He inched a little further to his right, progressing westward in excruciating increments, a wagon-train with palomino snails in harness or a one man continental drift. This brought him up against the nursery’s west wall at its most southerly extreme. Just half of one side of the building to complete and then he could with honour make good his escape into a comfortingly artless world. Exhibit thirty-two, apparently entitled The Rood in the Wall, was similar in its proportions to the previous piece and proved to be the image which had prompted the irate departure of Bob Goodman earlier, or at least that was Mick’s assumption. Though the great majority of painters mentioned by his sister were obscure to him, he had at least across the years achieved familiarity at second hand with the peculiar work of William Blake, and recognised the piece before him as a kind of composite, a modified amalgam of the Lambeth visionary’s cryptic images. Predominating blackness, conjuring a subterranean and funereal ambience, was punctuated in the watercolour’s upper reaches by illuminated alcoves in which labelled likenesses presided like memorial statuary in a mausoleum. Leaning closer, he perused the names on tattered paper scrolls like Gilray dialogue-balloons: James Hervey, Philip Doddridge, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, William Blake and a few others, sombre and reflective, candlelit with colour in the cemetery dark. Their pious, downcast glances seemed to be directed, more in pity than contempt, towards the crouching, naked giant at the bottom of the painting, crawling wretched on his hands and knees along a stunted, lightless tunnel, bowed head weighted by a heavy golden crown. Mick recognised the figure, although only through the agency of an Atomic Rooster album cover he remembered, as Blake’s penitent Nebuchadnezzar. The damnation-shadowed features of the fallen Babylonian regent were herein replaced, however, by the asymmetric physiognomy of his sister’s much put-on actor friend, whom Alma seemed to employ as a stress-relieving executive squeeze-ball, a receptacle for her interminable gusher of abuse if Mick himself were poorly or on holiday. The only other element of the arrangement, something he did not specifically recall from Blake, was the rough-chiselled cross set into crumbling stonework at the painting’s centre, just above the grovelling monster but beneath the sympathetic audience of Gothic saints above. It didn’t seem to have that much to do with his own brief encounter with infant mortality, or even with the Boroughs, but then you could say that about the majority of the supposed works of art included in the heavily confined yet sprawling exhibition.
Feeling like an athlete superstitious about looking at the finishing line until they were right on top of it, he essayed an inexpert version of the military right-turn he’d learned at Boy’s Brigade and saw to his immense relief that there were only three more decorative hurdles between him and the propped-open doorway, between him and freedom. Better still, the first of these, which he was currently confronted by, was small and simple. On an insubstantial sheet of what looked very much like typing paper, tin-tacked to the nursery wall as if it were the work of a precocious child on parents’ day, there was a fluid and expressive pencil drawing with a wandering line as natural as April weeds. Not even bothering on this occasion to attach a separate label, Alma had just scrawled The Jolly Smokers at the top left corner of the piece itself, in chlorophyll. The drawing was a spindly and fragile detail of St. Peter’s Church, the front porch of the disused building with its honeyed stone and the black wooden ribcage of its roof, a strand of wheatgrass straggling from between the slabs outside its open entrance. In the shadowed recess a recumbent figure slumbered, trainer-soles towards the viewer and all other indicators of the person’s body-type, age, gender or ethnicity concealed beneath the slippery tucks and undulations of the unzipped sleeping-bag spread over them. Silvery graphite traceries uncoiled and trickled lovingly across the quilted contours, the implied form motionless beneath, digressing to investigate the intricate topography of each plump fold. The more Mick studied the deceptively spare composition, the more he found himself questioning his first assumption that this was a study of a homeless person, merely sleeping. With the bag pulled up and covering the face there was a mortuary aspect to the imagery which could not be ignored. In its veiled stillness, that of dream or of demise, the slumping shape inhabited a hesitating and ambiguous borderland between those states, much like the one suggested by that physicist who’d either gassed his cat or hadn’t. Mick could come to no conclusion other than an observation that, in disagreement with its title, the depicted scene was far from jolly and appeared to be non-smoking.
Moving northwards once more he progressed to the next picture, which he realised with a leaping heart was the penultimate exhibit. A square work in oils as spacious and resplendent as its predecessor had been meagre and without assumption, the attendant taped-on tag revealed its title as Go See Now This Cursed Woman. What at first appeared to be a maddeningly regular and even geometric abstract, the imagining of Milton Keynes by a despairing Mondrian, resolved on close inspection to an intricately-realised reproduction of a game-board, a generic layout on the Snakes-and-Ladders model of a lavishly embellished grid, each box emblazoned with a decorated number or iconographic miniature. He realised with a minor start that the game’s focus seemed to be the mink misfortunes of Diana Spencer, the familiar tabloid Stations of the Cross – sun through a thin skirt showing off her legs; posed at the gate with Charles; a coy glance up at Martin Bashir or her final public smile before the rear doors of the Paris Ritz – reduced to outsized postage stamps. The game-board layout, with its numbered spaces, loaned these incidental moments the uneasy sense of a relentless, hurtling linear progression to a predetermined outcome: an arrival at that final square, sooner or later, irrespective of the falling die, an outcome obvious from the commence of play or, indeed, from the opening of the cellophane-sealed box on Christmas morning. What had startled Mick was the unlikely coupling of board games and Diana Spencer, just as in his sleepless ruminations of the night before. It was quite clearly no more than coincidence and, now he thought about it, not particularly memorable at that. The idea of the blonde from Althorp’s life as a bizarre and fatalistic form of Cluedo was not that much of a reach, all things considered. Still, it had him going for a moment there.
Stealthily, he began to move toward the final lurid obstacle that stood between him and the gaping nursery door. Internally, he played a game where he and all the other gallery-goers were a surly crowd of culture-convicts, shuffling around the exercise yard, wondering if wives and sweethearts would still be there waiting for them on the outside after all this time. Unnoticed, hopefully, by the imaginary machine-gun towers that he’d by then positioned at the corners of the room, he inched towards the unlocked prison gate and genuinely gasped to feel the warder’s heavy hand fall on his shoulder from behind.
“Here, Warry? Have you got the lighter?”
Mick turned to face the dipped glare of his big sister’s headlight gaze, that of a sulky and uninterested basilisk who couldn’t be arsed turning people into anything except stone cladding. Alma seemed preoccupied and, worryingly, too distracted to insult him. Even in her mention of “the” lighter she appeared to have reclassified it as their mutual property and not an object that belonged to her alone, which in itself seemed to suggest a softening of policy. Was Alma ill? He fished inside a pocket of his jeans for the requested artefact. Handing it over, he felt duty-bound to ask.
“Warry? Is everything okay? You don’t seem quite your usual self. You’re being reasonable.”
Taking the lighter from him without any kind of thank you, which at least was more her style, his sister shook her hanging-garden head in the direction of the table-mounted model of the Boroughs, like one of the district’s rodents in that, famously, you never got more than six feet away from it.
“It’s this. It’s still not right. It isn’t saying what I want it to. It’s saying ‘Ooh, look at the Boroughs. Wasn’t it a lovely place, with all that history and character?’ All of the local photo-books I based it on are saying that already, aren’t they? This needs something
else. Cheers for the lighter, anyway. I’ll bring it back soon as I’m done with it.”
Once more, there was that weird politeness and consideration. Alma drifted off, presumably to elevate her mood and smoke her way towards a resolution of her quandary. Drawing a deep breath in anticipation Mick turned his attentions to exhibit thirty-five, the show’s final inclusion, dubbed by its torn-paper tag as Chain of Office. Portrait aspect, once again in gouache, a full-length appraisal of a single figure on a ground of marvellous cascading green – the picture’s bare facts crowded in to fill Mick’s field of vision and prevented him from viewing its totality. Alone, the single-colour backcloth with its seethe of nettle, lime and peridot was overwhelming, an experiential bouillon taste of knee-high fairground, fumbling adolescent meadow, boneyard moss. The painting’s subject, standing with both arms raised in greeting or benediction, had a mayoral air in part bestowed by the work’s title and in part by the eponymous medallion hung about their neck. On close inspection this gunmetal gong appeared to be a saucepan lid, with its supporting chain having seen previous service dangling from the cistern of a lavatory. The multitude of references in the pieces thus far, whizzing past above Mick’s head, had made him feel like he was being strafed by Melvyn Bragg but this, at last, was one he caught; was one he recognised. The dented lid, he knew, was an allusion to the bygone Boroughs custom of appointing some disreputable individual as the neighbourhood’s own mayor, a pointed satire staged there on the Mayorhold at the site of the Gilhalda, the original town hall, to mock the processes of government from which Northampton’s earliest population was by then excluded. The self-deprecating nature of the tin-pot talisman itself was undercut, however, by the sumptuous robes in which that central form was draped, more gloriously decorated than those worn by any real-world civic dignitary. Around the hem there ran a border of meticulously rendered paving slabs, greying and cracked with jade grass in the seams, while up around the collar …
It was him.
The person in the painting, it was Mick. It had Mick’s face, perfectly captured even down to the smeared glaze of highlight up by his receded hairline, although after a few moments’ scrutiny it came to him that this ingenious verisimilitude was actually occasioned by the paint still being wet. The likeness, even so, was unmistakeable and, truth be told, atypically flattering. From the sincere blue eyes to the engaging smile Alma had made him look quite handsome, at least in comparison with all his earlier appearances throughout this showing, whether as a simpering toddler or as a burns ward admission with his features more eroded than the sphinx. If he’d known sooner that the entire exhibition would be leading up to this, he wouldn’t have been half so grumpy or ill-humoured in his earlier appraisals. Now, though, he felt guilty and uncomfortable, which almost certainly was the effect his sister had been hoping for, if he knew Alma. Otherwise she would have said something when she waltzed up to pinch his lighter a few minutes back, with him stood right here by the painting which mythologized him, which absolved her of all her foregoing cruelties. Since he was standing facing the west wall of the day nursery, the only one with windows, he looked up from Chain of Office and out through the smeared glass for a sighting of her, pacing, puffing, wearing even more tracks through the patchy turf outside, but she was nowhere to be seen. His first thought was that she’d been so distressed about whatever she believed was wrong with her miniature Boroughs that she’d had a breakdown and absconded: a faked death, a changed appearance, a disguising limp, a ticket to another town. No one would ever again meet with Alma Warren, the failed model-maker. While he was almost entirely certain this was what had happened, he felt that he should at least take a quick shufty at the gallery behind his back before he bothered to alert the media.
His sister, it turned out, hadn’t even made it as far as the nursery door before being waylaid by her adoring or deploring public. She was further off from it, in fact, than Mick himself, leaning against the table’s further, eastern side and glowering at her handiwork like a displeased Jehovah, albeit one who’d swapped his beard for lipstick, though each to their own, of course, and nothing wrong with that. More disconcertingly, she was flanked by the two elderly ladies Mick had noticed earlier and who’d been slipping in and out of view throughout the afternoon. One stood to either side of Alma as she loomed over the papier-mâché district, hunching like a monstrous slagheap with more slag to it than usual, ready to engulf the shrunken Boroughs in a devastating avalanche of turquoise fluff and bitterness. The old girls, spider-webbed with wrinkles and their exposed flesh the mud of a dried reservoir, seemed to be taking turns to stoop and mutter their opinions into alternating ears of the preoccupied and frowning artist, though Mick doubted that the advice of whichever woman was engaging Alma’s deaf side would be implemented. With her wrecker’s-lantern eyes fixed irremovably on the diminished alleys of her reconstructed world his sister didn’t look at either of the women while they spoke to her, encouragingly by the look of things, but would acknowledge their remarks with grave nods of the head. Incredibly, it seemed that not only was Alma for once listening to somebody’s opinion of her work, but that she also appeared to agree with them. The two were evidently loving every minute of their audience with the subdued and uncharacteristically compliant artisan. From deep within their creased papyrus sockets their eyes gleamed and sparked, hobnails on cobbles, as their wizened heads dipped one after the other to their whispering, well-mannered vultures pecking at Prometheus’s liver. Though what they were saying to his sibling was impossible to hear above the hubbub of the gallery, Mick thought it looked as though they were administering an excited pep-talk, urging Alma to stick with her vision and to take it further, carrying it onwards. Something like that, anyway. The biddies pointed jabbing crab-leg fingers at the model on the table, with the one on Alma’s deaf right side repetitively mouthing something that looked like “keep on” or “go on”, something with two syllables like that. And Alma nodded as if she were heeding counsel that was irrefutable, taking career instruction from two dotty-looking termagants who ninety minutes previously she hadn’t known existed. Still no closer to an understanding of his sister than he’d been, aged seven, when she’d shot him with that blowpipe, Mick turned back to Chain of Office to continue his inspection.
Having now recovered from the shock of realising that he was this ultimate exhibit’s subject, he was able to take in the painting’s other content, notably the splendid robe in which his sister had seen fit to deck her central figure. Hanging folds of heavy velvet were embroidered with exquisite threads of gold, a gilded crazing that resolved at a few inches from the picture’s surface into a meandering treasure-map of the terrain that Mick was born from. It was one of those charts that had three-dimensional bits bulging out from it, of which he was always unable to recall the name. He could see overhead delineations of St. Andrew’s Road and Freeschool Street, Spring Lane and Scarletwell as plunging pleats in parallel and Doddridge Church a decoration on the bias, burial ground compressing as it gathered to the pinch-points. It occurred to him that in the raised-up buildings and projections of a vanishing cartography, a bit like Alma’s problematic Boroughs diorama, she’d contrived this last piece to reprise all of the exhibition’s other works in small. He eyed the piece, squinted the gaud, and saw that his ennobled likeness sported tiny glued-on snail shells as links, one mottled spiral badging either cuff. He was absorbed in these calciferous adornments, trying to establish if they still housed mollusc occupants, when he heard the distinct Pacific cadences of Alma’s pal Melinda Gebbie raised above the background susurrus, and everything kicked off.
“Alma, you fucking asshole, don’t you fucking dare!”
Mick turned, from only idle curiosity, and found himself confronted by the single image from this viewing that he’d take away with him, the solitary tableau that was genuinely unforgettable. His sister, with a blankness of expression that was either innocent or guilty to a point past caring, saint or serial murderer, leaned forward over Mar
efair and Saint Mary’s Street, reaching past Castle Street and across Peter’s House to Bath Street. The old ladies huddling behind her hugged each other and performed a clumsy, hopping little dance. Lucy Lisowiec’s enormous eyes prepared to fire themselves across the room, accompanying her rising siren wail.
“Almaaaaaaa!”
Pressing a wavering tongue of blue and yellow from the flint-wheel of Mick’s lighter, Alma let it taste the simulated birdshit caked around the rim of her scaled-down Destructor. More-ish, evidently. Dribbling incendiary frills of indigo poured down the lampblacked chimney tower to its base with startling rapidity, sending up acrid and authentic billows of particulate towards the ceiling-mounted sensors as they did so. It all burned so fast, being constructed wholly from materials designed to do just that, and in his sister’s dawning look of apprehension it appeared that even she was unprepared for the appalling pace of the toy-town calamity she’d just unleashed.
A spreading gorse of conflagration engulfed Bristol Street and its environs, with the bijoux fever-cart and centimetre-high mare towing it into the mouth of Fort Street parched to curling smuts and gone upon the instant. Arson reflux scorched the narrow gullet of Chalk Lane and spewed annihilating riot-bile down Marefair, the anachronistic witch-hat turret on Black Lion Hill shrivelling unrepentant at the stake and twisted round with shifting scarves of gold. Infernal tributaries sluiced from long-gone Bearward Street to flood the Mayorhold with combusting vapour, tromp l’oeil sweetshop windows disappearing into light before the flickering translucence climbed the razor-cut of Bullhead Lane to Sheep Street, where ignition moved like scrapie through the paper flock. Hot orange devils swarmed on the crusader church, unravelling its steeple into sparks and levelling the thick-walled round down to a howling mouth red as a branding-iron, a blazing torus, pinkie ring of an apocalyptic angel. Mercy, bright and cauterising, stroked the wounded neighbourhood. In Marefair, Cromwell’s bunk at Hazelrigg House was made immolate among the millenarian tinder, shaved skulls you could strike a match on, cavalier plumes smouldering on pinpricked cornices. From the charred stump of Bath Street’s smokestack, searing ripples spread through the flea-circus district in dilating sapphire hoops, as from a shooting star fallen into a petrol pond. Incineration danced on Broad Street and Bellbarn, flash-vanishing Salvation Army forts and suffering no barber’s pole that it remain unlit. The Rizla laundry flapped like phoenix wings in Greyfriars’ central courtyard, damp with drizzled flames, while all along the crisping terraces six dozen public houses called last orders and submitted to a harsher temperance. Saint Elmo flirted with the upper reaches of Saint Katherine’s high-rise, jumped between laboriously fashioned television aerials on Mary’s Street in a peak-time transmission, sentimentally retracing the trajectories of a Restoration predecessor, and the martyring Niagara spilled down Horsemarket dragging a bridal gauze of choking fume behind. Cremating fancywork writhed briefly on Saint Peter’s architraves. Zero-gage holocaust accomplished in mere seconds an erasure over which the Borough Council had deliberated for just shy a century, deleting cobbled histories in its sheathing Catherine-wheel spray, no west wind this time to ensure that only the torched gloveries and milliners of Mercers’ Row or thereabouts would ever be regenerated. The short reach of houses on St. Andrew’s Road from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane became an ashen Rothko bad day, by some fluke of thermal whimsy sparing only the Monopoly-sized premises at the line’s south extremity. Boys’ clubs and bookmakers, cottaging-friendly lavatories and corner dives were caught up in a pyroclastic flow from Regent Square down to the foot of Grafton Street, and Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dance-school on the current site of Alma’s exhibition spouted rolling white clouds from its open door in microcosm of the building it was modelled on and situated in. Sharp to the sinuses and tear-ducts, these at least elicited a lachrymosity that the more gradual demolitions of some several decades had failed to provoke. Fast-forwarded there on the tabletop a precinct of the heart was firestormed to oblivion in facsimile, its final music the repeated shrill of panicking detectors.