by Mark Morris
Drawn by the noise, her neighbors are peering through their own windows or stepping cautiously out their doors. Some already have cell phones pressed to their ears. Next, the police will come.Then what? What will they make of any of this? How will they explain it?
As if it is hearing itself in her thoughts, the driver stirs. Lindsay stifles a gasp. The heap of clothes and jutting angles shifts and begins to rise, slowly, like a blow-up doll being inflated one breath at a time. Pressing herself against the wall, Lindsay inches past it to the bedroom door. She backs out of the room.Without taking her eyes off the driver, she retraces her route through the trailer. She reaches the front door just as it achieves its full height. It turns its head to regard her. Curls of smoke roll out of the bullet holes in its coat. It moves toward her. She runs outside.
The station wagon is still idling in the middle of the lane. The passenger-side door hangs open. She climbs inside and yanks it closed. The upholstery is patchy with mould. The engine’s vibrations carry up through the seat. The driver emerges from the trailer. In an instant, it’s beside the door. In another, it’s reaching for the handle. She hits the lock down just in time. It rattles the handle, then lets go and brings its face close to the window. A ripple passes through the hairs on its face. It slams a gloved hand against the glass and leaves it there. Extra knuckles notch its over-long fingers.
Lindsay scoots backward over the parking brake into the driver’s seat until she’s pressed up against the door.A familiar keychain hangs from the ignition, swaying gently.
Up ahead, something catches her attention. A faint glow. She squints at it through the layer of grime on the windshield. Before her, maybe ten yards away, lights hover in the air.What she’s seeing doesn’t make sense.There’s nothing there for lights to reflect upon, just empty space. It has to be an illusion, some kind of interplay of the filthy glass and a neighbor’s porch lamp, only she knows it’s not. She knows, because the lights are the same jaundiced shade she saw in the driver’s eyes, and because the lights don’t quite look like they’re floating in the air—more like they’re shining through it. The effect makes her think of tissue paper flattened over the end of a flashlight.The beam filters through, revealing the paper’s thinness and frailty, its readiness to come apart at the slightest pressure.
On one side of her, the driver continues to paw at the door. On the other, Gus is emerging from his trailer. The sleepy look on his face turns to one of horror as he takes in the scene. He shouts Lindsay’s name. Whatever he says next, she misses. It’s been eight years since she sat behind the wheel of this car. Her father used to take her to empty parking lots to practice driving. He would set up orange traffic cones and drill her for hours on three-point turns and parallel parking. If she did well, her reward was getting to drive home. Eight years, but the muscle memory is still there, and she’s already gone.
FOUR ABSTRACTS
by Nina Allan
A Life on Canvas: the art of Rebecca Hathaway, Burton Museum and Art Gallery, Bideford, August 2016
Rebecca Hathaway died in February 2015 from complications following a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s four years earlier. She was forty-nine years old. Hathaway worked in a variety of media including ceramics and textiles, though paint was a recurring constant throughout her career. She herself described her work in oils as a kind of journal-keeping. The ten abstracts that comprise this exhibition have been drawn from all periods of her working life, beginning with a canvas painted for her graduation show at Reading College in 1984 and culminating in two previously unexhibited oils taken from her studio in Hartland, part of the series she was working on at the time of her death. The paintings on display grant a unique insight into the mindset of an artist whose troubled personal life was frequently reflected in her work.
You ask me how I knew her and what she was like. That’s a long story.
1. Junk, 1984, 3’x4’, oil on canvas. Hathaway’s graduation show consisted of eight identically sized canvases, each depicting a massed multitude of common household objects, painted in a hyper-realistic style to fill the canvas entirely, leaving no blank spaces. The canvas on display here, No. 6 in the original series, features a number of objects taken from what Hathaway always referred to as the junk drawer of the dressing table in her bedsit on Leamington Road: lipsticks, nail scissors, orphan earrings and a pencil eraser. The objects are painted slightly larger than life size, and with their colours artificially heightened in a manner suggestive of 1960s pop art, although Hathaway always denied this influence. She described her graduation show as a series of “distilled observations”, a visual diary of the year in which she painted them.
* * *
Not long after I first met her, Beck told me a strange story. This was in 1980, when we were both studying History of Art at the University of Reading. We were swapping childhood memories, which is most of what you do when you’re first getting to know someone, and I’d just told Beck about the time I put a ladder up to the bathroom window to spy on my brother Robby as he lay in the tub. I was fourteen when I did that, Robby just twelve.
“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I said. “One minute you’re running around naked together in the back garden, the next you’re supposed to act like strangers. I think it’s weird, anyway.”
Robby’s reaction when he found out what I’d done had been both tearful and furious. When I told him he’d become a prisoner of the social construct he told me to fuck off.
“It’s instinct,” Beck said. “The instinct that says you have to stop sharing baths at some point or you’re going to end up shagging your own brother.”
I made a gagging sound, and we both collapsed in shouts of laughter, bending ourselves double with our foreheads touching the carpet. I was secretly thinking it was Beck’s brother Ben I fancied, not Robby; Ben with the reed-slender wrists and sweeping eyelashes. Ben was three years older than Beck and me, and he had a fiancée already, a girl called Ros who was at Oxford reading PPE.
“You think that’s weird,” Beck continued. “When I was ten, my mother sat me down and told me the women in our family are all part-spider.”
“You what?” I sneaked a glance at her, trying to work out if she was being serious or taking the piss. Her eyes were closed, head tipped back to rest against the side of the bed. Beck had the same long, fair eyelashes as her brother, but whereas Ben’s eyes were dark brown, Beck’s were hazel, so pale in certain lights they looked almost colourless. Topaz, Beck said, the same as her mother’s.
“I know you think I’m joking but it really happened,” she added.“Mum said I’d start my periods like everyone else, only mine would last longer and be more painful because the lining of my womb had silk in it and it was difficult for the human body to break it down. She said I’d soon get used to it. When I asked her what else would happen she said probably nothing, because the spider genes had become very diluted over the centuries and I’d most likely go my whole life without even noticing I had them.”
She paused, and while it seemed that she was giving me the chance to butt in, to ask a question, to get angry even, I couldn’t think what to say. It was obviously a wind-up—I mean, how couldn’t it be?—and yet even as I waited for Beck to fall on her face laughing, to knee me in the side saying she really had me that time, it was the best one ever, she refused to do any of those things, just kept leaning quietly against the bed, saying nothing and waiting until I actually began to feel a bit creeped out.
“It can’t be true, though,” I said in the end. “Why would your mum tell you something like that?”
Beck made a “huh” sound, midway between a laugh and a snort of contempt. “You don’t know my mum,” she said. “It was probably just her way of explaining puberty to me.”
The room was almost dark—aside from the narrow fluorescent tube above the hand basin we had switched all the lights off—but when I turned to look at her I caught sight of a tear glistening on the curve of her cheek. I watched as it slid dow
n her face and plopped into her lap.
“Last year my periods stopped completely,” she said.“The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me. They think it’s just stress—exams and starting college and all that. I think it’s because I’m a freak.”
“You’re not a freak.”
I leaned sideways and hugged her. She pressed her face against my shoulder and cried. I could feel the wetness soaking through my T-shirt. I wasn’t sure what she was crying about—her mum being weird, or her stopped periods, or something else, hidden between the lines of those other things, but it didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was that she could cry and I was there to hold her. I felt a thrill of secret excitement, not so different from what I’d felt perched at the top of that ladder, staring at Robby’s new, alien body through the misted-up glass.
After a bit, Beck lay on the floor with her head in my lap and we carried on where we’d left off, talking about who we’d hated most at school and what we hoped we’d do when we left university. We talked until two in the morning. We were inseparable, even then, just three weeks into term. I was scared—scared that something would come along to fuck us up. Even getting off with Ben would fuck us up, I reasoned, because that would mean I’d have to think about Ben all the time and what a drag that would be, once the novelty had worn off.
I actually felt relieved that Ben had a girlfriend, that Ben and I was never going to happen.
* * *
I knew all along that Beck’s mother was the photographer Jennie Hathaway. Jennie was the reason I made friends with Beck in the first place, if I’m honest—I had the crazy idea that I could write my final year dissertation on her—although in fact I didn’t meet her until Ben’s wedding the following summer. Jennie seemed nervous to me, as if she were permanently on the lookout for an escape route, as if the wedding, the guests, the whole day was too much to cope with. Small, almost spookily thin, hair even straighter and paler than Beck’s. Constantly glancing about herself, searching for images.
There was something about her that made me feel uncomfortable, maybe because she was so different from my own mother, who worked in a bank and who still went to Yates’s wine bar with her girlfriends on the last Friday of every month. Came home hammered too, usually. I got on better with Beck’s dad, Adam. He seemed much more easy- going, more like Ben.
It wasn’t until I began work on my postgraduate thesis that I discovered that Jennie Hathaway had produced a little- known series of photographs of the naturalist Terezia Salk, who died of a rare wasting disorder she contracted during an extended period of field studies in the Amazon basin. Some reports said the disease was the result of a spider bite, although it was more likely that Salk’s immune system had been compromised through repeated bouts of fever, and the disease was able to gain a foothold as a result.
I was unable to source the whereabouts of the original negatives. Salk’s family bought the lot, apparently.They were determined to suppress the photos, which they saw as a gross invasion of Salk’s privacy.
Jennie Hathaway photographed some pretty weird shit—one newspaper reviewer referred to her as the British Diane Arbus—but I came away with the feeling Salk’s death affected her more than she’d bargained for, that she took it personally.
Which could help explain why she fed Beck all that spider nonsense.Terezia Salk’s unborn child died in the womb, I do know that. Salk’s doctors had to perform a caesarean because Salk was too weak by then to undergo labour.
Jennie photographed the baby too, apparently.There’s no way that wouldn’t get to you, especially if you had young children. It could be that she was suffering from some strange form of survivor guilt.
2. Sticklebacks, 1988, 3’x2’, oil on canvas. This canvas, which formed part of Hathaway’s first major London show, is painted in a similar style to the works in her graduation exhibition, although the colour palette is more subdued and there are indications of the looser, more painterly style that came to characterise her work over the following decade. On closer inspection we see that the closely packed shoal of “sticklebacks” that throng the canvas are actually Yale keys, more than two hundred of them, collected by Hathaway specifically for the purpose of painting them. Questioned in an interview about the meaning of Sticklebacks, Hathaway spoke of the significance of keys as symbols of secrecy and confinement.
In the autumn of our second year at university, Beck dropped out of her History of Art course and transferred to Reading College. She wanted to be an artist, she insisted, not a professor.We had a massive row about that and for a while afterwards she stopped speaking to me completely. She told me years later the reason she cut ties was because she was terrified of losing me, which didn’t make much sense even then and was agony at the time.
She was living in a grotty bedsit off London Road and spending most of her time with a postgraduate named April Lessore, who made collages from strips of pre-war fabric and old bus tickets. I refused to call April an artist, although textiles are really big now and so I suppose you could say she was ahead of her time.Whatever she was, I loathed the sight of her. I even began to loathe the month of the year she’d been named after.
I think Beck and April were probably lovers, though I never asked. By the time Beck and I were properly back on speaking terms, April was history.
* * *
A week after Beck’s funeral, Ben called and asked me if I would help him clear out her place. I didn’t know who was speaking at first. I mean, I recognised his voice but I couldn’t place it. Ben and I had never spoken on the phone before that, not even once.
He had been a part of my life for thirty years—longer—yet if you took all the time we’d spent physically in each other’s presence, it would probably have added up to less than a weekend.
“Don’t feel you have to say yes, Isobel,” Ben said.“But if you think you could face it I would be grateful. I haven’t been down there, you see, not since last winter. It became too difficult.”
I felt a rush of self-righteous gratitude: so it hadn’t been just me.
“What does she want to bury herself out there for?”That’s what Ben’s wife Ros said, when Beck announced she was leaving London to rent a cottage on the North Devon coast. Not a bad question, although in fact the answer seemed more obvious to me than I let on at the time. In my experience, people tend to do one of two things after a bad breakup: either shag themselves into oblivion or head off to the back of beyond and pretend to be finding themselves.
As I stepped on to the platform at Exeter St David’s I couldn’t help thinking about the last time I’d made this journey—four years ago, or so I told myself, although in fact it was closer to seven. When I looked for Hartland on the map it didn’t seem that isolated—in a country the size of England, nowhere is ever far from anywhere else, or so you’d think, which made it all the more unbelievable that the trip took five hours: the high-speed train to Exeter then a local line to Barnstaple then a bus ride along the coast road and into Hartland. That final stretch of the journey seemed to take forever. Barnstaple is a weird place—half historic port, half industrial estate—and from there the landscape only gets stranger. Stretches of desolate roadway through a flat, tussocky hinterland I never knew existed. Farmhouses and wind turbines, the odd ruined barn.
The village itself, when you finally get there, is one of those places you might have visited on holiday as a child: a bus stop and a convenience store, a cafe with a striped awning, a church and a tiny gift shop for the tourists. The cafe has a cappuccino machine now, which is sad and a relief at the same time.
Stepping off the bus, I felt my separation from London as I might feel a piece of grubby sticking plaster being torn from a mostly healed graze and tossed away.
Beck’s cottage was at the far end of a dingy side street. The inside looked like a deliberate reconstruction of a typical 1960s interior, complete with vinyl wallpaper and a bulbous three-piece suite in Carnaby Street orange. There was a wood-burning stove though, and
a monstrous iron Rayburn that provided the hot water. “The owners said I could redecorate,” Beck told me excitedly, except she never did, just plonked her stuff down and forgot about it. The Fulham flat was just the same.
The best thing about the cottage was its position—backing on to open fields, with the sea just visible between the trees. The back garden was a mess: a grubby concrete yard, a tangle of brambles and cow parsley beyond that.The attached barn Beck was using as a studio was just about watertight, the chill taken off by an enormous mud-coloured storage heater that looked as if it dated back to VE Day. Removing it would have been a major work of demolition, which was clearly why no one had attempted it. The barn’s rafters curved high above our heads, like the exposed ribcage of a capsized Viking longboat.
I shivered. I hadn’t yet told Beck about Eddie moving out. Coming so soon after her and Marco I was afraid it might look ridiculous, a copycat breakup. I was still at the stage where I was missing him, more than I thought I would, even though I knew it wasn’t Eddie I missed so much as the familiarity of our routine, up to and including our constant sniping at one another. After ten years together, Eddie and I had the fine art of bitching pretty much nailed.
I didn’t feel like discussing it, I guess. I hoped we wouldn’t have to talk about Marco either. Beck had spent most of the past eighteen months convinced it was only a matter of time before he came back, which was a delusion on her part, obviously. Marco had served his time and he wasn’t about to get back on the merry-go-round.
The whole place smelled of damp, cottage and barn both. I was worried about Beck’s health, even then.
* * *
That was the year Beck began working on the diadem paintings.I saw some of what she’d been doing—underwashes mainly, burnt sienna, overlaid with gritty layers of flesh tones and Naples yellow. They reminded me of the fields behind her home.
* * *
People tend to assume Beck and Marco split up because of Beck’s breakdown, or that her breakdown was actually caused by Marco leaving. Neither thing was true. Marco left because of Beck’s affair with Lila Nunez, or that’s the excuse he used, anyway. But the real reason for Beck’s breakdown was her mother’s suicide.
