This is Life

by Dan Rhodes

  She also had plenty of aunts, uncles and neighbours who were more open-minded about art, but listening to Sébastien, who was still going on, she knew he would stretch even their patience. He was saying something about mapping territory beyond the beyond. He wasn’t doing himself, or anyone else, any favours at all.

  She had never been able to work out what this kind of talk had to do with anything. It seemed designed only for the artists to elevate themselves into positions of intellectual unassailability before they had even taken the time to put brush to canvas, or smash the bricks, or saw the hooves off the freeze-dried donkey. She couldn’t see what it could ever do but alienate people, and turn them away from all art, good and bad, and it was this that had driven her to keep her proposal as straightforward as possible, as uncluttered with explanations and justifications.

  She supposed the simplicity of her proposal had, at least partly, been a kind of protest against the sort of thing she had been listening to, as well as the excruciating artists’ statements she often read on exhibition programmes, words that turned her against the work before she had even seen it. But whatever her intentions, her plan to announce that she was going to simply draw some pictures no longer seemed bold and combative; it just seemed very small, as if she hadn’t given it any thought at all. She worried that she would be laughed out of the professor’s office, or castigated for having a lack of ambition or for being unable to articulate her ideas. Her courage evaporating, she did what she always did at times like this: she asked herself what her friend Sylvie would do.

  Sylvie was always breezing into difficult situations, and she had a knack for escaping them. Aurélie began to consider feigning a fainting fit to get out of the appointment, but she decided that Sylvie would have come up with something more creative and far less transparently fraudulent than this. Then, as if from nowhere, a plan came into her mind. She knew at once that she had found a way to present the professor with the kind of proposal he would be looking for. She had no idea whether or not it was any good, but at least it was something other than saying she was going to draw some pictures.

  Sébastien’s soliloquy was still going on. By now he was furiously bemoaning the blindness of the public, how unable they are to even see brilliance, let alone comprehend it. By this, she knew he meant that they were unable to see or comprehend his brilliance. She had seen his latest piece, and it had looked like something torn from a children’s colouring book; if it had any worth she was blind to it as well. She was annoyed with herself for having let him make her so unhappy, and even more annoyed that she still found him so attractive, that she still wished he had called, and that it had been her, and not the unsmiling sculptor, by his side. She made a mental note to have a word with herself about him, to write a list of everything that was wrong with him and stick it to her fridge door with a magnet.

  She left him to his monologue and continued to pull her plan into shape. She even started to feel quite pleased with it. It had still been forming in her mind when the professor’s secretary called her through to his office.

  Every year Professor Papavoine began this day with the intention of listening hard to what his students were saying, but it had never happened. In the opening seconds of his first appointment it would strike him that there was really no point, and unable to get away from this truth his concentration lost focus and only odds and ends of the students’ ideas ever registered with him. These sessions barely counted as tutorials; being only symbolic, they were a way of acknowledging that the students had made it through to the second year of study and were now ready to have their projects approved by an authentic professor. The faculty’s primary aim in this was for news of these encounters to reach the parents, who would, they hoped, be satisfied that their offspring were receiving an acceptable standard of education. Whatever the students’ proposals for their personal projects, Professor Papavoine waved them through, wished them all the best and sent them on their way. He didn’t see what else he could do.

  The only time he had ever come close to vetoing a suggestion was when a student had proposed a project in which he would publicly collect, categorise and display everything that came out of his body over a twelve-week period. A big glass vat would contain his urine, another would house his excrement, and smaller demijohns and specimen jars would hold snot, earwax, semen and sweat. He had planned on presenting this as an exhibition called, simply, Life, during which he would be on display himself twenty-four hours a day, naked and publicly topping up the exhibits as the weeks went by, while microphones picked up the sound of his bodily functions and a series of speakers amplified them around the room in near-deafening surround sound.

  Professor Papavoine had pulled a slightly quizzical face and said he wasn’t quite sure about this idea, at which the student had turned white with rage and stormed out, vowing to leave the college, turn his back on Paris and make his name in London, which he had promptly done with this very concept. In interviews he had derided the conservatism of his forsaken home city, and announced that he had embraced the English way of art, which he confirmed by selling the completed work to an oligarch for three quarters of a million pounds and gaining membership of a number of private drinking clubs.

  He had gone on to present Life in San Francisco, Tokyo and São Paolo, and with each new staging its popularity had increased. It had become acknowledged as a sensation of the international art world, and it was due to open in Paris any day now: the return of the Prodigal Son. Everybody was talking about it. Since his meeting with Professor Papavoine he had shaved off all his hair, even his eyebrows, and changed his name to Le Machine. There were posters all over the city of the artist naked among the empty receptacles, his genitalia only just obscured by a carefully positioned specimen jar. Bold letters across the top said, simply: Le Machine: Life. Were it not for the booking information at the foot of these posters, they could almost be mistaken for advertisements for a gentlemen’s fragrance. Professor Papavoine spoke to nobody about his encounter with the star of the event.

  In every case other than Le Machine’s, though, Professor Papavoine had expressed neither doubt nor discomfort, and he made a point of offering no praise. He would think no more of the ideas he heard until weeks later, when the time came time for him to sit on the assessment panel.

  Aurélie carried on. Professor Papavoine really wanted to hear what she had to say, and he worked hard at concentrating. She told him her plans to blindly throw a dart into a map, and how the nearest suitable public space to where it landed would become the starting point of the project. Then she started saying something about small stones, and strangers, and random selection, but he lost the thread. As he looked at her, he was only just able to stop himself from sighing. She was so pretty. Her shortish hair was tied back, and he noticed that one of her ears stuck out a bit more than the other, and her teeth were a little uneven. He guessed she would have been offered braces when she was a teenager, but refused to have them fitted. Oh, petulant child, thought Professor Papavoine.

  She wasn’t quite beautiful, but she was really, really close. To him, her extreme prettiness combined with her rough edges to make her even more incredible to look at than if had she been the conventionally beautiful, airbrushed type.

  He realised he was no longer listening, and tuned back in. He heard the phrase mixed media, and immediately tuned back out. He was mesmerised. He wanted to . . . he wanted to do all sorts of things with her.

  Professor Boucher would have made fun of the feelings he was experiencing for Aurélie Renard. ‘When are we going to get a decent midlife crisis out of you?’ he had asked Professor Papavoine with depressing frequency. ‘You’re in danger of leaving it too late – what are you? Fifty-what?’ He was fifty-seven. Professor Boucher habitually mocked him for never having taken a mistress. There had never even been a fleeting clandestine romance, or a tortuous, humiliating episode of unrequited obsession. ‘And you are definitely French?’

  ‘There are rumours in my fam
ily that I had an English great-grandfather.’

  ‘Maybe that explains it. But even so, could you not just fuck a student every once in a while? For the faculty’s sake? This is an art college, after all – we have our reputation to consider.’

  Professor Papavoine liked to think he had a high threshold when it came to vulgarity, but he often found his colleague to be almost unbearable, and sometimes he wondered how they had ever become such close friends. His working days would have passed so much more serenely if Professor Boucher had been a personal and professional adversary.

  He was pleased to see that Aurélie Renard seemed to be looking a little unsure about the words she was saying, avoiding eye contact as she spoke about making a statement, and the importance of social documentary, and how she aimed to capture the essence of somebody’s time, because, er, I suppose, er, everybody lives in their own time. As with all the ideas he had half-listened to that day, it didn’t seem to make much sense, and, as with all of them, it could go either way. It would be good, bad or, as was almost always the case, somewhere in between. He had heard plans to appropriate the now, to create tension between the artist and the work, and one desperate case had even risen to his feet as he announced his plan to subvert the zeitgeist.

  More often than not, he felt sorry for the students as they made their proposals. It was as if they really believed that their work wouldn’t count as art unless it had a paragraph of awful words behind it. He longed for one of them to tell him that they were going to paint a picture, and work really hard to make it a good picture, and leave it at that. This never seemed to happen.

  At least Aurélie Renard’s proposal seemed, if he had understood any of the fragments to which he had paid attention, to be about something. So many of the concepts he heard were so abstract as to be unintelligible. It struck him that she had stopped talking. It was his turn.

  He said what he had said to the others: ‘That sounds fine. I wish you all the best with it. I look forward to seeing the result.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘I hope it’ll be interesting.’ Relieved at having made it through, her guard came down, and she smiled. ‘I suppose I just want to make something beautiful.’ As soon as the words came out she felt she had made a mistake. That would have been the last thing the professor wanted to hear.

  She rose to leave, but Professor Papavoine gestured for her to sit back down. He opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a card. It carried the university’s crest. He shook his head, put the card back and pulled out another one. ‘I would like to hear how things are going. Any time you would like to talk about it, just call me.’ Knowing he was crossing a line, and trying not to tremble, he handed it to her.

  She took it, and looked at it. It was a personal card, with the professor’s home address and phone number on it, along with a personal email address. She had a pretty good idea that this was unusual, and wondered whether or not she should start to become suspicious of his motives. She put it in her pocket. ‘Thank you, professor,’ she said.

  He paused, looked straight into her eyes, and said, ‘Any time.’ He looked down at his hands, which were clutching the edge of the desk. ‘Day or night.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, quietly. She looked sadly at the dull gold band on his ring finger. ‘Of course.’

  He watched her go, and when the door had shut behind her he picked up the framed photograph that faced him throughout his every working day. It was a picture of his wife. He smiled. She would have been about the same age as this Aurélie Renard when it was taken. She too was a little below average height, and slim, and very pretty, in a no-make-up kind of way. She was what Professor Boucher would have called a compact blonde.

  At last, he allowed himself a sigh.

  III

  Weeks later, when she watched the footage, Aurélie Renard calculated that when the stone smashed into the baby’s face it would have been travelling at somewhere between sixty-five and seventy kilometres per hour. The impact made little sound, just a dull smack that had been buried by the sound of the traffic and the hurdy-gurdy before it could reach the built-in microphone. She found it strange that something so terrible had made so little noise.

  People were still making their way through the square. Some of them glanced her way, having caught an unexpected flash of movement and noticed her video camera. Uninterested, and just wanting to get out of the cold, they walked on. To her, they might as well have not been there. She saw only the baby, reclining in his buggy. There was a terrible stillness. Perhaps she had killed him.

  She put her hand to her heart with relief when his little hands rose and clenched into fists. She hoped that this meant he was fine. She hadn’t spent a great deal of time with babies, and had no idea that this moment of calm was usual when they are hurt, that it takes a while for the shock to subside and the pain to register. Three seconds after the event, the child’s face crumpled in confusion and despair, and tears spilled from his eyes. His mouth opened wide, but there was still no sound. Then, on the seventh second, it came, a bottomless howl.

  Aurélie lowered the video camera from her shoulder. She put a hand to her mouth as she shook with worry. The possibility of such an outcome had not crossed her mind, and she realised just how stupid she had been. She had no idea what to do next, and it was only then that it occurred to her that the baby had not been making his own way across the square. He came as part of a package with a mother, and she was leaning over him, dabbing his face with a cloth. Only when this was done did the mother turn away from the inconsolable child and give Aurélie a look of disgust that she would never forget.

  She knew she deserved it. She wanted to turn and run, to get out of there as quickly as she could, and try to convince herself that this had never happened. She couldn’t, though. She had to say sorry, to the howling child and to his mother. Burning with shame, she made her way over to the scene she had created.

  She stood silently, cringing as the mother made a point of ignoring her, choosing instead to lean over the buggy and apply a folded baby wipe as a compress to the child’s face. It wasn’t until minutes later, when the baby had at last stopped crying, that she turned to Aurélie, gave her an ice-cold smile and said, softly, ‘You did a good job. Look . . .’ She lifted the makeshift compress, and pointed to a red blotch on his face. ‘That’ll bruise nicely. Very nicely indeed. Another centimetre in this direction,’ she pointed, ‘and you’d have put his eye out. Just imagine that! And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech – I want you to really imagine it.’

  Aurélie pictured a shattered eyeball, and it was awful. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She and the baby’s mother were around the same age. She liked the way she was dressed; perhaps under different circumstances they would have become friends. She had been on the lookout for a new scarf, and she could have asked her where she had bought hers. She liked it a lot, and thought the turquoise complemented her colouring. She could have gone to the same shop and bought herself one, but in a different colour so it wouldn’t be copying. An image flashed before her of the two of them in their scarves, drinking coffee and laughing as the baby looked on from his buggy. But instead she stood there feeling like a child as she accepted her scolding. She wondered whether this was the right moment to explain herself and apologise.

  The woman hadn’t finished. ‘Better luck next time.’ Her eyes narrowed. Her sarcasm exhausted, she exploded in anger. ‘You make me sick.’

  Aurélie nodded. She made herself sick too.

  ‘What did you think when you got out of bed this morning? I know – I’ve got a brilliant idea: I’ll go out into the street and throw a stone at a baby. You’re a genius. Round of applause!’ She clapped and clapped, and Aurélie stood still, looking at the ground as she accepted this bitter ovation. ‘Bravo!’ cried the baby’s mother. ‘Bravo!’ Just when it seemed this would never end, she pulled her phone from her pocket. ‘And when the police come, what will you tell them? I can’t wait to hear . . . One moment.’ The sto
ne had fallen nearby, and she took out her handkerchief and gently picked it up between gloved fingers. ‘Fingerprints. In case you make a run for it.’

  Aurélie nodded. She wasn’t going to make a run for it.

  The baby’s mother seemed to be examining her. Then, in a single motion, she reached out and yanked a stray hair from Aurélie’s head. She held it up, and said, ‘DNA.’ She placed the hair next to the stone on the handkerchief, which she folded and put in her coat pocket.

  ‘So what will you tell them? Why did you do it?’

  Aurélie rubbed the spot on her head where the hair had been plucked. She knew she owed her a full and honest explanation. She looked at the ground. ‘It’s an art project,’ she said. ‘I’m at art college.’

  ‘Art!? Painting a picture, that’s art. Carving a statue, that’s art too. There’s a guy coming to town who thinks that shitting into a bottle is art. Maybe it is, I don’t know. But this is the first time I’ve ever heard that attacking a baby can be a work of art. You know what? I think it might even catch on. You’ll get full marks for your project. You’ll be rich. You’ll be just like Monet, only instead of painting lily ponds you’ll be hurting children. Here comes one now – quick, go and kick her in the face.’

  The square was no longer busy with commuters, and a toddler was nearby, holding her father’s hand. She looked as if she had only just learned to walk – her legs were stiff and wide apart, her steps faltering. She was a picture of delight as she put her new-found skills to work. The last thing Aurélie wanted to do was kick her in the face.