by Nina Allan
“Have you heard from him, Laura?”
She glanced down at her plate, and I thought how that was the one thing about her I still found touching: her inability to lie without being detected.
“Not a thing,” she said. “I haven’t laid eyes on him since the trial.”
I didn’t pursue it. There was nothing to gain, and in any case I was sick of the subject. Later on that day I admitted to myself it wasn’t just Niko I was sick of, but everything. I was even sick of my apartment in New Cross, with its damp-smelling airing cupboard and perpetually dripping bathroom tap, minor annoyances I kept meaning to get fixed but never found time for. I fingered the travel documents I’d picked up that morning, the stamped visa and boarding pass for the Dubai shuttle, and felt a wave of relief sweep through me. I knew that so long as I could get on that plane I would be able to sleep, that my current bout of exhaustion would be at an end.
For the first time ever I began to give serious consideration to Sallie Stowells’s invitation for me to join her bureau in Melbourne. I’d known Sallie for years. We shared a room in the press corps hotel during the third Iraq war. She’d been urging me to join her for a while, complaining that her best reporters kept getting themselves killed.
“Either that, or they leave after six months to work in TV,” she said last time we spoke. “I need a safe pair of hands.”
I’d always turned her down before, but even with the wildfires and the mass shootings I was beginning to see the attraction. It would be a new start.
* * *
—
That first London show was so successful that Niko could have painted full-time if he’d chosen to. He decision to stay on at St. Martin’s was just one more example of his naivety if you ask me. He approached his teaching commitments as he approached everything else: with missionary zeal.
“It does me good to be around the students,” he insisted. “There’s a raw energy about them, a passion. If you met them you’d know.”
“There’s already too much bad art in the world, Niko,” I said. We were in the Pillars of Hercules, on Greek Street. He had specks of yellow paint all over his hands, and the back of his sweatshirt was white with plaster of Paris. He reminded me of Van Gogh in that made-for-TV biopic, the one starring that German actor who went on to be an expert on UFOs. Madness on both counts. I found it amusing that if Niko hadn’t been my friend, I would probably have despised him as a matter of form.
Laura was right about the legal side of things. There’s a Cromwellian fury at the heart of this nation, a cesspool of bigotry that wields the law as a weapon of revenge rather than the tool of justice it was created to be. You might even say that this propensity for score-settling is part of our character, that England’s damp and chilly climate has corroded our souls. The Bishops call it a theocracy and insist there’s no fairer form of government, but so far as I can see, Rouse’s so-called divine revolution was founded on envy, political infighting and the old-fashioned lust for power. But Niko’s work had its effect, even on me.
I always knew he painted portraits as well as abstracts. No gallery would take them of course, not after the Bermondsey Statutes, but he had whole sketchbooks and portfolios full of them, everything from pencil studies to finished oils. In spite of the strict prohibition laws on depicting the human form in painting, sculpture, art photography – they even had a clause against costume dolls – Niko was still able to find students who were willing to sit for him. It felt risky to them, I suppose – art as the new punk rock. Not that anyone seemed to give a damn what Niko was up to. Until the Laura paintings.
The first of Niko’s models was a stringy, dark-haired twenty-year-old named Joanna Newbis. He painted her naked, elongating her arms and fingers and coarsening the texture of her skin. Niko showed me some reproductions of drawings by Egon Schiele and I could see what he was getting at, but even so, I didn’t like them much, there was something of the butcher’s shop about them. When he’d finished with the figure studies he painted her face in close-up. Then he painted her cunt, over and over again. At first it looked so raw you could almost smell it. In the end you grew so used to seeing it, you forgot what it was. It became a thing in its own right, a ragged, reddish-brown ellipsis, slightly puckered along its edges, like a split fruit, or like one of those bizarre single-celled pond organisms you can only see with the aid of a microscope.
I saw him do the same trick with a scorpion tattoo on the shoulder of one of his other models – a kid named Dwain Khan – and also with the lace edging of a silk camisole. He highlighted color and texture, emphasizing the abstract qualities that lay dormant in the most concrete, the most specific of subject matters. His paintings were enthralling and disturbing at the same time. To dismiss what he did as pornography is the cheapest brand of ignorance.
If you get the wrong judge though, even having the right lawyer might not save you. There’s more than a whisper of corruption about our courts these days, but for me the most terrifying judges are those who actually believe in the sentences they’re handing down. In a way they’re just like Niko. There’s no reasoning with absolute faith.
* * *
—
I left him to make up the bed and then sent out for food. When it came he scoffed the lot. It was as if he hadn’t eaten for days. He looked better after that but there was still an air of futility about him, that panicky look rebel insurgents get when they realize that every safe-house has fallen and there’s nowhere left to run. He lay back in his seat and closed his eyes. I could see them flickering back and forth beneath the lids, like nervous mice. He was clearly exhausted.
“Where will you go?” I asked. I refused to imagine a scenario in which the morning came and he refused to leave, postponing his departure from one day to the next until the police arrived. I dismissed the idea at once, not because it seemed far-fetched but because I couldn’t deal with its implications. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Niko had his plan already worked out.
“I’m going to Leipzig,” he said. “There’s a guy who has a ticket waiting for me in Brussels. He says I won’t have a problem crossing over, provided I can get on the Eurostar in the first place. But I have that sorted, too. Stefan Rogers up at the college knows someone who’s supposed to be in Maastricht this weekend, for a conference on pharmaceuticals. He reckons I can buy his ticket. It’s all arranged.”
“But this is crazy, Niko. What will you do in Leipzig, even if you get there?”
“Teach and paint. As I do here.”
“You know that’s not going to happen. You’ve not been east of Frankfurt in years. I have, and I can tell you the infrastructure’s just not there anymore. The universities are a joke – just glorified military academies. And unless you feel like teaching maths or Chinese to twelve-year-olds there aren’t any teaching gigs.”
At best he’d get some sweeping-up job in a canteen or factory. At worst he’d end up as manual labor on one of the reconstruction sites. That’s about the only positive thing you can say about Eastern Europe these days: there’s always plenty of building work going.
Niko knew these things as well as I did. I think that was at least partly why he looked so tired.
“I’ll manage,” he said. “At least I’ll be able to work.”
“In one of those blasted high-rises with the concrete cancer? Or in a basement that fills up with sewage whenever it rains?”
“If I have to.”
“Have you been to see Mica?” That was probably the wrong thing to say right then but I’d run out of arguments. Niko shuddered.
“I can’t face it,” he said. “I’ll write to her.”
“Does she know you’re here?”
“God, no.”
Mica Okonkwo lived on a decrepit houseboat on the Regent’s Canal. Not the park end of course, but the eastern stretch, over towards the King’s Cross basin. Her studio was a sublet
, part of a converted warehouse complex in Camden. She taught English part-time at a local primary school but even so I think she found it difficult to make ends meet. Once during the summer I’d seen her stacking shelves in Tesco’s. In certain lights she looked haggard and crazy like one of the bag-ladies who camp out on the sidings at Waterloo Station, but then she’d turn her head and smile and you’d see someone else: a woman who knew her own mind and intended to use it. I don’t know how she met Niko. As far as I knew, she lived alone.
Mica worked in ceramics, building tiny sculptures using rolls of clay that she left to harden then scraped smooth with a flexible steel kidney. The finished objects resembled beach flotsam, or artifacts from an ancient burial site. I have no idea how she coped with Niko’s women. That was something none of us talked about, least of all Mica.
The strangest thing about her was her sympathy with our esteemed leader, Bishop Damian Rouse. Not that Mica was in favor of the Bermondsey Statutes – she had been as enraged by the reintroduction of the death penalty as Niko – just that so far as her own work was concerned, she said she found it easy to comply with them.
“It is still possible to say big things in a small way,” she insisted. She and Niko were always arguing over this. Mica had conducted a considerable amount of research into isolated societies where photography was still seen as a major religious transgression, so she knew all about the sanctity of the human image. When Niko’s work was going well, he appeared to thrive on these discussions. When he was having difficulties he would get drunk and accuse Mica of collaborating with the enemy. He could actually become quite aggressive, which was unlike him. Mica had her own ways of dealing with him, no doubt, but she never backed down in an argument.
I knew Niko had asked Laura to model for him, but I didn’t know the half of it. If I had, I’d have told him not to be an idiot. It was as if he had a death wish or something. But then again that isn’t exactly uncommon among artists.
He worked up the portraits of Rouse from the photographs in the Mackinnon biography. That book was hard to come by, even then, although it wasn’t until after the trial that it was officially banned. Niko’s masterpiece showed Rouse as he appeared during his Cambridge days: the velvet blazer and horn-rimmed spectacles, the blond hair flopping forward into his eyes. It was at Cambridge that Rouse developed his signature style – the studied nonchalance of the outcast intellectual – and although he’s lost his hair and gained some weight since then, the frilled shirts and heavy specs remain the same.
Laura he painted from life. I have to say it was a shock, seeing her like that, even though I knew the scene Niko had painted was entirely the figment of his imagination. In a way it was that image – Laura on her knees with Rouse’s dick in her mouth – that finally made me realize that she and I were over, that we had run our course, that there was no way back. Naturally, she looked glorious – you could say it was her best role yet. And then that side panel: Noah Pinkowski, seated behind a lectern taking notes, an onyx fountain pen between his fingers, his denim-clad, foreshortened legs drawn up on his stool. The scale and technical accomplishment of the painting suggested that Niko had started work on it long before Pinkowski’s execution, yet the timing of its unveiling – less than a month afterwards – seemed to suggest that it had been painted as a direct response.
Pinkowski’s was not the first state execution to be carried out in the wake of the Bermondsey Statutes, but it was the most notorious. Pinkowski’s alleged crime was his authorship of The Rotterdam Club, a scandalous and suspiciously well documented account of Damian Rouse’s alleged association with the Golden Gryphon, the neo-Nazi organization that was said to be behind the metro bombings in Paris and Budapest. That was the official version anyway, though there were certain insider factions who insinuated that Rouse wanted Pinkowski removed from circulation because he had scored higher yearly averages than Rouse when they were both at Cambridge.
Score-settling, in other words. Pinkowski being a dwarf may have added some color to the news coverage, but it certainly didn’t help him on the stand.
The title of Niko’s painting was “The Magdalene.” He may as well have called it “The Suicide Note.”
* * *
—
He went out like a light. I managed to get to sleep OK but woke again in the small hours, filled with that sense of foreboding you get when you know something is wrong but cannot immediately remember what it is. Outside, it was raining hard. I listened to the water sluicing down the faulty guttering, hoping the window seal in Niko’s room hadn’t begun leaking again.
I traded the Fulham place for the New Cross flat more or less the minute Laura moved out. Laura loathed southeast London, which was probably the main reason I decided to move there – I knew she would never be tempted to try and come back. She referred to my place in New Cross as the roach motel, which was actually a misnomer as I never had cockroaches, the flat was too damp for them, too close to the river. The money I had left over I salted away. I lay in the dark with my eyes open, wondering if Niko would take any of the money if I offered it to him. It seemed like a waste to me. I imagined him getting off the train in Leipzig and knew he would stand out a mile. He’d most likely get mugged in the first five minutes if his comrades didn’t send him a minder.
I didn’t have much more than spare change in the flat. I fretted about how things might look later, if the police came knocking, if they discovered I’d withdrawn a huge wad of cash on the very day my old friend and criminal associate Nikolaus Schilling jumped bail and fled to Europe under an assumed identity.
I got out of bed at around six o’clock. I didn’t want to wake Niko before I had to, so I washed and shaved at the hand basin in my bedroom. The basin was square and heavy, supported by a cast-iron bracket secured to the wall with giant masonry screws. There was a blue-gray tidemark halfway up the bowl that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard I scrubbed at it. Like everything else in the flat, the sink had a prewar feel, a robust ugliness that had disgusted Laura on sight but for which I felt a grudging respect.
The basin seemed to insist on its rights. Perhaps that’s why I’d never had it removed, even though for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year I found no use for it.
When I went through to the kitchen to make coffee I found Niko already there. He was fully dressed and seemed more in control of himself than he had done the previous evening, but the sight of him unnerved me, all the same. If I tell you he looked like his own ghost, you’ll think you know what I mean, but you’ll only understand a part of it. Yes, he looked gaunt and pale and nakedly preoccupied. But looking at him, leaning against the kitchen counter in his tatty old Levi’s, I became suddenly and painfully aware of how irretrievably he had lost his place in the scheme of things. He could not walk into a travel agency and book a seat on an aeroplane, nor could he apply for a teaching post outside of his current postcode. He could not send mail without knowing it would probably be opened by the Home Office censors. He could not broadcast, he could not publish, he could not vote.
I experienced a sudden twinge of vertigo, as if these strictures applied to myself instead of to him.
“I’m going to call Stefan Rogers,” I said. “It’s safer if I do it. Then I’ll need to go out for an hour or so. Will you be all right here by yourself while I’m gone?”
He nodded. In the time that remained to us, we barely spoke two words to each other that weren’t essential for basic communication. I downed half a cup of coffee then took the tube up to Shoreditch, where I telephoned Stefan Rogers from a public call box and arranged to meet him in a burger bar opposite Charing Cross Station. I called in at the bank, then went to a grubby little shopping mall I knew just off Cheshire Street and bought a waterproof rucksack, a pair of black Doc Martens and a selection of own-brand T-shirts, sweatshirts and jeans. Niko was an inch or so taller than me and I was a couple of pounds heavier than him, but we wer
e more or less the same size and I knew the clothes would fit.
I walked into the burger bar just after ten thirty. Stefan Rogers was already there, sitting at a corner table flicking through Time Out. I ordered myself a cup of coffee and he asked me about the Kuwait job. As I got up to leave, Stefan handed me a paperback book, an ancient and dog-eared copy of Dr. No.
“Thanks for lending me this,” he said. “I’d forgotten how good it is.”
The Eurostar ticket was tucked inside, still wrapped in its cellophane seal. Stefan and I had agreed upon the book ruse instinctively, caught halfway between mutual terror at exposing ourselves to risk on another’s behalf, and excitement at starring in our very own spy movie.
At six forty-five that evening I said goodbye to Niko on the concourse of St. Pancras Station. It was still the rush hour. Streams of commuters pushed past us on every side. I looked at Niko and shrugged. We embraced briefly and then he disappeared into the crowd.
I never saw him again.
* * *
—
I went to the Odeon cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. They were showing Wendell Schwarz’s Passover, a new director’s cut, and I went in just as the film was about to start. I fell asleep more or less as soon as the lights went down and woke up a couple of minutes before the final credits. I’d seen the film with Laura when it first came out. We were in Istanbul, on one of our rare trips abroad together, and we’d gone into the cinema because it was the only place the air conditioning appeared to be working. I remember Laura took her shoes off under the seat, then spent the entire film reading the Paris Review. Most of all, I remember how happy we were. Things always seemed easier between us when we weren’t in London.
When I came back out on to the street it was raining again. I walked down Charing Cross Road with my head down, bought a copy of the Evening Standard at the station entrance. There was nothing in the paper about Niko and my heart lifted at that, even though I knew it was still far too soon to start imagining that he – or I – was out of the woods. When I arrived back at the flat I made myself busy fixing supper. It wasn’t until after I’d eaten that I went into the spare room. The bed was made, the corners of the undersheet tightly folded as if Niko had been to the kind of school that set a value on such things. Perhaps he had. Belatedly I realized I had no idea.
