by Johnny Mains
Walking on, the blizzard of photographs ended and the small exhibition started with his painting Oiseau, or Bird to you and me. What was it about? It looked like the skeletal remains of a dead bird, almost prehistoric, decaying on a beach, with part of the body missing to reveal the corpse of a young bird inside. Then there were a couple of sketches of things that looked like skeletons adorned with various pieces of meat.
Entrails and sausages, steaks and cuts. Next came a storyboard for a proposed film on surrealism and a proper painting called Le Signal de l’angoisee – The Signal of Anguish – depicting a woman who was naked, except for a pair of stockings, standing in a strange landscape being watched by someone you couldn’t really see through the square window of the building behind her. It was disconcerting, it was creepy, it made you stop and look back at the painting to see if the watcher had stepped forward, revealing themselves, but, no, they always stayed in the shadows. And that was good, that was something out of left field, which couldn’t be topped, or so I thought, but I was wrong. They had kept the best for last. Kept it for me, because it changed my life forever.
Tête Raphaëlesque éclatée.
Exploding Raphaelesque Head.
If you don’t know it, Dali’s painting was inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima and uses a classic Madonna-like pose typical of the Renaissance artist, Raphael, but has the head fragmenting. Some of these fragments looked like pieces of twisted silver. Flesh turned to metal, possibly transformed by the alchemy of nuclear forces, while the splitting parts around her neck are darker, almost stone-like, but in strange, sharp, conical, wriggling shapes that resemble shapes seen in some of Dali’s other work. This may be a painting depicting the instant after the explosion, still head-like before it shatters in a thousand different directions, as the woman looks down, demurely, almost in prayer.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I stood staring, oblivious to the other people who flowed behind me, tried to get in front of me for a better look, but I denied them with my closeness to the canvas. Eventually, after several minutes had passed and my eyes had finished taking in every square centimetre of the canvas, I snapped out of my reverie and spoke to a member of the gallery staff. I made some vague, rambling enquiries about buying the painting, which were instantly laughed off, until I insisted that I had the money to buy it if they named their price. That received a more hesitant, less certain laugh, which attracted the attention of some security staff who stood in the corners, hands behind their backs, watching my every move until I went to the shop in the Gallery. There I bought all the books I could find with Dali’s work in them. They even had a few tacky products inspired by the very painting that dominated my thoughts. A jigsaw, a tea towel, various notebooks, a shopping bag. I’ve added a few tacky products of my own over the years, all with a production run of one. Some I’ve commissioned from other artists, some I’ve made myself. If you ever come to my house, which is admittedly highly unlikely, you will see two walls covered in a reproduction of that exploding head. It also adorns my bedroom ceiling. I try to make it the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning keeping my eyes firmly closed until I am in position to gaze up at it.
But all of these things, they are never enough.
After I had made my mind up, after I had foolishly thought I was ready, my first subject was male, in his thirties, found sleeping rough beneath the pier – what was I thinking about? I almost died. He spat at me as soon as I took the tape off his mouth, struggling violently in the chair I had tied him to, trying to rock from side to side before he fell over. I’ve seen enough movies to know if that happened he would break the chair and be on me. I thought I could get the grenade into his mouth when he was shouting. It wouldn’t fit, and I had already pulled the pin. We both had about five seconds. I dropped the grenade under his chair and dived behind one of the blast walls I had constructed in my special studio. There wasn’t much left of him, and what was left, wasn’t pretty, and was, well, everywhere. Wrong, wrong, wrong and I thought my ear drums had burst with the noise.
My second subject was a homeless man and this time things went slightly better. I drugged him and took out all his teeth with the help of a hammer and some pliers, and managed to squeeze the grenade into his ruined mouth in plenty of time, especially with the pin protruding outwards. Still, what a mess. Grenades were clearly not the answer, but at least the money I splashed on state of the art earplugs, connected to a digital processor, was money well spent.
My third subject was a male hitchhiker. I killed him first – how? Well, that doesn’t matter, but it was better he was dead as I had started to experiment with different kinds of explosives and wanted to make things as simple as possible.
This time I used ammonia gelatine, placed in the mouth. Again, messy, but not without potential.
The fourth subject was an old beggar, and an old boozer too. I used Semtex this time, obtained from shadowy contacts of a guerrilla artist I know. This time I tried a different, more ambitious place to put the explosive, namely inside the skull. I should have been a surgeon, instead of the third waster son of a logging tycoon. I’m good at this. I shaved some of the old man’s hair off, before peeling back the scalp, and sawing through the bone, and then again and again at different angles until I was able to pull out a rough circle of skull before removing part of the brain. Too much Semtex was an obvious, beginner’s mistake and I also noted that I needed to remove more of the brain in future.
By now, I’d learned all I could from the men. I didn’t need them anyway; they were just practice. Dali’s painting is the fragmenting head of a woman. Killing these male subjects first had made things easier from a planning and preparation point of view, but from now on, it was going to be women only, and they would all be dead if possible. At peace, serene. Madonna-like.
The fifth subject was my first female, and my brilliant idea was to try and take the top of her skull out from inside her head, and make it easier to explode and come apart. It took hours to achieve anything like the desired effect, leaving me exhausted with another mess on my bloody, gloved hands. What was there before the explosion didn’t even resemble a head very much, so you can imagine what was left afterwards.
From now on, the skull would have to stay.
My sixth subject was a drug addict, and I went back to basics with the hole in the top of her head and a slightly lower amount of plastic explosive. Not enough for the desired effect, but getting there.
A woman possibly in her early thirties was my seventh subject. It was hard to tell her age. She’d clearly had it tough by the state of her, so in a way I was doing her a favour. I picked her up by the old bus station. Sadly, I over compensated with the explosive charge, and her head sort of imploded, collapsed in on itself, totally the wrong result, possibly due to where I placed it within her skull, I would need to do much better next time.
Now it was time to go up a gear, time to find a different sort of woman. Three at most, I hoped. Two to practise on and the third would be the charm. Sad, but true, and I’m not being insincere, not really, but none of my female test subjects so far could be classified as ‘lookers’, not after the drugs and the booze and the abuse have worn them down. Two out of three have had broken noses and all have cheeks riddled with broken blood vessels.
Victim number eight was a high-school beauty and a real test of my mettle. Her youth and good looks gave her some of the qualities of the subject in the Dali Painting, which was strangely off-putting. What a set of lungs she had as well, constantly screaming the place down. Even though my place is out in the country and my studio well hidden within the depths of the estate, I still kept her drugged at the end. Glued her eyes shut, and puffed up her lips slightly with collagen filler. She was almost perfect, almost.
Ninth victim was me being really stupid and acting on impulse after finding a woman at the side of the road, trying to get her car to start. Anyone could have c
ome along and seen me. Seen us. Anyone. What an idiot I can be at times, although I did take care to push her car down one of the old forest tracks and saw it tumbling between the trees towards the old lake where it should be rusting at the bottom. I was also pleased to note the similarities to the Dali painting when I slowed down the film I have been taking of all my explosions, slowed it down to almost frame by frame, the incandescent Hiroshima moment.
For my tenth victim I scoured a lot of online model agencies until I found the ideal woman to hire, being very careful to cover my tracks for when she was inevitably reported as missing. That face. That nose. Those lips, they hardly needed filler at all. As for the curve of her eyebrows? Well it was divine. The hair wasn’t, of course, but still, you can’t have everything. Crucially, her hair was longer than I needed it to be, but I still had to be very careful when I cut it, very careful when I styled it. I wasn’t even really sure if she needed to be alive when I did all that. Not being sure, I thought it better to drug her then wash and cut her hair. Shame I had to cut into her scalp to plant my little charges.
Now it is perfect. She is perfect. Head and neck severed from her body and carefully mounted. Drained of blood. Lips perfectly full. Eyes closed, head angled downwards, Hole cut out of the top of the head with an angled light source shining down from above. I know the angle isn’t going to mirror Dali’s exactly, but I don’t want anyone to see the Semtex placed inside her. Now there are six cameras pointing at the head. One from each side. One from above. One slightly below, looking up as she looks down.
Dali would be proud of me.
The Bloody Tower
ANNA TABORSKA
Shakil had more in common with Jim Morrison than Osama bin Laden, so it came as something of a surprise to his family when the front door splintered with an ear-rending crash at four o’clock one Sunday morning, and a naked Shakil was dragged out of bed, handcuffed and pulled out into the darkness.
It was a year since the Prime Minister had given his speech in Parliament to accompany his new anti-terrorism legislation, and a year since the ravens had flown the Tower.
The birds had been restless all morning. The Raven Master tried in vain to persuade Thor the talking raven to say ‘good morning’. At around midday, about the time that the Prime Minister sat down amidst a deathly silence a little over two miles away, Thor croaked something that might have been construed as sounding rather like ‘Nevermore!’ and took off – half flying, half hopping, taking the other ravens with him.
‘Thor! Thor, come back!’ The Raven Master ran as far as he could after the departing birds. Another Yeoman Warder joined him, disturbed by the desperation in the older man’s voice.
‘Don’t worry mate, you know they won’t get far with their feathers clipped’. But the Raven Master wasn’t convinced.
A year later and the ravens weren’t back, the Crown Jewels had been removed, the tourist attractions ousted, the Yeoman Warders sacked, and the Prime Minister had his own little Guantanamo right here on British soil – in the heart of the capital.
The Tower – in reality a collection of twenty-four towers and various other structures – was nothing if not perfect for the job at hand. It was as if the ancient buildings had been waiting for seventy-five years for blood to flow down their walls once more. The Tower’s last victim had been shot on 15th August 1941: a hapless German spy who broke his right ankle while parachuting into Ramsey Hollow, Huntingdonshire, and was duly court-martialled and executed before he had managed to do any spying. Josef Jacobs’s executioners had been considerate enough to allow him to sit before the eight-man firing squad – made up of members of the Holding Battalion, Scots Guards – as his injured leg made standing difficult. The coroner noted during the autopsy that Josef had been shot once in the head and seven times around the white lint target that had been pinned over his heart. The poor man was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, Northwest London, and, to add insult to injury, earth was later thrown over his grave, allowing for the cadavers of total strangers to be buried on top of him.
Shakil had enjoyed history at school, and under different circumstances would perhaps have been interested to know that he was being driven into the Tower of London complex, but by the time the tear-stained blindfold was removed from the eighteen-year-old’s eyes, he was already in a damp, dark cell, and his only thought was one of fear for his life.
He spent his first half hour shouting for help and looking for a way out, then footsteps resounded and three guards appeared.
‘Shut up, you piece of shit! And stand up for The Warden.’
The Warden was dressed in an Armani suit and very shiny shoes. His accent was an uneasy fusion of public school and East End wide boy, explainable by the fact that his daddy had paid for him to go to public school, but the boy had not been bright enough to get into university, and had instead used his financial leverage to hang out with bankers, gangsters and aspiring politicians. His money and dubious connections had finally landed him his current position, and he intended to abuse every inch of his power.
‘Congratulations,’ the Warden intoned sarcastically to the frightened teenager on the other side of the bars. ‘It is my duty as Warden to welcome you here. You are officially the first detainee of the Tower of London Detention and Concentration Facility.’
‘I didn’t do nothing!’
‘Shut up when the Warden’s speaking!’
The Warden continued by assuring Shakil that during his stay he would not only give up his terror cell, but would also help them to fine-tune the system they were creating.
‘But I didn’t do nothing!’
‘I am referring, of course, to the Government’s new anti-terror system.’
‘But I didn’t do nothing.’
The Warden laughed. ‘Get him scrubbed up,’ he told the guards.
Even as Shakil was told where he was, his family had no idea whatsoever. It was seven in the morning and they had already been waiting two hours at the local police station to speak to someone who might know something. The duty officer told them to come back at nine, when the chief superintendent would be in, but they refused to leave. It took all of Mr Malik’s diplomatic skills to stop his wife and daughter ending up in the holding cells, as panic for Shakil made it impossible for the women to sit still and wait in silence.
When the chief superintendent finally turned up at half past nine, he tried to go straight into a meeting, and this time it was Mr Malik whose nerves gave way.
‘What have you done with my son?’ he shouted repeatedly at the top of his voice. The police station was filling up with other distressed members of the public by now, and the chief superintendent decided that in the interests of public relations it would be best to assist the Malik family rather than incarcerate them. He made a couple of phone calls, and finally informed the Maliks that their son was being held on terrorist charges at an undisclosed location.
‘Terrorist charges! Shakil? Do you even know what you’re talking about?’ Shakil’s sixteen-year-old sister Adara yelled at the chief superintendent, while Mrs Malik suddenly felt faint and her husband had to hold her up.
‘Calm down, Miss Malik.’ The chief was starting to seriously consider locking up the lot of them – public relations or not. If the son was a terrorist, then there was a good chance that the rest of the family were as well.
‘Shakil – a terrorist? Look, my brother’s greatest ambition is to strip at hen parties. How on earth could he be a terrorist?’ Adara was hysterical, and Mr Malik tried to calm her down, while holding onto her sobbing mother.
‘Mr Malik,’ the chief superintendent put on his most professional smile. ‘Why don’t you all go home and once we know something more about your son, we’ll contact you.’
Eventually Mr Malik decided to take the remains of his family home, to regroup and think where to appeal for help
. On the way home, Adara replayed the events of the previous night in her mind, and tried to think of anything that could have contributed to her brother’s abduction by the Met’s Anti-Terror Squad.
Shakil and Adara had been invited to a party. There had been a long discussion with their dad, who hadn’t wanted Adara to go. Shakil argued that if his father trusted him with the keys to his car and to his explosives warehouse, then surely he could trust him to bring his sister home safely.
‘Your sister’s not a car.’ But Mr Malik lost the argument, as his wife joined in on the side of the children, and the siblings went to their friend’s party.
After about half an hour of chatting to each other and the hostess, a blonde girl had come up to Shakil and asked him where he was from.
‘East End,’ Shakil gave the girl his sexy smile.
‘No, I mean, where’s your family from? You’re not English.’
‘I’m Pakistani.’
‘Oh . . . Are you a terrorist?’
‘Maddy!’ Their hostess’s embarrassment was painful to see.
‘My dad says that all Pakis are terrorists,’ explained Maddy. Adara and the hostess exchanged glances, wondering which one of them was going to deck her first, but Shakil merely thought hard for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I am a terrorist – a terrorist of the heart.’
