by Adam Thorpe
Jamie had an unlit roll-up in the middle of his mouth, caught by his teeth. ‘The case for the defence is that they’re pretty keen on having a lawn?’
‘I don’t care. It’s unacceptable. We’re paying them good money.’
‘A capitalist contract,’ said Jamie. ‘By 2050 or probably 2030 the world’s going to be uninhabitable except for the filthy rich thanks to the capitalist contract, yeah?’
Nick found the battery unit under a plastic cover on the house side of the fence, nestling inside a little shelter of breeze blocks. He used two long splints of wood like a claw to release one of the copper clips, which sparked furiously as he worked it off. He was scared. Another electric jolt was sniggering in the wings. He told the others to stand back, having some vague idea that electricity could arc through air.
‘Wood doesn’t conduct, does it?’
‘’Course not,’ Tammy scoffed.
‘We do have our fair share of troubles,’ Sarah sighed.
‘I wouldn’t call them troubles,’ said Nick, unnecessarily. ‘I’d call them very minor incidents.’
The clicking stopped.
‘Let’s hope they stay that way,’ said Sarah, involuntarily conjuring dark, skeletal figures in dust-storms, tarpaulined camps, flies on babies’ cheeks.
Jamie said: ‘I once knew this guy called Les Trubb and he was something like Hungarian or maybe Slovakian in the form below at school, and really up himself?’
‘So what?’ muttered Nick, easing off the other clip with his claws of wood, still not trusting the basic laws of circuitry.
‘He’d be on the noticeboard for, y’know, exam results and so on as Trubb Les and I’d put a circle around it and write spelling, exclamation mark.’
The clip came off. Oddly, it sparked.
‘Right,’ said Nick, standing up, ‘now for our pronunciamento to the gods.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Tammy, glad that her father was still alive.
TWELVE
Lucy Sandler was in the bath when the call came; heady with Badedas, bubbles like the tops of clouds seen from a plane. They hid her body, in which she found fault. Or many faults. Fault lines, fissures, inadequate muscle tone. She’d given up massaging her breasts; a lot of effort for nothing. She’d once had the sharpest figure – the sharpest – of any of her circle: and the nicest hands. Now she looked, not like a Bonnard, but like the Lucian Freud in the glossy arts magazine she was trying not to get wet, a nude from the eighties whose ‘sombre tones of sagging flesh, relieved only by the cranberry-tinted elbows laid in like bruises above the groin, mercilessly expose time’s stake in life’. What pseudery, she thought. Despite the author of the article, Julian Dale, being an old friend. Who never talked like that in front of a painting; all he did was gossip, queer-gossip. But cranberry-tinted elbows, that was good, she had to admit. She glanced at her own elbow: pale and bumpy, like a pug’s nose. Why so shiny?
She reached for the cordless, carrolling on the glass shelf. Important calls always came when you were in the bath, especially in the early evening. This was from the Fusspot family in France. Yet again. Fuss fuss. She felt it was somehow wrong, metaphysically wrong; they should have had some kind of intermediary. An agent. An agent of the Lord.
Mr and Mrs Fusspot and their three little girls – but she couldn’t think of names, she’d be hopeless on that radio panel show whose sentence she could never remember. She was reasonably sure her mind was going, but terribly discreetly, like a retiring butler. Perhaps it was just age. The same was happening to Alan. Mr Fusspot was going on about an electric fence. An electric fence around the seed-bed, to keep the boars off.
‘What a terrific idea,’ she replied. ‘Jean-Luc has at last shown some initiative. The French are short on initiative. Because of Napoleon, who had much too much. Unlike us, they haven’t invented a thing, I don’t believe.’
It didn’t matter that she knew this was quite untrue. Cinema, photography, Marie Curie. She was a conversational mannerist. The distance-distorted voice went on about how powerful it was, the electric fence. Six thousand volts. That did sound rather a lot. The bubbles cleared to show a flat, unappetising breast. Can that really be mine? she mused. It was like a motorway service-station omelette. The fence could kill someone with a weak heart.
‘What a clever way to get rid of one’s husband,’ she joked.
Oh, how he fussed. They had small children, he was saying, as if she didn’t know it. Who might be grilled like fritters: she saw them sparking, their eyes popping, hair a star-shape, face black and smoking as in those violent cartoons.
‘Then tell them not to touch it,’ she sighed. ‘They’ll soon learn. Anyway, didn’t you touch electric fences when you were their age? We had horses. I was always daring boys to touch them. The wires, I mean. It’s called toughening up.’
Really, it was incredible, the way this intelligent man, this major don, was so dependent on her. The very epitome of the brilliant academic without a single life skill. She said a brusque goodbye, pretending she was in the middle of a meeting, and dropped the phone on the bath mat. Alan came in without knocking, half-naked, his peeling stomach showing through his dressing gown like a separate being, a surly bald servant in an experimental drama. Her cloud cover had mostly vanished to clear sky, exposing the ancient landscape below: he looked down upon it like a disapproving god.
‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘I’m pulling out of Iraq.’
He showed her an email to ‘Mister Shandler, Art deeler’ that said all four of his limbs would be cut off. Not as clever as the one a few months back that said he could have a shorter penis, for free, from ‘Al-Ka-ida’.
She handed it back with a grunt. ‘Probably the silly boy next door,’ she said. ‘The one whose ball breaks our geraniums. He’s Steiner-educated. They don’t teach spelling. That’s my construction on it.’
‘You’re building crap on spec,’ he said, pensively folding the piece of paper. ‘I’m going to pull out, Lucy. Before I fall apart. I don’t even feel the hot breath of Interpol or the FBI on the back of my neck. I feel much worse.’
‘Hmmm. Let me think.’
She let a little pause embed itself with a V in his forehead. Alan could not fall apart. Not the right term. Dissolve, maybe. Exfoliate to a quivering mush in the centre.
‘Funnily enough,’ she said, ‘I’ve just been talking to France, sweetheart. Mr Fusspot. Jean-Luc has erected a massive, lethal electric fence. Perhaps you could crawl inside it.’
‘Where?’
‘Around my lawn. To keep off the boars. As in wild pig.’ She prodded his stomach with her toe. ‘The type with tusks and a big fat belly.’
‘I’m pulling out of antiquities entirely,’ he said, pushing her foot away so that it landed back in the water and splashed him with froth. ‘Don’t sound too interested.’
‘You look like an epileptic,’ she laughed, indicating the side of his mouth by touching hers.
He wiped the bubble-bath from his face with a hairy wrist. ‘I’m telling you, I mean it. I didn’t just come up to ogle you and say how about it.’
‘Silly billy,’ she said, ‘of course you aren’t quitting. You know too much.’
‘Exactly.’ He sat down on the edge of the bath, his huge exposed belly concealing his naughty bits like a Churchillian frown. ‘I can’t handle the Russians. My hair is falling out, my skin is crumbling. I think this is from the Russians. They always spell my name like that. They want the gypsum worshippers from Tell Asmar. Or at least, nice Mr Putin wants the gypsum worshippers, probably.’
‘Yesterday it was the Iranians.’
‘Tomorrow it’ll be the Chinese. Or the Saudis, so help me God. I take a different route home each day, Lucy. They gouge out eyes with their thumbs. Out, vile jelly,’ he went on, quoting flatly, ‘where is thy lustre now? All I want is to live until I can have my own electric wheelchair and get my arse wiped for me.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ she murmured, closing her eyes.
Sometimes Alan’s gargantuan wit grated on her aesthetic sensibilities, and he looked simply fat and revolting.
‘Art Brut is back,’ he said, quietly.
‘Art Brut? Oh, come on, Alan.’ She was genuinely surprised. Alan had gone potty.
‘Zig says it’s the coolest way to make a buck. We had lunch together today. You find some lunatic asylum somewhere dull like Iowa and take the art for a tiny donation. Even drawings in biro. Doodles. Crazy magazine collages by some mute psychotic. Sculpture, if you’re lucky. Stuff stuck on in any old way by a dwarf toe-obsessive with a mental age of five.’
‘Assemblages,’ Lucy corrected him.
He drew a hand over his face as if clearing fog and sighed. ‘Zig sold a crazy painting he found in a garbage tip and cleared, wait for it, twenty thousand dollars, last week. That gallery off Madison, owned by those twins. Twenty thousand dollars. All he did was some preliminary working-up in the local papers and local TV, then sourced it to his friends at the national level. Zig has a long ponytail, which helps.’
‘Outsider Art,’ said Lucy, without opening her eyes. ‘If you want a ponytail you’ll need my sewing machine, Alan.’
‘Let’s stick to the Frenchie name, it’s more accurate. Raw. As in steak.’
‘Sexier,’ she said, contemptuously. ‘As long as you say it with a French accent. Which you don’t.’
‘Art Brut is back and becoming very, very big, Lucy,’ he insisted, leaning forwards and persuading himself. She could smell the lunch with Zigismund Moritz on his breath. ‘Everything else is tired. Tired and old and over-analysed,’ he added, lifting her arm and pecking at it with his lips – ironically, she felt. ‘What’s really tomorrow’s lunch is intimacy and feeling and paint and stuff, not the massive installation that is so up itself it thinks it’s divine as in forever. That’s yesterday’s breakfast. And abstraction is so out you can only swear with it.’
He dropped her arm. It hovered.
‘We need to talk about the fence. That’s today.’
‘We will talk about the fence,’ he said, scratching his stomach and scattering a light fall of snow over the bathroom tiles.
He explained how Art Brut fulfilled people’s need for the unmediated, the genuine; the primitive without the sub-colonial, tribal angle. She knew all this, she’d read the articles, but she let him continue because she felt pity for him. He was so boyish, so American. This was his latest gewgaw. It was going to be overplayed with, ruined, thrown out. ‘The bottom’s gone out of tribal. Everyone travels, these days. Where Barry would come back to LA half-dead from malaria with a crate full of juju stuff from places no white man had ever set foot in, retired couples take weekend breaks in those places. Practically. They have wheelchair access and twenty-four-hour parking.’
‘I thought there was nothing left,’ said Lucy, who’d once had a fervid fling with Barry Jordis.
‘There isn’t,’ Alan confirmed. ‘It’s all fake, now. Even in the deep bush.’
‘Wasn’t it always?’ she murmured, remembering the tiny, terrifying mask above Barry’s great bed, with jagged white teeth and a coil of twine around it. The heat of LA shut out by a vast picture-window, the glacial breath of the air conditioning, the huge and tinkling whiskies on their bare bellies.
‘Art Brut isn’t fake. It can’t be. It just is. That’s the essence of it, in a world that is entirely fake, otherwise. That’s why it’s suddenly becoming it. The prices are following.’
‘It’s unmediated crap, Alan. It’s amateur. The fag-end of this awful campaign against elitism. End of discussion. We have a serious lawn issue. Jean-Luc’s put up this lethal fence and they’re fussing. I can’t find solutions to everything.’
She turned the hot tap with her painted big toe. The scalding water flushed warmth between her legs like exploring fingers.
‘Amateur,’ repeated Alan with a groan, shaking his head. ‘What you’ve just said is very conservative. But the main point, Lucy bunny, is it’s safe. I mean, I’ll go home by the same route each day. I’ll keep all of my limbs. My penis will remain the same size until the day you excite it, in whichever year that may come.’
‘You Americans, you may run the whole show but you’re so brutally naive,’ Lucy laughed, working up the bubbles by paddling her hands, flecking his face again in the process. ‘And such cowards!’
‘I can’t bear them. They’re – oh – completely ghastly. Sort of autocratically callous,’ Nick complained, several hours after the phone call to the Sandlers. ‘They’re heirs to Alexander III. They’d support serfdom like a shot.’
He had, much to his regret, re-established the current in the fence. They were to re-establish the current each evening, then disconnect it in the morning. Life was all about compromise. He had no desire to toughen up his children by the Lucy Sandler method. Or by any method.
Jamie was eating with them tonight, picking at the stew and knocking back the fairly decent Cahors at the top end of their budget (around six or seven euros), and commenting adversely on the music. First Sibelius, then the soft jazz, then the troubadours, then the Smiths. He shook his head each time and asked them how they could listen to it, it was depressing and/or geriatric. Sarah suggested Dylan and Jamie concurred, knowing that Nick didn’t like Dylan very much: he found his wailing voice annoying. Nick was stung by all this, despite trying not to be: ‘What you should be saying,’ he declared, ‘is that you find the music depressing or geriatric or whatever. It’s called projection. The music in itself is not in the least depressing, it is uplifting – and to say any of it is geriatric is just risible.’ Nick hadn’t used the word ‘risible’ ever before in his life, he didn’t think.
Jamie shook his head in disbelief, his contempt visually heightened by his wearing, for no apparent reason, a pair of small, round sunglasses that made him look creepy. He was back in his father’s denims, too; he’d cut the jacket and jeans shorter and sewn a Union Jack onto the top pocket. Nick had commented on this adversely and Jamie had laughed: it was a punk insignia. Nick had missed punk by several years; already in his mid-twenties, embarrassingly old. Jamie wore the jacket open over a tee shirt that said, in discreet letters, This Is My Clone. Nick found it all slightly sad, slightly vulgar and slightly unsettling, but kept this to himself.
He was explaining his comment about projection: the latest research had found that habitual use of cannabis increased the chances of depression or even schizophrenia by fifty per cent. Thirty, Sarah corrected. Whatever, Nick went on; if you artificially stimulated the endomorphin gates you needed more and more to swing them open, and eventually they hung loose and there was no more endomorphin.
‘I think you mean endorphin,’ said Sarah, swaying slightly to her Dylan.
‘Endorphin. The substance like morphine, anyway.’
Jamie reckoned someone had been reading crap newspaper articles and then half-remembering them and that this was no great advertisement for the speaker’s professional rigour. He sounded like a much cleverer version of himself, sneering like this, and Nick lost his cool. He found it incredible that his son, of all people, belonging to a generation for whom the term ‘recliner’ was invented the better to accommodate an evolutionary twist in the upright biped, could accuse him of a lack of rigour.
Jamie sighed, rose from the table and walked off into the night without a torch, distantly slamming his eponymous door and breaking cobwebs instead of glass.
Tammy emerged, investigating the noise from the top of the stairs, and was rewarded with a finger-snapping command from her father to go back to bed. Sarah went up and placated Tammy as if she’d just been beaten about the head; she padded back to bed and clutched her long-haired troll that had once been Sarah’s, when it was already retro.
Nick claimed, when Sarah returned, that kids these days were mollycoddled, over-protected, treated like porcelain. Sarah objected to this accusation and went quiet, even mournful. Once she’d got so depressed and tired when Alicia was a baby that she’d spent a mo
rning yelling from the bedroom and throwing shoes at its locked door while Nick tried to reason with her.
The light flickered off his retreating hairline as he stared into the candle-flame, swallowing his darkness in more wine, costumed against his will in a frock coat and mutton-chop whiskers with a handy birch-rod at his side. The age gap had broadened between them: it usually did on these occasions, giving rise to all sorts of mutual assumptions and misreadings. The wine could not touch the venerable, solemn stuff they served on high table at college. He’d been spoilt, as fruit is spoilt. He no longer felt genial.
‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah, after a silence interrupted only by a night creature’s moronic beep-like call, possibly an owl’s. ‘We should have gone to Finland after all. Or Brazzaville. We did consider Brazzaville, didn’t we? Much more honest.’
‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my very best.’
‘I hate it when you say that, Nick. You sound like a doctor over the dying patient.’
‘I don’t think I’m the doctor,’ he murmured, listlessly. ‘Oh, let’s play Scrabble. And let me beat you for once.’
Alicia appeared as they were undressing and informed them there was a cat purring in the girls’ room. Not a cat, but the ghost of a cat. The noise turned out to be the beginnings of a wasps’ nest in a crack in the beam; or perhaps last year’s, reawakening. Nick stumbled on the stairs, going down for a roll of tape to put over the crack.
Jamie was sitting on the sofa. He’d returned from the blank of the night. His eyes were hidden behind his little round sunglasses; he had a leaf in his hair and a scratch on his cheek. Nick, passing into the kitchen, ignored him. On the way back he noticed the dusty bottle of wine and the full glass on the stool at Jamie’s elbow.
‘Oh. That’s Alan Sandler’s untouchable wine supply,’ said Nick, who was more dismayed by this than anything else. ‘Isn’t it? That’s incredibly out of order, Jamie. That’s stealing from the gods.’
