Darke
Page 9
I had an invitation to the opening party, at which Rimington (S.) was going to give a little talk, after which the gathered throng would be invited to make and to solve their own Puzzles, while being videotaped as they worked. The resultant variations on a theme would then be streamed live for the rest of the show, on an enormous wall at the rear of the gallery.
It was a prospect that I found resistible. I sent S. a brief note, and signed it J., regretting my incapacity to attend. I didn’t add any details. Suzy, on the other hand, decided to go, I suspect to spite me. God knows she had been exposed to my views, and knew that I would regard her visit to the opening as an act, if not of treachery, at least of provocation. The treachery itself was exposed a few weeks later, when an ‘original’ artwork, which she had constructed dutifully on the night of the opening, and then purchased, arrived at the door, delivered by an android gallery boy of the standard sub-Armani type.
Suzy being out at the time, I opened the box and took out whatever you wish to call a Rimington, other than horseshit. A picture? A sculpture? An installation? Not only was the category unclear, so was the maker. Suzy had put it together herself. But as S. observed in the printed notes to the catalogue, the work in (t)his show was collaborative. He supplied the shapes, the sizes, the colours, the frames, the occasion. His co-equals put these given pieces into a new shape of their own. ‘Thus,’ S. concluded, ‘deconstructing the autonomy of the artist, producing a work of art which can be traced to the dialectic between artist and onlooker, in which the latter becomes an artist and the former himself an onlooker. The artistic gaze is irrevocably dual.’
Rimington (S.) apparently believes that if the term ‘artist’ has to be used at all, we have to erase or cross it out at the same time. I’m not clear what this means, though it’s much how I feel about him.
I hate the telly. Stupid stuff. But occasionally, in a weak moment, I turn on the News at Ten. On one such foolish evening, I was informed that the Prime Minister, blessed be his name, had reshuffled his dog-eared pack and come up with a new Minister of Education. And there, staring down the screen like a demented adult child, was the egregious Golde.
‘Gollum!’ How bloody marvellous! He looked – Foetus Hague is another example, and Gummy Millipod, who killed his brother – like someone whose inner child persists in the visage of their outer adult, whose grown-up manifestation is unnatural, macabre and mildly alarming. A confirmation, if one was needed, that we are indeed being led by a gang of incompetent schoolboys.
Why can’t other people see this too? Or is it sufficiently common in politicians of the most thrusting kind, this regressive self-centredness, accompanied by an adult capacity to mask it in the phony voice of concern, and the learned facial tics and grimaces that are supposed to pass for compassion? Think: Margaret Thatcher, showing sympathy. It’s no wonder every politician needs spin doctors and image-enhancers. They change their views, alter their voices and bodily carriage, and the more they do so the less convincing they are. The mere desire to run for high office ought to disallow holding it.
And there was old Golde, Golluming away about his Precious Education!
I have had an impertinent email from George. There was no need, so far as I could anticipate, for him ever to initiate contact, but it was my own fault. He alone knew how to get in touch.
And today, this:
My Dear,
Do forgive me this, because there are, I believe, two formidable reasons to disobey your injunction to leave you alone for a goodly time. The first of these, I think you will agree, is not unamusing. The second I am initiating with some trepidation. On moral grounds, as we used to call them at school.
I recently received – or you have received, to put it properly – a letter with the embossed seal of the House of Commons, delivered by Registered Post. Though the postie was reluctant to allow it, I signed for it on your behalf, explaining that you were out of the country. I must admit to opening it. How could I not? And can you credit this? – It was from Golde, recently installed in a rather grand position in the government. A walking embodiment, one might call it, of the Peter Principle, though I always had a lurking respect for the boy. Unlike his fellows, he had a voice of his own. Sly, to be sure. But neither entirely disagreeable, nor stupid. I sometimes found him amusing, when I wasn’t repelled by him.
I suppose I still feel the same, encountering him in his adult incarnation. Are you aware of this? I have no idea how you live now, whether you have severed your connections to the world so thoroughly that you have abandoned the news, and the new. Our new Secretary of State for Education is forming an Advisory Board on the Arts in Secondary Education, to consist of ten carefully selected worthies, and writes to ask if you would do him the honour of serving on it?
I presume you will not answer this request, and unless you tell me otherwise, I will inform the Minister that you are not available for public service.
My second reason for writing, though, is more pressing, and I apologise for raising the matter. You/I have received, over the months of our agreement, a series of letters from Lucy – she always puts a return address, so I know it to be her – and I have not thrown any of them away. The most recent have notes on the envelopes themselves. Typical: ‘DAD, FOR GOD’S SAKE READ THIS, I NEED TO SEE YOU! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?’
I find this heart-breaking. I am chagrined that you should be so adamantine in your withdrawal. Surely some sign, some glimmer of response, some acknowledgement is called for? It is a cruel and unusual punishment for her, and I am aware that you have always adored Lucy. Why would you cause additional pain, after all that you both have gone through?
Can I beg you to answer her in some way or other, however slight, and however strong your reasons – I cannot, quite, fathom them – for remaining so cruelly aloof.
Forgive me for saying so.
Your old chum,
George.
I was sufficiently astonished and distressed by this to turn off the computer and to walk away. I may have been hyperventilating, but I’m not sure what that entails. I cannot recall being so angry since my battle with Spikedog. I will not be bullied in this manner. I cannot bear being the focus of George’s interest. Or anyone else’s.
Or indeed my own. I do not write in this journal because I am interested in myself. I bore myself silly. These notes and evasions and snippets are mere distractions: I am rummaging in my effects, reduced to this. It’s rather agreeable actually to have something to do.
Dear George,
I am sorry you have felt obliged to disregard my clear instructions. But as you have done so, and in the spirit of marginally diminished curmudgeonliness, here are my answers:
1. Write to the Minister. Say NO. Perhaps you might convey to him my view that ‘The Arts’ ought not to be taught at secondary level at all. Better to teach young persons to enter trade, or to learn one.
2. Throw Lucy’s letters away.
Never write to me like this again. If you cannot avoid doing so, for your moral reasons, then do not write to me at all.
Yours,
James
MAN SAVED BY FUCKING THE CLEANER!
Was I tempted? Not at all. Better than that, I was flattered, and better yet, touched, and best of all, momentarily breathless with sensuous pleasure. I held onto her hand fiercely for a few moments, but quickly repressed the impulse. Give in to that, and lips are next. I remember the drill. It escalates, it rises. I didn’t.
I may not have fucked the cleaner – God forbid! – but it was well nigh time to fuck the dog. Revenge is a dish best served hot. Hotter. It was time to do some serious research! I love the internet, that library of information and misinformation, the hunting ground of thieves and butchers. What surprises me is not how much malice I find there, but how little.
And so useful when you need something, if like me you have retired from the world. If you Google ‘What is the world’s hottest sauce?’ you get a number of links. I chose ‘Chilliworld’s T
op Ten Hottest Sauces’. The third was distinctly promising:
ChilliPepperPete Congealed Dragons Blood. This is a [sic] even hotter version of the bestselling Dragons Blood. Pete says that the concentrated flavours and heat makes this bad boy over 5 million scovill. £19.95
A ‘Scovile’, I gather, is a scale named after Wilbur Scoville, who calibrated chilli hotness in 1912. Sixteen million is as hot as you can get: ‘Pure capsaicin and Dihydrocapsaicin’. But, persevering, I found ChilliPepperPete’s apparently lethal concoction was but a strawberry milkshake compared to:
Blair’s Collector’s Reserve bottle contains 16 million Scoville Units of Pure Capsaicin. The tiny 1-ml vial inside contains pure capsaicin crystals, hottest element known to man. Nothing in the world could get hotter then [sic] this 16 Million Reserve. Be among the few to get one of these limited edition bottles. No more the [sic again] 999 of Blair’s 16 Million Reserve will be produced.
The reviews were promising: ‘Back when I was in my frat phase and dinosaurs roamed the earth a frat bro dared me to dump a tsp of this on my tongue. Lo! The earth was covered in magma for forty days and forty nights! Hell had released all fury on my bowels!’
Sounded good to me. I dislike frat boys almost as much as Spikedogs. That the amount of hot stuff was so minuscule, and the price so extravagant (£245), reassured me. This was just the bad boy for my bad dog. Anyway, it’s always better to buy the best. I’m not rich enough to buy cheap things.
My only fear was that Blair’s Reserve would not just teach Spikedog a lesson, it might kill him. That’s the problem with employing your nuclear deterrent. You can’t learn anything if you are dead. Death is not a punishment, whatever the proponents of its capital variety may argue. Prison is a punishment. Misery and pain and despair and solitary confinement are punishments. Blair’s Reserve is palpably a punishment. I should recommend it to the good ol’ state of Texas, it would save them a fortune in hangings, or however they execute their villains. They only need to incinerate their tongues, and bowels. That’d learn ’em.
The tiny well-wrapped vial arrived six days after I sent my order, accompanied with the direst warnings about overuse – which meant virtually any use at all – and especially about getting any of the devilish stuff on your skin. This would apparently be exceedingly unpleasant, and the resultant hole would end up in Peking.
Perfect. That very evening, wearing two pairs of rubber gloves, I inserted the crystals into a piece of fillet steak, which I then coated with Tabasco, to make sure it looked and smelled the same as Spikedog’s accustomed hotty treats.
It wasn’t. After I lobbed the napalm accurately into his chosen locale, he approached it with barely repressed delight, like a drinker in a bar who orders his Bloody Mary extra spicy. He gobbled it down, and looked up at my window with as grateful a look as could sit upon his hideous features. Dumb mutt.
There ensued a short pause as he began to feel something new, and different. And worse. And then – trust me on this, it is not fanciful – he levitated like an overfilled but unknotted balloon suddenly released, you could imagine him spiralling upwards making rude noises, diminishing as he got further away and the air ran out, then tumbling back to Earth as a soggy bit of rubber.
As he landed, his legs splayed out, in imitation of the sort of tiger-skin rugs Sir Henry would have placed in Ayah’s bedroom, if he’d been allowed.
Furious activity ensued at both ends of the wretched creature. If his previous howls, at their most piteous, were, say, 500 on the Scoville Howling Scale, of a sudden he was at 5,000 and rising. If a dog can scream, he was screaming. Windows opened above his garden, and in the adjoining houses.
‘Shut up, you fuckin’ mutt!’ the neighbours chorused. Spikedog screamed louder. His tongue hung so far out of his slobbering mouth that you would have supposed him trying to rid himself of it entirely, to excise it at the junction with his throat.
At the other end, my chilli pepper was proving a catalyst for the universal organic truth: the body is a mechanism for producing shit. It is inexcusable of me to mix metaphors like this – I can be quite strict on the subject – but he was mixing his. He was an open fire hydrant of sewage. He howled like a demented banshee (whatever that is), whirled like a dervish, trampolined up and down again, spewing as he bounced.
Spikeman hurried out, bare-chested, buckling his belt. ‘Oy, darlin’,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
Watching carefully from behind the curtains, I would have laughed, had I any laughter in me. Instead I gloated, a richer sensation by far.
Part II
It was dictated by her physical grace, the confidence that nothing could ever go wrong with her body. She’d suffered recurrent bouts of depression, whether caused by her inability to write, or the other way round. But through it all the physical glow was maintained. She kept up her tennis, joined Queen’s Club after we moved to London, and actually improved as the years went by, until she had established herself as a high-quality club player.
Though she’d scorned doubles at Oxford – ‘if I am going to lose I want to be responsible for it myself’ – in middle age she came to enjoy it more and more. Less physically demanding, more tactical. And anyway, most clubs do not allow singles play at peak hours. Yet another reason, Suzy remarked tartly, why this country cannot produce good players.
One afternoon, when they had a roll-up mixed doubles – you simply got matched up with whoever was hanging about – she was paired with a portly, middle-aged doctor named Lawrence Weinberg, a former Cambridge blue, who was genial, encouraging and possessed a solid all-court game. They teamed up, got on and became a regular partnership.
Too regular, I thought. Soon he – they – were Suzy’s major topic of conversation, for I had long since silenced her on the gossipy inwardness of London literary life, which I despised: who was likely to lose their job as literary editor, who’d switched agents or publishers, who’d be shortlisted for the Booker, who was fucking whom. Hah.
Suzy found more and more time, and excuses, for her new passion for mixed doubles. She was out a lot – didn’t he have any doctoring to do? – and came home smiling, triumphant, and late. A shower after the match, a few drinks to wind down, home just in time for supper, which I was expected to provide, and would not. Often we went out, or without. I was aware that she would have liked some acknowledgement of her exalted state, some suspicion, some confrontation. Something dramatic.
I suspected that she had chosen him because he was Jewish – appetitive, highly educated, over-confident – because she thought it might provoke me. She would have been delighted if I’d put framed Hamas posters in my study, or added The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to my bedside table. Something to show that I cared. Anyway, I could hardly accuse her, could I? She had an affair. So what? I did too, more than once. People make such a fuss about the odd casual insertion. We had dinner with Lawrence and his perfectly adequate wife on a couple of occasions, but we were playing at being civilised, and I put an end to it.
I suspect that the sexual partnership ended within a year or two, but the tennis one went on and on. In the event what really mattered was that he was a doctor, and he was worried about her health. She and I had both noticed that she was low on energy, and that her throaty cough was less sexy, more insistent than it had been. Suzy shrugged it off. Illness was something that happened to other people, a sign of physiological imperfection that didn’t pertain to her. An organic category mistake. If she was going to be ill, it would be mental, never physical. I cannot remember her having so much as a cold. Her increasingly husky voice, she insisted, was merely an attractive by-product of her cigarette smoking, not a symptom of some malady.
She didn’t consult a doctor, maintaining that they were for the needy, seedy and weedy. But it was finally the doctor who consulted her. As she walked off the court, after a strenuous final rally, having twice successfully chased down a lob, only to lose the point and match to a drop shot, she stood by her chair gasping.
‘I’m fine. Do shut up,’ said Suzy, taking the courtside chair, coughing harshly, handkerchief to her mouth. ‘You fucking doctors are such scaremongers.’
‘Are you coughing up blood?’
‘No, it’s nothing. Hardly anything. Nothing. I just cough so much it makes my throat bleed.’
That evening Suzy got a phone call, and went into that hushed I’ll-take-this-in-my-study mode that often indicated that something was up. I ignored it, and didn’t ask who it was when she returned to the drawing room.
‘That was Lawrence,’ she said.
‘Oh yes.’
‘He’s concerned about me. He thinks I need to get a check-up.’
‘So do I. I’ve said so a lot. Why are you listening to him and not me?’
‘For fuck’s sake, this isn’t a pissing contest! He’s a doctor, and he says he would be grateful if he could set up an appointment for me.’
‘With him? That’s a bit rich . . .’
‘Why? It isn’t improper or unethical to use a friend as your physician.’