Personality

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Hard to believe Paris and Rome are somewhere out there,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve said about Rome before.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘there’s a kind of sister organisation to St Clare’s over there, so I’ve gone once or twice. I don’t know. I think I love the idea of it. As a place to live. It seems …’

  She leaned her back against the window.

  ‘Old and modern at the same time,’ he said.

  She smiled up at him and said, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.’

  He made a face and she laughed.

  ‘Just free somehow,’ he said.

  She looked into the buttons of his shirt. ‘I’d like that,’ she said quietly. He loved the life in her eyes. He loved her skin and her quiet way of saying things indirectly. Her capacity for wonder, eyelashes dark and beating in time to her thoughts. He loved her mouth. He kissed it.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ he said. ‘Time is what you’ve never had.’

  The sea ran out of light and they went downstairs to collect their bags from the bedroom. Some of the wives were in the corridor next to the dining-hall. ‘Hello, you pair,’ one of them said. ‘It’s the Sussex reunion soon, Maria, and we’ll be expecting a song from you.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Maria said.

  ‘You’ll do great,’ said the woman.

  *

  When Maria was feeling up to it – on her good weekends – Michael would show her places around London she’d never seen before. He took her to small places in Soho where you could have a drink, hidden bars, and he took her round the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum. They went to look at the stuff you could buy in John Lewis and she felt dizzy going up the escalators, then round to Ronnie Scott’s to listen to the latest thing on saxophone. Michael loved to watch the way Maria would glide into those places and take it all in with her eyes. He would encourage her gently to eat something here and there and to drink water; they both knew she was trying her best, and they held to the notion that patience might allow her to recover in her own way.

  ‘Is this boring?’ he asked in the jazz club.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and she laughed into an empty glass.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That obviously means you’re beginning to like it.’

  He tapped the rhythm out on his jeans and she got a picture of him then as he had been years ago in Rothesay. She found it hard to imagine they were still in any way young: he sat there listening, he played with the wristband of his watch, and sometimes he looked over at her and winked. He had been interested in listening to her speak as well as sing years ago, as if taking real notice of her living and breathing. And he had winked at her back then too.

  ‘I’m happy,’ she said to him.

  He lifted one of her fingers across the table and kissed it as if to silence himself. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said.

  Her health was up and down, but he would appear out of her terrors like a calmative. He made her laugh when he could, slipping into the American slang he had used as a teenager, and he made way for her confusions, not solving her head but caressing it, and walking around what she couldn’t say. She began slowly to eat and they got to know one another, favourite films and styles of shoe, admired buildings, perfumes, matters of taste and personal choice. She noticed that when he made tea he put the sugar and the milk and the bag in before the hot water. When he drove the car he liked to lay his hand on the gear stick and feel the vibrations. He noticed that she liked the smell of diesel and hated the sound of polystyrene. She liked to ask questions: Why does toffee go white if you stretch it? And so did he: What is your favourite month and why? Their love wasn’t a choice, it was a recognition, as much for her as for him, and so they seemed to enjoy something new yet something familiar, while fearing the worst the world had to offer.

  They went one day to the South Bank to see paintings. Maria was vulnerable and Michael held her hand as they walked up the steps. ‘It’s grey today,’ she said.

  ‘Take it easy.’

  On the second floor of the gallery the walls were red and the thock of heels on the wooden floor could be heard as Michael and Maria walked between paintings by Otto Dix. The room was empty, the security man slumped in his chair by the fire escape, his eyes opening and closing, gratefully oblivious to the entertainments around him. The pair loosened hands and separated and went off to look at the pictures in their own way. Michael stood close to them: he leaned in to examine the paint, and noting something livid in the eyes of the subjects, he recalled an essay he had read in Horizon one of those afternoons before the job at St Clare’s, an article about the Germans and charisma.

  A rumble of heavy shoes quickly filled the space as children entered. They carried clipboards and some of the girls had linked arms and one flicked her fringe and another pulled chewing-gum from the end of her tongue. There was pushing and bursts of laughter, and the children jostled together behind the information officer, a woman in a blue suit. ‘It’s important to remember,’ she said, ‘that he actually volunteered. He spent much of the war as part of a machine-gun unit, so he saw a great deal of active service, and experienced the full horror of the war. He was at the Somme in the summer of 1916 and witnessed many deaths and terrible injuries. This had a deep impact on his imagination. He was badly injured himself.’

  The painting was called Trench Warfare. Some of the girls were still giggling and there was a smack of chewing-gum. ‘Now,’ said the woman, ‘by the end of the war Dix had won the Iron Cross. Afterwards, he quickly became disillusioned with the war however, and in paintings like this one, his disgust was given artistic expression. These paintings became important anti-war statements.’ She looked from the painting to the girls. ‘What can you see in this painting? Yes?’

  ‘Tons of dead bodies,’ one girl said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They look like they’ve just been thrown in,’ said another.

  ‘Yes. The bodies are decomposed. Many of them are crooked and almost indistinguishable from each other and from the roots and the trees around them.’

  ‘It’s gross,’ a boy said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘I think the artist wanted it to appear that way. He wants to represent the waste of human lives and his depictions of the dead men are uncompromising. Would you say the painting looks ugly?’

  ‘Totally,’ said the same boy.

  ‘Not ugly,’ said someone else. ‘You can see from the red on the sky and it’s like maybe you can get out of this horrible place.’

  ‘The sky is mostly dark.’

  ‘But there’s this pink bit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘like red sky at night. What do you think the artist means by that?’

  ‘It’s like a fire going on in the distance,’ said one of the boys.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the teacher, ‘but what else?’

  ‘As if hell or somethink is there. Like hell.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said the teacher. ‘Anything else?’

  The girl with the chewing-gum took her finger down from her lips and tilted her head. ‘It might be that the next day it will be better and the war will finish,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ said the woman. ‘I agree with that. I think that in all the devastation and horror the picture depicts, there is a note of hopefulness in the use of colour. Human degradation has perhaps reached its lowest point, and tomorrow, or soon, there might be an end to this kind of madness and suffering.’

  Michael stood in front of the painting called War Wounded. He was listening to the woman and the pupils. ‘Dix was upset by the way crippled ex-soldiers were being treated in Germany,’ she said, ‘and his work is often a kind of protest. Like many people, he believed the world the soldiers returned to would be a better one, but in fact it was worse. Dix was viewing it from the German side. But some English artists were interested in the same thing. They wondered what kind of country would exist after such horrific fighting. Dix had hoped there
would be freedom and beauty, but instead there was more ugliness, and in one of his paintings he shows himself returning from the war as a wounded officer and being greeted in Berlin by a group of prostitutes.’

  Some of the boys sniggered into their collars.

  As the woman spoke of German decadence a fly came into the room; it went over their heads, buzzing into the air of dispelled words, private thoughts and small breaths.

  Maria had been standing in front of one painting for some time and when the children and the teacher approached she didn’t move. She stood between the painting and the group and Michael stood at the very back watching this arrangement, and thought to himself that the painting was like a stone dropped into the pool of their thoughts, Maria, then the girls, then the teacher, then the boys, and himself at the back.

  ‘This is called The Hunger Artist,’ said the teacher. Everyone looked. Men sat at tables in a restaurant with green wallpaper. They had round faces and bowler hats, and spittle came from some of their mouths. Some had moustaches and they seemed aggressive with their knives and forks. The plates were piled with food. Women with red faces and blue eye-shadow grabbed at pork chops with their fat fingers. And there at the far end of the restaurant, high on a wooden table, a small girl sat cross-legged in a bell-shaped glass case, her large, black eyes staring out at the crowd, her body emaciated. The bones stood out on her face, her ribs protruded and her hair was sparse and thin.

  ‘We see here how Dix set out to provide a moral portrait of his time,’ said the teacher. Maria didn’t move: she stood still in front of the painting and her shadow affected its colours. ‘But he was also reflecting many everyday realities. Hunger artists were people who starved themselves as part of a public entertainment. In 1926, when this was painted, there were six hunger-artists performing in Berlin. These artists, as they were called, were often young women, and, as you see depicted here, they would be placed inside glass booths while the diners enjoyed their meal. The diners are eating sausages and fried potatoes. The girls would exist on water and many of them smoked cigarettes behind the glass. There was a restaurant in Berlin at this time called Zum Goldenen Hahn, and it is believed that Dix ate here, and he became fascinated with the hunger artist as a grotesque symbol of what was happening in Germany with the rise of Nazism. Only he painted this picture much later.’

  ‘Was the girl really starving?’ asked one of the pupils.

  ‘Yes, very often,’ said the teacher. ‘See to the side of the picture a blackboard. It would be usual for the restaurant owner to write on this board the number of days the hunger artist had gone without food. No one quite knew who these performers were, or what their story was; they would seldom speak for themselves.’

  ‘Were they not allowed to talk?’

  ‘Nobody knows. People mostly spoke for them. Or about them. That was the story of their lives.’

  ‘Did they get money for it?’

  ‘Oh yes. They were paid. Restaurants where they appeared would always be full. It proved extremely fascinating to the people of Berlin at the time and Otto Dix believed this gave a shocking insight into modern culture.’

  The teacher then spoke of the way the faces had been painted and the style of the eyes. She made reference to other painters of the period and pointed to certain features in the work’s execution – blurrings, estrangements – which, she told them, were evidence of the way the painter had adapted his technique to the subject. The pupils were chit-chatting among themselves; the tour was getting a bit boring for them.

  Maria still stood in front of the picture. Before going up and putting his hand on her arm, Michael paused: she seemed so private and untouchable, and the few steps to take her arm seemed like miles. She turned to him then and smiled in a careful way. She kissed the back of his hand. ‘Clever, those children, weren’t they?’ she said.

  ‘Yes‚’ he said.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Maria didn’t want anything from the bookshop and the daylight outside was glaring. As they went along the walkway, she took a lungful of air and thought it was like fresh wind from the Thames. A man was leaning against the wall. She had seen him briefly in the gallery and the sight of him had registered with her and made her anxious. Now he was looking at them, and as they were about to pass he stepped forward and Maria suddenly shrank inside her coat. Almost unnoticeably, she tightened her hands around Michael’s arm. The man had two shirts on under a lumber jacket, he was very white-faced, dirty-looking, and he wore a wet smile on his lips. ‘Miss Tambini‚’ he said, ‘it’s grand to see you out and about. Would you sign my programme?’

  Michael could feel Maria shiver. ‘Not just now, mate‚’ he said. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘I’m not asking you‚’ the man said. ‘Maria. Would you just sign this for me?’

  Maria tried to take a step forward.

  ‘It’s only a fucking name on a bit of paper‚’ the man said.

  Michael put his hand out and kept the man back. ‘Just leave it‚’ he said. ‘Get out the way.’

  The man went to take a further step forward and his face was animated with fear and hurt. ‘Fuck off‚’ said Michael, looking right into the man’s eyes, and as he said it he swept the man out of the way with one strong swipe of the arm.

  ‘Don’t look back‚’ Michael said as they went down the steps and made for the tunnels of the South Bank, and later, after they had laughed about other things and Michael had kissed her in the ticket hall, Maria felt glamorous. Going down the escalator, the sound of a saxophone at the bottom, the moving steps conveying her at speed past faces and coloured posters, and Michael somewhere behind her, she filled up with a sense of soaring strings and advancing audience. The audience that loved and needed her. The audience that lifted her over the chaos of things. She opened her eyes wide as the escalator took her down the long staircase; she smiled and heard applause, the orchestra swelling with pride, the world waiting.

  7

  Skin

  A vase of white tulips stood on a table beside the window. The tulips were the room’s central event: the green stems alive as grass snakes, and the white flowers, closed-mouthed, sedative, were awkward in themselves, ashamed to need the sun.

  It was the beginning of April, and they lay together on the bed asleep, Maria and Michael, a year or more after her last TV appearance, two days after her twenty-third birthday. Michael still had his own flat in Kensington: it sat there pristine and hardly used, a memoir of his first days in London, full of books and forgotten T-shirts, a place to return to in those hours when Maria needed to loosen him from her attention.

  They lay together in the soft-breathing aftermath of the night before, its whispers, kisses and tears; the light came through the wooden blinds and lay over them in stripes. She dreamed a familiar dream: she and her grandmother were playing noughts and crosses on the flagstones of an old cemetery and laughing and dancing together in a rainstorm of boiled sweets. When she opened her eyes she reached out and touched a bare arm. ‘Michael‚’ she said, ‘don’t leave.’

  ‘I’m right here, lovely‚’ he said.

  Maria fell back to sleep as he sat propped against the headboard smoking a cigarette and carefully watching the bluish trails of the ascending smoke. She turned and snuggled into his legs. Her mouth was against his stomach and she began, still half-asleep, to lick him there, and then she began to bite his flesh and his cock became hard and her hands plucked at the waistband of his pyjamas and tugged them down, then her hand travelled over his arse and came round. She held on to his cock and she stroked it with her hand up and down.

  ‘Maria‚’ he said. His head was back and he exhaled deeply into the pillows. She was awake now and shivered with nerves but at the same time in the dryness of the morning she thirsted to suck his lips and in the growing heat all her hatreds became tenderness for him. But she felt too fat.

  ‘Maria‚’ he said. ‘You’re the only one I’ve ever loved.’

  He was na
ked now lying next to her; she could feel the smoothness and roughness of his chest and she buried her head into his neck and bit him again. She wanted to bite him and break the skin and eat what was inside. She could taste his smell and licked the salt from his neck and drew her tongue along the line of his jaw and could feel his hard cock against her. She imagined the blankets were waves and sank under bringing her arms against his body for balance and she swallowed a mouthful of her own saliva.

  She dug into the mattress, as if to escape or climb further inside the warmth around him, and her fear was made odd by the excitement she felt at the words he spoke and the way his hands were undressing her. ‘I want to be inside you and stay inside you, Maria‚’ he said. ‘I want to lick and fuck you and make you come.’

  She was naked now against him, wanting to cry. Her skin was white and her nipples brown and he licked them in circles and sucked the raised nipple and grazed it with his teeth. He could feel her ribs against his arms as he leaned up and kissed her forehead and licked her eyes. ‘Don’t hurt me‚’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt you‚’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  It was not terrifying so much as blurred. He sucked at her wrists then chewed her earlobes and caressed the sides of her body until she felt she had completely opened and was lost in him and not sad. He lifted her round in the bed and sucked her breasts and kissed her stomach and put her fingers on his face and made her touch his cheeks and eyes, then he put all her fingers in his mouth at once and he moved his warm tongue over and between them.