Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  Cézanne’s hands, his long, intelligent fingers crusted with paint, flutter awkwardly around Zola’s back before settling into their embrace.

  Jeffrey pauses the action, freezing the men in mid hug. He’s always liked this scene because of how fragile and humane Cézanne appears. He can’t imagine things would really have happened this way — their physical closeness he means. They show, in the movie, when Hortense touches him for the first time and he flinches, violently, like she’s assaulted him. There’s a flashback to Cézanne being kicked down the stairs at school, yet here he is, holding his friend. Maybe Zola was the only one allowed to touch him like this. Or perhaps it isn’t true.

  Jeffrey had read all about Cézanne’s fear of touch in his mother’s book. And in the DVD interview, the director, J-P McKeown, cited Annie Yeung as having helped him ‘understand’ the character of Cézanne, as if such a thing was possible, as if the different perspectives of a genius’ life, or anyone’s life, could be arranged and ordered to present a whole being.

  He takes up his own copy of the book — slim, worn, the pale grey hardcover darkened with years of holding — from his bedside table. Between its pages, mother and son speak to each other, Annie’s voice made from the whisper of flicked leaves.

  She has already explained to Jeffrey that Cézanne’s reaction to being bullied at school was extreme, but not one he was able to control, and showed him how Zola helped him through those difficult days.

  She’s told him about Cézanne’s father, too, whose attempts to control his son with blackmail and outright hostility, the threats to cut off his allowance, tainted their relationship. At least your father has not done that, he has heard her say. If it were not for him, you wouldn’t be able to create, or share, your own art.

  As Lone Wolf, the most famous digital guerilla artist on the planet, he’s able to send his work to every computer in the world, bypassing all firewall technology, spam filters, State censors and content blockers — he is the subject of news reports, TV documentaries, speculative magazine features, unofficial cyber-retrospectives, international conferences, academic dissertations, blog forums, monographs, journal articles and, perhaps most flatteringly, forgery. None of this concerns Jeffrey at all. What matters to him is the dissemination of his work. After that, people can do what they like with it.

  Yes, Walter provides him with everything he needs and it’s only because his father allows him access to CantoCorp’s systems and resources that he is able to do what he does and no one knows his location, or his identity. But he won’t give his father credit for any of it. Wasn’t it the least Walter could do? Jeffrey is his son after all, and a son is not a shiny trophy to show off to friends and associates that you put away when it becomes tarnished.

  Your father didn’t put you away, Annie whispers. You did that to yourself.

  He has no reply to that.

  Jeffrey’s living quarters, in which he has stayed for the last ten years, are directly below the CantoCorp penthouse. Generously proportioned and self-contained with sound-proofing so effective Jeffrey may as well be in another building all together, he loves their restrained, chocolate and beige elegance because it reminds him of the Mandarin Oriental.

  His father would never cut the power, or the water, or the air con, as he had initially threatened to do. For all the blustering about how little he cared for others’ views of him, Jeffrey’s instinct had been that Walter would not want to be seen as a bad father and that the minimum amount of fuss following his decision to become Hikikomori was best for everyone. He could easily lie about Jeffrey’s whereabouts, or play on people’s sympathy regarding his son’s self-imposed isolation if he wanted, it didn’t matter. As it was, Walter simply never mentioned him. Jeffrey was like a flower in that respect.

  He is happy to reap the rewards of his father’s guilt, and the past ten years have gone quick enough. His food is delivered whenever he asks for it, his clothes and towels and bed linen all laundered and returned within twenty-four hours. He keeps the place spotless himself. Any equipment he orders is left outside the door and all Jeffrey need do is lean across the threshold to take it in. He has his running machine, his free weights, his computers, books, music, wants for nothing in fact. He is not much interested in what his mother has to say about this.

  The pause function on the movie times out and it starts up again. Zola and Cézanne pull apart and make their way down the street, arm in arm, Émile chatting, gesticulating warmly, Paul’s face relaxing into a thoughtful smile. The moment of the two men embracing makes sense if what matters is showing how deep their friendship runs, which is the truth of that scene.

  Jeffrey has explained to Annie that he and Cézanne were about the same age when each suffered the violence that was done to them; Cézanne kicked down the stairs and Gor Gor’s death, which Jeffrey felt as physically as an assault, and his response to it was as much beyond his control as Cézanne’s fear of being touched was. That’s what he tells her.

  At least Cézanne had Zola to protect him, but Jeffrey has no one. Gor Gor understood him more than anyone ever could. He and Leslie were as inseparable Zola and Cézanne had been.

  But…

  Yes, he knows no one is inseparable! Gor Gor and he were separated, weren’t they? He and Walter Junior… they should have been inseparable too. And their mother also; she was taken from him and no one can tell him why. Why were they all separated?

  This time, it’s Annie who has no answer.

  He has his friends. He receives so many messages, so many other invisible voices, he can reply to only a tiny proportion. Some post video tributes to him on YouTube, and there has even been fanfic written in which Lone Wolf appears as a character. He’s developed ongoing communication and true friendship with a small number, privately. They feel they know him, some say, and that he knows them, or a part of them in him, which makes them feel they know themselves more in turn. They write to him the things they couldn’t say to anyone else, though he does not reciprocate in that respect. He doesn’t tell them he is a twenty-five-year-old man who hasn’t left his room for a decade, who has conversations with his dead mother and loathes his soon-to-be-dead father. None can touch him as Zola hugs Cézanne, or Leslie and Marius joking around on the red carpet, or the doctor laying a soothing hand on his father’s arm. He can’t remember that last time he was touched.

  One friend, the painter Sophie Greene, has been a particular favourite. Over the last couple of years they’ve developed a real bond and if he’s come close to revealing his identity to anyone, it’s her. During one of his digital conferences, she casually quoted a line from his mother’s book which he instantly responded to, though carefully, paranoid about giving his identity away. He’d given her access then to his personal forum, letting her in to his inner circle and she’d shared how one of his digital interventions had come at a time when she was feeling extremely vulnerable.

  She’d gotten back together with her on-off-on-again ex-husband — some useless poet guy, apparently — and then ended the relationship again — “and for good this time!” He may be the father of her child, she’d written Jeffrey, but she couldn’t take his mood swings and erratic behaviour any more. One day, in the middle of it all, her phone had pinged and she’d opened the message expecting another desperate tirade from this Joel and, instead, there was Lone Wolf’s latest work, a never-ending shower of blooms that had beamed around the world but which, she felt, had been sent to her only.

  This meant a lot to Jeffrey because he’d only recently — this was 2011, he seems to recall — felt brave enough to start making flower pieces and, unusually, he’d not only replied directly to her thank you but asked questions about her and her relationship with her ex and then, after Googling her, he’d let her know how much he liked her work, her self-portraits especially, and was interested in its development.

  He was aware of idealising Sophie, for a period, as a beautiful young mother, which in itself gave birth to strange, imagined memo
ries in which she replaced his own, Sophie’s and Annie’s voice and face merging into one. He’d taken some time out to process, to compartmentalise, before entering back into their dialogue — they were not Inseparables, Jeffrey and she, but he recognised a friendship that was important, and precious.

  Opening up his mother’s book, he turns to the dedication page:

  In memory of my adored wife An-Xie Yeung (1960 - 1990) and

  Walter Yeung Junior (1988 - 1990), and for Jeffrey Yeung, my

  only living hope, with love.

  In the short preface Walter writes that he had wanted to publish his wife’s book posthumously, as proof that she had once existed in the world and Jeffrey has often asked her, when reading this, “Aren’t I that proof, mother?”

  Currently, his favourite section is about a painting in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses. Annie reads the apples nestled amongst folds of a tablecloth as suggesting domestic warmth and comfort. The cloth protects and nurtures them, like arms enfolding. At some point, he worked out that she was writing this book while undergoing her IVF treatment, and he imagines her filled with yearning as she writes.

  A quick tap at his keyboard calls up the very painting. He fills his bank of screens with it, bathes in its bright blue and orange glow. It’s like the sun coming out, like laughter. He is so lonely sometimes.

  There are two small apples, one green, one red, sitting side by side at the front of the table. He thinks he can smell them, those apples. He and Walter Junior would have been exactly like that once, nestled inside their mother.

  Right now, the focus of his own work is all on creating his most spectacular digital bouquet. ‘Flowers for Gor Gor’ will be delivered to the whole world, a gift and a tribute on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Leslie’s tragic suicide.

  He wants to remind people of their connection to the natural world, playing with its inbuilt paradox, given that the flowers aren’t real, and a nostalgia for things he himself no longer experiences. He hasn’t touched, smelled, or even seen a real flower since Leslie’s 49th day. He still orders them occasionally, in the hope that they will slip through his father’s perverse restriction and arrive outside his door, but they never do. Walter still asserts that power in their relationship. Perhaps, afterwards, there can be flowers once again.

  It’s the only thing he has ever refused you, Jeffrey. Surely you can you understand why?

  Yes, yes, he understands. He knows full well the part flowers played in his own family tragedy and, as a result, ‘Flowers for Gor Gor’ contains a very specific and unbearable sense of loss that he’s only now able to express; a floral tribute not just to Leslie, but to the three most important people in his life, all of them dead. At least this bouquet will not rot on the sidewalk.

  Jeffrey taps at the keyboard, wanting to see Walter, and finds him in his bedroom, sleeping. He spends most of his time asleep these days, or simply lying with his eyes closed, earphones in, listening to no doubt God-awful music. He’ll leave him to it.

  He clicks through the security cameras, flitting around the headquarters of CantoCorp, which is calm and quiet, as if the images are all frozen, or still lifes. Walter has not been seen for weeks and rumours are circulating, building in intensity. He used to stalk the corridors every day, keeping everyone on their toes, controlling everything with his legendary charisma, so-called. Now, at the closing of the Walter Yeung era, there is only a subdued sense of crisis, dampened by a blind faith that CantoCorp is too big to fail and everything is in place for a smooth transition. Jeffrey has only sporadically considered what this might mean for him. What will he become?

  One screen is crackling and fizzing with dynamic force, he sees — the room with the painting machine. Jeffrey sits up to watch, re-charged by its energy. This machine has always struck him as strangely antiquated. With its complex workings on view, the nuts and bolts and wheels and joints all rendered in glittering CantoCorp steel, it’s like something from 1960s sci-fi, or a steampunk fantasy, the past’s version of the future. Its many arms, fitted with different sized paintbrushes and palette knives — one even has a prosthetic hand for finger and thumb smudging! — dab, jab, spin and stroke.

  What can it be doing at this hour, at this particular point in his father’s life? Jeffrey would not put it past him, even so near death, to be planning some last ridiculous spectacle, a prank to be played at his art museum’s opening, perhaps.

  What a waste of money, technology and time simply to make fools of some art experts. What a failure of the imagination not to use all of this technology to create something truly stimulating. Walter’s idea of the painting machine is pointless — yet another way of exercising his power, not just over those who work for him and those around him, but even over dead, great artists whose unique abilities and individuality he must hate.

  The end product will be the result of hours of scanning and processing of an original work of art. All the necessary information — exact layering of paint, gradations of colour, angle of strokes, the varying thickness of the surface — will have been analysed and fed back into this machine in order to reproduce it as faithfully and accurately as possible. If it were up to Jeffrey, if he had his father’s infinite resources, he would create something a million million times better than a ridiculous painting machine: virtual reality landscapes, copied from paintings, that you could actually be in, actually feel. Maybe he will, as a future project. ‘Flowers for Gor Gor’ will be, he has already decided, his last floral work. It’s time for a change of direction.

  He visualises himself walking in the countryside at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire; the houses, the fields, the trees, constructed of planes of blue, green, orange and white, the sky a scribbling of blue paint, darker in some patches, the canvas showing through sometimes like a tear in the fabric of the universe. He’s accompanied by his mother now, walking up the mountain together, right to the top, to survey the beauty of the world she loved, Cézanne’s world, because his paintings spoke to her in ways his father would never fully understand, and, perhaps, neither would he, though he has read her book over and over.

  He finds himself smiling, imagines reaching in to Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, the blossoms silky-pink against his fingertips, and takes an apple from the table — the bright red-orange-green one on the far left — the little pile of apples collapses around it. He smells apples again, takes a bite and it tastes sour-sweet and juicy, just as he thought it would be.

  Emerging from this reverie, he taps his keyboard and the bank of screens fills with a single image of the painting machine at work. All but smothered by it, Jeffrey spots an easel with a canvas resting on it, and zooms in. Which of Walter’s prized masterpieces is it to be this time?

  He can’t quite see past the flailing robotic arms, will have to wait for a pause in the action… then — there! — Jeffrey jumps up.

  Walter bought this painting in secret, he knows, and his mother’s love for these apples is expressed often enough in her book for Jeffrey to understand why he had bought it.

  Jeffrey returns to his desk, switches to the camera in his father’s suite. Sure enough, there, on the wall in front of Walter’s favourite armchair, where Still Life with Apples and Jug of Flowers usually resides and has faced him throughout his whole illness, hangs instead the star of Walter’s birthday prank, three months ago; ‘Cézanne’s Landscape, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

  He wouldn’t be seeking to reveal his ownership of it now, would he? Through another stupid game that he isn’t even well enough to witness? No, something else must be happening. But what… What game is he playing?

  Maria & Nick, Liverpool — 2008

  “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

  Maria waves her phone. “Sorry. Mad busy. Anyway, I’m not that late.” She leans past him, pulls the drawing towards them. She’ll dive right in but try and keep things light. “What’s this then?”

  �
�Oh, not much. It’s been a while, you know. I was thinking about school. Paddy’s classes, d’you remember?”

  “Do I? God, the things Paddy used to make us draw. He must have retired years ago by now. He’s probably still trawling Crosby Sands for bits of old bleached wood. They’ll be all piled up somewhere with no one to look at them. He looked like a bit of old stick himself, d’you remember?” He stays quiet, is looking closely at his drawing, so she pulls a chair up and waits.

  She’s nervous, Nick thinks, gabbing away like that. She’s doesn’t know how to say what she’s got to say. He clocks that she’s gripping her phone really tight and her eyes are still assessing the drawing, darting over it, looking for a diagnosis on the paper that tells her exactly how he’s doing. It’s obvious she’s seeing someone else.

  It’s nearly a year since she moved out. He’d spent the first six months in shock, numb as anything, and then it finally hit, one morning when he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow and he thought he must be getting flu or something, then realised what was coming and called Doctor Hartmann.

  At these times, there’s a mountain of feelings inside him, so many there’s no way to express them, because where would he start? Hartmann asked him once, “How do you climb a mountain, Nick?” and Nick had sat in silence, a silence Hartmann refused to fill for him, for what felt like ages, until eventually he’d managed to whisper, “One step at a time, until you get to the top.” Doctor Hartmann had nodded to him, pleased, and Nick always tried to please him in the way that he’d tried to please Paddy, and this was because he never could please Jimmy.

  He’ll ask her straight out: Maria, are you seeing somebody? But those words are not words that he’s practised, and he feels them solidify in his chest at the thought, and his mouth needs liquid words if he’s to be able to speak them. How did they get this far deep into each other’s lives without being able to speak properly to each other?