,” I said, and saw him wince. You really must see the Minotaur’s lair, Harry, I thought maliciously. Do some living. Besides, it’s a story. The artist’s garret.
“The spider’s web,” Harry said.
“Something like that.”
“Are you inviting me back to your place?”
“You make it sound like I’ve just shown you my prick, Harry. No, actually. I want you - need you - to see my studio. I want to show you where everything takes place, as it were.”
That was different. Harry could see what was what, he’s not stupid. I wanted him to see what I believed about the human figure, blah-blah, and so on. I explained all of this as we walked. His notebook flagged out of his arse pocket like a rent-boy’s menu handkerchief. He actually helped me down and up some quaintly Georgian steps. We cruised along the quays in slow motion. Or so it must have appeared to the rest of the bustling younger world. Dying is merely getting old very fast, John used to say. When he could still speak. On the way, we collected cigarettes, a bottle of plonk.
My door. Big and pompous with knowledge of its preservation order, my Georgian castle towers over our demolished street. The sound of African music one side, the odour of Chinese cooking the other, and always a Gauguin of colourful women walking up and down carrying bags and small children. They chatter and laugh and show big white teeth. Now and then an African in an expensive suit and immaculate white shirt will stand and look up and down the street. The women know me. The Chinese keep to themselves. The grandmother speaks no English, a wizened doll of a woman drying like vellum in the back room, you can see her every time the door to the kitchen swings open. I remember the Italian chippers with their Pope pictures and the sound of new chips when they’d crash into the boiling fat. Changes. The odour of hashish drifts like a gas on the wind.
I fiddle the majestic useless key in the lock. The big door’s paint is peeling like strips of blackened skin. The knocker, brassy smooth, reflects every light in the street.
“After you, Harry.”
Harry is carrying the bags like a good boy. We enter the catastrophe of my room and I turn on the light. A naked bulb, of course. There are my familiars, my wrecked couch, my crushed armchairs, the drink-sodden Turkish carpet, the retreating wallpaper. I indicate the couch to Harry. If he only knew the celebrity arse that’s snuggled down there, he’d be grateful. More for the column. But knowing things isn’t really living, is it? There’s more.
Over the plonk from relatively clean glasses, we create little damp patches of silence. Harry’s eyes wander around the room, going off on their own. I let them. I watch Harry. I study the tightness of the fabric of his pants over his fat knees, the way, I suppose, Michaelangelo studied the folds of fabric in his day. Not that I like Harry’s fat knees, God help us. Harry takes everything in. He reads the spines of my few books by tilting his head. He spots the book, coffee-table size, on Velasquéz.
“That’s from the Bacon set-up. The reconstructed flat.”
“No, that’s the original.”
Tipsily impressed, Harry actually went over to have a look at it. That was the loneliest, the saddest thing I could ever have imagined him doing and I didn’t give him credit for much. He was like a curious child. A man-child. A living ambiguity between maturity and childhood. Ideas for a study formed in my head. Then Harry leaned up and away from the book, which I’d bought, as it turned out, for fifty pee out of a basket a month back.
The silence, as Harry turned around and around like a figure in a music-box, was a colour all of its own. A texture, too. Like sandpaper. The old irritation came back. I wanted Harry to be more curious and then I’d show him what he wanted - needed - to see. Sure enough:
“And where, like, do you work?”
“Back in there,” I said carelessly.
“I really would like to see the studio.”
“Your-eyes-only status, Harry. Have I your word?”
Harry was hooked. He reached round for his notebook but I nodded my head seriously like a teacher who’d received the wrong answer. He understood, or the child in him did. I stood up wearily. How much, after all, can you expect another to understand you?
Behind a heavy red curtain, mottled at the hem with rat munchings, I opened my studio door. Another naked light bulb blew out upon a long room full of paints, brushes in tins, bottles of turps, easels, clothes, rolled paper, big housepainter-sized brushes, empty wine bottles, objects under white sheets. There were no windows, which was just as well of late. At the shadowy end of the room was the fire escape door, which also did for deliveries at all hours.
“Funny smell,” said Harry.
“Paint and things. The usual.”
Harry planted himself awkwardly on a paint-mottled rickety stool. I put on an apron. I steadied a large canvas on its legs. Harry got up, as I knew he would, and took a peek.
“Part of my Resurrection series, Harry. Driving me ga-ga. It needs life, the human shape rising from the earth sort of thing. Won’t be a tick.”
Harry nodded and grunted. The dark tones of the work so far revealed very little. But the hint was there, a mass of tissue rising agonisingly from the earth itself. I might just chance something with this one, I thought. I might let it flow a little. Like water.
“Definitely,” said Harry. He was getting just a tad tipsy now, our Harry. He flunked his big tumorous arse across the little round stool. It disappeared up inside him. Billy Bunter wrapped in Old Glory. He slugged his wine back and peered about him again. I leaned into the canvas and pretended not to look at him. In fact I couldn’t keep my eyes off him now.
“What sorta life?”
“I don’t know, Harry. Something natural. Just a hint of movement. A gesture.”
Harry didn’t understand, and indicated this with a lardy frown. It made him look even younger. I’d conveyed the impression that I was using him as a model and that made him drunkenly smug. This was fame indeed, for Harry; how the coffee cups would chatter now! He began to straighten himself up, as clearly he thought a good sitter should. Harry was, quaintly, Old School, if you follow.
“You’re obsessed with the human figure,” Harry said. I suppose it was a question. By now I had angled myself in towards the canvas like a truly inspired painter should. Harry, watching me, would have seen that. He found it difficult to sit up straight and hold his glass in his hand. The wine was spilling, though he didn’t notice it. Dark red, on cream white.
“It is all we are, Harry. That absurd pronged image. Then it disintegrates. Symbol of time itself. Loosen yourself a little, Harry.”
I didn’t make sense even to myself. But that was unimportant. Harry was hypnotised. Every word I said now, every gesture I made, would sit like a jewel in the rubbish-heap of Harry’s critical mind. I felt inexplicably sad. Are all critics merely lonely children no one’ll play with? Is art itself such a sad thing? Am I someone’s fretful lost child?
A lump formed in my throat, a tightness that seemed to rise out of my chest. As the lump grew, it pulled its energy from my hands. The brush slowed, got stuck in its own paint. I stood back from the work. I took a depth breath. Harry was staring at some point on the floor. I recovered myself. Whatever had hovered round my soul had flown.
“Must have models,” I heard Harry say. He smiled, but it was like a great toothachy thing, bending his face. “I really liked your work tonight. It’s just like, well, I guess we’re kinda all Bacon-ed out . . . .”
“The models are all around you, Harry. Pull off one of those drapes. Carefully, now.”
I’d paid enough for them, God knows. And they wouldn’t last. I’d end up having to pay to have them taken back. Dark doings at the back door. So I had to make as much use of them while I . . . .
Harry screamed. Well, a loudly amplified rat’s squeak, if you can imagine. A sound as if his very soul were being dragged across a bed of nails. His hands in the air like that, the expression on his face as his flabby mouth opened, the glass tumbling over and over in the air, spouting wine like blood everywhere as if he’d been shot, his body arched backwards and upwards from the waist. You couldn’t ask for better.
I worked quickly, filling my head with a sort of snapshot, a still, of Harry’s St Vitus’ hysterics. The human figure repelled him, obviously. Headless, armless and legless it was broken down to its workable minimal centre, the focus point from out of which emotion was drawn, shaped, angled; but you couldn’t explain that to Harry. I don’t like too much whiteness, it hints at leprosy, and the effect of darkening and withering to indicate decay, an eating away, is achieved by pouring a little petrol, an eggcupful, over an incision in the flesh and then setting it alight. The flesh will crisp and darken. Takes a while, and it’s smelly, but it works. I felt confident about the Resurrection pieces. Harry’s little agony would pass, but I’d captured it, at least in the rough. I could touch it up. The vomiting I most certainly did not need.
Or is it want?
(c) 2004 Fred Johnston - Albedo One. All rights reserved
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