And when he was twenty-eight and in temporary residence on the fringes of the Bowen Street cemetery, he was discovered.
The critic who found him has told the story often enough. You might have heard it already. It’s one of those stories of genius discovered in unlikely places. Like the story of Janet Frame, rescued from lobotomy in the psychiatric ward. Or the shepherd boy discovered in a field, who drew a perfect circle on stone and so was rescued from a life of rural drudgery to paint the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel.
As the critic tells it, he began noticing around the city, walls that were tagged not with the usual copybook signatures and crudely executed gang slogans, but painted with complex interconnected visionary landscapes, dense with detail and bright primary aerosol colour. He began to seek them out: on building-site hoardings, on the blank concrete faces of offices and government departments, on the empty spaces of city carparks.
‘They stood out,’ he said. ‘They were fantastic. I’d never seen anything like them before.’ There was no signature, no mark that indicated authorship, and since they were executed at night, under cover of darkness, no hint of the artist’s identity. This artist, whoever he was’ (the critic assumed a ‘he’ — the subject matter, the preoccupation with fanciful machinery, the female figures were all suggestive of the male eye) ‘worked at dazzling speed, in total control of his chosen medium’. In a single night he had covered ten metres of hoarding at a new hotel site on the waterfront in one vivid apocalyptic vision before he was disturbed and forced to leave it incomplete. The critic began to try and seek him out, going out late at night to wander the streets in pursuit of elusive genius. He approached the owners of buildings on which the phantom’s work had appeared overnight and attempted to persuade them against whitewash. To begin with he had little success, and several major pieces disappeared beneath the hands of cleaners in overalls, at great and irritating expense.
The critic became more cunning. He had a friend who owned a gallery off Taranaki Street: a snow-white cube that normally featured the works of established artists. Tawny Otago landscapes, black circles on black canvases, words scrawled blood red on chalky white. The critic persuaded his friend to place hoardings across the front wall of his gallery for one week. A tempting surface of plain unpainted ply, smooth and empty of all notices other than a ‘POST NO BILLS’ sticker. Then the critic sat across the road in his car and waited like a hunter after big game, like a DI in a prime-time series. And like the DI in the series, he missed his mark. On the third night, he fell asleep at the crucial moment. When he awoke four hours later just as the council cleaning trucks arrived in half light to scrub the streets, it was to find the hoarding covered in the first of my brother’s works to be taken down and re-hung. It is a wordless cartoon in brilliant slashes of primary colour, a triptych of rapture in which bird-headed demigods and big-breasted women fly and tumble through storm clouds over a futuristic city. It’s extreme, it’s astonishing, it’s distorted and it’s beautiful and it hangs now in the critic’s stairwell, the first Brian Lacey to receive the reverence accorded to ‘art’. But of the artist himself there was no sign. He had evaded capture and the critic resigned himself to never knowing his identity. He wrote a piece for the Listener recounting his frustrated pursuit of genius.
I doubt that Brian saw the article, but perhaps he came upon it wrapped around some sandwiches in a litter bin or flying with the wind against a rusted netting fence, because the city piecing stopped. For a time, the critic feared he would be left with just his demonic angels. But people had read his article and he began to receive notice from time to time of other works around the country: portraits of strange hybrid animals on the walls of an abandoned abattoir at Patea, mangled limbs and broken machinery on the torn corro of a former railway shed near Te Kuiti, walls covered in form and colour among the broken glass and shit and burned-out fires of temporary campsites in crumbling kilns and roofless cottages and woodmills rotting back into the bush. The critic became a hunter, developing a sense for his quarry’s movements, his chosen habitat. He began to compile a documentary record: maps and photographs tracing the imagery that ornamented decay.
And one morning he received a phone call from an accountant in Nelson. The accountant had been on his way to visit a client, an orchardist in Motueka. A sunny morning, I imagine: one of those perfect days in early spring when the broom is out and everything smells sweet and full of promise. He had taken the long way round, and decided to stop by a river. A pee, I suppose. An unreliable bladder requiring frequent evacuation. He was a man of a certain age. He had climbed down a little bank where the flowering broom, the feathery branches of fennel and a bridge offered concealment. He peed long and luxuriously into the fennel, liking the sensation of relief, and the sound of the river swirling against the concrete piles of the bridge, and the smell of his own piss blending with liquorice-scented leaf, and the bright gleaming of the broom, and the muddy whiff of a silt-laden river, and the sun on his back after hours inside a warm car.
He had sighed with the pleasure of perfect life.
There had been some movement to his right. A dog growling from the undergrowth. And now he became conscious of it, there was some other sound, some busy buzzing sound sawing away at the edges of the perfect moment. There was a smell too: a sweet, meaty scent that lent a queasy flavour to the day.
My brother was lying among the fennel in a ratty blue sleeping bag beneath a cloud of flies glittering emerald and silver in the sunlight. By his side crouched a skinny collie dog, baring its yellow teeth at all intruders. Over their heads trucks rumbled across the bridge like thunder, like gods rolling down in iron-wheeled chariots, and down here where the river pooled deep and eel-dark around its foundations, was a mural. Every inch of one of the piles was covered up to the lower surface of the roadbed, accessible from metal reinforcing that protruded from the masonry. Beneath its vault of blue and red and gold, my brother lay, one arm pillowing his shaggy head, his face turned upward to the sky. Both his legs were broken. He had jumped, the coroner concluded: there was evidence of heavy impact among the broom beneath the bridge and a trail of dried blood leading back to this place as if someone had dragged himself there with great effort, back to the smooth clay cupping his body as if it lay in the palm of a great generous hand. Back to the comfort of a ratty sleeping bag and a dog for company as he flew up and up into the blue.
The critic had found his artist.
The hoarding hangs still in his stairwell, the torn corro from Te Kuiti hangs in Te Papa. The bridge features in the critic’s guide to Lacey’s work, which includes a map for the curious who wish to trace his erratic course throughout the country.
And that was how my brother came into his inheritance.
Ten
Clare wakes to the momentary bewilderment that accompanies travel: where am I? Where’s the bathroom? Whose bed am I lying in? Light filters round the edges of unfamiliar curtains that make a matching set with a duvet of smudgy pinks and purples, that same vaguely floral design that furnishes B&Bs and motels the world over. She has slept under that same duvet cover in Dunedin and San Francisco, Singapore, Paris and now, she remembers, Killinaboy. She is in a guest house called Tir na nÓg at Killinaboy.
She lies cocooned by the polyester-cotton blend of the Universal Duvet, listening to unfamiliar sounds. A car passing on the road outside her window, taking the corner fast and braking. Cows trumpeting in a nearby field like a besieging army at the gates of their byre. Somewhere within the house a door closes. A bee is humming with orderly purpose among the polyanthus flowering in a box outside her window. Through the bedroom wall she can hear the sound of other people waking: that soft companionable murmur a few inches behind her head that always makes her, just for a moment, lonely.
Normally she does not feel lonely. Even in the quiet weeks after Paul left her to seek enlightenment at the feet of the Gucci Guru she felt a peculiar satisfaction in their separate existences. No matter how painful, it seeme
d a vastly superior option to the petty restraints of a story shot down in tattered feathers mid-flight, or the reluctant departure from a warm delightful room to dull coupledom, shrinking and wrinkling together like a pair of apples left too long in the bowl.
Elizabeth had been solicitous nevertheless. She had offered the consolation of possible reunion. After all, she had gone back to Roderick, the minor indiscretions of mid-life stacked neatly away among the appliances in the designer kitchen. Neither of them could bear to abandon that kitchen when it came right down to it: the beautiful Italian coffee-maker, the built-in rotisserie and the wine cellar. It was too much to exchange for sexual freedom in some city singles apartment with a ridiculous gym they’d never use and an underground carpark that looked like the kind of place where you could get shot by some drug-crazed psychopath as you climbed out of your Subaru.
‘Don’t worry,’ she’d said. ‘Give him a month or two and your Paul will be back on the porch!’ She’d flung up her hands and shrugged in the European fashion. ‘Male menopause! God! They all go through it!’ Then she had invited Clare to dinner that Saturday, just a few friends and an Osso Buco. Clare needed lots of TLC right now.
Morgan had been less clumsy. He simply said, ‘So he’s dumped you, stupid bastard. Never mind, sweetie. There’s a movie about Mongolian throat singers on at the Regent. Do you want to come?’ But then he had always known the perfect solution, ever since they had shared an office when they first arrived as tutors back in 1985, he in high-tops and slashed jeans, she in big hair and knee boots. They shared a taste for documentaries. And Indonesian food. And banalities. They collected them through the endless meetings and consultations of the nineties, as some management apparatchik outlined another cost-cutting measure, another restructuring. ‘At the end of the day,’ droned the administrator, or ‘the level playing field’ or ‘the triple bottom-line’, while she and Morgan kept tally.
They were friends. In the weeks between lovers they spent Friday nights together, happily slumped on the sofa in his flat or hers, eating takeaway Rendang and watching Michael Moore hunt down corrupt executives or Masai warriors hunt down an antelope.
It was Morgan she told about Tony, the one she very nearly married, because she was thirty-five and other people were getting married and Tony seemed to want to marry her. He was a nice man. He was a lawyer who worked for Citizens’ Advice. He had taken her to a jeweller’s in Akaroa one weekend, walking with her down the narrow rose-scented streets to select a ring from a studio overlooking the sea. She had chosen an emerald in an exquisite silver setting. It slid onto her finger as if it had been designed especially for her.
They made love that night on a sheepskin rug before the fire in the little rented cottage. A morepork had called in its hopeful, melancholy fashion from the ngaios outside the window, and a creek had chattered only a few metres away, dashing down to the sea. Her emerald ring had flashed green in the firelight. And suddenly she had needed to remove it. It was imperative. She could not bear its tight silver band about her finger. She tugged at it. But something had happened since it slid on so readily, and now it would not budge. It dragged up a fold of skin, jamming on the knuckle.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Tony, rolling over to trace the line of her bare breast.
‘Can’t get this off,’ she said, tugging and twisting.
‘Why do you want to take it off?’ he said.
She was licking her knuckle, trying to make the skin slick. Panic was building in her chest, a frantic urgency to get this ring off RIGHT NOW. She went to the tiny bathroom with its vase of jasmine and artfully placed candles, and rubbed lemon verbena soap onto her finger. She rubbed till the skin tore and blood made a pink froth.
‘Wait till morning,’ said Tony, all reason from the doorway. ‘Your finger will shrink back overnight.’
‘I want it off NOW,’ said Clare, soaping furiously.
She had got dressed, dragging on jeans and tee while Tony looked on at this madwoman who had suddenly materialised in Clare’s place, determined to run back down the road to the jewellers.
The jeweller was still awake and watching the wrestling on TV, but he fetched his snips and cut the ring from her bloodied hand.
‘You want to keep it?’ he said, holding it up like a pulled tooth. The snapped symbol of her failure to achieve matrimony.
‘I’d say you suffer from a deep-seated fear of commitment,’ said Morgan. ‘I’d say you are not yet ready for the joys of a mature and long-lasting relationship … Do you think we should order two lots of Lumpia?’
It was true. She liked men, enjoyed their company, liked being in bed with them, but sooner or later she ran. She became impatient at being introduced as somebody’s ‘partner’ or, worse, ‘girlfriend’. She hated the proprietorial arm about the shoulders or the familiar pat on the bum. She hated being included in family gatherings: weddings and twenty-firsts where she had to stand awkwardly clutching a drink and talking to the current man’s sister who plays golf twice a week and wants to move to a hideous gated community in Queenstown with a golf course on site and an artificial lake large enough for water skiing. She began to feel trapped. She began to feel, above all, anxious: it was surely only a matter of time before this man too would leave without warning. She could scarcely bear the suspense. She knew how it would go. Some childish part of herself, some little girl kneeling by a bed praying for her father’s return, took over and demanded immediate, self-protective, pre-emptive action.
Better to end it quickly. To decide, quite simply, to fall out of love. She had become adept at it. She stopped thinking about the current lover. She began to make excuses not to stay the night. She felt nothing when he touched her. He switched in an instant from being the one person above all others whom she wanted to see into someone wizened and boring whom she wished to avoid at all costs. Then there was nothing for it but to attend to the hideous business of telling him it was over. And sometimes the unloved one was sensible, because he had also become bored and was ready to leave: he was simply awaiting the right moment to tell her so. And sometimes they argued, or became odd, ringing at all hours, or — once — scrawling BITCH in crude aerosol letters a metre high on her front fence, or driving pathetically past her house, or popping in at unexpected moments to return a book, a pair of earrings, clearly expecting to surprise her with someone else, for there had to be someone else, or why would she leave so abruptly when it all seemed to be going so well?
There never was anyone else. She simply couldn’t breathe around them any longer. Morgan understood. He liked the stories of her rackety life, especially the partings, especially the awful ones. She made documentary narratives of them: ‘… and there he was, at the sushi place though he’s never eaten sushi in his life, he’s strictly a petrol-station-pie kind of guy, and he’d bought this eight-piece combo and he came over and started talking while he was eating it, and he’d smeared the salmon roll with wasabi — he must have thought it was avocado which he doesn’t usually eat either — anyway we’re in the middle of this dreadful stilted conversation where he asks me how I’m getting on and how he is missing me and all that, and then he takes a whole mouthful of the roll and almost explodes. God, it was awful. I felt so sorry for him.’
‘But you are not going back, are you?’ said Morgan. ‘You have moved on. You have discovered that when one door closes, a window opens.’
‘I am not going back,’ said Clare. ‘I am putting my faith in the universe. I have processed that relationship and achieved closure. Besides, he used to blow his nose and then examine his handkerchief.’
‘You have made a wise decision,’ said Morgan.
Morgan understood. He gave her, in exchange, narratives about women turning up on his doorstep at 11 p.m. in winter coats and boots and nothing else, wanting to party. So clichéd. And women who asked him to accompany them to choose curtain fabric on Saturday mornings. And women who filled his answerphone with alternating rage and plaintive entreaty when he ha
d decided it was time to quit. He probably did not tell the whole truth, any more than Clare did. She did not mention episodes of stupid sex with unprepossessing men, and he did not, she presumed, tell her about the times he asked the party hopefuls in. What they presented for one another was edited for entertainment, but the process of editing made the stupidities tolerable. Clare loved it when Morgan flung back his head and laughed at some tale of disaster. She had not realised how much she had come to depend upon his audience until it stopped.
Because a few months after Paul left, Morgan discovered true love.
She guessed before he told her. He had changed his style, adopting a spiky youthful haircut to replace the romantic floppy look he’d had ever since she’d known him. And his customary languor, the ironic pose that was his default mode, had been displaced by a kind of fizzy energy. She had known what was coming and, when he told her, she could have written the lines herself.
‘I’ve met someone,’ he said. ‘I want you to be the first to know. I want you to meet him. He’s special.’
‘What’s his name?’ she said, surprised at the slight quaver in her voice.
‘I know it’s a cliché,’ said Morgan, ‘but it’s Mark. I think he might be the love of my life.’
He had lost all sense of irony. Worse still, he became suddenly concerned for Clare’s well-being. He wanted the whole world, or at least the individuals in it whom he cared about, to experience this miracle of true love.
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