Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  A voice calls out — “Paul!” — it is Émile’s voice, but when he searches all around and above him, Émile is not there.

  Something about the sky terrifies him, filled as it is now with storm clouds, roiling like the sea, pressing down, pressing, pressing….

  He reaches up with the palette knife as if to puncture the sky’s violent mass, to let the air out and a vision comes; a painting of that sky, the retreating woman’s dark blonde hair, loose, trailing on the ground, a knife, a boot planted firmly — his boot — another woman — the model — complicit in death — the horror of now.

  This is the kind of reality he must create; a true reality, a terrible reality. If Émile can do it so can he.

  He pushes the knife into his pocket, turns to go back to where he belongs; standing in front of the easel, facing his canvas and the questions of painting.

  “Émile will have to wait.”

  Maria, Liverpool — 2008

  Maria rushes into the Walker, late she knows and worried by how Nick will be. She stops at the sight of him hunched over paper, drawing, the back of his neck looking exactly the same as the boy’s of fifteen who, on that morning when she’d heard about his dad and gone round straightaway and opened the back door that was never locked and seen Nick sat at in the kitchen with a pile of broken eggshells on the table in front of him, drawing them with this crackling fury, like he couldn’t not do it.

  Sue, Nick’s mum, was standing at the hob and neither of them noticed Maria when she walked in. Then Sue had looked up as she plopped a glistening, freshly fried egg on a plate warming on the top of the grill, underneath which some rashers of bacon were spitting gently. “Hello, Maria love,” she said, like she always did, and Maria hugged her, though only for a second because Sue turned straight back to the stove, spatula in hand.

  “I heard what happened,” Maria said.

  “Where’d you hear exactly?” Nick asked from the table, without looking up.

  “It’s all over the place,” Maria told him, but she didn’t say it was even on the local news that morning. “I’m — I’m really sorry. I don’t know what else to say. Poor Jimmy.”

  She’d sat down across from Nick and reached over and placed her hand on his, the one that was resting on the edge of the paper to keep it straight.

  Sue cracked another egg into the pan and its sizzling filled the silence. She reached across, added the newly halved shells to the pile in front of Nick and his thin sketch of them.

  Thinking about it now, Maria wasn’t surprised that Nick and his mum were acting so normal, in spite of what had happened, because that was how they lived their lives; acting normal in the face of horrendous violence. She’d not asked Nick then, and has never asked since, why he hadn’t phoned her himself. She’d been frightened of the answer he might give, of making him angry for making it about her — that was one of his common accusations in those days.

  She’d been frightened of his reactions to things for as long as she could remember and she mustn’t be frightened now — though she is — at the sight of him sitting head bowed in the café of the Walker, drawing, which had come to indicate different things at different times in their lives, until it was impossible to read what it meant, inside their relationship. Eventually, Maria had stopped encouraging him, stopped asking, “How’s your art going?” because it could spark a sulk, a storming out, a row, sex, she could never be sure. It was manic, that’s what it was. Drawing was the only mind-altering substance Nick had used — before his medication, she means. The highs were amazing. He was such a joy to be with then. But the comedowns, the times it wasn’t going right, they were just awful.

  What she’d heard that terrible morning, seeing something wrong on her mum’s face when she’d brought her a cup of tea in bed, which she never did, was, “Jimmy’s really gone and done it now.”

  Maria had never seen her mum so angry and so controlled at the same time, remembers that the cup and saucer jangled with it, and Maria’s first thought was Nick, he’s killed Nick, but he hadn’t, her mum said, “he’s only gone and ruined the rest of his bloody life for him,” which was almost as bad.

  And her mum told Maria what Maria’s dad told her when he came back from the pub last night; that there’d been a lock-in but Jimmy hadn’t stayed for it, had left when the guitar and the fiddle came out and the singing started, and the pub door was bolted behind him, and if the curtains hadn’t been drawn someone might have seen Jimmy sitting in his car all that time and eventually gone out to him, to check he was alright. Or they might’ve seen what he was doing with the can of petrol and stopped him, but they hadn’t seen anything, and they were singing and playing so loud by then that they didn’t hear the whoosh of the fire when it started and she just hoped to God it was quick but it must have been awful.

  The next thing they knew there was a hammering at the pub door and they all stopped singing because they thought it was the bizzies come about the noise, but it wasn’t, it was Nick who’d been sent by Sue to fetch Jimmy back home because she had to be up early the next morning for her shift at the bakery and, despite everything, she never got a proper night’s sleep, Sue once told her, unless Jimmy was next to her. “God, she must really have loved him,” her mum had said, “and Christ only knows why.”

  It was Nick who found the car burning with Jimmy inside it, and when they’d all run out the pub to see if what Nick had told them was true, that was when the car windows blew and the flames roared out, and Maria’s dad, who hadn’t slept a wink, told her there was nothing they could do except call the fire brigade and wait and watch and by God they hoped it was quick. “He’s in the bedroom crying to himself now,” her mum said, “and don’t you tell him I told you that.”

  And Maria had thought, once a man sets fire to himself, isn’t it better to let him burn away if that’s what he wants, because to do that to himself he must have really wanted to die so hard that it was best to just let him get on with it, though she’d never said that to Nick.

  When Sue put a fried egg butty down in front of her and said, “Have some breakfast won’t you love, I’ll pour the tea,” Maria had started to eat with one hand, all the while keeping the other hand over Nick’s while he carried on with his drawing.

  She did it for Sue’s sake really because she wasn’t hungry at all, and the bread turned to cement in her throat, but Sue must have thought people would be calling in to offer condolences and she should give them all fried eggs and bacon butties and cups of tea and, at the same time as Maria realised this, Nick said, “No one will come,” and Sue had said, “People will come” — spatula flicks quickening — “they’ll know what’s right and they’ll come and say sorry and pay your Dad their respects.” Then Nick had spat the word, “Respects?” and said, “What are they going to say, Mum? Oh, we’re so sorry, Sue. We’re sorry your Jimmy’s gone and made a show of himself. We’re sorry your Nick had to find him burning to death in the car park? We’re sorry you don’t have to worry about where he is and what he’s done ever again? We’re sorry the pair of you’ll never have to sit in the kitchen waiting for him to come home, listening out for the sound his keys make on the hall table so you can tell whether you’re in for a fucking hiding or not and if you’re quick enough slip out the back door and walk around for a few hours until he fucking conks out and it’s safe to go home?” He’d run out of breath then, Maria remembers, his knuckles whitening around his pencil as he stabbed the table with it, and his hand that was under hers bunching into a fist, screwing up his drawing in the process.

  That bunched ball of rage was something that Nick must have buried inside himself because Maria never heard him shout at his mum again after that, because he knew, and his mum and Maria knew, that the person he really wanted to shout at was his dad, but he’d never ever had the guts to do that, and now Jimmy was dead.

  Maria takes out her phone to check the exact time and sees she’s missed a call from J-P. He’ll have to wait.

  She takes
a big breath to steel herself, tries to calm her heart, hates being a liar, but sometimes it’s necessary, isn’t it? Maybe she should wait until Nick is a bit more settled. No, he’ll never be settled. She hates that she thinks about him this way, that he’s a burden to her, but it’s not her fault. What she worries about most these days is becoming just another angry person in Nick’s life, but it’s hard always trying to be better. And what are you supposed to do when someone offers you the chance of a lifetime?

  She’d already left school at sixteen, hadn’t she, to help her mum and dad out with the bills after her dad’s redundancy? Not gone to college to do fashion, as she’d wanted, but straight into an admin job with the local council. She thought she might study later, when she’d saved up a bit, but she never did. She’d stayed with Nick because they loved each other since school. In fact, she’d noticed him way before he paid her any attention and they used to laugh about it, how she’d been after him since Primary and he never knew anything about it.

  They did everything together; first snog, first sex, first love — in that order. If it had been up to her mum they’d have got married straight after school, but Nick got in to do Fine Art purely on the strength of his portfolio, produced during one of his bouts of stability, and that was amazing given he hadn’t done his final exam, so there was no way they could have afforded to get married, and it would have been too soon anyway.

  When he’d started hanging out with his arty mates, Nick saw less of her, which was fine because she wanted him to get on and everything, but whenever she was invited to a party or went to an exhibition with them, they’d thought she didn’t notice that they talked down to her, glanced at each other then looked away when she’d told them what she thought, gave an opinion. None of them cared that Nick wouldn’t even have been there if it wasn’t for her; when he’d had his first breakdown at seventeen, and Sue hadn’t been able to cope with it, it was Maria who put Nick back together.

  All that time she was doing her ‘little job’ at the Council, as everyone called it, bringing in money, set for life if she wanted, but all she was doing was answering the phone to angry, desperate people, and filing away pieces of paper, or taking files out of cabinets and putting them on other people’s desks until eight years had passed and she’d become the person who had files put on her desk and she and Nick were living together after he dropped out of college halfway through.

  The day she’d seen the advert in the internal mail for a job in the Film Office her heart had jumped at the thought of doing something like that, even though it was really a demotion to go back to being an administrative assistant, and was less money, but they’d manage and she’d make Nick understand.

  Both the interview process and the waiting were agony because she’d wanted it so badly and they’d kind of given her the nod but until it was confirmed she didn’t believe it wouldn’t be taken away from her. She’d thought what it would mean if she didn’t get it, had felt so desperate she hadn’t told anyone else she was going for it because she couldn’t bear the thought of what she’d say when they gave it to someone else. But she did get it, and it had her name written all over it that job, felt like her most perfect and best opportunity, right up until the one that was given to her last night.

  After only a year, she was made Artist Liaison, a job created specifically for her and which she loved, and then she was taking phone calls from America and Europe, from all over the world, actually, talking to people who could also be desperate and frantic at times because of the deadline pressures they were under and the amounts of money involved, but she knew how to deal with that because it was not that different from the job she had before. She’d been dealing with that all her life it felt like, had to deal with it when she got back home, never knowing what kind of day Nick had had, what mood he was in. Asking him how his day had been was exactly like taking a work call because you never really knew what was going to be on the other end, even though she’d learned to read some of the signals, including the drawing. And all the time, the unspoken thing between them was always Jimmy, because Jimmy possessed him, and so haunted their entire relationship.

  At Jimmy’s funeral Maria had searched Nick all over for some sign of distress, but his face had stayed flat as a stone, a blank oval, which she supposed was also a sign of his grief, and anger, and hurt, and he barely spoke to anyone that day, met their condolences only with a mute stare.

  And Maria had tried really hard to forget the image she had of a burnt and blackened Jimmy that appeared so clear in her mind when she’d watched Nick, and his uncles, and a couple of Jimmy’s pub mates carrying his coffin into the church. How light he must be, she’d thought, like charred paper that crumbles when you touch it.

  The priest gave a sermon about being plagued by demons and how those demons were made more present by drink, and Maria knew that the men in the church, coughing and shuffling and looking at the floor when he said all that, had already been to the pub beforehand and would all be going there after to give Jimmy a bloody good send-off, treading over the scorch marks in the car park on the way in.

  But before that, they went to the crematorium and, as the dark green velvet curtains closed, and the organ music played, Maria had thought, Well they might as well finish what he started.

  She’d found herself telling J-P some of this at dinner, last night — not the stuff about Jimmy, just about Nick’s depression.

  “How come you’ve been working for the council for so long when you’re clearly very bright,” J-P had asked, and she’d said, “You can be clever and still work for the council, you know,” and they laughed together but she was honestly glad to be asked about herself. She got that J-P liked her speaking to him like a normal person, already like friends after only a few days working together.

  She’d asked him about the film, in turn, and J-P had told her about how his dad used to take him to the Walker when his mum was having her treatment in the Royal and there was a painting called The Murder by Paul Cézanne, that he’d been frightened of and fascinated by at the same time and how he always used to ask his dad to take him to see it one last time before they left.

  Maria had told him that she’d been to the Walker loads of times and seen that picture, though she didn’t really like it, but she didn’t tell him she’d lobbied really hard to work on this project because she wasn’t technically senior enough to coordinate a whole shoot liaison on her own, but she’d used what she remembered from school art classes about Cézanne, dragging up stuff from Paddy all those years ago, stuff she didn’t even know she remembered, to convince her boss she should be the one to work with this particular director on this particular project, and, anyway, wasn’t it about time they gave her the chance to prove herself?

  Then J-P told her about how, when he’d gone to the Metropolitan Museum for the very first time, he’d walked into this room which was full of paintings of apples and landscapes and some lovely pictures of his wife who Cézanne didn’t really get on with, and he’d started to cry because, ridiculous as it might sound, they were lovely pictures. Then he made it his mission to find out about this artist he remembered from his childhood and how it could be that the same person produced such different paintings from The Murder.

  He’d told her all about him wanting to astonish Paris with an apple and she didn’t say she already knew that story because she loved that J-P was talking to her like an equal and this was what she wanted and she wasn’t going to ruin it. And just as she was thinking that J-P said, out of the blue, “Maria, do you fancy coming to work for us?” meaning him and Marius together she’d already guessed, and everything they talked about was leading up to that moment, so she said “Yes,” like that, straightaway. She said, “Yes, I’d love that.”

  But right now, standing in the café of the Walker, watching her ex do the thing that scared her the most, she thought, What if I’m replacing Nick’s need of me for J-P’s? She knows it’s a skill she has — this meeting people’s needs — but
what about her? No, she has to value her skills more — organising, listening to people, being honest with them — because they are skills. It could be a massive stepping-stone for her, this. If it doesn’t work out with J-P and Marius she’ll move on, work for someone else. She fucking well deserves it. She can’t let Nick keep her here forever, that’s the truth of it. She has to find out who she is and what she wants because she’s hardly ever had the time to think about that. Or she starts to, then stops herself.

  But she knows what she doesn’t want any more. She’s cared for Nick as long as she can remember and she still cares for him, but when he turns and looks up at her now as she approaches the table where he’s sitting, it’s the same look that he gave her at his mum’s kitchen table when she put her hand over his, filled with the same defensive neediness, and even though she loves the boy in him, she doesn’t love the man.

  She has to move on, she has to, otherwise she’ll end up burned alive in a car herself one of these days.

  Jeffrey, Hong Kong — 2013

  A black carriage trundles briskly over the cobbled Paris street. Suddenly, an arm reaches out the cab window and the driver pulls up sharply. His glossy, chestnut brown horse tosses and shakes its startled head.

  Cézanne, muttering darkly, pulling his greatcoat around him, stalks the façade of a grandly imposing edifice. To him, the building’s columns are as good as prison bars.

  The carriage’s cab door swings open and Zola jumps from it, removing his hat with a sweeping gesture. “Paul!” he cries, his round, bearded face blooming into a warm smile.

  Cézanne halts, lifts his head, as intensely agitated as the horse.

  Zola rushes towards him, arms wide open.

  Cézanne’s scowl softens and he pulls his hands from his coat pockets.

  “So it’s true!” Zola exclaims, holding his dear friend by the shoulders. He plants a delighted kiss on Cézanne’s scruffy cheek and then the other, pulls him into a hug. “You’re really back with us. In Paris.”