Amaryllis Night and Day

  On the trip out from London the M40 had been bleak, with only the van de Velde sky to provide interest above the articulated lorries and the onrush of miles. Going back the yellow lights provided a constant vanishing point, and into it we vanished.

  But the maze and the walking of it didn’t vanish. I had told Lenore that I was ready for it, that I wanted to do it, and afterwards I said I wasn’t sorry I’d done it. But in the time that followed I often found myself shaking my head and saying, aloud to myself if I was alone, ‘Why did I do that?’

  20

  The Dark Road

  When I returned to the table (lurching a little, I noticed) Amaryllis wasn’t there and I thought, Well that’s it for today. When am I going to see her again? In my glims? Then she came back and I exhaled.

  ‘I had to pee,’ she said. ‘Did you think I’d gone?’

  ‘I was pretty sure you wouldn’t leave me to drink all this alone,’ I said. I hadn’t noticed that the sounds around us had stopped but now I noticed them coming back with the lights both plain and coloured, the figures moving and still, the music and the voices and the smoke. Had that happened before? We both sat down, lifted our whiskies to our mouths, drank, put the glasses down, and looked at each other. ‘You were saying,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were going to tell me something you needed me to glim.’

  ‘Yes.’ She gulped down some beer, rubbed her face, ran her hand over her hair. ‘It’s hard because I get mixed up between my glim life and the unglim and I think some of my memories are false. But even a false memory is all right if it makes you feel good and doesn’t hurt anyone, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So much of life is like driving on a dark road and you can’t see what’s beyond the headlamps’ beams.’

  ‘If you keep moving ahead,’ I said, ‘you get to see what was in the dark a while back.’

  ‘Could you glim for me … ?’

  ‘Yes, Amaryllis, what?’

  ‘Could you glim for me a dark road in America?’

  ‘Where in America is this road?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe Maine, maybe Massachusetts. Have you been to those places?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘This is a very lonesome road in the middle of nowhere. I remember piney woods on both sides.’

  I saw a yew tree, heard the District Line rails cry, Wheats-yew! Saw the oncoming train circling, returning.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, you said “piney woods”.’

  ‘That’s how they say it in that part of the country, I think. Piney woods on both sides. And a little white petrol station with a red roof and a little red cupola. There’s a small sign with a winged red horse on it. MOBILGAS, it says on the sign which is hanging from a bracket on a tall pole with a lamp on it. Three red petrol pumps with lit-up white globes on top, also with the winged red horse. It’s evening, a summer evening with the sky still light. The lamp over the sign lights up the boughs of the nearest pines. I remember the stillness of that summer evening, the lonesomeness of that empty road – it was such a long time between cars. There was a man standing by one of the pumps and he made it all even more lonesome. He was wearing a waistcoat and a tie. White shirt.’ She began to cry.

  ‘Amaryllis, why are you crying?’

  ‘The look of those lit-up globes on the pumps and the lamp over the sign and the sky that’s still light …’

  ‘Amaryllis, what you’ve described is a painting by Edward Hopper. It’s called Gas.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help it if he painted a picture of that road and that petrol station – I was there on holiday with my parents when I was five or six or seven and I can see it in my mind.’

  ‘OK, I’ll try to glim an Edward Hopper. Is there anything down that road beyond the limits of the picture?’

  ‘Why do you keep calling it a picture?’

  ‘I can’t help it – it is a picture, a very well-known one that you must have seen a reproduction of and made into a false memory. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘This is 1999. So you were born in 1971. Say you were seven when you were in Maine or Massachusetts, that brings us up to 1978. By then I doubt that you could find petrol pumps like that in America. Maybe not even in Tibet. Surely you’ve seen reproductions of Hopper paintings?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said rather sullenly.

  ‘It’s hard for me to believe that someone who plays Chopin hasn’t also become aware of Edward Hopper.’

  ‘What are you,’ she said, ‘some kind of snulture cob? Culture. Snob.’

  ‘I guess I am, now that you mention it. Anyhow, what’s down that road? If anything.’

  ‘One thing at a time, OK? Let’s just put me on that road and we’ll go on from there.’

  ‘If it’s my glim we could well end up in the bushes.’

  ‘Is that what I am to you? Your glim totty?’

  ‘You’re many things to me; that’s just one of them. Goodness knows I’ve made unglim advances but you don’t seem to want to be my unglim totty.’

  ‘I thought you were different.’

  ‘Different from what? I’m different from a horse or a crocodile but I might well be similar in some respects to other men.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me about respect,’ she said in a very dignified way. ‘The question is, are you going to glim that road for me or not?’

  ‘Of course I’ll do it. I can’t help wondering, though, Amaryllis, why you don’t glim it yourself. Your recall is so visid, so visually ibid. Vivid. So why don’t you?’

  ‘You have to keep asking questions, don’t you. How many times do I have to tell you that if I do the glim it’ll be that bus stop again and I’d rather it weren’t. OK? Do you have a prolbem with that?’

  ‘No prolbem, sweetheart. Your whim is my engraved-in-brass. Or chiselled-in-stone, as the case may be.’

  ‘Right. That’s it, then. See you in your glim if you can be bothered to make the effort.’

  ‘My place again, right?’

  ‘I think you can prolly go it alone this time. Let’s just a greena bedtime, OK?’

  ‘Did you say greena bedtime?’

  ‘You neenry peat everything. Two o’clock all right? That’s 02:00.’

  ‘Righty-o. Let me see you home. You may be just ever so slightly tired and emotional.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said tearfully. ‘I know you’re a true friend. But if you could find me a cab I’d rather. Please forgive me, I know I’m a lot of trouble.’

  ‘You? Trouble? Never!’ We kissed and hugged and after a while I found her a cab and put her into it. I didn’t hear what address she gave the driver. And I still didn’t know her last name.

  21

  Bird-Women

  ‘One cannot be sure,’ wrote art critic Lytton Toomey in the Guardian, ‘whether Peter Diggs’s bird-women are sirens or harpies. They are by turns seductive, housewifely, terrifying, comical, and disgusting. Certainly they sing, as evidenced in the rowdy pub scenes where they appear, as everywhere else, topless. When partying they flaunt other parts as well. Shopping in the supermarket, their demeanour, despite the partial nudity, is modest. In other situations their talons are frightening, their habits unclean. The mise-en-scène of the pictures is to some extent Hammer Gothic but the style, the atmospherics and the general look call to mind the Symbolists, particularly Redon and Khnopff.’

  Toomey was reviewing my 1994 show at the Fanshawe Gallery which had a rather good press and was, surprisingly for me, a sellout: in earlier shows I’d never sold more than two or three paintings. When I find a theme I can do something with I tend to stay with it for a while; I’d done that with Don Quixote and I’d done it with Orlando Furioso. If I’d painted six versions of Angelica being rescued from the sea monster by Ruggiero I think I could have sold them all; I hadn’t realised at the time the commercial possibilities of bondage and besti
ality.

  Lenore had her own opinion of my bird-women. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘if you’re afraid of women why don’t you just come out as a queer instead of pissing about with harpies?’

  ‘Any sensible man is afraid of women,’ I said. ‘You’re just jealous because you haven’t got a gallery and you probably never will because all you do is your notebooks and paintings you don’t finish.’

  ‘The difference between us, you poor schmuck, is that I’m concerned with seeing and you’re concerned with selling. And you’ve well and truly sold out with your birds with tits and women’s heads.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’ve been exploring a theme that’s worth exploring while you’ve been hugging your images to yourself because you’re afraid of submitting a finished work to judgement. You’re afraid that you’ll be told you’re not as good as you need to be. Whatever happened, by the way, to that painting of the figure on the maze?’

  ‘I never intended to finish that one, stupid; that guy is still walking.’

  ‘And you’re still talking, but only to yourself’

  ‘Right. The next sound you hear will be your front door slamming as I leave you to your harpies.’

  ‘For ever?’

  No answer but the front door slamming.

  That wasn’t the end; she rang me up the next day and I took her out to dinner at the Blue Elephant. The foliage, the gentle plashing of the fountain and the rain-forest humidity had a calming effect on both of us. What we had between us was always ready to erupt like a dormant volcano; there was only a little bit of lava running down the mountain that time but it was definitely not the safest picnic spot.

  22

  The Essential Amaryllis

  I wanted Amaryllis to be with me but she wasn’t. I went up to the studio and looked at the warm-toned empty canvas. I went through my sketches, trying to find her essential self in them. Seeing her in the glimworld and the unglim both was confusing; I trusted my senses, I wasn’t hallucinating her, yet almost she seemed a creature of my imagination. With her unpredictable comings and goings she lacked the solid reality of persons who were where you expected to find them when you expected to find them.

  Until now I’d thought only of what I wanted; I’d never considered what she might want other than not to be alone. Maybe she didn’t want me at all; maybe I was only a means to some end I knew nothing of. And was I perhaps using her in some way I didn’t know about?

  The light was waning; I turned on the colour-corrected fluorescents and began to develop her face in cool tones. I remembered how she’d looked in the first glim, her glim in which she was thin and haggard. In spite of her confidence, even arrogance sometimes, I sensed that the thin woman with the straw-coloured hair was still how she thought of herself – unsure, afraid, searching for something she’d never found, and that face wanted to show through the winsome beauty of the Pre-Raphaelite nymph.

  The painting was going the way yesterday’s drawing had: it was better than I was ordinarily capable of doing. In the face that was coming to life on the canvas was the going to the cliff’s edge, the clear-eyed weirdness under the misty beauty. In searching for Amaryllis I lost myself, and by the time I stopped and cleaned my palette and brushes I didn’t know where she left off and I began. ‘The idea is in the image.’ How many times had I said that? And when I said it, was I just talking bollocks? Amaryllis’s image was by now indelibly imprinted on me but what was the idea of her? She was a fair one who constantly beckoned, but to what? For that matter, what was the idea of me? Did I even want to know?

  How quickly the strange becomes the usual! I was in love with a woman who was most responsive to me when we were both asleep. Between the glim and the unglim, where was reality? I went out on the balcony and looked to the west. There was the moon, one night past the full, sailing serenely in and out of cloud-wrack. Perhaps Amaryllis too was looking at it now. It was 01:35.

  23

  To Maine or Massachusetts

  I did the Möbius, watching the slider go around the twist again and again while I saw in my mind Amaryllis’s delicate sweet belly and her yin-yang tattoo. Soon my head went wide, then long, but it was easier this time, with no nausea.

  When the glim came I was standing by the Edward Hopper Mobilgas station looking down that lonesome road in the summer evening in a silence made up of the chirping of crickets. The air was very fresh and it was quite cool. The Mobilgas sign creaked a little as it swung in the breeze. There were bats flitting against a purple not-yet-dark sky. I threw a pebble into the air and one of them followed it down as it fell to the ground. Loneliness, I thought, is the essential human condition. Everything else is gravy.

  The man by the pumps was putting cans of oil in a rack. ‘Looks like a slow evening here,’ I said.

  ‘They’re all slow,’ he said. ‘And for my sins I had to get stuck here.’

  ‘You sound English.’

  ‘Look, mate, it’s your glim. When you learn to talk Maine or Massachusetts I’ll do the same, OK?’

  ‘Listen, buddy, I’m as American as you are.’

  ‘I doubt it. Where you from?’

  ‘Born in Pennsylvania.’

  ‘Where you from now?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘London, England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Why’d you say that?’

  ‘My daughter went to London with a tour group. They went to a museum and there was an unmade bed: dirty sheets all rumpled and a used tampon and a used condom. In a museum! They call that art over there, do they?’

  ‘Try not to think about it,’ I said. ‘Think Edward Hopper.’

  ‘He’s the only reason I keep this miserable place going. Nobody ever stops here.’

  I shook my head sympathetically. ‘Gets pretty cool here in the evenings, doesn’t it.’

  ‘No use breaking my balsam about it. Turn up the heat if you’re cold.’ He finished what he was doing and disappeared.

  There was a pale glimmer down the road: Amaryllis’s T-shirt. As she drew closer I saw that the words on it were:

  The world is whatever is the case.

  ‘Is that Wittgenstein?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t ask me, it’s your glim, Mr Snulture.’ She kissed me thoroughly, then took my hand and shoved it inside her jeans and knickers. ‘Everything north and south of my tattoo is yours,’ she breathed in my ear. ‘Also east and west, front and back included. Because you’re my kind of glimmer. And you’re reliable.’

  ‘I’m not putting words in your mouth, am I? Since it’s my glim, I mean.’

  ‘Stop worrying and kiss me.’

  I did.

  ‘When it’s your glim I feel a lot freer,’ she said, putting her hand inside my shirt.

  ‘I’m not complaining.’

  ‘Let’s just walk for a while. Smell the pines!’

  ‘Just as I yewsed to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I mumble sometimes.’

  We held hands and walked down the road as the sky grew darker. The crickets carried on cricketing; a bird said something; somewhere an owl hooted. There were no cars; that dark road had only the particularity of the pines and the crickets and the owl and the other bird, the evening breeze and nothing more – none of my daily concerns and worries. Except perhaps one or two.

  ‘I remember this road from when I was little,’ said Amaryllis. I can feel myself passing through myself to that time when everything around me was so much bigger and the time in front of me had no end to it. Do you feel realer in this glim than you do when you’re awake?’

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘You don’t like this road. I can tell.’

  ‘It’s all right; I don’t mind it.’

  ‘Do you like just walking with me, not doing anything more than this?’

  I like walking with you, talking with you, anything with you, Amaryllis.’ Being with her was so weird that I felt completely at home with it. br />
  She kissed me and we paused for a little quiet snogging. A few minutes later as we came around a bend we saw the Pines Motel with its green neon sign that said VACANCY. ‘On the other hand,’ said Amaryllis, ‘why fight it?’

  The place looked fairly run-down but all we actually needed was a bed so I opened the screen door of the office and we went in. There was a long strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, well furnished with flies. There was a portrait of Cotton Mather on the wall below a sampler that said JESUS LOVES YOU. There was a calendar from Smallville Hardware & Building Supplies Est. 1929. The picture on the calendar was Gas by Edward Hopper.

  The owner was an American-Gothic sort of woman with silvery hair pulled back in a bun, steel-rimmed spectacles, a faded print dress, a jet brooch, and a strong smell of camphor. She was reading a large much-used family Bible that weighed about three kilos, the kind with tooled leather covers and a brass clasp. She marked her place with the ribbon, gave us her beady attention, and said in a starchy voice, ‘Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”’

  Amaryllis burst into tears. ‘Oh, Peter darling,’ she murmured brokenly with her face against my neck, ’I do remember Zion! No one has ever glimmed me the way you do.’

  That was the first time she’d said anything about old glimmers. I’d never expected her to be without sexual experience but thinking about her being pulled into someone else’s glims made me wonder if I was on a road to nowhere with her. I held her close and stroked her hair and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Please stop that long enough to check in,’ said Mrs Gothic. ‘What you get up to or down to in your room is none of my business. Checkout time is at noon.’

  We checked in as Mr and Mrs Peter Diggs. I paid in advance with American money that I found in my pocket and Mrs Gothic gave me a key to one of the small cabins that stood in a row with the paint flaking off their clapboard sides. There were a Coke machine and an ice machine but no other visible amenities. I was confident that the mattress would be damp.