Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Only F had been there in the foyer, standing at the desk, dictating an email. There was commotion in the main room, but Gael wasn’t led in and she didn’t go of her own volition because it had been an odd day and her plan to fuck M like a mouthguard-sporting, hunkering rugby player would already not be as good as she’d imagined and the hallway would do for this transaction. F was friendly, if to-the-point, explaining that they don’t normally take in work until a week before a show. That’s why there are only twenty-six shows a year and not fifty-two. There’s no space to take in one artist’s work with another’s in situ, or while they’re altering the space. That, and there aren’t fifty-two artists worth showing in a year. But Gael insisted that it was only these five – that the rest would arrive by shipment the following week, when she’d be in touch again. Moving swiftly on to the topic of money, so as not to let F make a big favour out of a simple issue of storage, Gael said she’d like to fix up now, in cash. The more of it she could get off her person, the better. As F navigated the computer slowly with one hand to write up and print out the invoice, she told Gael there’d been a discussion and the auras could simply not be shown against white walls – they don’t want these to invite comparisons to Robert Ryman’s white on white on white by white or harkback Ab-Ex – and that paint stripping would be the best alternative. ‘So you’ll see on the invoice’ – F squinted at the monitor: a different set of glasses, this time, tucked into the cleavage of her starched-bedsheet dress – ‘that’s not cheap, but it’s not expensive.’ Six thousand. When Gael fell silent, F said that the gallery is a twenty-two-hundred-square-foot space and paint stripping can cost up to fifteen dollars per square foot. So they had the artist’s finances in mind when they’d decided only to strip the main back wall. ‘Remind me how many we’re showing?’ Fourteen, Gael said, and asked could they not just paint it grey, like the floor. F threw her long plait from the front of her shoulder back like a tie tossed out of grub’s way. ‘A rough unpainted plaster wall will enhance the paintings’ raw, arresting, bleached effect. You have to understand that if a work looks five per cent better, it’s ten times more likely to sell. If it looks ten per cent better, it’s the difference between selling two paintings and selling all of them. But that’s only my professional opinion, on which this whole business rests.’

  So there it was. Paint stripping and opening night refreshments plus tax. $7,213.56.

  Later, in the safety of a toilet cubicle, she’ll put the remaining $30,221 back in the matryoshka envelopes and arrive at another percentage.

  ‘Mum?’ Gael answers her phone in the café she’d come to to recover and take stock and check for damage. She hadn’t drunk any water since her run and the loose cash was rammed into her bag like stolen jewellery into a bin liner. She’d sort that out shortly. And her slovenly outfit. But she’d sit here first and get her mind in order, unrushed. The missed calls were up to seven, but she had answered this one before it even rang.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Sive asks.

  ‘Yeah.’ Gael wipes her nose with one of the stiff napkins from the dispenser on the table. ‘It’s just … good to hear you.’

  ‘You’re crying,’ Sive says.

  ‘Am I?’ Gael feels a smile on her cheeks, but she looks at the pile of bunched-up napkins before her like a stash of melting snowballs. She has no one to throw them at. ‘Oh yeah.’

  Sive laughs a little, warmly, and that sets Gael off. She sobs and sobs the wobbly, achy outburst of gleaning, from one moment to the next, that you’re lonely.

  ‘I’m sorry for not phoning earlier, love. If I’d known–’

  ‘No,’ Gael says, ‘I’m fine, really–’

  ‘I suppose I think of you and I just, I think, you know. I think of the mast of a ship.’

  Gael inhales in intervals and hears her mother’s words and voice apart and then together. She tilts the dregs in her mug to gauge if they’re worth drinking. Sive doesn’t rush through the silence. Some people can’t bear to talk to Sive on the phone because she treats the receiver like an empty auditorium. She doesn’t condense the conversation or make it efficient or audience-ready. Sometimes, she says barely anything. Just calls to spend time in that receptive place. Hums, maybe, a refrain, after a while, absolutely to herself. Gael is sure she stays with the phone to her ear, silencing away long after the other line has disconnected. Perhaps it’s the static she likes. The acoustics. But mobile phones are no good for static. No doubt there’s an app to add background static to phone calls like the false shutter click on digital cameras. How romantic the species can be. And foolish. ‘Will you talk to me,’ Gael says, ‘now that you’ve made me all soppy?’

  Sive sighs. ‘If I remember correctly, I was phoning to scold you. It was my Motherly Duty. But I don’t think I’ll bother. If it’s all the same.’

  Gael thanks the waiter who refills her mug for the third time and clears her plate. She had some satirically overpriced eggs, so she’s bought herself another half hour of sanctuary. There’s the sound of listening.

  ‘Are you in a café?’

  Gael sniffs. ‘No, they serve coffee in the brothel.’

  The clack of a tongue. ‘What’s it like?’ Sive asks.

  ‘The coffee shop?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Gael blinks her eyes into focus and looks around. At the huge blackboard menus with chalk font listing thirty kinds of coffee up high behind the bar. The counter displaying monster pastries to take away in brown paper bags – icing a fist thick on the cupcakes. A six-strong wait staff. The chunky wooden tables and colourfully cushioned chairs. Redbrick pillars. The layout, lighting and décor designed to make a roomy chain café feel cosy and local. She’s at one of those long communal tables where people come with their laptops and eke out hot drinks for hours. But there’s no one else at it now. ‘It’s quiet,’ Gael says, noticing that the din isn’t as bad here, ‘in comparison. The noise here … I’ve been using the airline earplugs. They fall out. But at least they turn down the soundtrack for an hour or two, if they don’t quite turn it off.’ She pauses. ‘It’s like … there’s no silent register. All the registers are taken. Even the ones humans can’t hear. Those are taken too. With … unoiled handbrakes or … silent alarms … or infrastructure disintegrating because the Saudis own it and it’s cheaper to let a bridge cave in than to raze it.’

  Sive makes a wincing sound. ‘You’d think we’d come on from ancient Rome.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘So many died because of the noise. Chariot wheels clattering on paving stones. The construction and carousing that went on night and day. Thousands died to it.’

  ‘Death by noise isn’t a thing, Mum.’

  ‘If sheer exhaustion doesn’t get you, because you can’t sleep, you can have a stroke or heart attack. The body has a ‘fight or flight’ reaction to noise. The nerves and hormones and cardiovascular functions are all affected.’

  Gael’s jaw is dropped. Here she is worrying about being robbed by her contractor and the damn background jazz could be killing her softly.

  Sive asks, ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Oh, you know. With a dude in a place.’

  ‘I see,’ Sive says. ‘Very reassuring.’

  ‘With a Cuban guy in Harlem.’

  Sive won’t step into Gael’s traps. ‘So long as you’re being sensible.’

  ‘How’s Art?’

  ‘He said you’ve been emailing. That your interview went well and you’re waiting to hear?’

  Gael sometimes forgets to whom she’s told which lies. ‘Tell him I’ll get a job when he does.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing.’

  ‘Writes a good email, does Art.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘But I suppose that figures,’ Gael says. ‘Since the only relationship he has with his son is by email.’

  Sive lets a few moments pass. And then something in the would-be static changes. ‘You’ve been pressuring Guthrie to do more paintings?’


  Gael groans. ‘What is he like? Telling Mammy on me.’

  ‘I’m glad you admire his talent.’

  ‘Yeah yeah.’

  ‘And that you’re encouraging. But you don’t really know how to just encourage, Gael, do you? Only to goad.’

  ‘Whatever you’re having yourself.’

  ‘Don’t be facetious with me. The thing I have to say to you I hoped not to have to say, but this … Well. It is what it is.’ Sive pauses.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your brother’s doing phenomenally well, Gael.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘But you don’t know why.’

  ‘It’s because of the kids, obviously. He’s completely high on them. He’s found his drug of choice.’

  ‘It’s because,’ Sive says steadily, ‘of antipsychotics.’

  When it comes to the truth, it can never be presented in isolation. To tell one truth, you have to tell others. Sive uses a lenient voice, which Gael knows is effortful for her to sustain and she prefaces the account by telling Gael that she needn’t interject or comment. Sive will know she’s there, sitting down in a café in Manhattan, doing her best to listen through all the bedlam and noise and blare. ‘I’ll tell you the facts first, or I know you won’t hear anything else. But please know that what I say after is just as important.’

  Gael covers her other ear with her hand. ‘Mum? You’re scaring me.’

  ‘You never directly asked how your brother got custody of the children. If you had, I might have told you. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It’s his private life and I hoped he’d open up to you himself, when he was ready. But that hasn’t happened. And now it seems you need to know. The fact is, as a culture, we don’t think it’s possible for young men to be assaulted by young women. Boys are physically stronger. More often than not, boys consent to having sex with girls, whatever their belief system. And anatomically … well, the fact is that erections are not always accompanied by arousal and certainly not by willingness to break one’s pledge to one’s God. One’s whole belief system. I won’t stay on this topic, Gael, because it’s difficult. I am his mother.’ Sive clears her throat very harshly. ‘Ára coerced him. There was bruising and all that was documented at the hospital. I took him in on the day it happened, not only because I suspected, but because his fits were so frequent, he was barely recovering between them. At the hospital, there was a social worker, and I wasn’t privy to those conversations but Guthrie had some difficult decisions to make, and our priority was to get him into a stable condition. Whether or not to press charges came later. Your father and I had to deal with that together. Jarleth was barely recognizable. It seemed as though he was another patient, sick with all of it – sick with the pain this … girl, only a minor, too, we forget. If I hadn’t met Art by then … I don’t know. He was still living in England, but he ferried over. I feared Jarleth would set a torch to the girl’s house. It was a dark, dark time, Gael, and I won’t say we did things the right way, but we did them how we did them. We three turned up at Ára’s family home and told her parents that the hospital had photographic evidence and DNA swabs – which was your father’s idea – and that this was undoubtedly a forced encounter. Just like that, her parents knew it to be the truth. How did they know? Because she was pregnant. The timing matched. And there was a private history of violence we only learned of later. Expulsions. “Antisocial behaviour,” one school put it. We left them, that first time, with the knowledge of it. And the threat – at that stage, it wasn’t blackmail – but we had to go back. Because – we don’t know how, was it a text message or some sinister communication – Guthrie found out about the pregnancy and you’ve never seen a young man flood with such certainty and purpose. She wouldn’t do this to him and erase the results of it. The results would never be erased from his soul and he wouldn’t let another sin be pinned to him for eternity, he said. He’d raise the children. The social worker told us that, with his condition and age, he was an unfit parent, even in the hugely unlikely event that the girl’s parents would cancel the trip to Manchester and in the even less likely event that Ára would give birth to twins she wouldn’t get to keep, which was so unlikely, the conversation wasn’t worth having, the social worker said. But Jarleth was involved by then and you know how your father reacts to being told a thing is impossible. Much like you do. And I admire you both for it. It was one of the things–’ Sive halts the march of her sentence, then continues:

  ‘Guthrie’s doctor reminded us that he’d never tried antipsychotics – often effective for his disorder – of course because Guthrie wouldn’t acknowledge the condition. And you can give someone a placebo, but you can’t give them a drug they don’t know they’re taking. But now he had good reason to cooperate. The doctor told him the drug had been known to help in cases of epilepsy, too; reducing inflammation in the brain, or some such thing he said. And Guthrie held out his hand out for the pills. They monitored him for a day or two in hospital, then as an outpatient, and he didn’t have another fit. I know you’re still there, Gael, and that you’re listening. This is a lot for you to take in and the only reason I’m telling you is so that you know why his fits have stopped and what it means for you to ask him to do more of those paintings. He painted those to remember what the fits were like, before they left his life for good – he did one for each he’s had in the two years since the twins’ birth. Only a handful. The last was in March. He won’t paint another unless he relapses and I know you wouldn’t wish that upon him.’

  A long queue has formed at the pastry counter and Gael can’t understand how six staff members aren’t enough to keep on top of it. It seems as if it the fault lies with the girl on the till, clicking its touch screen as if playing online Texas Hold’em for all the money in the tray. Her lower lip hangs loosely. People in the queue talk into Bluetooth headsets. One reads the nutritional information on a takeaway chia seed and coconut pudding. Gael had seen those puddings on the way in and thought they looked nice. There was something else in them. What was it? Oh yeah. Raspberry coulis. But $6.95 worth? If they’d been $5.95. $5.95 is just over $5. $5 and change. Whereas $6.95 is $10 with some change back. Maybe they could have made it $6.25 and then you’d still feel it was just over the five rather than under ten.

  ‘Thanks for letting me know, Mum, okay? I have to go. I’ve got a thing.’

  ‘If you need to talk to someone,’ Sive says, ‘your father’s on secondment in New York. Just so you know. I’ll send you his number. It’s not likely you’d want to, but he’s there. He’s been very civil. And with this–’

  ‘Really gotta go, Mum. Say hi to Art.’

  Gael closes her laptop and her backpack and takes it to the restroom to tally the cash and change clothes. The Plaza’s luggage storage has her rolling bag, containing all of her good clothes, bar one set. But she doesn’t change into that outfit. She changes into her bargain-bin boyfriend jeans and grey hoodie, all biro-marked from graffiti’ing the blackest and bluest of things. Guthrie & Ára Up a Tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. She washes her face and her genitals at the sink.

  Forty per cent is gone, she determines, when she counts up what’s left of the cheque. She whacks the wall a dozen times. Hand over fist, options forfeited. She splashes her face again. Ties up her hair, messily. Glad not to be clean and glamorous. Glad to be dressed boyishly. A boy, destined for manhood, physical dominance, priorities straight. She won’t spend another hundred. The change, only. She’ll take thirty thousand back to Guthrie for Christmas. On top of whatever comes of the show. No less. She should never have involved him. She’d had a dozen alternative plans, before the paintings, any one of which she could have made work. This had been an error. A big one. High time to cut losses.

  On the way out, she forgoes the chia-coconut pudding, but approaches the loose-lipped barista to ask if there’s somewhere she can pick up a sleeping bag.

  The girl gives her a hundred-mile stare, showcasing her lower gums, the colour of sealing wax. ‘You mean like, for c
amping?’

  ‘For protesting,’ Gael says.

  Make that a ninety-nine-mile stare. ‘Um. Lemme get the manager.’

  8

  Non Zero Sum

  October 2011

  I

  The night sky is that marauding kind of dark that comes of storm clouds and too much hanging in the morning’s balance. It’s hard to see if her mopping is making the granite cleaner or just pushing the dirt around. As far as she knows her physics, filth can’t really be got rid of. Only moved from one place to a less patronized place.

  Streetlamps cast insipid orange like dawn diffused through broken bottle shards on a beach. Dawn, though, is a way off. It’s five a.m. on Friday, 14th October. Gael’s tenth day of protest posturing. The Stanislavsky method is showing under her eyes and is expressing in the form of a constant dull headache. She hasn’t taken her backpack off once since arriving at Zuccotti Park, even while sleeping. It acts, now, as a Victorian bustle beneath her see-through poncho.

  ‘Church ain’t out till we quit singing.’

  Gael glances across to see if that comment had been directed at anyone. On all fours, Erin is lit from below as she scrubs grime from the underground lighting; rain spitting off her poncho; bleached dreads dripping out the front of her hood like stalactites. It’s a headfuck to tune into all the misdirected talk here – the interrupted points and itching, half-articulated arguments. All of it urgent. Gael had missed the camp’s transformation into the tiny town it now is: library, town hall-type assemblies, food outlets, sanitation committees, permanent residents and all. She’d missed the bond-forming march across Brooklyn Bridge a fortnight back, when police threw a net over seven hundred people and arrested them. But she’d been here for the mayor’s visit to inform protesters they would have to vacate by seven a.m. Friday so that the park can be cleaned. They’d be allowed to return afterward if they abide by Brookfield Properties’ rules, including no lying down in the park. That the cleanup was a pretext to dissolve the camp was obvious. Similar tactics had been used to evict M15 demonstrators in Spain. So Occupy had put out an emergency call for supporters to rally at the park at six a.m. this morning to defend the occupation. Those who’d been camping felt the crescendo as clear as the day that had to come and no one slept. Gael closed her eyes for an hour before midnight, but the clattering of tidying and rubbish collection kept her from resting and a heavy downpour at one a.m. had the effect of a cold morning shower. The less die-hard of the crowd fled, leaving only a few hundred sweepers and pavement-scourers. More rain took at least a hundred stalwarts – Gael among them – into the local McDonald’s, which suddenly reneged on its twenty-four-hour policy and shut its doors. McFuckinChickens all round.