by Stella Duffy
Staying too-long weekends with her unwilling grandmother, the stick was the last thing the little girl saw when the old woman turned out the light and closed the box room door behind her, the first thing she heard in the morning when it began its nose-tap tap on the wall next door, its owner crying out for her cup of tea, the in-bed treat she claimed should be also be a treat for the grandchild. A treat to take care of her elderly relative, a privilege to be given the responsibility of the heavy black kettle, the gas fire, the porcelain cup and saucer, the heavy milk with cream floating in yellow globules across the surface of the jug. An honour then, to walk into that dark room where the curtains were never opened and the ivy had been allowed to grow over the French windows and the calendar stayed on the wall, the same faded picture of Our Lady of Lourdes and the exact date it had shown fifteen years ago when the old woman’s husband died and the stick ceased its incessant poking at the recalcitrant turn-out of young girls, became instead the only thing left to lean on.
It was not a treat. It was a fearful journey every morning, wracked with the possibility of dead grandmothers and the looming photograph of the long-dead grandfather and the smell of denture fixative and the likelihood of spilt milk to sob over, stewed tea and cracked china. It was never a treat. But today’s ballet is. Both for this younger woman and her partner. And so, despite the pain and the looks and with the help of the dragon’s head stick, they will go out. Brave the crowds and the braying ballerina children, little girls in itchy princess dresses and pointy plastic tiaras, parents dressing up their dolls to remake the unfulfilling treats of their own childhood. Knowing it cannot work but trying anyway. Impossible to recreate the perfect turn-out but trying anyway.
Her partner taking too long in parking, she makes her way to the disabled toilet, pushing her stick out and across her body as she so often watched the grandmother do. The door is locked, a red engaged sign in a shiny new bolt. This place has recently received lottery funds, the money spent on toilet doors was surely a vital component of the budget application. She waits a minute, another five, the door opens, a mother and toddler walk out. The mother looks at her and before the face, the clothes, the woman before her, she immediately sees the stick. The stick glows in the dim corridor with a sense of entitlement and – in this queue only – privilege. The mother looks down at the toddler as if in explanation, excuse that will turn into defiance if necessary. The stick-bearer doesn’t care in the least. But the mother does. And hurries her daughter away.
Finally a lift and several carefully negotiated steps later, she sits beside her partner in a specially arranged aisle seat and waits for the slow confection of the staged picture to begin. The stick-bearer has been far more ill than this. This is a minor physical disability. The burning ache, the throbbing waves are debilitating yes, but minor in that they will pass. Already in the past fortnight the extremes of pain have started to recede. She has been far more ill than this, with no hope of let-up or stick to clear her way. She has stood several times on the edge of insanity, her nails ripping from their tucked-up finger-beds as she tries to claw herself out of the falling pit. And she has fallen and stayed fallen and hidden in the dark and lost in the maze. But then she looked well enough on the outside. She is not one who shows her distress in weight loss or gain, tired eyes or red nose. And she did not have a stick. There was nothing physically wrong with her and no accommodation was ever made for the fact that from her more usual place of pain, this aisle seat would have been a torture, simply walking through that crowded foyer would have taken reserves of courage and fortitude impossible to measure. And even so, because the world demanded it, she has made those walks and sat in those seats and dug her nails deep into her thighs to stop herself from crying out when the hurting was so severe as to undo even the clamped-shut mouth. But those times there was no wand to wave the people around her into semi-fearful compliance. And just as she knows that this physical disability will pass, so too will the other return, the progression and pain inevitable. Knowing this, she has chosen to enjoy her outing with the stick, take advantage of the stature and space it offers, thrill to the helpful feet and pitying glances. There will be time enough for ignorance later.
The curtains part, her partner sits attentive and eager, the stage rises to the applause and a long-dead grandmother adjusts imperfect feet with a heavy stick. At home that evening the lovers dance sugar on to sour plums and remember there will be better nights. Just as there will certainly be worse.
Silk Lovers
WE HAVEN’T SEEN each other for over two years but we know what to do. We remember the rules. The promise. The vows of silk.
She has prepared herself for this moment. She wears a red silk camisole covered by lush black velvet and topped with sharp red lipstick. Her hair is long and newly dyed dark and covers the nape of her cool neck. She has readied both her own body and the room for his arrival. She has waited twenty-six months for him, she will not spoil this moment by even the most delicate scent of imperfection. There are red rose petals poured before the fireplace. The flames burn high and the petals will be dry before the night is over. The glasses of soft red wine are ready, there is a tiny table holding fingernail size savouries and miniature cream chocolates.
When he arrives, he too is beautiful. Still too beautiful. Still more beautiful than her. He laughs, knowing how hard she has tried, knowing how easy it is for him. He has thrown himself together and, as always, his easy charm discomforts her. He has packed a small bag with all the tools they will need. The tools have not been used for over two years. Still, they are pristine and perfect. As he is.
A sip of wine, refuses chocolate, refuses food and then he is ready. She has no problem following his commands, they flow back like a catechism. He puts the handcuffs on her. They are made of thin paper, almost tissue but even more thin. And smooth.
‘Don’t rip them, now.’ he whispers.
She is led to the chair, her hands cuffed in her lap. Nearly naked.
I continued with the plan even though there was so much else to occupy my time. Watching you. Watching you with her. Watching you watching her. How could you forget to watch me?
She is so careful not to move, not to rip the tiny fibre threads that hold her hands together. The paper immobilises her more effectively than steel. It catches her breath as well as her skin. He places on the blindfold. It is made of thin silk, a single layer and white. Thin enough for her to see through.
She has seen through his deceit too. Though only after he showed it to her. Then it became transparent. She had not known where to look at first.
He undresses himself, to one side, where through the white silk his burnished bronze body is milk chocolate matt brown. He places scissors close by and stands the paper-cuffed woman in front of him. He takes the threads of silk – real silkworm silk they have been saving for this time – and slowly winds the threads between them. His feet to hers. Her legs to his. Their thighs to each other. There were thousands of tiny worms died for this union. Each one softly ripped from its silk and re-laid in a fake cocoon of cotton wool so they could plait themselves together, solder their union.
I left the worms making their silk. I knew we would need it. Eventually.
She receives his body, silk of their skin wound round in silk. This is a winding not a wounding. Not yet. Two smooth bodies stretch, one up, one down to create face-to-face Siamese, twinning themselves in fire-lit melting. Paul hands her the scissors which she holds in her softly cuffed hands. Her arms in front of him and in front of her, her bare arms and the stainless steel against the small swelling of her stomach. The tiny flesh swelling that warms and covers those eggs, holds safe her generations to come.
This shroud is softer even than the skin shroud I have lived in for two years.
There comes a point where the bodies are joined, his arms against her torso, their chests together. His free arms work above and behind her and now they wind their heads together, faces cheek to cheek. She sways, dizzy with l
ooking into his eyes and breathing his breath and is gravity held by his stronger passion.
He always said his was the stronger passion. Not a stronger skin though, I think.
This is not a thought I say out loud.
Now she and he are one, his arms free for a moment until he digs his thumbs, fingers, hands into and under the threads across her back. He is tied to her. She who is returned to him so they can do this thing. This thing they are committed to. This thing that will set him free of her longing, needing. Her disappointment. They spin. Twisting, four feet too close for purchase, rotating on the axis of what they have promised to do, what they bred the worms for, what she has promised to do.
– Yes, I will. If you ever leave me, I will kill myself.
– Promise?
– I promise.
– Good girl. Now go to sleep.
Difficult to move her hands, thin tissue cuffed inside the tiny convex opening of their two stomachs, so gently to lift one hand above the other where the mingled running sweat has melted her paper bonds. She holds the criss-crossing steel blades and in the moment they fall, in the moment he goes, in the moment the steel meets the narrow resistance of skin and a then little sinew she finds herself worrying about the stain on the silk. The steel travels further in and catches – on an organ. Stomach? Spleen? A lung? She is not clear about the location of these secret parts. Both of them hear a small hiss but they do not know if it is his or hers. A hiss of escaping breath or hiss of escaping venom. They always were too close.
And she need not have bothered about the stains. She caught his blood herself. More full of blood than usual but not especially unpleasant.
When he left me I told him he really shouldn’t.
His eyes were very near and she could see he was surprised. It was a look of horror and terror and sex and fucking and then bliss and then – nothing.
He was surprised by the steel, she was surprised by the nothing. She had expected more. Peace perhaps. Or a transcendental awareness. But no, he gave her nothing.
Typical.
She took the silk to a weaver and then to a dressmaker. The dressmaker made a thin band of cloth. Mary kept it. It would have made a lovely blindfold but that the red stains dried ochre and she could no longer see through it.
And there is no point in a blindfold that actually blinds.
You might as well close your eyes.
He did.
Face Value
IT WAS NEVER about me.
It’s not about me.
I used to say that all the time, at first when the fuss happened, when it took me from promising to promised, from potential to arrived, when everyone wanted to know who I was and where I’d come from, I said it as my stock answer.
It’s not about me.
Because it was true, it wasn’t.
Later, in interviews, quite possibly hundreds of interviews at the time of the retrospective, the same old questions, all over again, I said the same, all over again. Or at those stupid parties where I was only in attendance to promote my career, to assist my agent, to do the right thing by the person they’d decided I was, at the events there was always some oily man who’d think it was flattering to contradict my stock answer, to correct me, with an ‘Oh but come on, surely you can admit it now …’
I’m admitting it now.
It was not about me.
They’d ask too, sitting around the dinner table with friends, this workmate of that gym-buddy, this father of that child at school. I noticed, when I was younger, as a non-mother, that the school gate friends of my friends were the worst. They had nothing to talk about but their children, and even the most besotted parent runs out of child-praise eventually. Halfway through the second bottle, house prices, the government, and the cost of the child-minder covered, the increasingly desperate conversation would finally turn to me.
You don’t have children?
What do you do?
And then—
Oh. You’re her. You did that piece.
For God’s sake. I did about four dozen others, each one of them massively successful, along with a hundred or more less well known, and another couple of hundred that never saw the light of day beyond my studio. But yes, I made that piece. And no, it’s not about me.
Maybe I wouldn’t mind if they were also interested in the rest of it, the paintings and the tapestries I worked on next, the miniatures I’ve been making for over a decade now, even the films, self-revelatory as they are. The films are about me, intentionally, deliberately, they are self-sacrificing, self-offering, in a way that nothing else I have made has been. Which might explain why they’ve not been as successful. Something about the giving up of self, too readily, that doesn’t sit right with the viewer. The viewer wants to feel they have prised us from our shell, found the pearl hidden in the gritty oyster. When I offered my pearls, strand by strand, reel by reel (it was film, not video, for some things I am a purist), there was – oddly – less engagement for the viewer. Well, there it is. I have had to accept that not all of my work is received in the same spirit it is offered. I took a while to learn, but I know it now.
I hasten to add, it’s not at all that I dislike talking about my work. I’m happy to do so, just not that piece. And because I’ve been so open about it, because I’ve said time and again in interviews, that I will talk about anything but that, because I have not lied, not once, when I have discussed my feelings, my lack of feelings, my choice never to speak of it – that is, inevitably, what it always comes back to. The one journalist, interviewer, fan, who is sure that they will force me to reveal all. How it made my career and then broke me. How I went a little crazy for half a year or so after that exhibition. How it changed my life.
I did not change my life. It wasn’t about me.
I have been an artist for just over fifty years. I have a well-respected, widely-sold, widely-collected back catalogue. I am known, wanted. Yet of all the work I’ve ever made, it’s always that bloody piece that they come back to – and they will insist on asking about it, all of them. All of you. And so, because it is the truth, and because I know I can never get you to shut up and leave me alone if I just refuse to answer at all, I generally say something like;
But what no-one ever understood, is that it wasn’t about me
Then there they are, the almost-winks, the smug insinuations, the little knowing grin that what I’m really revealing is how false we artists are, how blind to our own truths. I am offered the smile that suggests, no matter how honest an artist endeavours to be, that we are never fully revealed in mere words, that we show so much more in our self-deluded hiding than we do in the truths we try to speak.
In short, they – you – do not believe that I do not want to talk about it. They – you – do not believe that they don’t understand the piece and never have done.
I’m telling you now, once and for all, it was never about me.
This is why.
She was nineteen when we met, I was twenty-five. Now, at sixty-four, that six year gap between nineteen and twenty-four seems nothing, but come on, don’t you remember how adult you felt at nineteen? And then how, by our mid-twenties, nineteen – all the teens – seemed an age away, the love earned and lost, the passion experienced, the agonising, ecstatic growing up that had gone before, that had changed our DNA.
So, she was nineteen and I was her senior by every bit of six years. She was being paid very little by my agent to come over and help me out – my agent’s phrase, not mine. My agent’s idea, not mine. I’ve always guarded my privacy, even back then I didn’t want anyone in the studio, couldn’t bear the idea of someone watching as I worked. I have always wanted a clean line between process and product. The market didn’t like the separation then, and they like it even less now, when artist and art-work have become so inextricably linked that buyers believe they are getting a piece of you when they hang you on the wall, when they make space in the foyer, when they build a room just for the work.
Oh yes they did. They created a room just for the work, my work. Astonishing. I was twenty-five – dear God I was young, and I was good. Young and good, there is no more potent combination. True, money is handy, money is useful, but when you’re young and talented, money is a sideline. It’s only with age that we come to understand its true worth. Someone – someone malleable, amenable, needy (someone my agent could pay, my agent being old enough to understand the true value of money) – came up with the astonishing idea of creating a room for my work. It took a little persuasion, or maybe a lot, I wasn’t involved in the negotiations then, I don’t involve myself in them now. Process/product. Keep them apart. In the end, the gallery owners, in collaboration with a middle-aged architect keen to show he wasn’t yet past it, decided to use the occasion of my first major exhibition to extend the gallery. Yes, it may have been an idea that was pending, my work may have been just the excuse they needed to demand their Board agree to a bigger spend, or perhaps the architect paid, and certainly my agent fucked. Whatever happened behind the scenes, the effect was that they made a new space specifically for, informed by, my first ever exhibition. They changed a building for me.
They took out two walls, lifted the ceiling, opened a room that had been all about artificial light, proud of the artifice of its light, and made it about the day and the night, and the difference between the two. My work in daylight, sunlight, rainlight, from five until nine – this was a summer exhibition, we considered autumn but dead leaves turn to mulch, and no-one wants chill winds at an opening. The people we wanted to come, to buy, were all about showing themselves, we couldn’t be handing out scarves as they entered the building, so summer it was. And there was also my work in sodium yellow – we kept the space open twenty-four hours a day. I know it happens all the time now, but not back then, forty years ago you understand, we were new, brand new. We were a happening for the rich and comfortable. They so wanted to be happening, they just didn’t want to have to wear batik. Neither did I.
