This was how Smitty had made his name: through anonymous artworks in the form of provocations, graffiti, only-just-non-criminal vandalism, and stunts. He was famous for being unknown, a celebrity without identity, and it was agreed that his anonymity was his most interesting artefact – though the stunts made people laugh, too. He had a crew who he had known since for ever, and who helped him when he needed helping. Last year, the sale of signed works and his own book about himself had taken his earnings over £1,000,000 for the first time.
Smitty disliked writing things down – a dislike which meant he had struggled at school and been directed to what were regarded as non-subjects such as art, which had led him to art school, which had led him to where he was today, thanks – so he preferred to use a crappy hand-held dictaphone. He liked the way the object, which seemed so much a tool of corporate subjugation, so much the kind of thing which would belong to the kind of man who would murmur the kind of thing like ‘Take a memo, Miss Potter,’ was in his hands an instrument of subversion, of creativity, of chaos. Also his assistant would transcribe it later and then send him a text message, to his pay-as-you-go mobile which couldn’t be traced, since a large part of Smitty’s work, and an even larger part of his allure and his fame, was the fact of his total anonymity. No one knew who he was, or how he got away with what he did. In the case of the hole project, getting away with what he did would be a big part of it. A certain sort of artist would get council permission for the hole, would apply for a fucking grant for it. Not Smitty. He pressed Record and said:
‘Bloody great hole.’
The assistant came up the stairs, put a slab of daily newspapers on the table and brought Smitty his cappuccino. It was half-hot, not quite cool enough to complain about, and he was out of breath so he had obviously been hurrying, which added together meant Smitty didn’t feel quite justified in giving him a bollocking. All the same, he was a little displeased. The assistant was a middle-class boy pretending to be a streetwise working-class kid, which in itself Smitty didn’t mind, since he had once been like that himself – but he did prefer his cappuccino piping hot. Then the boy took out the day’s mail from the pocket of his manbag, and Smitty cheered up, since one of the things instantly recognisable among the letters was a fat packet from the clippings agency. His favourite reading, his favourite viewing and listening, was anything about himself, or his work. The coverage usually turned on the amazing thrill given to all by his anonymity.
Smitty tore open the envelope and a bunch of clippings fell out. Some of them were about the paperback of his book, a couple of them were reviews of a new piece he had made on an abandoned building site in Hackney. It had been called Bucket of Shit and had involved putting ten abandoned toilets around the rubble – only instead of being filled with shit, the toilets had been full of cut flowers, crunched together and spray-painted to look like oversize turds. He and his crew took photographs and sent press releases out by email. The council’s contractors had cleared the piece within forty-eight hours but the harvest was here in the clippings, most of it favourable. Urban renovation and the ease with which we passed by, unseeing, the urban underclass; that was, apparently, what this latest ‘guerrilla intervention’ had been about. One or two of the usual twats didn’t get it, but so what? It wasn’t a popularity contest.
‘Can I have a look at the clips?’ asked the kid. He was – this was one of his better points, perhaps even his best – visibly excited by Smitty’s fame and danger and aura. Smitty lobbed the cuttings onto the table in front of the boy and went back to looking out the window. Calmed and buoyed by his reading, Smitty felt himself become expansive.
‘You’ve got to be a brand, man. Then you find some shit to flog, yeah? That’s the way it works. A stunt like that, Bucket, takes effort to think through and set up and it’s harder still when you’ve got to do it hands-off, so no one can trace it back. Got to be careful, got to cover your tracks, like those Indian dudes walking backwards in their footprints, yeah? And there’s not a penny in it either. Nada, sweet FA. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing in it, no forward movement. The stuff which can’t be sold, that’s the stuff which makes everything else seem real. You can’t commodify this shit. Which is the whole point. But it adds to your mojo, to your aura. And that allows you to make shit you can sell. See? So that thing which cost whatever it was, four or five grand, by the time it was all in, the long run, it’s what’s paying for those papers and this cappuccino.’
The assistant, who had heard other versions of this speech before, nodded. But he did not look as fully alert or on the ball as he might do, and Smitty disapproved. He was, truth be told, a little tired of all the people who wanted to be him. Whose admiration was expressed as envy. He wasn’t old, nowhere near – he was twenty-eight, for fuck’s sake! – but he was already thoroughly familiar with young kids who thought that making your name was easy, that all that needed to happen was for the oldsters to budge up and make way and then it would be their names all over the papers. Achievers who hadn’t achieved anything yet. Hanging out a shop sign with nothing written on it. That kind of would-be up-and-comer was half in love, half in hate with the people they wanted to be, fizzing with envy they hadn’t diagnosed in themselves. This boy was like that, and was showing signs of insufficient respect. He liked Smitty’s fame but didn’t seem to appreciate that Smitty came attached to it. More interested in his own work than in his employer’s – even though he didn’t have any work of his own to speak of. He had come recommended by Smitty’s art dealer and agent, a bright kid related to somebody or other, freshly graduated from St Martin’s or Clerkenwell or wherever it was. The kid was bright and on his better days had a hungry look that Smitty approved of, but the boy also needed to be careful. He had the air of someone who liked to take a few pills of a weekend. Smitty liked to talk about living large and caning it, but his attitude to drugs was, beneath the rhetoric, cautious and epicurean: small amounts, meticulously chosen, at the right time and in the right company. He took as much trouble sourcing his drugs as a different kind of person would take sourcing organic meat. If his assistant was getting off his face Friday-to-Sunday to such an extent that his concentration was wavering at work, he was soon going to find himself being an ex-assistant. An ex-assistant with a watertight confidentiality clause in his contract.
A beeping noise went off. The boy fished his phone out of his pocket.
‘You asked me to tell you when it was half eleven,’ he said.
‘Yeah, OK,’ said Smitty. He picked up his mobile and his wallet and his car keys. ‘Got a thing to go to. My nan.’
‘Sorry,’ said the boy with a hint of something in his tone Smitty didn’t like, an only just detectable irony of some kind. OK, that’s it, he told himself. You’re fired. He headed out the door to his car in a genuinely shitty mood.
13
Smitty would have been the first to admit that he was a rubbish grandson. He lived in Hoxton, his nan lived in Lambeth, and he visited her, what, about three times a year? They both stayed with his mum at Christmas. And that was that, out of a typical 365 days.
Smitty’s mum had been young when she had him – twenty-one – and Petunia had done quite a bit of looking after him when he was small, childminding and babysitting and the rest. He had been very keen on her then. She was good at looking-after, keen on cuddling, and had never once lost her temper – in fact, at the age of twenty-eight, he’d still never seen her angry. He’d got on well with his grandfather too, Albadadda as he was known (Albert plus dadda). His grandfather had been a mixture of grumpy and hilarious, the kind of grown-up who gets on well with small children because he is close to being one himself. When Smitty’s parents moved out to Essex, he saw much less of his grandparents; hardly saw them at all, in fact. He went through the usual teenage thing of thinking his grandparents were smelly and boring and made loud noises when they chewed, and was only starting to come out of that phase when his grandfather suddenly died. That was the year he went to a
rt school. He was at Goldsmiths so it wasn’t far away, and he could easily have made a regular habit of visiting his nan. His intentions were good. It was just that he didn’t do anything about them.
But Smitty and his grandmother Petunia got on well for all that. When he did see her he was able to be relaxed, his guard down, with none of the wariness he was never quite able to put aside with his mother. That was partly because of his work. His mum would ask questions and he would fend her off with talk about being an artist, deliberately leaving the impression he was some sort of commercial artist, in the sense of a graphic designer or something like that – and she could tell, with her maternal antennae, that he was doing pretty well at it, though not that he was genuinely minted. (Of course, some of Smitty’s art-world mates would have said that he was absolutely a commercial artist in a larger sense. That was OK by him.) His father didn’t know the details of what he did and didn’t particularly care, since he could tell that Smitty had an entrepreneurial streak and would turn out fine. ‘He’s a natural barrow boy, like me,’ was what he always said to Smitty’s mother, often in Smitty’s hearing. That too was a description Smitty didn’t mind at all. His mum, though – he instinctively didn’t want her knowing what he was up to. As for his nan, saying to her ‘I am a conceptual artist who specialises in provocative temporary site-specific works’ would have been like telling her he was the world heavyweight boxing champion. She would have nodded and said ‘That’s nice, dear’ and felt genuinely proud of him without needing to go into any further details. She was good at accepting things; a bit too good, maybe, in Smitty’s view.
Anyway, here he was. Pepys Road. Smitty had taken the Tube, because although he could easily have driven, and deeply loved his Beemer, he found he got more ideas when he took the Tube and spent the trip looking at people and wondering about how to get into their heads. That was a big part of what art was about – getting into people’s heads.
Before Smitty rang the doorbell, he could hear his nan pottering about inside. One of her signature moves was to put the kettle on before coming to the door, so it would be boiling within seconds of the guest sitting down. Then the door opened and there she was.
‘Nan!’ said Smitty.
‘Graham!’ said his nan, because that was Smitty’s real name. He handed over a box of chocolates – a fantastically expensive box of chocolates that his soon-to-be-ex-assistant had ‘sourced’ (the soon-to-be-ex-assistant’s word) from a poncy shop in West London. His nan would not notice that the chocolates were incredibly fancy, which is why Smitty felt free to give them to her. If he’d given them to his mum, she would have subjected him to Abu Ghraib-style interrogation about how much they had cost and whether he could afford it.
‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ said his nan. They went through to the kitchen, Smitty’s favourite room in the house and possibly in the whole world, because it was exactly like time travel to 1958. Linoleum – Smitty loved lino. A Coronation biscuit tin. A proper kettle, one you put on the stove, none of that electric rubbish. The world’s most knackered fridge. No dishwasher. His granddad had been too tight to buy one, and then after he’d died and his nan was living on her own there wasn’t enough washing-up to justify the expense.
His nan wasn’t moving quite as well as she might have been. She was what, eighty-three next year? Nan had never taken up much space, but she had always seemed pretty robust, physically. That ran on both sides of the family. But she seemed thinner, frailer, and now that he was looking closely, slightly less steady on her pins. Probably just age, pure and simple. You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
Smitty was tempted to put out an arm to help her down the single step into the kitchen but resisted the impulse. Nan was talking about how she got most of her shopping done over the internet now, how his mother had set it up for her, and what a blessing it was, though she didn’t like the fact that they used up so many plastic bags, sometimes a whole plastic bag for a single item, but his mother had told her that they took away the bags too and she had asked and it was true and that was a blessing. Smitty semi-listened to all this.
‘You can get anything over the internet now, Nan. Friend of mine moved to Los Angeles. In America, six thousand miles away. Before he goes he sells his flat, sells his car, and dumps his girlfriend. Then he goes online and rents a flat, rents a car, and gets a new girlfriend, all over the internet and all before he’s set a foot in the place. True story.’
‘It’s a different world,’ said his nan. She was fussing about with the teapot and cups. His nan was a bit of a tea snob and liked the whole ritual, warming the pot, doing it with leaves and not tea bags, proper cups. While she was doing that, Smitty picked a postcard up off the table. It was a black and white photograph which he took a couple of seconds to realise was the front door of 42 Pepys Road, shot in an arty style with a camera held low and tilted upwards so the top of the door frame loomed over the rest and the angles looked funny. The kind of photo which would be crap if it were a normal photo but would be OK if it were consciously artistic. Smitty turned the photo over. On the back it said, in printed black ink, ‘We Want What You Have’. There was no signature and the postmark was indecipherable.
‘You seen this, Nan?’ Smitty asked.
‘I’ve gone back to English Breakfast. It’s a bit stronger. Oh, that! It’s one of these postcards I’ve been getting. One every fortnight or so for a couple of months. All pictures of the house with the same thing written on them. I’ve kept them. They’re all over there by the dresser.’
Smitty went over to the dresser. Sure enough, beside photos of his nan with Albadadda, and of his mum and himself and his brother and sister at various phases of development, there was a stack of postcards, all of them pictures of 42 Pepys Road. All of the pictures were different. One of the photos was an extreme close-up of the door number, another was shot from right down the street, as far away as you could go and still pick out the front of number 42. Another was shot from head height, looking straight down at the front doorsteps. Another, from more or less the same angle, looked sideways across the front bay window. One of them had four different pictures cropped into quadrants. Underneath the postcards was a jiffy bag addressed in the same handwriting. Smitty opened it and took out a DVD, with a label which also said ‘We Want What You Have’.
‘Have you had a look at this, Nan?’ he asked, knowing what the answer would be. No point sending a DVD to Mrs Howe.
‘No, of course not darling, I don’t have one of those thingies.’ She put the cup down in front of him. ‘I always think English Breakfast is nicer with milk, but I’ve got some sliced lemon here if you need it.’
‘Sure. Thanks. Listen, Nan, can I borrow this? Do you mind if I borrow all these cards?’
‘Of course you can, darling. Drink up, it’s much less nice when it goes cold.’ She put a plate of biscuits beside Smitty, and began unwrapping the posh chocolates so she could offer them back to him.
14
The Younts had gone away for the weekend. It was ten days before Christmas and seven days before Roger was due to find out about his bonus. Their host was a client of Roger’s at the bank, a man called Eric Fletcher, who owned a house in Norfolk. This is where the Younts were.
Eric’s house had a barn, which he had had converted into a spa, for the use of his wife Naima – he liked to joke that building her a spa was the only way he was able to get her out of London. Opposite it he had built another barn, so that the house was now framed on both sides with a courtyard in the middle. The second barn was given over to the business of entertaining children: the downstairs was full of toys and games for small boys and girls, Lego and Barbie and Bratz and Nintendo Wii and Action Men and Brio; the upstairs was equipped for older ones, PS3 and Xbox 360 and pool table. Both rooms had flat-screen televisions and DVD libraries. There were two nannies. ‘Th
e whole point of this place,’ Eric would say, solemnly, ‘is that it’s supposed to be playtime for everybody.’
All this had come as a very welcome surprise for Arabella. She had not met Eric before and had not known what to expect. Roger had said that he was a yob but that the house would be lovely, and to give Roger his credit, which she was not especially in the mood to do, he had been right. This was a treat; and Arabella had a deep and sincere love of treats. You could not have too many treats. It was perfectly all right to live from treat to treat. Also, Mrs Eric was simply heaven. She was a shortish, plumpish, very chatty half-Asian woman of about forty who at this precise moment was sitting back on the marble seat next to Arabella in the hammam, stark naked except for a towel wrapped around her head to protect her hair from the steam. Arabella, feeling a little shy, had gone into the hammam with her dressing gown but had now joined in by casting it off. Of the other wives, two were now getting massages, one was still in bed, and one was showing off by swimming laps in the pool. Arabella and Naima had already bonded over their shared obsession with The X Factor and their mutual determination to watch all the weekend’s episodes.
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