by JH Fletcher
He was hungry; he went into the kitchen and opened a couple of tins, heated the contents in the microwave. He ate standing up, spooning the stuff in without registering what he was eating, then went out of the house again and over to the studio.
He switched on the lights. He had spent weeks experimenting, trying to ensure that they were all in the right place; now the interior of the studio was as brilliantly lit at night as it was during the day. The reek of oil paint assailed him; at one time he had worked mainly with ripolin on masonite, but recently had gone back to canvas and oils, trying to find a new method to derive meaning from a world where all meaning had been lost.
He studied the unfinished painting on the easel. Returning to his work had once been like coming home, renewing acquaintance with an aspect of himself that was discoverable only through the medium of his work, familiar yet always new. Always the critics had commented on the personal nature of his paintings, the way his personality came through. In those days it had been an advantage, but those days were gone.
He studied the painting closely, shifting it this way and that. No use; it was like meeting a stranger. There was nothing with which he could identify; nothing, it seemed to him, of value.
Anger, stark and brutal, blazed from the canvas.
He studied the work with the dispassionate eye of the artist. It had strength, certainly; the colours were powerful, the explosive energy manifest in the silent room. Yet they were the strength and power and energy of a madman, a barely controlled passion that said more clearly than words, I hate you. Even worse: I despise you.
He detested what it revealed of the man he had become.
He hesitated, fingers itching for the brush, but the painting was like an unwelcome stranger whose acquaintance he had no wish to renew.
Perhaps he would feel better in the morning.
He switched off the lights and went back to the house. Overhead a scattering of stars blinked through the wild hair of the wind-blown clouds. Against the tender night, his memory of the painting’s angry pigments blazed like a furious and unforgiving eye.
He went indoors, had a shower, went to bed.
Images.
Jester, climbing the mountainous seas, the darkness filled by the storm’s frenzy, the cold green waves laying their hands upon the yacht. The gold of lamplight, limbs pearl-coloured, the warmth and texture of love. Stella’s ecstatic features, her limbs sinuous beneath his own. A glitter of stars above a white-flecked sea that stretched for thousands of miles to the realm of ice. The screech of tyres. The echoing thud of destruction.
Eventually he slept.
He woke to the sound of the phone. Grabbing the receiver, he squinted in the sunlight spilling into the room.
‘Hullo?’
‘Angela.’
‘New York. You told me the Stuyvesant would be writing to me about next year’s show. It’s November already and I haven’t heard a word. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing’s going on. I spoke to the Stuyvesant last week. They said they’d come back to me, but so far they haven’t.’
Cal had no interest in excuses. ‘What are you planning to do about it?’
‘I suppose I could contact them again.’ But did not sound very enthusiastic about it.
‘You’d better do it, then, hadn’t you?’ God knew she got paid enough to afford a phone call.
‘I’m not sure it would be wise to pressure them too much —’
‘If you don’t push them, they’ll leave everything to the last minute and then, all of a sudden, they’ll be yelling for action. Just call them, okay?’
And slammed down the phone.
The conversation had unsettled him; it took so little to fire him up these days. Even the trip on Jester hadn’t helped. Blame Stella, he thought. I should never have taken her with me. That sort of trip, I need to go alone. Next time I’ll remember.
He knew it would be no use trying to work until his head was right. Instead he walked along the road until he came to the cliff path and followed it to the end. There was a way down to the shore from this point. Hardly anyone knew it was there. It was a bit of a scramble but safe enough if you knew what you were doing, and Cal had been using it since he was a kid.
At the bottom a patch of white sand was ribbed with rocks the colour of dark sapphire; he came here often when he wanted to be alone. This time, to his disgust, someone had beaten him to it. Two boys, both about ten years old, were crouching side by side at the edge of a large pool. Mantis-like, forearms lifted, they were poised motionless, as though frozen by the sunlight into statues of the most delicate bronze. Their eyes were fixed on something in the water, and they did not hear him approach.
He recognised neither of them; guessed they must be from the holiday park on the far side of the headland. He was hopping mad to see them there; all the same, at once he started assessing the angle of the light on their bodies; the pose of the heads; the tension that held them both, with the pool and rocks, in a single dynamic whole. He knew there was the making of a picture here and his mind was busy with possibilities: the boys’ heads superimposed against a background of burning buildings, the shattered span of Sydney Harbour Bridge, the soaring, soot-stained tower of a vast crematorium. Past and future, he thought. Life.
The idea improved his mood, if only momentarily.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.
The nearer of the two boys glanced up at him and then quickly back, eyes tethered to whatever it was they were watching. Neither spoke.
Cal came a little nearer, peering over their shoulders into the weed-fronded pool. Momentarily the light on the water dazzled him, then his eyes adjusted and he saw below the surface the pale shadow draped over the dark rocks.
‘An octopus,’ he said.
‘Devil fish.’ So said, importantly, the bigger of the boys.
His companion nodded eagerly, wanting to please, to belong. ‘Devil fish,’ he echoed.
‘It won’t harm you.’
But this was not gothic enough for the children.
‘My dad says they get their arms round your foot, they’ll pull you under and drown you.’
‘It’s not big enough for that.’
But saw they wanted to believe the worst, to polish their justification for killing the creature whose alien characteristics threatened so powerfully.
‘What are you going to do with it?’
But knew, without the boys telling him. Again the smaller of the two shot him a sly smile, offering complicity. Cal understood that by inflicting death, they would become whole, if only for a moment, and again saw their rapt faces against a background of destruction: the looming chimneys, the stark and dangerous watchtowers garlanded by wire.
Suddenly he was sick of it, sick of everything and everyone. He turned and walked across the glaring white sand that crunched like sugar beneath his feet. Let them get on with it, then. Kill or not, as they chose.
Thus Pilate, he thought, washing his hands.
At least Pilate had cared enough to try, if only briefly, to save a Jewish troublemaker. Cal cared nothing: neither for the boys, shouting now in shrill excitement, splashing ferociously through the weedy water on their mission of destruction; nor for the fish; for nothing and no-one upon the face of the earth.
Kill it and be done, he thought. Maybe then I’ll get some peace.
He stripped off his shirt and lay on his back upon the harsh sand, feeling the sun bite into his chest. His eyes were closed against the hot glare but, through the blood-flushed darkness, he continued to see a moving kaleidoscope of images: the children’s faces, the healing and destructive energy of the sea, a narrow flight of stairs fleeing downwards into the consuming night.
He heard the triumphant cacophony of the boys’ voices and opened his eyes to see them running pell-mell across the beach, the broken octopus trailing tentacles of flesh and slime across the yielding and indifferent sand. The sapphire rocks quaked beneath the booming assault of the s
ea.
The two figures clambered between boulders towards the open and more popular beach half a kilometre away where, no doubt, their parents lounged beside the lazy waves, unknowingly destined to become recipients of the trophy wrested from the sea.
The ceramic fragility of their laughter faded. Silence seeped soothingly into the space where the boys had been.
Cal lay, prisoner of sun and sea-surge, of the images that for twelve months had never left his mind, that leaked on to canvas and masonite only to renew themselves endlessly.
In Paris, texture and depth became Cal’s universe. For a month he stayed in digs; after that managed to get hold of a one-room flat above a grocer’s shop in the Rue de la Huchette. For three months he lived there alone; afterwards shared it with Gianetta Frachesi, a sculpture student from Milan with whom he was in love.
Every time he opened a book it was her face he saw upon the page. Every minute was enlivened by his awareness of her existence, the certainty of his feelings and the knowledge that they were shared. Even the veins that carried his blood were aware of it.
With his tutor he studied the work of Dürer, of Goya and Picasso and Cezanne. He visited the Louvre and spent hours observing the simple profundity of Honore Daumier, and a dozen others. When he was not working, Cal read the poems of the French romantics, telling himself the French had great reputations as lovers. He spent hours battling with the works of Baudelaire, that great artist with his doomed love and Creole mistress riddled with syphilis. The English poets had also managed to capture the emotion and pin it miraculously to the page, so that its beauty and truth and life survived even that capture. Theirs was a great art and somehow, in pigment and stone and ink, he knew he must attempt to achieve something of the same.
Simplicity revealing truth. The sculpted shapes of Gauguin, the taste for the barbaric, the massed colours, raw and vibrant. The Elizabethan dramatists or the King James’s version of the Psalms. Then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing. It was a sentence capturing all there was to be said of glorification and praise. It was what Cal felt, it was the emotion, incarnate on the page.
In the place of words, he would have to find the line, the texture, the spaces between the lines, to express what he wanted to say.
Why were the simplest things the most profound?
Contrast, contradiction, conflict.
Yet he felt no conflict with Gianetta, nothing but certainty and peace. There were no shadows.
He told himself he should write to his parents; he wanted to, he wanted to tell the whole world about her, shout it into the sky, but could not bring himself to do so. He had read that the Malays were afraid to speak the tiger’s name, for fear of summoning him. He felt something of the same: speak too loudly of what was precious and the gods of destruction and of envy would arise.
Cal lay in the room, listening to her breathing, his eyes open to the almost imperceptible beginnings of the dawn.
This was the best time. Sleeping, in quietness together, she was his. Making love, they belonged, not to each other, but to the passion that consumed them both. This was the best time.
Yet it was precisely for that reason, because it was best, that he could not remain still. He had to express it, to share the moment. So his hand moved on her, his palm caressed her skin until she woke and turned to him.
Drowning, the moment passed.
To Cal she was everything beautiful: long-legged, slender-boned, startlingly blonde for an Italian. Regardless of colouring, the temperament was unmistakable. There were moments of rage, violence. She knew how to raise her voice at him; knew how to throw plates, too, although not often and fortunately ill-aimed. Her temper was part of the whole; he accepted it in that context.
One evening he was late. He had stayed hours in a cafe with two friends, discussing politics, art, women. The Tour de France was on; they watched it on television. When the broadcast was over they talked some more. More politics, more art, more women.
He felt in a benign mood as he strolled home through streets crowded with traffic. It was a fine summer evening, the air full of the smell of warm dust and leaves, grazed by falling pollen. Only as he climbed the single flight of stairs that led directly from the street to the room did he remember that today was the anniversary of their first meeting, that he had promised Gianetta he would be home early for their own private celebration.
She had prepared a special meal; now it was ruined. Cal was full of apologies but she smelt alcohol on his breath and erupted into screaming rage, hurling abuse at him until he, too, lost his temper and started yelling back. She snatched up a plate and hurled it; it crashed to pieces on the wall behind him.
‘For God’s sake, stop acting like a child!’
He grabbed her wrists; she ducked her head swiftly and bit his hand.
‘Christ!’
Furious at the sudden pain, he let her go. At once she slipped away around the table.
His raging eyes abused her. ‘You stupid bitch! Why don’t you shove off and leave me in peace?’
‘You think I want to stay with you, you drunken animal?’
Which he was far from being. The awareness of injustice stoked his fury.
Tears of rage ran down her face. She whirled and disappeared down the stairs. He chased her to the top of them. She was halfway to the open door leading directly to the street. He followed her, bawling:
‘And don’t bloody well come back!’
He never knew if she heard him or not. She ran blindly on and through the door. Following at her heels, he was in time to see her run straight out into the roadway and under the wheels of the fast-moving lorry.
Dear God. Dear God.
There is a patch on the wall by the bed. They say I stood there, striking the wall with my fist, hard, harder, harder, until they took me away. It should have been my head; I should have killed myself, but could not. I cannot. I have murdered once. I cannot do it again, and I have no friend to do it for me.
I have no friend.
‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with. Nothing.’
‘An accident. Shocking, of course. But an accident.’
‘She always was a temperamental girl. Always. To fly into a rage like that —’
‘You’ve nothing to blame yourself for.’
‘She can’t have looked at the traffic at all. And in that busy street —’
‘You’ve nothing to blame yourself for.’
‘It must have been instantaneous, that’s one thing. She can’t have known a thing.’
‘You’ve nothing to blame —’
A scream, rising in the head.
Dear God. Dear God.
TWO
When Cal got back to the house, Dave Holt was sitting on the grass outside the studio. Cal’s heart sank. He owed Dave lots, but this business of rocking up uninvited had always exasperated him. Today, in particular, he could have done without it. It was bad enough having his own doubts about the way his life was going without someone else getting in on the act. Which, he knew only too well, was why Dave was here. Again.
Cal had discovered that the world was divided into those who believed in him and those who did not. After ‘Coastal Sequence’, the series of paintings that had established his reputation, the believers had far outnumbered the rest. No longer; over the last twelve months, the new harshness in his palette had scared people off. Nowadays, Cal thought that Dave was the only one who still had faith. Sometimes even he seemed to be wavering.
Cal told himself he didn’t care, that no artist could afford to be influenced by what others thought. The creativity was still there; it was only a matter of time before people came to understand and accept his new style.
He wasn’t sure he believed that himself, which didn’t help. Was pretty sure that Dave didn’t, either.
Dave Holt had backed Cal from the first. He had done more than anyone to push him forward, but recently had been warning him that influential people in the art
world were beginning to lose faith.
‘Never imagine you’re bullet-proof,’ he had said, wagging his finger. ‘Even your show at the Stuyvesant could be at risk.’
If Dave were right, that could be serious; the show was supposed to announce Cal’s arrival as a major player upon the field of international art.
Scornfully, Cal had refused to accept the warning. ‘They’d be turning their backs on reality. Chocolate-box vision …’
Yet, in his heart, had known that it was he who had turned his back, that with Gianetta’s death, he had lost his vision or any belief in the future.
All, all gone into the dark.
Which did not mean he wanted another lecture now.
‘Come to give me a hard time?’
‘Of course.’ Grinning, refusing to acknowledge the bleakness in Cal’s tone. ‘Why not?’
Unique among critics, Dave was a jolly man, but Cal had learned to tolerate even that. It even served a purpose; his laugh, effervescent as bubbles, provided such a contrast to Cal’s anger and despair that it gave them added weight.
‘I’ve been watching two boys on the beach,’ Cal said. ‘They were smashing up an octopus. I destroy, therefore I am. The SS would have been proud.’
He shoved past the critic and into the studio, thought of slamming the door behind him but did not, insufficiently interested to bother.
Stella, he thought, that’s who I need now. Yesterday he would have said he’d seen enough of her to last for months, that indulging self-hatred in the texture of her most intimate flesh had lost its appeal. Now he knew better. Turning your back on destruction only prolonged the agony.
Dave Holt and Stella Loots, he thought. The light and the dark. Of which, always, I shall embrace the dark.
Cal knew by the changed texture of the light that Dave had come into the studio behind him. Without turning, he said savagely, ‘You want to look, that’s fine. But don’t go telling me how lousy they are. You reckon you can do better, buy a canvas and do it yourself.’
