Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  “Never.”

  “But when you look at a painting or a sculpture, you know whether you like it or not, don’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, then. That’s all there is to it. You have a walk around – and it’s a lovely building – and you look at the art. You like it or you don’t. You move on. It’s not an exam. No one’s going to tap you on the shoulder and ask if you know a Monet from a Manet.”

  “Good, because I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. But I still love the National Gallery.”

  “Since when?”

  “Excuse me, I’ll have you know I’m a regular patron. Have been for a while.”

  She hoped there would be no follow-up questions. Her patronage of the National Gallery had consisted, to date, of precisely two visits. Her companion and guide on both occasions was Dan, who was a genuine art fan. This pleasing incongruity – he seemed to know as much about Caravaggio as he did about car engines – was one of the things she had loved about him. It wasn’t even in the top ten, but it was on the list somewhere. She hadn’t contributed much to their tours herself, apart from making occasional efforts to start caption competitions. But her central point still stood: taking a walk round a gallery was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, there you are. That’s me – hidden depths. Why don’t you give him a shout and tell him you’d love to go?” There was no immediate refusal. Holly was encouraged enough to add a sweetener. “Did he have a time in mind? Because I could stick around for a while, give you a hand getting yourself ready and all, and then drop you into town.” Still no refusal. She pressed ahead further still. “I’ve nothing else to do and it’d be fun. We could have a girly giggle and –”

  “All right, Holly, don’t lose the run of yourself. You’ve never had a girly giggle in your life and I’m fully capable of dressing myself. But I will take the lift, thank you.”

  Holly was so taken aback by the speed with which her mother relented that she fell momentarily silent.

  “Oh! So you’re going?” she said then.

  “I . . . Yes.”

  “To the gallery? This afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re calling him now to tell him as much?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. Good. Off you go, then.”

  Mrs Christmas rose from the kitchen table, gathered her threadbare cardigan around herself, and hobbled off in the direction of the phone.

  “You’re limping,” Holly said. “Have you got a sore hip or something?”

  “No. Me foot’s asleep.”

  Holly was relieved but, still, the image of her mum limping about didn’t sit well with the nap and jigsaw images that were already swirling around in her mind. She felt as if she was getting an unwelcome sneak preview of days to come. Seconds later, she heard a muted voice from the livingroom. It was enough to snap her out of her daydream. No; her mother wasn’t some wizened old dear with one foot in the proverbial. She was a sprightly fifty-something who, even now, was setting up a hot date. A couple of minutes later, she returned, looking much brighter than she had when she left.

  “I can tell already that you feel better,” Holly said.

  “I hate to admit it. But you’re right. He was delighted I rang. Said he was getting worried about me.”

  “And?”

  “Three o’clock at the main entrance.”

  “There you go. So, what are you going to w–”

  “He wants you to come too.”

  Holly was sure she’d misheard. “I’m sorry?”

  “I told him you were giving me a lift there and he insisted.”

  “What? What the hell would he want me there for?”

  “He’s just trying to get you on his good side, I think.”

  “Thanks, but –”

  “Please, Holly.”

  Cogs turned. “Hang on a minute. Are you sure it’s Charlie that wants me to go?”

  Her mother smacked her lips. “Well, all right, it might have been my suggestion. But he didn’t object.”

  “Mum!”

  “Please. As a favour. It’ll be less weird for me if you’re there.”

  “It’ll be less weird if I’m there? Fuck me.”

  “Don’t swear. Just go for a while, at least. Holly –”

  “All right, all right, Christ.”

  For the first time since she’d arrived, her mother smiled properly. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  Their arrival at the gallery was a masterpiece of timing. Holly peeked at her watch as they went through the main entrance and saw that it was twenty seconds past three. Charlie was leaning against a wall on the far side of the lobby. He was wearing a blue shirt and blue chinos. A luridly red sweater was draped around his shoulders, its sleeves casually knotted on his chest. At first glance, Holly thought he’d come dressed as Superman. When he caught sight of them he sprang forward to meet them, issuing hellos and great-to-see-yous and then abruptly stopped as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do next. After a moment’s pause, he lurched forward and gave Mrs Christmas a tiny kiss on the cheek before turning to Holly and doing his wrestling move.

  “Well, isn’t this great,” he said, clapping his hands together. “An afternoon of culture! What could be better?”

  “I don’t know anything about art,” Holly’s mum said apologetically, as if this was something that needed to be cleared up right at the outset.

  Charlie patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry about that, Delia,” he said. “I know more than enough for both of us.”

  A cold hand gripped the back of Holly’s neck. This didn’t sound good.

  “Now,” Charlie continued. “Shall we? I took the liberty of getting the tickets.”

  Holly wasn’t sure that she’d ever heard anyone actually using the phrase “took the liberty” in a non-ironic way outside of a black and white movie. It was quite charming, she supposed. She looked at her mother and saw that she, for one, was chuffed.

  The three of them walked across the lobby, presented their tickets and made their way up the main staircase. Within fifteen minutes, Holly had fallen a few paces behind them and was seriously contemplating trying to lose them entirely. There were two problems. Firstly, she had gravely underestimated how much this trip to the gallery would remind her of Dan. She’d known that he would pop into her head – how could he not? – but she hadn’t realised that he would pull up a chair in there and make himself comfy. It was like being haunted. She kept imagining that she could see him everywhere in her peripheral vision, but when she turned, there was usually no one there. The sole exception was the case of a Japanese tourist who cleared ground when she did a sudden one-eighty to glare in his direction.

  The second problem was even more predictable. On both of their visits together, Holly and Dan had wandered around at a reasonable pace, not rushing by any means, but not dawdling either. When something caught their eye, they stopped and had a closer look. As soon as they ran out of things to say, they moved on. Charlie took a different approach. He stopped at the first painting they came to and simply started talking. The piece in question was of a type that Holly had no time for – a depiction of rural life from a bygone era. There was a barn. There were some chickens. There was a horse. There was a woman carrying a bucket. Holly wouldn’t even have slowed down, let alone stopped by it; she wasn’t sure that she would even have consciously noticed it. She gave Charlie the benefit of the doubt for about a minute and then concluded that, no, her first impression had been correct: he really was just describing the scene, as if they she and her mother were on the other end of a phone line. “Here we have a woman carrying a bucket,” he said. “Here we have a chicken.” It went on for several minutes. Holly noticed that her mother nodded occasionally as Charlie waffled, as if she was grateful for his insight (Good God, you’re right! It is a horse!). When they eventually moved on, Holly almost broke into a jog. She had gone
quite a way, skipping several paintings, when she realised that she was alone. Looking back, she saw that Charlie and her mother – in other words, Charlie – had stopped at the second painting. She moped back towards them. Painting number two was, to Holly’s eye, practically indistinguishable from painting number one. It was a little darker, sure, and a little more wintry, but it was basically the same sort of thing. Charlie seemed to have even more to say about it than he had about its neighbour. After he’d described it for them (“Here we have a farmer”, “Here we have a hedge”), he moved on to a discussion of the artist’s technique. “Note the use of reds and browns,” he intoned, pointing to a patch of the canvas that was indeed red and brown. “These are rusty colours. Rusty? Rustic? Coincidence? Hmmm?” They spent at least as long on the second painting as they had on the first. Painting number three featured another farmer. This one was in bed, breathing his last. His family were gathered around him, all looking understandably upset, except for one plump daughter who was bent double, staring at the floor in the manner of someone who had just lost a contact lens. Holly let Charlie run through his routine again (“Look – brush-strokes”), but when they started off for the next painting, she spoke up.

  “Personally,” she said, “I’d like nothing better than to spend an hour in front of every single painting, but time is against us. Maybe it’d be better if we picked up the pace a little and stopped at the highlights only?”

  This was a long way from the phrasing that had sprung to mind naturally. Her delight at having restrained herself was short-lived, however.

  “That’s the problem with your generation,” Charlie said. “No attention span. You want culture – if you can be said to want it at all – delivered in handy, bite-sized chunks. If it can’t be swallowed whole in one gulp, you don’t wanna know.”

  He said all of this with the slight smile that she recalled from the Chinese restaurant: I know it sounds like I’m having a go at you, but we’re just having a laugh, really, like old pals. Holly tried valiantly to come up with a gentle reply but she drew a blank. After staring mutely at him for a few seconds, she felt she had no choice but to say what she really thought.

  “And the problem with your generation is that you can’t tell the time very well. There are more than eleven thousand pieces of art in this gallery. So far we’ve spent five minutes on every one we’ve passed. The doors are closing at five thirty. Can you see the problem or should I get a calculator out?”

  She mirrored his insincere smile.

  “Maybe Holly has a point,” Mrs Christmas soothed.

  “Humph,” said Charlie, somehow managing to make it sound like an excellent debating point.

  Thereafter, they moved through the gallery like normal people, going through each individual room in no particular order, criss-crossing the floor and doubling back on themselves as they saw fit. They had been a rigid trio up to this point, but now Holly made a point of being a sort of satellite around the couple, travelling around in a loose orbit but never quite floating away entirely. For one thing, she felt like a total gooseberry, and a gooseberry to her mother at that; it was surreal. And for another, it was nice to periodically get out of earshot of Charlie. He was a little quieter for a while after they decided to speed up, but it didn’t last. Before long, he was holding forth with as much gusto and as little intelligence as ever. Despite her best efforts, Holly inevitably caught some of it.

  She couldn’t help but compare Charlie’s musings with Dan’s. The latter had always supplied hard facts, putting the paintings and sculpture in historical or social context and, where available, sharing juicy gossip about the artist (this one died of syphilis, that one murdered her husband). He was never boring, quite the contrary – he made everything funny, even the syphilis and murder. And yet he never sounded like he was showing off. In much the same way that she had never come to share Mark and Lizzie’s deep love of wine, Holly never even got close to Dan’s level of passion for art. But she appreciated his attempts to drag her up behind him. Charlie, by contrast, was starting to remind her of a psychiatric patient being presented with Rorschach ink-blots – Tell me what you see here. Worse still, he was obviously convinced that he was a great expert. His chin rose and his chest expanded as he made some of his more grandiose exclamations (“This cloud looming in the distance is, of course, a reminder of our mortality”).

  One of the last paintings they came to was Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ. It was the only piece in the entire gallery that Holly knew by name. She wasn’t sure if she had always known what it was called – it was, after all, probably the most famous painting in Ireland – or if she had learned its name from Dan, who’d had something of a mini-obsession with it. In fairness to him, it was an astonishing thing to look at. Its recreation of the moment when Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane seemed to owe more to photography than it did to painting. On this, her third viewing, Holly found that she was incapable as ever of articulating exactly what it was that made it so hypnotic. The light, she thought. It’s the way the light . . . the . . . the light’s . . . really . . . nice.

  Charlie too knew it by name; for the first time, he didn’t consult the little information card by the frame before he began pontificating (they didn’t have audio guides – he had decreed them “unnecessary”). As ever, his analysis was strictly descriptive, but this time Holly was able to correct him when he got even that much wrong.

  “Flanking Jesus, Judas and the Roman soldiers on the left and right,” he droned, “are two mysterious figures. Who are they? What is their role in this terrible drama? We will never know.”

  “The one on the left is the disciple John,” Holly said cheerfully. “The one on the right is generally believed to be a self-portrait of the artist himself.”

  Charlie seized upon her last few words as if they were the only ones she had spoken. “A self-portrait of the artist himself?” he sneered through downturned lips. “And who else would he do a self-portrait of?”

  He turned to Holly’s mother, apparently expecting that she would be highly amused by his skewering of her daughter’s regrettable phrase. But Mrs Christmas looked back at him without expression. He gave up almost immediately and returned his gaze to the painting. Holly understood that he was embarrassed because she had chopped him off at the knees and she accepted that. Still – she thought she had glimpsed a side of him that was not merely buffoonish but downright unpleasant.

  Her opinion of him didn’t improve any when he said, “I wonder, Holly, if it has escaped your attention that a great many of the beautiful works we’ve seen here today were religiously inspired?”

  She discarded the first response that came to mind, which was “Oh, fuck off”, in favour of something a little more diplomatic. After a moment’s thought she said, “Then again, most of these pictures are very old. I don’t think modern artists are all that bothered about God.”

  In all modesty, she was extremely pleased with this reply. It was aimed at getting him off the subject of religion and back onto modern art. They’d already exchanged a few words on that topic. Charlie had tried his best to bullshit about the cubes and lines as much as he had about the horses and farmers but it had been obvious that his heart wasn’t in it. There were a couple of occasions when he seemed to come perilously close to saying, “I could have done that!”, which, Dan had advised her, was the stupidest thing a person could say in a gallery. Personally, Holly preferred the modern stuff. When confronted with a traditional figurative painting, she found it hard to judge it on any criteria other than how much it looked like the thing it was supposed to be. This was not a sophisticated attitude, she knew, but that was how she felt. Quite a lot of modern art, on the other hand, wasn’t supposed to look like anything. This seemed to free her up, somehow, to consider it as an entity unto itself. She had started to say as much to Charlie about half an hour previously but had stopped out of fear that she would sound like one of those tedious clowns on Latenight Review.
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  “You’re quite probably right,” Charlie said. “These modern guys were probably Godless to the core. Which is why they end up doodling while the old school, the ones who knew the Power and the Glory, were able to create the likes of this.”

  “Hm,” Holly said and strolled away, chewing her tongue like it was a nice piece of steak. It did the trick. When Charlie and her mother caught up with her a couple of minutes later, there was no discernible tension.

  They wandered through another couple of rooms and then agreed to call it a day.

  “There’s a café,” Holly said when they reached the lobby again. “Cup of tea and a bun, maybe?”

  Charlie rose on his toes. “Actually . . .” He pivoted to face Mrs Christmas. “I was thinking maybe we could go for something a little more substantial. Dinner for two?”

  Holly took the brick-like hint and got in before her mother could reply. “Even better. The two of you toddle off and get something proper. I have loads to do at home anyway.” She nipped forward and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  Her mother blinked and blinked again. She had the look of a woman who’d just realised that she’d had her purse snatched. “Uh, yes. It was lovely.”

  “Great. Okay then. See ya later. Charlie.” She extended her hand. He did what he always did. When she had regained her balance, she gave them a smile and a nod. Then she turned around and left them to it, telling herself that the nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach was hunger. She had only taken a few steps in the direction of the door when she stopped dead. Dan was standing on the street outside, talking on the phone. He was on his way into the gallery; he had to be. She refused to believe her eyes at first. This was bad luck of such colossal proportions that it seemed impossible. Predictably enough, he looked great. In fact, he looked exactly the same. It might have been the day after she had last seen him, not a few years later. She stared for a moment in shock and hastened back to her mum and Charlie.

  “Hi again,” she said.