Nightshade

by Annalena McAfee

  “Back to work then,” Luka said. His voice was louder, a yobbish jeer. “Your public’s waiting…”

  He was openly goading her. She wiped her hands on her overalls. She’d mix the colour herself if she had to.

  “Either get on or get out,” she said.

  He rolled his eyes, a delinquent child defying tedious elders, and with a camp flourish of the tweezers, dropped another Ricinus bauble in the tank.

  “If people like these flowers so much, why don’t they just grow them?” he said. “Or maybe buy them and put them in a vase? At least they can sniff them, touch them, poison their enemies with them, if they want.”

  “You don’t mean that, Luka,” she said quietly.

  Even now, in the face of his blatant derision, she was willing to give him another chance. He was all she had. But he stood there, his face twisted with an ugly sneer.

  “I mean, who would prefer a photo of reality over reality itself? People want the real thing—authenticity. What are you adding to the story, two degrees removed from nature, with your pissy paintings that look like photographs of the real thing?”

  “What’s got into you?” she shouted. She felt an urge to slap his insolent face.

  “What was it Florian Kiš said?” He was holding up his phone. “I looked it up…Here we are. ‘Pointless whimsy. A shameful squandering of talent for which the artist should be horsewhipped with a bouquet of her ghastly flowering blackthorn.’ ”

  She smacked the phone from his hand and it fell to the floor.

  “Florian was angry,” she said. “Angry that I left him. Angry that I was going my own way, that he couldn’t have me any more.”

  Luka laughed, a cruel snigger, picked up his phone and stood there gloating, delighting in her rage.

  The memories threatened to derail her altogether. When she discovered the portrait of Wanda, she said nothing to Florian. Nor did she challenge Wanda, who was still up and wearing an expression of feline satisfaction when Eve finally got home that night. But something had shifted for Eve. Spurred further by her inconvenient pregnancy, this was the beginning of the end with Florian.

  As for Wanda, Eve knew then that she must play a long game. Whatever Wanda Wilson might be saying now, she never meant more to Florian than a quick fuck—late-night fast food consumed in a frenzy of greed and disgust. In a hopeless bid to win Eve back, he consigned Wanda’s portrait to the backyard bonfire in one of his culls of second-rate work. It was Girl with a Flower that had survived.

  All at once, it was clear to Eve. Why try explaining to Luka? He wouldn’t understand anyway. It was a case of mistaken identity. She thought he had the intelligence, seriousness and talent to be a partner in work and life. She’d got it wrong. She was on her own. This clarity was all she needed. Luka had been a necessary part of the process. “You start to paint and they all begin to leave, one by one, shutting the door gently behind them until you’re left standing there, finally alone—just you and the work. Paint and a passion.” The crowd had gone. It would soon be time for her to leave too.

  Confusion and anger began to drain away, replaced by a focused calm. Time was running out and she must be an automaton for her art. Her hand was steady again and she turned away, picked up her brush and applied herself to a single red seed capsule. She would outline the form and get the colour right later. The rest would follow. Nothing else mattered as she dabbed and incised, striving, as she had for so many years, to bring the illusion of life to the flat plane of canvas. With each painting, you finally master it and then you have to learn how to do it all over again with the next.

  A gust of air and a sudden clatter broke her concentration. Luka had thrown the tweezers at her, missing her by inches.

  “The only way I could get your attention,” he said, leaning over the herbarium, grinning like a malign child.

  “That’s it!” Eve said. “You can leave right now.”

  “I’ll go when I want to. When you pay me for my half-share of all these.” He gestured towards the canvases.

  She lowered her brush. “You have no claim on anything.”

  “I guess they’re worth less now than they were last week,” he continued, with that provoking smirk, “before the papers and the Twitter storm and the fallout. But you never know—things could pick up; your stock could rise again. Maybe you can rehabilitate yourself. Charitable work for Boy Scouts?”

  His transformation was complete. Her Botticelli angel was revealed as one of Bosch’s tormenting demons. How far he had fallen, and how swiftly.

  “Get out!”

  “This is my work, as much as yours,” he said.

  She laughed. “No one will believe that. You’re a nobody. A lightweight peddler of cheap fakes.”

  He was pointing at the red canvas. What did he mean? His finger stabbed towards the right of the painting, where she would put her signature once she’d completed her work. But there was something already there—a fist-sized black smudge. She looked closer and saw that it was an ink drawing. A grinning Mexican skull.

  “I’ve left my mark,” he said. “On all the canvases.”

  Appalled, she glanced around the studio and could see, even from this distance, that it was true. She’d been so agitated by lack of sleep and by his vicious taunts, she’d narrowed her focus to a single seed capsule and hadn’t looked up and taken in the outrage—a black smear marked every painting like a disfiguring sarcoma.

  Her response was instinctive. Any artist whose work was so brutally defaced would have done the same, or worse.

  * * *

  —

  Replaying the scene as she walks through the night, she struggles to recall picking up the big hog-bristle brush. One second she was holding it and the next she felt it leave her hand. She must have drawn back her arm to hurl the brush with some force but she has no memory of it. All she’s left with is an impression of controlled calm the second before she released the brush from her grip, and the appalling moment of impact—the silence followed by the scream…

  * * *

  —

  The brush landed with a splash in the floating herbarium, sending up a spray of viscous liquid. His howl had a guttural, animal quality as he desperately rubbed at his face.

  “My eyes! What the fuck have you done?”

  She led him to the bathroom, filled the sink with cold water and told him to keep splashing his eyes. In the bathroom, standing behind him as he bent over the sink, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and recoiled—hair like dried sweepings from the dissection tray, eyes shrunk to lustreless beads receding in their folds of flesh, bloodless mouth a puckered gash in a grisaille morgue portrait. She ran the tap again, held a clean rag under it and told him to use it as a compress. Then she took him to the bedroom and left him lying on the bed, still whining.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Just keep rinsing the rag in this bowl of fresh water. You’ll be fine.”

  Back in the studio she put on gloves, fished the brush out of the herbarium with tweezers and washed it. She checked her written formula for the green ground. Phthalocyanine green with cadmium. Two parts to one. She spooned out the powder on the grinding slab, poured on linseed oil then worked in the mixture with the glass muller. How long was it since she’d done this herself? That was another thing about having assistants to take care of business—they robbed you of agency and rendered you helpless. Paint and a passion—that was all you needed. Florian got that right. The ritual of process was profoundly satisfying and offered another, deeper way into the work.

  She jabbed a smaller brush into the puddle of green paint then, turning to the unfinished red canvas, she tapped at the disfiguring mark. After four light strokes with the hog-bristle brush, the skull disappeared. Within half an hour, Luka was erased from all seven canvases.

  Now she could begin. Her hand was steadier. I
t had to be. She mustn’t falter.

  28

  The road has widened. It’s getting busier. Six lanes of clamorous traffic, more lorries, giant bellows discharging toxins into the cold night air, conveying their burdens to points north and east. Looming ahead are brutalist high-rise Himalayas of social housing and shopping malls. There is little pleasure in this kind of walking. She heads down a short flight of steps to the canal, which is bounded by another squalid gallery of graffiti. Two figures walk towards her, pulling a wheeled suitcase which rumbles noisily on the potholed tarmac. As she approaches them, she sees that they are children, brother and sister, perhaps—both with wide pale faces and tousled fair hair—maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. They smile nervously at her as they pass. They are as uneasy about her as she is about them. Are they running away from a troubled home? Or running towards a more terrible fate? They could be Eve and her brother, half a century ago.

  If he were here now, John, bristling with social concern, would intercept these runaways, ask what they were doing, check that they were okay. Eve turns, wondering whether John’s instinct would be right—should she go after them? But they’ve walked on, out of earshot, relieving her of responsibility.

  She feels an urge to speak to her brother, to hear his familiar voice. He was always a good listener. He would be concerned about her, but then for him concern was always a cheap commodity, indiscriminately distributed. The purist anchorite, wherever he was, at the peace camp or on his croft, had no phone. He only spoke to her on his terms, with a borrowed mobile or from a rare public call box, when it suited him. When was the last time? More than eight months ago. Before the fall. He was too busy saving the planet to find time for his imperilled sister. She walks on, ricocheting between numb horror and panic.

  * * *

  —

  Red—symbol of life and of death, carnival and carnage—was always the most difficult colour to get right. She couldn’t blame Luka for that. She was at fault for asking his help in the first place. She needed no one: Luka, Josette and Glynn and the whole team, her family—they were all a distraction.

  As Luka lay whimpering in the bedroom, she prised open the jar of benzimidazolone maroon and scooped two measures of the fine powder onto the grinding slab. Precision was essential.

  A sudden commotion broke her concentration. He was standing by the door, still holding the compress to his eyes.

  “I need to go,” he said.

  “Go ahead. No one’s stopping you!”

  She measured out a quantity of vermilion, undercut with pulverised mercury.

  “I need to see a doctor,” he said, running his hands over the door, searching for the lock.

  “Come on. You’re making too much of this. Just keep swabbing your eyes with water. It’ll soon clear up.”

  He found the handle and tugged at it but the door was locked. The key was on the table, right beside her, next to the grinding slab.

  “I just want out of here!”

  “You know what?” said Eve, reaching for the small jar of naphthol red. “I want you out of here too.”

  Now he was scrabbling helplessly at the door.

  “Just let me go!”

  Eve was trying to keep track of the pigment mix. She mustn’t overdo the naphthol or she would have to start again.

  “Please. I need to go!” he said, his whine cranking up to a shout. “Now!”

  She sighed, put down the jar and wiped her hands on her overalls. “Okay. Where’s your mobile? What’s your passcode? I’ll ring your sister.”

  He handed her his phone then slumped on the floor, head in hands, dabbing at his eyes with the rag.

  She found Belle’s number. It rang out. Eve began to type in a text when she noticed a message sent by his sister an hour ago.

  “I warned you. If you let us down now, the deal is off,” it read.

  Belle’s text was a reply to a message from Luka, half an hour before:

  “I’m out of here. Can’t stand another second.”

  Now he was shouting again. “Tell her to hurry!”

  Ignoring him, Eve stared at the glowing bar of his phone in her hand as if it was radioactive. Then she thumbed through his messages and there it was. How could she have been so stupid?

  “Please, Eve,” he moaned.

  “Give me a moment. She didn’t pick up. I’m trying her again.”

  She scrolled back.

  Luka, 19 April—Think she took the bait.

  Belle, 19 April—Of course! How could she resist?

  Belle, 20 April—Any photos? Film? Remember—documentation vital.

  Luka, 29 April—Going to need chemical assistance. Those blue pills.

  Belle, 29 April—No worries. Whatever it takes.

  Luka, 30 April—Deed done. Yuck.

  Belle, 30 April—[thumbs up emoticon]

  Luka, 1 May—She’s a monster…Can’t believe you talked me into this.

  Belle, 1 May—Close your eyes and think of the money.

  “Eve!” Luka pleaded.

  “I’m doing my best.”

  Luka, 3 June—She’s doing my head in. Husband away. Need more blue pills.

  Belle, 4 June—Don’t mess up. Get those assistants out of the picture.

  Luka, 16 June—Sorted! Just me, G and J, and the PoC now.

  Belle, 17 June—

  Luka, 18 July—I’m going mad with this.

  Eve shivered. She felt cold to her core. The blue pills. The old man’s friend. The old woman’s too, it seemed. But the PoC? She looked back through the messages and guessed the truth seconds before she saw the text from Luka to his sister on 28 July.

  “More aggro from the Princess of Chintzes. If I see another fucking flower I’ll kill myself.”

  He was on his feet again, feeling his way round the table, trying to reach the door.

  “I need to get to a hospital.”

  “I can’t reach Belle.”

  He screamed: “Get me a cab!”

  “You’ve been lying to me.”

  “No!” he protested, screwing up the wet rag and pressing it into his eyes.

  “I’ve seen your messages!” she said.

  “No! Give me my phone!”

  “I want the truth!”

  “Please.” He was wheedling now. “I really need to see a doctor. Everything’s blurred. It’s agony.”

  “I’ll bathe your eyes again.”

  He let her guide him to a chair. She tilted his head and squeezed fresh water into those lying blue eyes, now veined with red. Then she soaked the rag again.

  “So?” she prompted. “Tell me. You and Belle…”

  “It was her idea. Nothing to do with me,” he groaned.

  She folded the rag and draped it over his face.

  “It’s all been a lie?”

  He flinched as she began to tie the wet fabric round his head like a blindfold.

  “She talked me into coming here.”

  He lifted his head to let her knot the rag.

  “Why?”

  He was mumbling: “One of her performances.”

  “Performances?”

  She tugged at the knot.

  “Don’t! That hurts!”

  She relented and loosened it.

  “Better?”

  He was suddenly defiant. “Don’t pretend you didn’t get anything out of it.”

  “How dare you!”

  “I need to go,” he said. He struggled to his feet, holding the back of the chair for support. Blindfolded, he was a caricature of justice, helpless and blundering.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Your dissertation?”

  He ripped the rag from his head and threw it on the table.

  “I didn’t do a dissertation
. I began it but I dropped out.”

  “It wasn’t about my work, was it?”

  “No.” He was smiling now, taking pleasure in her unease. “It was on a real artist—Florian Kiš.”

  Eve felt a swoon of sickness.

  “And Belle?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “What was her interest in my work?”

  He was rubbing his eyes again.

  “She was never interested in you. Wanda Wilson was her thing. Immersive work, relational art…that’s how she got the scholarship to the Art Ranch.”

  Eve gripped the table.

  “I’ll get your taxi.”

  She picked up his phone. But instead of calling a cab, she opened his email account. His answers had raised more questions.

  29

  The home stretch. Not long now. And then? Denial is an underrated survival strategy. She’s desperate for distraction, looking around like a tour guide, explaining the city and its history, her history, to herself as if to a coach party of curious travellers. She’s nearing the Olympic Park, built on the site of another defunct industrial estate. Stadium and velodrome, skate park and aquatics centre, funfair and running track, bounded by flower meadows and a vast shopping mall—all human needs, bar art and love, are met here. It was renamed to mark the Queen’s jubilee, like the new “super hospital” in Glasgow that Kristof advised on. Glaswegians, who’d voted to detach Scotland from the United Kingdom the year before the futuristic Queen Elizabeth University Hospital opened, renamed the hospital the Death Star. In the pre-dawn dark of a winter’s morning, there’s something of the graveyard about Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and the hulking silhouette of its stadium makes a convincing Death Ship.