‘I’m looking, sweetheart,’ shouts someone in the crowd.
I see myself out of body. In one hand a pint, halfway to my mouth. In the other a fag, halfway to my mouth. Neither one of them about to get there. She lies down on her side and curls up in a ball. I look at Lenny. Lenny’s got his mouth open, a bit like my dad. Kirk’s rubbing his vein and staring into the mirror on the pillar.
‘Fear of memory, memory of fear / That’s what I think’s going on here / Without you / No blood / Just sweat / And tears / Fear of memory / Memory of fear / That’s what I think’s going on here.’
‘Oh, baby,’ says Lenny, ‘she’s a fox.’ I disregard him. I love Eleni. I’ve loved Eleni for three years. I do, I love her. I love her, but fucking hell. And then Rosa Flood disappears behind the curtain, ‘Very dark,’ she says. Sounds like she’s from New York. ‘Very fuckin’ dark back here.’ No one says anything. We can all hear her smoking. A little drunken laughter like she’s playing with a fly back there. I finally put the pint to my mouth. Take it away. Down. Hold it there. Fag. Up. In. Draw. Out. Down. Hold it there. Waiting. Waiting. Finally:
‘And then,’ he said,
‘I hate to shoot you down
Whilst you’re still trying to glue on your wings
But it’s time to talk about the state of things.’
Death’s door was open
And banging in the wind
‘Time to talk about importance
About disappointing performance
About the leech
About the maze and the mouse
Time to break into your back with this axe in my mouth.’
He lit a match and blew it out
Put it down on the table, and frowned
As though he were about to quote from the Bible
And he did.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said,
‘Don’t you know anything?
It’s like pushing a deathbed through a ghost train.’
He didn’t explain what that meant
But I knew it wasn’t a caress
‘I know this . . .’ I said,
And set loose a mongrel inside my head
To retrieve what I knew.
It dropped an old shoe at my feet.
‘Love is the space between the hands as you pray.
Love is what hurts
When it’s taken away.
The incipient chord
Of the chorus of betrayal.’
‘You’re like a dream,’ he said,
‘You never come true,
You’re always in bed.’
His head was full of me
Nowhere.
And so I shared a pain in his shoulder
With death.
And instead of his love
I had settled for his restlessness.
For a spinning top
In my scarlet cot.
And for God,
In a bottle.
Or as you say . . .
A clock.
This is not a true story,
Until you think it is.
There’s a small commotion backstage. The dirty mustard curtains are tugged and punched, a foot comes through, a hand comes through, it’s a bit like Morecambe and Wise, and then the microphone’s unplugged.
Silence.
The silence in my head. A howling kind of silence.
Lenny lets out a whoop, and crashes his hands together, over and over, till the whole room concurs and whoops and crashes with him.
In my head, silence. A howling-wind-down-a-black-back-alley kind of silence.
Kirk’s been whispering to himself in the mirror on the pillar and suddenly he comes to, thinking the whole room’s applauding his desperate incantation, his resolute formula, obliviously whispered into the mirror. He looks up and bows.
In my head, silence. Like a solar wind.
Rosa Flood. Rosa Flood.
Eleni Marianos was born on 20 March 1969, vernal equinox, the day John and Yoko married and flew off to Amsterdam to spend the week in bed together. On 20 March 2004, I spent a week in bed with Eleni Marianos. Now and then we ran a hot bath and slept in each other’s arms. We turned off all the lights, lit candles and floated them on the water. Candles floating on the water and a blue rubber earth, and an alligator wearing flippers, and two yellow boats we used as ashtrays.
I love Eleni. I love Eleni Marianos.
On 1 May 2004, in Matala, Crete, we tied ourselves together at the wrist and leapt sixty feet from a cliff into the Aegean Sea.
On 5 November 2004, Eleni created a firework display on the kitchen table and set light to an egg.
On 31 December 2004, we broke into Blackpool Pleasure Beach and, at midnight, waltzed and then fucked in the Hall of Mirrors.
I love Eleni. I love Eleni Marianos.
We had to stay for another half-hour before Sam Delaney came on. Sam Delaney’s a mate of Lenny’s, which is why we came here in the first place. Sam Delaney was mad as fuck and limped around the stage shouting lengthy poems about pyramids and petrol. They weren’t very good, riddled with imbecilic rhymes like ‘Saturn’ and ‘slattern’, or ‘chorus’ and ‘Horus’. He was so drunk that most of it was like listening to a sleep-talker through a hotel wall. Still, Lenny liked it, or said he did. Kirk spent most of it in the bog and when he came out he couldn’t shut up and talked for ten minutes without breathing; still going on about the Art Strike as though I hadn’t already taken it as far as it could go. Delaney came down off the stage, said, ‘Hello,’ too close, and stayed there, swaying like a tree. At one point I gave him a light and he kissed me on the cheek. It was the kiss of a drunk.
Rosa Flood, meanwhile, had disappeared. She never emerged from behind the curtains. I imagined her round the back, squeezing herself out of some window, falling onto a heap of bottles, finishing her joint and singing a slurred dirge to a dirty grid. What a girl.
Lenny and Delaney are enthusing about going on somewhere but I have to get back to Eleni. Kirk has burnt himself out and is up to his neck in a steaming depression so I offer to walk him home.
He walks looking at the pavement, not speaking, flinching whenever anybody passes him. At one point I put my arm around him cos I think it’s better than saying something, but he shrugs me off, so perhaps I should just say something. But what is there to say to someone facing death? Not definite death, but possible death. ‘It’s touch and go,’ says his doctor. I hate this walk with Kirk all bowed and silent. I should say something. I should apply myself, concentrate and find the words. Just really concentrate here.
As he’s putting his key in the door I say, ‘Goodnight, Kirk.’
‘Goodnight,’ he says and climbs the stairs.
Well, at least I said something.
I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It’s freezing and it starts to rain and it’s the ugliest bus I’ve ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds. My skin feels like cardboard. My tongue is a slug. My heart is a clod of iced mud. My head is all filled up with its own brain and nothing else. And my brain is all filled up with Rosa’s eyes and Rosa’s arse, so get yourself the fuck off up to your bed, Kirk. Hide yourself beneath your tear-sodden, sexless sheets, Kirk, and leave me alone with this phantom in a skirt. Leave me alone with that smile from the stairs. Leave me alone with her lips on the microphone. Leave me alone with her eyes and her arse and her spoken word.
‘Love is the space between the hands as you pray,’ she said. ‘It’s like pushing a deathbed through a ghost train.’
Well, that’s exactly what it was like, Kirk, walking you home through the Soho night. What a girl.
By the time I get in Eleni’s already asleep. There’s a note pinned to the canvas: ‘Hope your night was a good night. I love you.’
Sheba once wrote me a note saying ‘Hope you had a good night’ but it didn’t say ‘I love you’ and she didn’t hope that I’d had a
good night, and when I crept into the bed she put on the light and sat up and my guts formed a fist.
I love Eleni. I love Eleni Marianos.
She’s pinned the note to my canvas cos it’s the one place she can be certain I’ll look.
‘Love is what hurts when it’s taken away.’
I pour out half a tin of black and go at it with my biggest brush. I pull over the stepladder and make two converging vertical lines down the canvas, like two tram lines disappearing into the distance.
And that’s it. I creep into bed. The light stays off and Eleni stays asleep.
5
GROVE ROAD, BETHNAL GREEN, LONDON
This is where Rachel Whiteread, back in 1993, erected House, a solid concrete cast of the interior of a three-storey house. The locals complained and said that real, empty, hollow houses should be developed on the site and Rachel’s house was pulled down.
One night I drove past and there was some bloke on the roof of Rachel’s house, snoring in his sleeping bag. There are some real artists out there.
Anyway, House is gone. I’m driving down Grove Road on my way to the Doodlebug Gallery to meet up with Myers and discuss what we can do about the missing painting. The show opens in six days, next Tuesday, and the catalogue’s promising five new paintings, including a self-portrait. There’s an exclamation mark after the self-portrait bit, like it’s a big deal, which it is, or it was, or it might be again.
Myers had called me in some fucking funk about how he’d sold the whole show on this self-portrait.
‘Joe,’ I said – he’s called Joe – ‘you’ll get your self-portrait.’
‘But we’ve only got six days,’ said Myers.
‘Joe,’ I said, ‘you’ll get your self-portrait.’
‘Cos I’ve sold the whole show on—’
‘Joe,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you your self-portrait.’
On Grove Road I get stuck at the lights ready to turn right onto Roman Road. I remember the times me and Lenny used to write on traffic lights with Magic Markers. At first we wrote ‘Go’ on the red light, ‘Sleep Now’ on the amber light, and ‘Stop’ on the green light. Later we moved on to ‘I’m In Pain’ on the red, ‘Help Me!’ on the amber, and ‘Fuck Off Then!’ on the green. We stopped after a while. The police asked us to knock all that kind of thing on the head.
My phone rings and it’s Mum. I fiddle the earpiece into my lug and struggle to clip the wire onto my lapel.
‘Mum, how are you?’
‘Have I got you on your mobile?’
‘Yeah, that’s the number you dialled.’
‘Ooh, I don’t like speaking to you on your mobile. Are you driving?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Ooh, I don’t like speaking to you when you’re driving. Are you in the car?’
‘Yes, Mum, I’m driving, and funnily enough the car is the thing that I’m driving.’
‘Ooh, I worry about you driving and speaking.’
‘But it’s OK, Mum,’ I say, ‘I’ve got my earpiece in. They’ve got these earpieces now and I can just speak and steer and change gear and scratch my arse and everything.’
‘There’s no need for that, Hector.’
Mum sounds strange. There’s no play in her voice.
‘Mum, what’s the matter?’
‘What?’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You sound on edge.’
‘On edge?’
‘A bit stressed.’
‘Stressed?’
‘Tense.’
‘Tense?’
God, fucking Christ, is nothing simple?
‘You sound nervous,’ I say, ‘you sound like you’ve just committed a murder or something.’
‘I feel like I have.’
I hear a siren behind me. ‘Somebody’s life gone wrong,’ I think. Ever since I was five, that’s what I’ve always thought when I hear a siren.
‘I might as well have committed a murder.’
‘Why, Mum, what have you done?’
‘I’ve bought a settee,’ she says, and then sighs.
‘But the old one was blood-stained and I thought you wanted to buy a settee.’
‘We did want to buy a settee.’
‘So why has buying a settee made you feel like you’ve committed a murder?’ I’ve pulled up outside the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and I’m watching a child running, screaming, from some bloke dressed in a Cheshire Cat suit.
‘We didn’t want to buy a settee like this,’ says Mum. ‘It’s hideous, Hector. I’ve gone and bought a hideous seven-foot settee.’
‘So take it back,’ I say.
‘I can’t take it back,’ says Mum, ‘it’s second hand, I bought it out of the Evening Gazette.’
The Cheshire Cat’s taken off his head and the kid’s screaming more than ever.
‘You mean you didn’t even see it?’
‘Of course I saw it! I drove round to the house and saw it. Your dad couldn’t be bothered. “Do what you want, Connie,” he said. So I did. I went round and saw it.’
‘So why did you buy it?’
‘Because I’m not right in the head,’ says Mum. ‘Because I should be locked up.’
‘What does Dad say?’
‘He’s upstairs crying.’ Then Mum begins to cry. Is everyone crying now? ‘He came home from bowls, saw what I’d bought, shouted at me, threw the newspaper at me, went down the pub and now he’s lying face down on the bed in the spare room, crying.’
It’s not like Dad to go down the pub. Dad’s never been the sort of dad who goes down the pub.
‘Mum, it’s . . .’ I say, ‘it’s only a settee.’
‘It cost eight hundred and forty pounds.’
‘Eight hundred and forty pounds! Bloody hell, Mum! Eight hundred and forty pounds for a second-hand settee out of the paper? What’s it made out of? Mink?’
‘It’s seven feet long, it’s a nasty beigey, browny colour, it stinks of cigarette smoke. Every time you sit on it there’s a sickening puff of smoke comes out of it, and you know what your dad’s like about smoking.’
I scuttle around my seven pockets for a fag.
‘You’ve still given it up, haven’t you, Hector?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ I say, holding the mouthpiece away from my lips as I light one up.
‘Big lump of a thing it is. It’s too high. It’s too bloody high. When I sit on it my feet don’t touch the floor, they just dangle there.’
I picture my mother’s little freckled feet dangling in her little Littlewood’s slippers, and I fill up.
‘I look like one of them folk in a film where everybody’s been shrunk – my feet just dangling there.’
‘Listen, Mum,’ I say, ‘just get rid of it.’
‘How can we just get rid of it?’ She lets out a horrible, heartbreaking sigh. ‘How on earth can we just get rid of it?’
‘Just chuck it out, I’ll give you the money,’ I say, ‘I’ll send you a cheque.’
‘No.’
‘Or cash. I’ll send you eight hundred and forty pounds cash.’
‘No you bloody won’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not having you pay for my faults.’
I make a mental note to report this sentence to Bianca.
‘Why not?’ I say.
‘Hector, you know that your dad won’t have you doing that. You know what he’s like with money.’
‘Exactly. I know exactly what he’s like with money, and that’s why I’m offering.’
‘He’ll say no.’
‘But, Mum, he’ll get ill. Remember when he lost his wallet?’
‘Eh?’ says Mum.
‘When he lost his wallet on the bus. His blood pressure burst through the roof. And that was only sixty pounds. Dr Bernstein had to put him on those tablets he’s still on eighteen months later.’
‘I know.’
‘And now he’s upstairs crying.’
‘I know.’
‘So
let me pay.’
‘No!’ she barks, and hangs up on me. Mum’s hung up on me.
So is everyone just fucking mad now? Is everyone just totally fucking mad and out of their heads now then?
I call back, but the phone just rings and rings.
I park the car under some crumbling grey viaduct off the Cambridge Heath Road. I see an old advert for Mazola cooking fat and think of Eleni’s mother, all blistered and sleeping. Her squeezy amber flesh gone all shiny and crisp, or damp, or black, or whatever it is that happens when you get splattered with boiling fat and fall into the fire.
The Doodlebug Gallery is a new space pioneered by Joe ‘The Eyes’ Myers. Up until eight months ago it housed a squad of Geordie canoe-builders. It’s an enormous cave of a space with painted purple bricks and neon strip lighting, and the ceiling’s well away from the floor and that’s why we’re here. Six of my older paintings are already up. Heads of strangers mostly, apart from one of Aunty Pat I did from a bleached photograph I found down the back of the cooker. Four of my more recent paintings are leaning against the walls waiting to be hung.
Number one I’ve called Dad, cos it’s a painting of Dad. A very big Dad. An eleven-foot Dad. I copied it from a Polaroid I took last Christmas. Big jolly Dad, laughing at the Queen.
Number two I’ve called Mum, cos it’s a painting of Mum. A very big Mum. An eleven-foot Mum. I painted it from some sketches I made last March. Tense-looking Mum, scared to move in case I draw her blurred.
Number three I’ve called Eleni, cos it’s a painting of Eleni. A very big Eleni. An eleven-foot Eleni. She sat for me at all hours of the day and night. A beautiful Eleni, cos I couldn’t see how to paint her any other way.
Number four I’ve called Lenny, cos it’s a painting of Lenny. A very big Lenny. An eleven-foot Lenny. Lenny doesn’t know I’ve painted it, cos I haven’t told him, cos I think the end result might piss him off a bit. I painted it from memory and so he looks like how he used to, back in the days before he looked how he looks now, which is just the same. Handsome. Conceited. Swollen with hubris. Eyes half closed, looking down.
The Late Hector Kipling Page 9
