‘I can’t promise very satisfying answers,’ Iris said.
‘Of course, of course, I’m just looking for a few off-the-cuff remarks here,’ he said.
‘He’s been interviewing me for months,’ Iris told me. ‘You’ll like this though – his name is Nikolas And.’
‘My nom de guerre,’ he simpered.
‘And this is Leander.’ She tried to gesture grandly towards me, but instead semi-tripped, her body unreliable under the renewed influence of ketamine. ‘Leander is… my new muse,’ she laughed.
‘Ah – then you must allow me to interview you as well,’ he said, handing me a business card from his breast pocket.
‘I’d be happy to,’ I said, accepting his card with a serious smile. ‘Another time.’
‘Yes, yes I understand – tonight I am here as an admirer not as an inquisitor. I don’t usually write articles – I’m an art director! But Lars is special – so excuse my over-excitement. I just wanted to clarify a few things. So. Would you say that your practice falls within post-modernism or meta-modernism?’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Iris said. ‘No.’
‘Can you… clarify?’
‘Neither of those movements were real anyway – they were just romanticism.’
‘But we are in a new era now,’ Nikolas insisted. ‘The internet is the most significant shift in human consciousness since the printing press.’
‘Fuck, you’re eager this evening!’
He blushed.
‘It isn’t a shift in power though,’ I said. ‘Maybe minds have shifted, but the internet reproduces the same inequalities as before, the same monopolies, the same ideals. If anything, it’s worse – more castles of zeros, more wealth for fewer people...’
Something crashed into the room – it tilted off its axis – and the magnetic field bent – the floor bucked, tripping the crowd around us – and for a second, I was in a zeppelin, looking through a telescope at a field of infrared hurricanes.
‘And our era has already given a name to itself,’ Iris said, holding me up. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be millennials now?’
‘So…’ Nikolas said. ‘Would you say that your practice falls within… Millennialism?’
‘Yeah sure whatever,’ Iris laughed, pushing past him. ‘Millennialism! It’s all for ignoring people who love you and getting ignored by people you love.’
‘But the word’s already taken,’ I said. ‘It’s for people obsessed with the apocalypse.’
‘That’s fine,’ Iris said. ‘Every era’s obsessed with the apocalypse.’
‘Maybe every era gets the apocalypse it thinks it deserves.’
A black tortoise crawled out of my knee and down along my leg trailing hoarfrost – and blew back up at me blue-black bubbles that smelt of eucalyptus. I shook my leg – it vanished.
‘Ok, but,’ Nikolas said, hopping after us, ‘do you prefer —’
‘Who cares,’ Iris sighed. ‘You choose the name, just please, that’s enough for now.’
We squirmed away from him towards the fifth room, to enter it for the second time, now from the other side.
4.
Francis was still in the middle of the room and he noticed our re-entry immediately. Three of the walls displayed his face, exclusively – two triptychs per wall, undistorted, undamaged, his repeating expressions serene. The fourth wall, which I had not looked at before, was occupied by a video. In it, Francis was naked, walking through a grey space with no features as the floor moved beneath him and the shadows on his muscles shifted. A pretty-boy with a boxer’s body, his projected self was twice the size of a normal man; his pace was decisive and unchanging. Many of those around us were gazing at his projected dick as though hypnotised.
‘So is this room supposed to be what happens after trauma?’ I asked. ‘And only Francis escapes here?’
The real Francis was hurrying over to us.
‘Or he’s the only subject who has not escaped,’ Iris said. ‘Perhaps in these photographs he is stuck somewhere deeper than the others.’
‘Where you been?’ Francis asked, shaking my upper arm. ‘What’s happened to you? You got a black eye?’
I looked past him as though he’d addressed these questions to somebody else. He had three women on his tail, dressed in shredded black – and they’d clearly been drinking for courage.
‘What are your names?’ I asked, stepping around Francis with a smile.
‘My name’s Ringo.’
‘And my name’s Ringo.’
‘And my name’s Ringo.’
They giggled in drunken succession.
‘Isn’t that quite… unlikely?’ asked Iris, also ignoring Francis and stepping to my side.
He grabbed my shoulders with his hands. This contact segued into a colour in my mind, Francis’ colour – a wheat-white spike, which soon subsided. I let him hold me, but kept my attention to the women.
‘Are you a model?’ one of the Ringos asked me.
‘No – but he is,’ I nodded back at Francis.
‘No, you are a model,’ the second Ringo said.
‘And you’re a film star,’ the third said, pointing at my chest.
‘I’ve seen your face on the side of the world,’ the first said.
‘Are these prophecies?’ I asked.
As I stared at her, her face disappeared – and her body blurred into a gleaming brown sack that throbbed like an organ – with a veil where her head had been – and I realised that it was an organ – a liver, covered in blemishes – which were messages from the planets, or from the angry spirits that lived inside them – but the only message that I could read was a blemish near the base – and it said that I was an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice – and I sneezed, and the liver turned back into a woman.
‘What about me?’ asked Francis over my shoulder, trying to lean into our triangle.
‘You’re worse than him,’ the second Ringo said.
‘And better than him,’ the third Ringo said.
‘Are you trying to be the three witches from Macbeth?’ I asked. ‘In which case – your next line should be “Not so happy, yet much happier.”’
I turned my head round towards Francis – briefly granting him my attention.
‘So I should call you Banquo from now on.’
The three Ringos laughed without understanding.
‘So you’re Macbeth then?’ Iris asked.
‘No, I’ll be Lady Macbeth,’ I said. ‘But I want to get away with it. In my version, she’d devastate the kingdom and then just wander off.’
I shrugged Francis off me and pulled Iris away, leaving him to confront his three drunk fans alone. Eva was lurching through the crowd towards us with a woman in a camel-coloured suit.
‘Oh good!’ Eva shouted, ‘You two have been making friends!’
‘No, I still hate him,’ Iris said.
‘Yeah I still hate him too,’ Eva gave me four tipsy kisses. ‘This is Amélie, my producer. Amélie, this is Leander, my nemesis.’
Amélie shook my hand, nodding her neat brunette bun. ‘You look perfect.’
‘I told you,’ Eva said, ‘I did his make-up and he’s wearing my clothes. Now pay attention.’ She tapped me on the nose as the ketamine glazed my gaze towards the ceiling. ‘I hate you so much that I want you to be in my film. There’s a scene we need you for. We need your bruises.’
‘I was thinking that,’ Iris said, turning to me. ‘The Ringos were right – you should model. I want to photograph you while your eye’s still swollen.’
‘I don’t do photos.’
‘It’s fine, of course he does photos, leave Leander with me,’ Eva told her. ‘My video is ready. Can we show it right now before I get too scared?’
‘Ok,’ Iris removed her arm from mine and poked me playfully in my stab wound. ‘But you will be captured.’
She wove away. And as I watched her, she seemed to be treading into a land of sonic booms, where the wind was faster than the speed of
sound – and I saw a moon nothing like the earth’s moon, dangerously close – due a collision that would rip it into a Saturn-like ring – and then the wind knocked me over.
Amélie steadied me upright.
‘Eva has been very insistent,’ she said. ‘We have in mind a small scene that...’
I was tugged violently backwards – and Francis spun me around, shocked to see me speaking to his ex-girlfriend.
‘I need to talk to you!’ he said.
I twisted out of his grip, back towards Eva, and rolled my eyes as though a stranger had barged into me.
‘What you doing with her?’ Francis asked.
I batted him away with my hand and said ‘I’ll find you later,’ almost laughing at my impersonal tone.
He stood stuck behind me, confused. Eva sniggered. ‘He’ll find you later, ok?’
She pulled Amélie and me closer towards her and led us away towards the opposite wall. Francis was fenced off by his admirers.
‘You’re mean,’ she smiled. ‘But he deserves it. I shouldn’t join in but I like the risk.’
‘I can’t hurt you anymore,’ I said. ‘You’re invulnerable.’
‘No I’m not, don’t try to claim you did me a favour by making him break my heart. Just listen. I want to use your natural evil for our film. We… I’ll let Amélie pitch it to you – she’s the sober one.’
‘It’s simple,’ Amélie began with a slight bow. ‘Eva is the lead role. Her character is on… a modern quest. I’ll put it like that.’
Amélie spoke with tidy gestures, pausing carefully before each phrase. Her voice had the colour of claret and the softness of cashmere.
‘And we have a wonderful writer,’ she continued. ‘He’s very talented at twists and shocks, but… I have been reviewing the dailies, and I have been thinking more about the script now that we’ve begun to shoot, and… something is lacking. At the moment, it’s all plot plot plot, and not enough atmosphere. Our writer has a writer’s mind… he doesn’t understand the difference between the screen and the text. We need more of the physicality of people colliding. So…’
‘So we need you!’ Eva said.
‘We need an additional ingredient,’ Amélie explained. ‘The film requires an undercurrent of horror. And we’ve been trying all week to create a scene that can add to this mood. We want something to happen on a dark road, in the middle of the film – but haven’t been able to work out what yet. We built the set, but nothing we’ve shot on it has been satisfying. So this evening, Eva and I were workshopping the idea of an encounter.’
‘With you!’ Eva said. ‘Not part of the main plot, more like a cameo.’
‘Don’t you have to clear this idea with the director first?’ I asked. ‘Or am I supposed to be a surprise?’
Eva laughed, and I remembered her scream in the kitchen this morning and the vision I’d had of a row of aristocrats stabbing themselves with their swords. The gallery wall rose into a dike behind her, holding back a sea – and she was its queen, though her orders now were to stab, not herself, but this dike with her sword – and so release the sea over her city, in the middle of the night – while the moon was shadowed by the earth in a syzygy with the sun.
‘Have you lost the ability to form memories?’ Eva asked, as the dike shrank back into a wall.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Iris… has already expressed enthusiasm…’ Amélie explained slowly, as though to a troubled child.
I smiled in astonishment. ‘Iris… is the director?’
‘You’ve been with her all evening!’ Eva said. ‘Are you so insanely solipsistic that you found out nothing about her? Did you even know this was her exhibition?’
‘I worked that out eventually,’ I said. ‘But yeah – I suppose I am that solipsistic.’
‘Well that’s fine for your character. We need you to play the sociopath you already are.’
‘I’m not a sociopath, I’m a psychopath.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Psychopaths tie knots and calculate. Sociopaths are messy, and indiscriminate, and they get caught.’
‘We think you could be a wounded beggar,’ Amélie said, intervening. ‘We only need you to come and improvise – while your bruises are still real. We have time and budget constraints – so we’ll need tomorrow to set up, and then we should shoot the morning after. We want to keep it minimal.’
‘So you can have a whole day of sleep before we need you,’ Eva said. ‘And I know you don’t have a job so you can’t pretend to be busy.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re trying to trick me into some kind of revenge.’
Eva cackled. ‘Maybe I am. But don’t pretend this isn’t why you fucked your way into our social circle in the first place.’ She gestured at the fashion crowd around us. ‘This is exactly the offer you wanted to get out of me. You just want to be begged to accept what you want.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want into walk into a trap. And how is being a cameo beggar what I want? I want sleep.’
‘You’re an insomniac. And of course you want a role in my film. Fame is the governing ambition of our era. You just want it to seem like you’d be doing me a favour, when actually I’m doing you a favour – an opportunity.’
‘You don’t have to decide now, decide tomorrow,’ Amélie said firmly. ‘Think about it properly. You’d be paid. And in my opinion, you are perfect for the role.’
The room suddenly dimmed – the video of Francis’ naked walk had been turned off. The crowd hushed, looking around to work out how they were supposed to react to this. But before a consensus could be reached, another video began playing across the wall.
It was a low-quality tripod shot of Francis slumped in a chair in his old bedroom – naked but for a pair of skimpy yellow swimming Speedos, clinging to his genitals in a way that seemed more indecent than the nudity of the earlier video. His wrists and ankles were tied to the chair with bright yellow ribbons in single bows, and a bright yellow ribbon was tied around his neck. Their knots looked weak, but he was not attempting to free himself. Instead he was weeping, his chin crumpled, snot dribbling over his lips – as a woman’s hand shaved his head, the rest of her body out of shot.
The footage skipped: he was standing on the seat, his legs straight, his upper body bent down over them – his ankles and wrists both tied to the chair’s arms in the same place, his yellow speedos waving obscenely up in the air. A green apple was stuffed in his mouth like a suckling pig’s – and he was drooling to the floor. He gazed into the camera, crying more softly now, his body twitching as it tried to sustain this posture.
The footage skipped again: he was sitting again and the ribbons had been removed. His hands were in his lap as he burbled with shining eyes. Then he vomited onto himself, twice, as he sank lower, swaying with a goofy smile.
The footage cut back to the opening shot and the loop began again.
Initially I was aroused by Francis’ degradation, but at the sight of his vomit, the ketamine seemed instantly to wear off, and I was returned to my injuries. I wanted to vomit too. I staggered away through the crowd, and Eva jumped after me.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, with an uncertainty that suggested regret, and not the malicious triumph she’d wanted.
‘I need some air,’ I said, pushing her away.
Francis was trying to catch up with me too, but he was slowed by the audience in his path. He had to pretend that this video was an expected part of the evening – and so had affected an implausible grin. Word was spreading fast, and more people were spilling into the room. I half-fainted as I struggled against their current – and fell into Iris.
I smiled at her. ‘Quick, come over here.’
I took her down the three steps into the foyer, into the side-corridor to the kitchen. This was no longer the territory of planets or moons. Though, perhaps, I could still be Pluto here – the demoted dwarf – if Pluto had been moved much closer to the sun, so the ice had ev
aporated into a tail, like a comet, and all that was left of my body was a heart-shaped lake.
Resisting the urge to vomit, I put a finger to my lips and pointed at Francis running out after us. He didn’t think to look down our corridor, and instead rushed out of the building.
‘He’s looking for me,’ I said. ‘I told you I’d break him.’
‘That wasn’t you. That was Eva.’
‘No, he could have withstood this attack if I’d been beside him. It’s my abandonment that hurts – he can shrug off the film as planned controversy.’
‘Was that the reaction?’
‘People are quite confused… I think Eva regrets showing it.’
‘It’s pretty weird,’ Iris said. ‘I’m assuming they were on mescaline or something?’
‘She didn’t say.’
‘Whatever – what I care about is you being in my film. Come to my set and I’ll take some portraits of you as well.’
I dry-heaved in reply, lunging across the corridor to balance myself on the other wall. My gall bladder burst out of my chest – and grew green helicopter blades – and flew east, dribbling gallstones across the carpet.
‘The ketamine’s stopped working,’ I said.
‘I can give you more.’
‘I need something stronger.’
‘I don’t have anything stronger.’
‘I need to find my mum,’ I said. ‘She’s got heroin.’
‘You need to go to hospital.’
I ran to the door and vomited onto the pavement outside. The texture I associated with ketamine had thinned into a tulle-like transparency. The ultramarine of my myalgia was visible behind it. Francis was anxiously scanning the line of smokers with his phone to his ear – too distressed by the assumption that I was somewhere ahead of him to think of looking back.
‘By the way,’ I panted, as Iris caught up with me, ‘I stole that twenty pound note we used as a straw. Can I keep it for a bus ride?’
She laughed. ‘I’m going to give you more money – you need to take a cab.’
‘He’s trying to ring me,’ I nodded towards Francis.
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