The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  I give the frame a little kick.

  ‘So what are we gonna do about this?’ says Myers, gesturing to an alcove. ‘I sold this show on a self-portrait in the alcove.’

  ‘I don’t know, Joe,’ I say, ‘I’ll come up with something.’

  ‘Hector,’ says Myers, ‘you keep saying this. You keep saying that you’ll come up with something. But it took you three months to complete the self-portrait and now it’s in pieces and now we’ve only got six days.’

  ‘It’s not my fault it’s in pieces, Joe.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was, but we’re fucked with having an empty alcove.’

  ‘A motorbike smashed right through the middle of it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So it’s not my fault.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So it’s not my fucking fault, Joe.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, how are you gonna do it?’

  ‘And all I’m saying, Joe, is chill out, you’ll get it.’

  We both stand there looking at the alcove, imagining what it is that he’s going to get.

  I don’t like Myers. It’s been eighteen months now and I don’t like him. I may even hate him. Really hate him. Hate as it’s defined in the dictionary.

  Here’s how we met: I was standing in the Waddington Gallery on Cork Street, trying to make some sense of a particularly slapdash example of Dubuffet’s ‘L’Art Brut’, wishing that I could do that. Wishing that I could just paint like I didn’t give a flying fuck about what anybody thinks.

  A hand appeared on my shoulder.

  ‘Hector,’ said Myers, ‘Hector Kipling.’

  Strange-looking fella. Almost a hunchback. Cheap grey wig. Eyes like fused fairy lights. We shook hands and he regaled me with his credentials. He told me I was a genius.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You certainly are,’ he said and palmed the wig into the nape of his neck. He stank of cigars. ‘I was at the Serpentine last year, and I was transfixed by your God Bolton.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I was standing there utterly transported, when who should appear at my side but Jay Jopling.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘You know Jay?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve come across him,’ I said.

  ‘“Do you like Kipling?” said Jay. “I don’t know,” I said . . .’ – here Myers put a hand on my arm – ‘“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve never Kippled.’” He threw back his chin, which was sharp and pockmarked, and laughed.

  That’s how I met Joe ‘The Eyes’ Myers.

  ‘I mean,’ says Myers, ‘what are we talking about here? How badly damaged is the original?’

  ‘It’s in shreds, Joe, and covered in petrol.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you just stitch it back together?’

  ‘Stitch it back together?’

  ‘You know, sort of like a Fontana-type thing.’

  ‘What are you talking about, you fucking retard.’

  Myers sighs and looks hopelessly around the room. Suddenly he brightens and holds up a big fat, nicotine-soaked finger. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘we could put up that one of Lenny Snook and say that that’s you.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Put up the picture of Lenny and say that that’s it – that’s your self-portrait.’

  ‘And how the fuck would that work?’ I say, genuinely confused.

  ‘Well, not that many people know what you look like.’

  ‘I look nothing like Lenny Snook.’

  ‘If you shaved your head.’

  ‘Joe, I look nothing like Lenny fucking Snook!’

  ‘But who knows what you look like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I shout. I start pacing the room like I’m dealing with someone a bit backward. ‘I’ve no idea of who or how many people know what I look like, the point is I look nothing like Lenny Snook, and plenty of people know what Lenny Snook looks like, and anyway what the fuck are you talking about? It’s not a self-portrait, it’s Lenny fucking Snook, I’m not putting up a painting of Lenny fucking Snook and calling it a self-portrait. What the fuck are you talking about, Joe?’

  ‘It was just an idea, Hector,’ says Myers, ‘now calm down.’

  I’m pacing the floor between Big Mum and Big Dad, and then I feel like I’m gonna collapse and I pace over to Big Eleni, and cos I can’t stop with this pacing I pace over to Big Lenny and I don’t know what it is within me that stops me from kicking his mouth through to the back of his head.

  ‘How is Lenny?’ says Myers.

  But then again, perhaps it’s Myers I should be kicking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lenny. Have you seen him? Isn’t he back from New York?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘he’s back all right.’

  ‘So has he told you what he’s doing for the Prize?’

  I lean on the wall and stare at the bricks. ‘Can I smoke in here?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Myers, ‘smoke away.’

  Smoke away. That’s exactly what I’ll do. Exactly what I’ve always done.

  ‘Has he discussed it with you?’

  ‘No, Joe,’ I say, ‘no, he hasn’t discussed it with me.’

  ‘Only I heard from Searle, who’d been speaking to Jopling, that it was something to do with a sofa.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Something to do with a sofa, an old settee, a settee filled with . . . or not filled with . . . more encased in . . . or imbued with . . . err imbued . . . yes err . . . I don’t know, it sounded a bit complicated. Ring a bell?’

  ‘No, Joe,’ I say. ‘It rings no bells at all.’

  Early evening. I’ve had to set up an emergency meeting with Bianca. She’s teaching me to imagine my hands getting warm and to breathe through one nostril, whilst closing the other nostril with one of my warm fingers.

  ‘As though your hands are filling with up with warm blood,’ she says.

  ‘Whose blood?’ I say.

  ‘With your own blood,’ she says and frowns. ‘Coming down your arms and into the veins of your hands.’

  If I was standing up right now I’d be falling down, but, since I’m sitting, I make do with lurching a bit to the left and leaning on a cushion.

  ‘Lie down if you like. Lie down on the sofa,’ she says. ‘Feel the blood in your hands,’ she says, ‘and tighten your anus.’

  BOX STREET, BOW, LONDON

  It’s Thursday afternoon. Outside it’s starting to rain again. There’s a pigeon on the ledge looking at me through the window like he’s seen me somewhere before and he’s trying to remember my name. In the far corner of the room stands Eleni’s piano. There’s a blue vase of purple tulips, a green bottle of water, a rubber snake, a painted egg, a glass ashtray in the shape of a heart and a smouldering fag. She’s playing one note over and over again; one of the black keys, way down towards the bottom. Now and again she plays another note, a white key, but only once, and then she’s back to the black key over and over, three-second intervals, sometimes twenty times in a row. She’s gazing at the TV. Sometimes she picks up the remote and rewinds it. Sometimes she pauses it. She’s pausing it now. There’s a man in a rowing boat in the middle of the night, sobbing like a child and pointing a gun at the moon.

  I’m lying on the floor at the base of the canvas. Two long black converging lines; each about eight feet long. I push myself up on my elbows, spread out my feet and look at my legs. Black jeans.

  ‘Fear of Memory / Memory of Fear / That’s what I think’s going on here.’

  Rosa Flood. There’s a name for you.

  ‘So what do you think you’re gonna do?’ I shout.

  She closes the lid and the tulips wobble. She turns off the video and crushes out her fag in the ashtray.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I’m finding it hard to know what to do.’

  I put a hand on the top of her head and begin to stroke her hair. The piano’s well polished and I can see her reflected in
the top, smiling at me, but with her eyebrows pointing up. Two converging lines. A smile like a sigh. Or a sigh like a smile. Her head feels warm and I run my fingers through her hair to the tangles at the end. She must have stopped brushing it.

  We haven’t talked all day, but now we’re talking it feels like I can’t believe we’re not talking all the time, over and over, about the same thing. The one thing.

  ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Eleni. What does your dad think you should do?’

  ‘I don’t know, he tells me that I should do whatever I feel I should do.’

  ‘And so what do you feel you should do?’

  ‘I don’t know. What should I do?’

  ‘Do you think you should go home?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  I stop stroking her hair and begin to stroke her neck right down to the collar bone, pausing to feel her pulse.

  Beyond the pulse there’s a silence.

  There’s a hundred different things I could say, and in Eleni’s warm head I’m sure there are a hundred more. Neither of us mentions any of them.

  Silence. A sort of silence. Just the sound of my fingers on her neck and a dog in the street, barking my life story to a puddle.

  Overcome by the silence she stands up, runs across the room, puts on her coat and goes out, slamming the door.

  Now we’re sitting in the church on Beecham Street, staring at the altar. When I followed her in I found her lighting a candle and curtsying to the font.

  Silence.

  I’ve never known such silence with Eleni.

  Me and Eleni have always talked. Always.

  It’s a dim, frosty, cheerless old church with a low wooden ceiling and the stations of the cross, shoddily executed, on seven sooty little windows. There’s a moth, doing the rounds, very taken with Eleni’s solitary candle. We have the place to ourselves. Eleni’s got her eyes closed. She might even be asleep.

  The door opens and a man walks in. He dips his fingers in the font, genuflects and takes a seat near the front. He looks familiar. Silence. A sort of silence. The sound of hammering coming from the cellar and the throb of a helicopter, and a drill, and a fire engine. Someone’s life gone wrong. Someone’s life on fire. The man looks round. Tall, lopsided, foppish-looking fella. I feel like I’m looking at this man the way the pigeon on the window ledge was looking at me. Suddenly it comes to me: he’s the man who asked me for the time in the toilets at the Tate, the man who said, ‘I’ve seen your stuff.’ He stands up, walks down the aisle backwards and goes out the door, slamming it behind him. Is everyone slamming doors now, then? A sort of silence. You could hear a pig drop.

  Me and Eleni have had a talk. I wrapped her up in my coat and walked her back home. There was still a lot of silence, save for the rattle of bottles from the brewery and someone, somewhere, playing ‘Eidelweiss’ on an accordion. We’ve decided that she should go home. It’s been four days since the accident and her mother’s condition is beset by complications. Her brother, who I think we can say is not really handling the situation, has disappeared. Yiorgos, due to an inflamed ulcer and chronic lack of sleep, is raving and sobbing, his taverna’s losing money and his shingles have come back. We’ve also decided that I should not go with her. In fact the question was never raised. But I think we can say, by the very fact of its omission from our discussion, that the question has been decided.

  I’ll miss her.

  I love her.

  Eleni’s asleep. We drank a lot of wine deciding she should go home. It’s only half-past eleven and I am not asleep. I’m up. In fact I’m up the stepladder, wobbling around from the wine that I drank before and the wine I’m drinking now. The canvas is coming along; it’s now completely black. Two converging black lines against a black sky. I don’t know why I think it’s sky. The way it looks right now it could be anything black. It could be the belly of a fly, the darkness of the throat, an acre of burned flesh. But it’s not. It’s the sky.

  The two black lines stand out because they’re dry. Then I go over them with red, so now there are two rust lines against a black sky.

  Can you tell what it is yet?

  It looks so fucking voluptuous that I want to take off my clothes and do a filthy loud bellyflop right into the middle of it. Just as I’m seriously contemplating actually doing such a thing, Lenny calls. He asks me if Kirk was all right when we left the Bobo Cat and I tell him that Kirk was just fine and how I’d looked after him and how Lenny isn’t to worry cos Kirk’s just fine. I ask him how he is, and he says he’s fine, and I ask him how the piece is going, and he says it’s going fine, but he may have to move out of the house, away from Brenda, to really crack it. I tell him that he’s welcome to work at my place, and he says thanks and he may take me up on that. I ask him if I’m allowed to know what the piece is yet and he says he still doesn’t want to talk about it. Then I ask him how he got on the other night with mental Delaney and he says fine.

  ‘Where did you go?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, we went to Helen’s bar,’ says Lenny.

  ‘Good?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, you know. You know what it’s like in Helen’s.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ he says, ‘remember that girl at the club who got up and did the poems?’

  I look at my canvas. Two converging red lines against a black sky. ‘Rosa Flood?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah that’s it, Rosa,’ says Lenny.

  ‘What about her?’ I say.

  ‘Well, she was in Helen’s. She’s out to fucking lunch.’

  I climb down the steps and put my foot right into the paint tin and I can’t get it out. Like I’ve been studying Stan Laurel all my life.

  ‘So you had a laugh, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, we had a laugh, it was a good night, you should have been there.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was walking Kirk home,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Lenny, ‘and he’s fine, yeah?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I say, ‘like I said – I looked after him.’

  ‘And how’s Eleni’s mum?’

  ‘Not good. Eleni’s going back to Crete.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he says, like he’s not taking it in.

  We talk for a while about Brenda and how it’s definitely it this time, how she’s definitely not getting another chance, how it’s definitely the end, definitely. We talk about his mum, who’s in a home, and how Lenny really doesn’t have a problem with that, and how anybody would be as deranged as his mum if they’d had their partner torn apart by a burning helicopter. I don’t argue with that. And then he asks me how my mum and dad are.

  ‘Oh, they’re all over the place,’ I say, and I tell him the whole thing about the settee. Every time I say settee I stress both syllables. ‘They’ve bought this set-tee,’ I say, ‘this ugly set-tee.’

  Lenny laughs.

  ‘It’s no joke,’ I say, ‘You know what my mum and dad are like, Lenny’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Lenny.

  ‘And so what about this piece?’ I say. ‘Are you gonna tell me or what?’

  Silence.

  ‘Or what?’ says Lenny.

  More silence.

  ‘I hear it’s about a settee. I hear that it’s got something to do with a set-tee.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Well, Lenny, that’s not the point.’

  ‘So what is your point?’

  I spit on the floor. I dip my brush into the thick rich fudge of black and climb back up the stepladder.

  ‘Lenny, I’ve offered to let you stay here to finish whatever the fuck it is that you’re up to, but it’s gonna get a bit messy if you’re staying here, finishing whatever the fuck it is that you’re up to, if you don’t tell me what the fuck it is. What you gonna do? Put up screens?’

  ‘Well, what if it’s conceptual?’ he says. ‘What if I don’t need to put up screens?’

  ‘Well, is it c
onceptual?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, ‘so it’s a sort of conceptual set-tee type of thing that we’ve got going on here?’

  ‘Hector!’ he snaps.

  ‘Don’t snap at me, Lenny.’

  ‘Well, why are you being so pushy about this?’

  ‘Why are you being so evasive?’

  ‘Why are you being so bellicose?’

  ‘Why are you using such big words?’

  ‘Why are you behaving like a five-year-old?’

  ‘Cos you’re behaving like a three-year-old.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, listen to yourself.’

  ‘Listen to yourself.’

  Then his doorbell rings and he says he has to go cos that’s someone at the door.

  ‘So let Brenda get it,’ I say.

  ‘Brenda’s not here,’ he says, ‘she’s in Glasgow at some pottery festival.’

  ‘Well, go and get it,’ I say, ‘and then come back.’

  ‘But I think it’s Rosa,’ he says.

  I stare at my brush and feel like eating it. I fall off the ladder and smash my head against the radiator and my knee against the edge of my easel. I roll around the floor for a few seconds and then make a considered decision to press my face into the pat of black paint piled up on my palette. Good idea. The paint feels cool against my skin. I raise myself up, catching my breath.

  ‘Hector?’ says Lenny. ‘Hector? Are you all right?’

  I just hang up.

  Is everyone hanging up these days?

  6

  OLYMPUS DESK, HEATHROW AIRPORT

  At the airport there’s a billboard showing a young couple holding hands against a sunset. The caption says ‘What’s wrong with looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles?’ Somebody’s spraypainted out the word ‘spectacles’ and written ‘testicles’. There are two blokes in yellow jackets taking it down. Next to that is a billboard of a man grinning at his watch as though he can’t get over that it’s quarter past four. ‘All the Time in the World’ it says, and behind him there’s a big blue world and a few of the other planets, as though he’s an astrophysicist or something.