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Chalk-stripe’s interest had already passed. He glanced at his expensive watch and was all business.
‘Hmmmm, what time is it now? Half-eight. We’re probably heading over in, what, half an hour? Forty minutes?’
That night her exhibit was a sheet of black papyrus, four or five metres wide, that hung from floor to ceiling in the last room. Up close, its homogeneous black grew to shades of charcoal and slate and ink and soot, and its smooth appearance resolved into the flecked composition of chipboard. Its surface was wounded in a thousand different ways: minute shapes were pricked and sliced and nicked in it. There were Ordnance Survey symbols—a church, crossed axes—but also a crown, a dagger, a mountain, a star, miniature semaphore flags. And tiny objects—all silver—dangled or poked through it: safety pins, bracelet charms, an earring, a pin, what must be a silver filling. The man beside David pointed to the largest object, low down in the astral canopy, and said he was sure that the St Christopher medal, just there, must represent the Pole Star.
The gallery lights at that end of the room had been dimmed, and the work, Night Sky (Ambiguous Heavens), hung a foot away from the wall. Fluorescent strip lights had been placed behind it and shone through the fissures in the paper. As it wafted gently in the convection currents, breathing, it made a far-off tinkling sound. The conversation with Ruth had left him charged. He wanted to be affected, to give himself up to something, and standing a certain distance from the black, and being a little drunk, he felt engulfed. This was Ptolemaic night, endless celestial depths of which he was the core and the centre. Everyone around him disappeared, and he imagined himself about to step into the dream stupor of outer space.
David watched, he drank, he waited. He spent some time in front of a massive LCD sign that took up an entire wall of the gallery. As he watched, a single number rose astonishingly quickly, in millisecond increments. His heart sped. Death may be hidden in clocks, but this was a kind of murder. After a minute or so he felt hunted and light-headed. Every instant added to the total on the sign came directly from his reckoning. And a certain sequence of those digits was the moment of his death.
He slipped out for a cigarette, but at nine o’clock he was Ruth’s guardian angel, floating a few feet behind her as she said her goodbyes. When they climbed the steps to Waterloo Road, Larry strode energetically to the central island to hail a passing cab. You could tell he was born to hold doors and fill glasses, Larry, to organize, facilitate, enable.
The view from the bridge was spectacular. The restive black river, slicing through the city, granted new perspectives. The buildings on the other side were Lego-sized, those far squiggles trees on the Embankment walk. Even though Larry and the taxi driver were waiting, Ruth stopped for a second to inspect the night, and stood gripping the rail. The normal sense of being in a London street, of trailing along a canyon floor, was replaced by the thrill of horizons. The sky was granted a depth of field by satellites, a few sparse stars, aircraft sinking into Heathrow.
Larry and Ruth talked for the length of the journey as David roosted awkwardly on a flip-down seat. Ruth’s piece had been bought before the opening—by Walter—though Larry had retained rights to show it. When the gallery owner opened his notebook to check a date, David noticed that $950k was scrawled by the words Night Sky. He listened to everything very intently. Away from the public crowded gallery, a new, personalized part of the evening was actually beginning. Somehow there were only three of them, and he felt nervous. When the cab pulled up he tried to pay for part of the fare, but Larry dismissed him with a rather mean laugh that took the good, David thought, out of his gesture. The club was situated down a narrow alley and behind a blue door that appeared abruptly in the wall. David hurried through as if it might vanish.
Larry flirted with the girl on reception, signed them in. They followed him through a warren of low-ceilinged, wood-panelled rooms. Each had a tangle of flames a-sway in a grate and much too much furniture. And each was full of people in various modes of perch and collapse, laughing and squealing and whispering, demanding ashtrays, olives, cranberry juice with no ice. As he trailed after, David adopted a weary expression: if anyone should look at him they would never know how foreign he felt, how exposed and awkward.
Larry spotted a spare corner table and charitably chose the three-legged stool, leaving David the rustic carver. Ruth settled into the huge winged armchair, arranging her black shawl around her. David realized he’d been unconsciously pushing his nails into his palms, leaving little red falciform marks, and he stopped, forcing his hands flat on his thighs. He normally spent the evenings on the internet, chatting on a forum, but that night he was an urban cultural participant, engaged with the world, abroad in the dark.
‘So what did you guys think of the exhibition?’ Ruth asked.
This was his chance and David began talking immediately. He had given it much thought and started listing pieces and their attendant strengths and problems, then discoursing generally on the difficulty of such an undertaking, the element of overlap and competition with other artists, what the curator should have considered doing differently. Ruth was smiling, but the more he talked, the more solid her mask became. When she nodded in anticipation of saying something, David concluded, snatching his cigarettes with a flourish from the tabletop, ‘But I would say—and I know this sounds a little crawly—but I thought your piece was the most involving. I felt drawn into examining the nature of darkness, how it’s actually composed.’
He found he was sitting forward, almost doubled over, and he straightened up. Ruth smiled and said, ‘Crawly?’ but he could tell he’d talked too much. Larry had a bored, paternal grin on his face, and he waved his hand, dispelling some disagreeable odour. The waitress slouched across.
When Ruth made some slightly barbed reference to pure commercialism, David sensed a chink between them and tried to widen it. He waited ten minutes and then asked about money, about how art could ever really survive it. Larry grimaced, and explained that art and money were conjoined twins, the kind that share too many vital organs ever to be separated. Ruth balanced her chin on her small fist and flicked her gaze from her old friend to the new. David said that sometimes the most private, secretive art is the strongest. It had to relinquish the market to be truly free. Surely Larry wasn’t saying that Cubism started with the rate of interest on Picasso’s mortgage.
Larry frowned, forced to detonate David’s dreams. ‘Well, the fact is, not everyone’s Picasso.’
‘I think Larry’s trying to tell you that minor artists, like me, need to make saleable products. Is that it, darling?’
‘You’re certainly not minor.’
‘I’m certainly not a minor.’
Larry gave a loud guffaw and patted the back of her hand. Ruth ignored him and lifted David’s cigarettes; he passed her the lighter and she drew one out of the packet, pinching it in half to break it in a neat, proficient movement. She noticed David noticing.
‘Can’t stop, can only downsize.’
Watching her, David found himself reminded of the finitude of earthly resources. She expected, and the taking was so heedless she had obviously acclimatized to prosperity at an early age. When the time had come for her to order a drink she’d spoken quickly, astonishingly, in a volley of Italian. The reluctant waitress had beamed, revealing one deep dimple, and replied in the same ribboning cadences. Later, when David leant across and told Ruth how much he liked her charcoal-coloured wrap, she said, ‘Well, that’s really something. It’s a bit Raggedy-Ann now, but you know who used to own it? Audrey Hepburn. She was a great friend of my mother’s.’
Men who own banks and Audrey Hepburn. A sheet of black paper for one million dollars. David lifted the edge of the shawl then, and pressed his thumb in the cashmere. It was soft as baby hair, as kitten fur. He thought of the symbolism of the act, touching the hem of her garment. He had a terrible tendency to think in symbols. He knew it made him unrealistic.
Nutter (#ulink_23ed4fee-0fb3-518c-b08c-a203769dce3a)
Blame is complicated but some of it must be David’s. It was a Thursday night weeks later, and as the tube slid alongside the platform Ruth held tight to the bar, bracing herself for the lurch. She noticed a young man suddenly uncoil, a few seats down, and bounce to his feet. He was right behind her at the barrier, when she couldn’t find her ticket, and she stepped aside to let him pass. Outside on the pavement, the man was peering into the window of an estate agent’s, his head almost touching the glass. She walked down the High Street, took the second road on the left and, after a few moments, heard footsteps and looked back. He’d turned the corner too.
Something in her registered his presence as aggressive. But still, it was possible, she told herself, that he hadn’t even noticed her. Or that he hadn’t noticed he was scaring her. This was England. There was a thing called cultural difference. She quickened the percussive step of her boots and clawed round in her bag, locating her keys and jiggling them into her fist, so the sharp parts faced outwards. There was also a thing called sexual assault. Maybe she should stop and let him pass. But then they’d be only a couple of metres apart. Maybe she should knock on the door of a house, somewhere lit up. Further along, brown leather in street light, a man unlocking his car. Just as she tensed herself to shout, he climbed in and the door of the car banged shut. The words died in her throat.
The car’s tail-lights receded, exited right. She glanced back and the man stopped, and she thought of playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with Bridget in the yard on Sherman Street. The grass had almost been hidden by pink cherry blossom. An image of Bridget’s tiny hands, a doll’s hands, pouncing on her, Bridget screaming and giggling. She started walking quickly again and a white cat slinked out from behind some bins. That did it: she broke into a run, her canvas bag slapping awkwardly against her side. Flight heightened her panic. In the noise her motion made, she was convinced she could hear him behind her, running, and if she turned now he would be there, six foot of shadow coming towards her, coming right for her, and would say nothing, do something…
Number 87. She vaulted up the steps and jammed the button for C, the top-floor apartment. David’s. The man was strolling now, thirty, forty metres away. It was fine. Was it fine? As he approached, she managed to pout disdainfully and stare past him, but kept her finger pressed on the buzzer. He was almost at the bottom of the steps, and then he was there, and he stopped. It was real. He was here to harm her. She stared and he stared back, his face a private smirk, the whole world some obscene joke. He was forcing himself into her consciousness, into her life, and she could do nothing about it. She made a shooing gesture at him, and then suddenly she was out of bravery: her knees went. She grabbed at the doorway for support. The man pulled his hands out of his black anorak and held them out, palms up, as if to say Cool it, let’s take it easy. But before he could speak, she cut in, her voice unnaturally high.
‘No—fuck you. I think you should walk on by, sir, and leave me alone.’ The ‘sir’ took even her by surprise. He took a step back and shrugged, still bemused.
‘Well look, I’m sorry but—’
‘If you try anything, I will kick you. I will kick the shit out of you. I’m not interested…’ She trailed off. Her American accent, minimal normally, sounded loud and false and ridiculous to her own ear, but she held his eye and nodded, to assure him she was serious. He sank his hands back into his anorak and leant against a lamppost as if he could quite happily wait there for eternity.
Upstairs David picked up the intercom handset: ‘Hello?’
‘Open the door. A man followed me and he’s right here.’
‘What? The buzzer’s broken. I’m coming down.’
Three floors up, in a steamy kitchen, David grabbed the first heavy thing to hand and descended the stairs three at a time. When he yanked open the front door, Ruth pawed at his arm, pulled him out onto the porch.
‘This man has been—’
David patted the fist that gripped his shirtsleeve. ‘Ruth, meet James,’ he said, there and then corrupting the future. She made a series of fathoming blinks and offered a panicky smile. David repeated: ‘This is James, my lodger.’
Ruth stood stiff with embarrassment, both hands clutching her shoulder bag.
‘Flatmate,’ Glover corrected, signing Don’t shoot, as he came up the steps. Ruth shook his outstretched hand, and noticed his engaging smile, his steady blue eyes.
‘I’m so sorry about freaking you out. I’d no idea…’
David backed against the hallway wall to let her pass, knocking unclaimed post from the radiator. Behind her, Glover widened his eyes at him as if to ask Who the hell’s this nutter? Ruth tugged the weapon David had picked up, a blue oven dish, from his hands.
‘And what’s with this? Were you gonna make him a casserole?’
The intricate machinery (#ulink_d200ab08-03ed-55af-b180-0acc0d05a064)
They climbed the stairs to dinner in procession—Ruth, then David, then Glover. It had been some time since the communal hall had seen any love. Handlebars, furniture, umbrellas and shopping bags had scored and scuffed the once-white walls until now they resembled the notepads in stationers used to test pens. The bare bulb hung limply. The radiator had leaked last winter and rust in the pipes had left a dark blotch, Africa-shaped, on the carpet. The man who came to read the meter had asked David if it was a bloodstain.
‘I’m sorry—James—I’m sorry for getting so hysterical down there.’
‘No, not at all. As much my fault as yours.’
‘You really should have said something and reassured her.’
‘I tried but she told me to shut up. In fact she threatened me.’
‘I did, it’s true.’ Ruth laughed. ‘You know what it is? I think it’s that everything’s so terrible everywhere, I’m just waiting for something to happen to me.’
She looked around the kitchen, taking in the slatted calendar for the Fu Hu Chinese takeaway, the cupboard with the missing door, the tannic stains of damp on a corner of the ceiling. David would have felt embarrassed, but he had a hunch that Ruth liked to slum it occasionally. She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.
‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’
He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.
‘It’s great you could come round.’
‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’
‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’
‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’
Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.
‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’
David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.
‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.
‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.
‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’
‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.
‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’
You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.
‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his laughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.
‘Not all the blame, I hope.’
David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.
‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’
They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang. At the sound Ruth looked sulkily around her, then lifted her canvas bag from the foot of the sofa and began to go through it, extracting an overstuffed black leather wallet, two purple silk-bound notepads, a hardback of Chekhov minus its dust jacket, a small Maglite torch, a silver glasses case, and then a phone the size and shape of a silver glasses case.
‘Her mobile’s not very mobile.’
‘It must be twenty years old.’
Ruth ignored them, wincing at the screen before answering it.
‘Hi, Karen, hi…No, that was from earlier. I straightened it out. I just didn’t know which form they meant…Right…No, I’m with a friend…No, I’m at the boys’ flat…Yes, tomorrow’s fine…Okay, great.’ She plunged the phone back in her bag. David realized she’d hung up without saying goodbye.
‘The boys?’ he asked.
After broaching a bottle of Amaretto that Glover located under the sink, Ruth announced that she was going to the National Gallery the next afternoon.
‘Is there something in particular you have to do?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, not really. I want to drop in and take a look at a few pictures, and then go somewhere else and think about them.’
Glover slapped his hand loudly against his chest in the gesture of allegiance. ‘Well, I’ve got to work, but David’s free, aren’t you?’ There was a hint of laughter behind his voice; he didn’t even understand that David would want to go.
‘I could check online and see what exhibition’s showing.’ ‘Or we could let it surprise us,’ Ruth said. David thrilled a little at that us.
‘You should drop into the Bell afterwards, sit and have a proper think about those pictures.’
David thought Ruth might take offence, but Glover had judged it finely. Through it all he possessed a firm sense of what people wanted from him.
The evening was out of the ordinary. David felt good. Here was difference and it was fine. Ruth on his sofa. An artist. An American. A woman. When Glover rang her a cab before heading, finally, to bed, there were just the two of them at last. David half-hoped and half-feared that a further intimacy would develop—as if now they’d lean in close and start declaring the stark facts of their lives—but it turned out Glover’s absence bred a vague uneasiness. When he disappeared, the strain of carrying on a one-to-one took hold, and Ruth checked her watch, then leant her chin on her hand, spacing four fingers along her jaw. David imagined them on his fleshy back, indenting. They were waiting for the buzzer and when it eventually went, they both started slightly, relieved. A chaste kiss on her hot cheek and she vanished. In bed he noticed, for the very first time, how the galaxies of Artex on his ceiling all swirled clockwise.
With a capital A (#ulink_cfaf3ab6-c110-5585-b2e0-624ad97660c0)
Raining when he woke, and so dark he thought it must still be night. Footsteps scuffled on the stairs and the front door banged: Glover was leaving for work. It was already after ten. A sheet of A4 on the kitchen table:
D, Thanks for dinner. Did you like the way I set you up? I’m on till six if you want to pop in later. God Save The Queen, J
The sign-off was a rejoinder to Who Dares Wins, which David had used on a note about milk and toilet roll a few days ago. It had been proverbs until recently. Had he set him up? Did he mean he’d set up a date with Ruth for him? Or did he mean he’d tricked him into going? David didn’t know. He crumpled up the note and dropped it in the pedal bin.
They’d agreed to meet outside the National Gallery at two, and he arrived ten minutes early. The rain had eased but not stopped, and the vista from the portico was still uniquely uninspiring: London done by Whistler, arranged in black and grey. Ragged, pewter clouds turned on Nelson’s head, so that he alone was all that held the heavens up. Lutyens’s limestone fountains were blown to spray and rain danced on the surface of their pools in time to the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’. Everything today had kept rhythm with the tunes on his iPod: the shunting of his tube carriage through its rock-wall galleries had accompanied The Clash, his footsteps on the underpass at Charing Cross had syncopated perfectly with the Blind Boys of Alabama. And now not even the Great British weather could puncture his mood. He was thinking about Ruth.
He had not been a success at Goldsmiths. Too shy and self-conscious in groups, he had fastened to students who showed him kindness and then been peeled, not kindly, off. Slowly he found a few friends with corners, who like him were awkward, and whose expectations had been comparably reduced. There was Adam, a tiny, witch-faced historian with a tinny, nasal voice; Michelle, a chubby goth who smoked all the time and looked skywards when someone addressed her; and a gentle nervous Chinese boy called Wu, who was almost certainly gay and had, David learnt from the alumnus magazine, hanged himself three years ago. He tried not to think of that time in his life. It was all too ambiguous, shameful and strange. He’d been vengeful then and quick to take umbrage, had found refuge in books and movies, and as a general policy scorned the world. It was only since he’d begun teaching himself and had made his own students laugh that he’d realized misanthropy could be taken for wit, and had found some semblance of pleasure in anger and cynicism.
But he still remembered anyone who’d once been nice to him, and that morning had pulled two cardboard boxes out from under his bed. It was a blue file, its spine entitled From Easter Island to Henry Moore—Versions of the Human. On the inside flap he’d written: Ruth Marks, Visiting Artist—Introductory Module on Sculpture. As he flipped through it, what came to mind was the moment he’d first seen her. He had slid, a few minutes late, into the back row. In various dark layers, with a black headscarf over her blonde hair, the new lecturer was gripping each side of the podium as if she might fall. She had huge dark eyes, deepened with a ring of kohl, and spoke with excessive solemnity, trying to convince them that she was a serious proposition. The sobriety, though, couldn’t stay completely intact. Her voice would crack with emphasis, she’d accidentally enthuse. She had an ardour that came with practising the art, a passion the professional tutors had lost.
David’s own journey to art, or Art as he always thought of it, had been a wrong turning. He was never quite sure why he’d been accepted onto the foundation course in the first place. Even now he was embarrassed by the sight of a watercolour from his A-level year that still hung in his parents’ downstairs toilet: an acid-green sky against which a singular figure in black trekked over the crest of a mountain. All his work had featured a lone individual in a vast backdrop, and only recently had he realized the link with the image of the sage on the mountainside, of Jesus or Muhammad in the desert, of Buddha by himself beneath the Bodhi Tree. He too, David Pinner, had been looking for enlightenment. And it had come, after a fashion: at Goldsmiths he met real artists, those whose panicked relationship with their materials betrayed not a fear of mediocrity, of exposure, as his did, but a recurring, unanswerable compulsion.
He pretended for a while; then stopped pretending. After one of Ruth’s lectures, he decided to stay behind and tell her he was changing courses. The hall’s draughty windows were mirrorbacked by the darkness of the winter afternoon, and stirred with his reflection as he walked towards the front. His steps echoed. Her hair in two Teutonic plaits, Ruth rustled across the stage in a madeira hippy skirt with tassels and small round mirrors sewn into it. She was folding her notes, too tightly to use again, scrunching them into a paper bolt.
‘Ms Marks?’
She looked up, mustered a smile. ‘Ruth. Please.’
‘Ruth. Hi. I wanted to say firstly that I’m finding your course really fascinating—’
She gave a rueful little laugh; the tassels swished as she moved towards her bag. ‘Well, isn’t that kind. I wish they all felt like you do.’
Some of the students had left, noisily, during the lecture. Ruth sometimes got lost in her text and repeated herself. Other times she simply stopped and stared over their heads.
‘Oh, they just want to get home. It happens on Friday afternoons.’
‘Really?’
David nodded bravely, saddened by his fellow undergraduates’ priorities.
