Art and Lies

  ‘I love you.’ Straight at my heart with her little knife. She looks eagerly for the blood. I must pretend to feel nothing even though I am doubled over with pain.

  ‘Heartless,’ she tells me ‘that’s what you are. Heartless.’

  I have told her that I am leaving home. Yes, and I am taking my heart with me. She knows I have hidden it somewhere. She knows that there is still a piece of me unkilled by the loving hands of my family. They have not yet made me in their likeness. I am still my own. Time is short. They will ransack me. They will find my heart hidden in my chest. They have devoured lungs, liver and tongue. They wonder why I do not speak. They wonder why I am afraid.

  I am afraid but not mortally. I have some courage left and it will be enough. When my brother lay over me like a winding sheet and me his corpse, it was a patch of red I remembered on a Leonardo robe. While my brother embalmed me with his fluid I clung to life through a patch of red. When I had to look at his empty eyes over me, it was the red that speeded my own blood from clotting. It was the red that pushed life through veins I had thought to slit. Warm red with light in it. Gold decorated red that gave me a robe of dignity to put over my own torn dress.

  Later, in the silent untimed years at the hospital of St Sebastian the Martyr, it was the strange vital yellows of Van Gogh that bore out a sane place in the babble of that overbright world. Overbright: the lights left on in accusing strips of neon. The nurses with their harsh friendly voices, cheerful, cheerful, nice nice. Be a good girl eat your party food. MY party food. Blue cake, green icing, pink candles to blow out. That’s nice, blow me out, every spark of me, on my birthday.

  I am twenty-one.

  I hid in my room with a book. ‘Withdrawn.’ said my report. ‘Uncommunicative.’ said my report. ‘Not fully socialised.’ said my report. ‘No progress.’ said my report.

  I was making progress. I was studying Van Gogh. Sunflower yellow. Cornfield yellow, sky yellow, yellow in the woman’s fading hair that she pushes away from her face. Yellow in the wicker of the chair, yellow in the layers of the land. Yellow in the clay ridges of the fields ploughed. Yellow in his clothes going home.

  I went home. This time I was properly dressed.

  I have been thinking back and back to that night on the parapet and the resolution of wings. I should have been killed. It was intended that I should have been killed. There is more to the story but it has taken me a long time to remember it. I have not wanted to remember it. When I told them in the hospital they said I was inventing. My mother is certain I am inventing. It is easier that way. Memory can be murder.

  It was Christmas Eve. My brother and his friends had been up late drinking. My mother and father had gone to bed. I could hear my mother crying her traditional eyeful of festive tears. I had been painting in my room, but to reach the bathroom I had to pass my brother’s door. I was going carefully, with a handful of colour-soaked brushes, when his door opened and he dragged me in.

  ‘I love you’ he said.

  I struggled. He was red-indian war-painted in cobalt and chrome. My brushes left their mark. I had to leave a clue to show I was not lying. I pushed the paint in his face.

  He had me down quickly. He’s a big man, wiry and well-knit, bull’s balls, Lucifer rod, thick and heavy and I am very light. My mother had wanted me to be a ballet dancer but I think that’s because she could have starved me.

  I knew better than to fight. Ten years of Matthew’s love embraces and I knew better than to fight. He had twice broken my wrists, once dislocated my hip, and the last time, two years ago, fractured my collar bone. I heard my father talking to him in the library. I thought it was all over. No more lies about a tricky horse. Two free years and I had begun to forget. Not to heal but to forget. I had begun to forget that my body was, what had Matthew called it? a weapon rest. He had me down quickly and pursued his usual gallop over my well broken hills. I was a landscape he had long since flattened. The challenge had gone, but not the familiar pleasure of ownership. These were his acres, my body, my blood. I was his liege-land. He inspected me.

  ‘Too thin’ he said. ‘No buttocks.’ He slapped them and had me turn over. Never side-saddle but often backwards he pleases to ride. The clock by his bed, still his childish, Mickey Mouse dial, notched the late minutes on the bed-post of my bones. Once. Twice. Enough. Not enough? Enough. He was asleep as I pushed him off me.

  A heavy man. My lungs were gone. What I wanted was air, all the clean fresh air in the sky, not the stagnant re-breathed unwholesome smell of Matthew’s bed. His bed that smelled of meat and drains. I was unclothed, he had a habit of tearing whatever I was wearing, I should have noticed, but there was nothing I could notice, except pain. I ran my pain up through the house, up the rickety attic steps, over the disused floorboards and out on to the parapet. My pain, numbed, soothed in the freezing Christmas air.

  Far off the sound of Noël.

  I sat on the ledge, my head between my knees, my feet warmer in the muff of my own vomit. Not thinking. Not feeling. Not living beyond the in-out-in-out of my defeated lungs.

  I don’t recall how long I sat. I heard footsteps crossing the floor and I reached to pull a coat round me, but there was no coat, and all I could do was to fix my eyes on the blank opening of the window and wait.

  ‘Sophia?’ It was my father’s voice.

  ‘Sophia?’ He refused to call me Picasso. It was his own name he wanted to hear. Sophia. Wisdom. The Ninth Muse. Feet first in her own vomit. ‘I christen this child Sophia.’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘What have you done to your brother?’

  ‘Matthew.’ I said his dead name in my dead voice.

  ‘He’s covered in paint and half-naked on the floor. He said you attacked him. He said “She’s gone mad again father. She’s gone mad again.” What have you done?’

  ‘He raped me.’

  ‘You little slut.’ My father came towards me, his hand raised, I shrank back, and he stepped into my vomit.

  ‘I’m going to tell the police.’ I said, sing-song, dreamlike. ‘This time, the nice doctor and the nice police. I’m going to tell them.’

  I stood up, I think, to walk to the police station, so, perhaps, I would have fallen on my own. As it happened I did not fall on my own. As I stood slightly swaying, completely unafraid, my father pushed me off the roof.

  She had never come to him for money. She had come to him for love. She had left empty handed. Her father could only love what was dead. As Picasso fell she thought, ‘He will love me now. My father will love me.’

  Jack Hamilton had made sure that his wife was dead before he married her. He had bartered for what spirit had survived her own father’s industrial complex, and laboured to make a machine out of what gaiety was left. She would not delight in life. She would not find beauty in valueless things. She smiled too easily and too much. Let her smile be only for him. Since he had no life, no pleasure and no beauty, he had learned to deny that there were such things. He took his satisfaction from his own man-made world. There were millions of pounds to be made out of Preserves.

  On the day of their wedding he had the corpse of his fiancée expensively dressed in the best shroud that money could buy. He married her beneath the sign of the dead Christ and took her back to the sealed rooms where she would find the compass of her life. Nothing for her beyond those rooms. She was his wife and the rooms of his house were her granted kingdom. At the centre was the marriage bed. She got in it and lay still.

  Their first child was stillborn. A baby who neither moved nor cried. ‘Such a good baby’ his father admired him. A man needs a stiff upper lip. The boy showed no emotion. His father was pleased. A man never cries.

  The boy had a kitten. His father had it de-clawed to save the furniture. The furniture had cost thousands of pounds. The kitten had been dumped. Nobody wanted the kitten, everyone admired the furniture, the boy would inherit it one day, long after the kitten was dead.

  The next child, a girl, was not stil
lborn out of the still bed. The baby screamed. Father had the doctors in but the baby screamed. The baby made all the noise allowed. No-one else dared speak when father was at home. ‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ was the rule, but wife and son never were spoken to and could only whisper now and then, when his back was turned. The baby ignored father’s rule and screamed. Mother and son admired the baby and hated her too.

  The dead family and the live baby went to church and the Vicar read The Sermon on the Mount. Father looked round the pews, satisfied to see that he was, by far, the richest man there. Mother and son stared ahead out of their unseeing eyes. Only the baby saw the stained glass shift under its own light. Red and green apostles on the cold floor, each stone flag become a tablet of light. Light out of the athanor that burnished her little body as bright as theirs; a new apostle, she shone.

  It was not possible for the dead family to kill her quite. Whatever light there was had been authentic. They wrapped her in black-out curtains, kept her in lead, they made sure she had the benefit of an asbestos education. At night, when they crept by her room in their black clothes, they peeped through the keyhole to check that she was dead. She was not dead and they feared her.

  ‘She needs to be married,’ said father who knew that a single woman is unnatural. ‘She can wear my dress,’ said mother, ‘I’ll do something about the smell.’ Always in the house the smell; parma violets, talcum powder, hung meat. The thick sweet smell the housemaid disguised with aerosols and furniture polish.

  ‘It’s the drains,’ said mother.

  ‘It’s the neighbourhood,’ said father.

  ‘It’s her oil paints,’ said Matthew.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Picasso.

  Father earned a knighthood. Mother fell ill. Increasingly the children spent more and more time together, sometimes they slept in the same bed. Nothing wrong with that, they were brother and sister, and besides, it saved laundering two sets of sheets. Sir Jack was a millionaire but economical.

  Soon after they had been married and were newly-deads, plain Jack Hamilton and his nervy well-bred wife, had bought a run down Queen Anne house by a stockyard. It was not fashionable, the area was poor, his wife was afraid to visit what shops there were. She never took her purse. In those days they were not wealthy and Jack wanted a grand house. Besides, he recognised it as an investment, and about investments he was invariably right.

  Years passed, and Sir Jack who had stubbornly refused all his wife’s entreaties to move, suddenly sold the house and the stockyard with it. He had been offered an undisclosed sum for the site which was to house a new private cancer hospital with residential apartments attached for those who would pay to die as slowly as possible.

  Lady Hamilton was happy. Happy as she took brochures from Estate Agents. Happy as she began to supervise the corridors of packing. Happy so that she sang again in spite of the pain in her throat. She would be leaving the dark house that had crumbled inside her.

  She went to see the doctor for some lozenges.

  ‘Cancer,’ he said.

  ‘Home from home,’ said Sir Jack, comforting her.

  My mother lay in her marriage bed and stared at the expensive walls. My father had a large collection of Victorian sentiment paintings; moral anecdotes of the fallen woman in her red skirt clutching the upright chair; the doctor, gravely attending to the dying girl. Popular pictures, expensive pictures, Collier, Sir Luke Fildes, Millais, the union of technique and insincerity (above all it must look real), commonly called, art.

  My father had often encouraged me to paint likeness and I had often asked him why he wanted a likeness when the thing itself was there. ‘Art is the mirror of life,’ he said, glowering out of Elsinore. I couldn’t tell him that it was only the nineteenth century and later who had taken Hamlet’s mad speech seriously. Not even the Dutch genre painters, whom the Victorians so admired, had ever gone so far as to believe that the lifelikeness of a picture was more important than its quality and composition. Until the mid-nineteenth century, every painter, however literal, knew that to represent accurately was not enough.

  ‘Go and look at my Constable,’ said father, ‘and then tell me that you are a painter.’

  I have looked at Constable. I have looked at Constable many times. How to tell you that acceptable, respectable, Constable, had caused a riot at the Paris salon of 1824? How to tell you that he had used pure colour next to pure colour, ungraded by chiaroscuro? How to tell you that his blobs and smears of bright paint shocked the worshippers of Ingres, not only by their vivid rudeness, but by the landscapes they not so much represented as revealed. This was not the Nature of the studio. Dangerous Constable, but tame now, dead now, canonised and hung on my father’s expensive walls.

  Picasso had said, ‘I am a painter and not a pimp. I do not live off other artists’ work.’

  ‘This is you,’ says my mother, holding up her drawing.

  ‘This is you,’ says my father, who is something of a cartoonist.

  ‘This is you,’ says my brother, who only ever draws himself.

  I collected quite a folio over the years and what I looked upon I became. How shall I stretch out my hand to touch another when I am unable to touch myself?

  Touch you. I can’t. Touch me? You can’t. How can you touch what doesn’t exist? Existere Exsistere: To Stand Out. Ex: Out. Sistere: To stand. What makes a person stand out? A sense of self. To get beyond everyone else’s lies I shall have to cut a figure of my own.

  Reproduction is safer and, to begin with, better paid. Reproduction always has done a roaring trade, but the calendar date is 1829, when Niepce and Daguerre discovered the process of photography.

  Is that my mother and father on their wedding day?

  Is that me?

  The camera never lies …

  The siren body through the peaceful air. My body, unsaveable but saved. A face bending over me with the sun in it. A voice urging me with the sea in it. The water of life on the dry soil. The sun on the frozen earth. Touch me: Your hand the envoy of your heart.

  It was a long time ago. I have had a fear of heights. A fear of memory. To conquer both I climbed back on to the roof.

  The night was cold. Each grey roof slate was varnished with frost. On the shiny surface of the roof the stars cross-reflected. I leaned back on the starry roof to look at the sky. My breath in cold white cones projected and disappeared. Cold fire from a cold fire eater. The light not put out but not hot enough to burn. How can I be what I know I am? Wood with a gift for burning?

  Against the stone steps, my father’s steps. Behind the stone buttresses, my father’s voice. Through the freezing, fluid air, my father in his smoking jacket. My father; the illusion of mass in a confined space.

  I decided to kill him.

  VICTORY.

  In the morning, he was at breakfast, in his usual place. I picked up the kitchen knife and stabbed him. He continued to butter his toast. My mother and my brother were murmuring about the weather. What was that? Gales Sweep City?

  I pulled out the blade and rammed it in through the second vertebra of his spine. I heard the bone splinter, the nerve twang like piano wire. Again I sank the carbon steel knife into the buttered flesh. My mother began to clear the table.

  Desperate now, I shot him with his own intruder rifle, the double bullet shattering his skull. I lured him to the factory and gassed him with his own cylinder of preservative. I poured acid into his bath and stood by while he melted down into pig pâté in an enamel mould. I scraped him out to feed to the dogs and watched them choke on their vomit. All this I did but he would not die. Impossible to murder the dead.

  As the days passed, and I breathed hate, ate hate, plumped up hate for my nightly pillow, I felt a strange numbness, new to my body. In my efforts to be rid of him, I was becoming like him, his rage, his misery, his methods, his pain circulating my veins. The more I hated him the better I pleased him. Not only would I become like him, I would become him, that is how the dead reproduce the
mselves.

  What then could I do to hurt him without hurting myself? What already hurt him most of all? Only that I was alive and that he had not yet been able to kill me as he had killed all the others. Every day that I threw life in his face, I insulted his morbidissima by refusing to be of his clan. The dead thrive only among their own.

  VICTORY.

  More life into a time without boundaries.

  On the morning that I walked away from the house I knew that it was crumbling. At the tall windows, the dumb, gesticulating figures of my family made crazy shapes against the placid glass. Black shapes against the pale panes, their arms in faint, and fainter signs of rage and vengeance. Black paddles turning the wheel of their own misfortune. Too late.

  The house shrank up around the dolls in the window. My past, which every day had devoured every day, shrank to its proper size. There would be a beginning not consumed by it. A beginning outside of hurt. A beginning outside of fear. I had not been destroyed by gravity.

  Gravity. Gravity’s skewer. She remembered the railings around her house and she thought of Saint Sebastian deep with arrows. For a moment, in the indifferent train, fear crept up beside her again. She looked across at the woman whose hair had the sun in it. She heard her laugh that had the sea in it. She recognised her.

  VICTORY.

  The

  Entire and Honest

  Recollections

  of a

  Bawd

  ‘Madam, you have fixed him on gravity’s skewer.’

  ‘Not so, not so!’ cried the Doll. ‘What goes in must come out.’

  ‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle, who had been blindfolded against the proceedings, and yet uttered her cry at carefully counted intervals.

  The Doll was not pleased. ‘It is so delicate a thing …’

  ‘Madam, if it snaps?’

  Ruggiero shuddered. Head in the pillows, nethers in the ether, he shuddered.

  ‘Madam, I suggest an operation,’ said Newton.