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‘Still, today’s did not go well…’ A bell rang in the corridor outside and stopped. ‘If it’s the handout, I don’t have any more copies now but next week—’
‘Oh no, I got one of those. It was more of a general thing.’ Up close the long nose became a little sharp, though it contained all the intelligence and glamour of European Jewry and sat, to David’s untutored Old World eyes, a touch uncomfortably with the Aryan hair. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your lectures. They’ve made me think in ways about things…’
She smiled uncomfortably. He realized he was giving the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and stopped. She waited for a few seconds, then swung her velvet bag up onto her shoulder and helped him out. ‘But you wanted to tell me you’re leaving the course?’
He was dropping art altogether and changing to English literature. They ended up sitting on the stage steps and talking for almost fifteen minutes. She asked David about himself and his family, and he found himself telling her. About being the only child of a philistine butcher and a woman fuelled by tension. He had never had any support. He needed the support. Why could they not have given him their support? When he’d begun to cry—for all frustrated artists, for all hampered ambition, for all the sensitive souls in the world—she’d dredged up a tissue stained with make-up from her bag, and had praised the bravery of his difficult decision. He often thought about how kind she’d been to him, and how attractive he’d found her own weird mix of confidence and fear. He’d kept that tissue in his pocket all evening, and the next day had been reluctant to bin it, although he had. Years later, in a second-hand book shop in the Elephant and Castle, when he came upon a glancing reference to her in A Guide to Contemporary American Art, he ran his fingertip along her name and bought the book.
David felt abashed on entering the National Gallery. When they climbed the great staircase, the awe of scale meant he was whispering, and by the time they came to the art, entering a room where portraits hung on thick gold chains against the crimson walls, and a cornice was piped like icing around the ceiling’s edge, both had fallen silent. Ruth stared at each picture and he followed, a masterpiece or two behind. David noticed he was walking in a formal, measured stride, much like the Duke of Edinburgh, and he’d even tucked his hands, rudder-like, behind his back.
When he joined her in front of a self-portrait by Murillo, brushing his duffel coat against her shoulder, she gave a raspy little sigh of satisfaction. It was a picture of a picture, with a frame within the frame, and the painter-subject, a lump-faced dignitary with a suspended moustache, reached out of his own portrait and rested his hand on the inner surround in a neat trompe l’oeil.
‘The fingers are very fine, aren’t they? It gives real space and depth, but it’s also Murillo saying’—she raked the air in front of the picture—‘look, I’m the only one who can decide the reality of the art, or the art of the reality.’
David nodded, not quite sure if her chiasmus made any sense. Nonetheless a statement was plainly called for: ‘It looks exactly like a hand.’
She stopped in reverent silence before a Michelangelo. The Entombment showed a naked Jesus being lifted up by John the Baptist and two others. To the front right of the picture was a blank in the shape of someone kneeling. The creases at the top of Christ’s thighs made the upper half of an X, marking the spot where his penis should be, but in its place there was only another blank, a cob-shaped void. I know how that feels, David thought. He put his hand in the pocket of his duffel and pressed it against his unresponsive crotch.
‘There’s something astonishingly modern about it,’ Ruth said at last, picking her words slowly, ‘and his mastery of the line’s incredible. It’s only through these contours’—she gestured again, spell-casting—‘that we experience the figure having volume and weight. It gives me a visceral reaction.’ She shivered, or pretended to shiver. David thought how pointless the phrase ‘visceral reaction’ was.
‘Who’s the missing person?’
‘The Madonna. Isn’t it almost as though Michelangelo couldn’t bring himself to make her visible, couldn’t make her witness her son’s entombment?’
‘Hmmm,’ David encouraged.
‘Though apparently he was waiting for ultramarine to paint her blue cloak. The lapis lazuli he needed could only be gotten from Afghanistan.’ There was a pause and then she tried a little political satire: ‘Nowadays they’d just invade it.’
As they headed past Leicester Square station and up Charing Cross Road towards the Bell and Crown, Ruth, like one of Prufrock’s females, was still talking of Michelangelo. She explained to David just why he was the supreme artist, how he represented the culmination of disegno. Just then a bicycle rickshaw went past, ferrying a bridal couple. The man, his hair slicked back as if he’d surfaced in a pool, grinned idiotically and waved. Poking from a millefeuille wedding dress, a wreath of white flowers in her hair, the bride was tossing confetti at passers-by. A trail of it stuck flatly to the wet road. Their cyclist was pumping his thigh muscles under a flapping, neon-blue rain poncho, and ringing his bell over and over. David couldn’t tell if they were genuine or some kind of publicity stunt, but was amazed when Ruth waved back, and even more amazed when he did too.
Glover acknowledged them with a solemn wink, and they waited and watched him serving. He had an undeniable elegance behind the bar. For a big man he possessed grace. Simultaneously he poured two pints, listened to a customer’s order, laid a banknote in the bed of the till, plucked up change, laughed at something, cracked a comeback, and all the while nodded his head to the R’n’B that slinked from the speakers.
He wouldn’t take money for the drinks, a first as far as David could remember. He just shook his head and mouthed no, though David noticed him glance to the side to check whether Eugene, his slight ginger colleague, was watching. After passing across two glasses of red, he propped himself on his elbows on the bar, flexing his tennis-ball biceps.
‘So how were the pictures? You get plenty to think about?’
There was an edge of banter to everything. Glover and David became her wayward boys, cocky and mocking and sly. It seemed to fit their three personalities, the little hierarchy of ids and egos and superegos. It was flirtation, David supposed, and surprisingly he was good at it. The Bell’s manager, Tom, came up from the cellar wearing a tight silver shirt—David whispered to Ruth that he should be put in an oven and basted regularly—and then Glover finished his shift and joined them on the other side of the bar.
They moved to a table, and when David produced his gift shop postcards Glover stared at each in turn and said, without a hint of humour now, how beautiful they were. Ruth began to repeat some of the things she’d said in the gallery, and her lack of irony drew something similar from him. She talked about painting the way Glover talked about cars, with a personal, urgent pride in what others had made. David told them his own theory of art—which was that the finest pictures by the old masters featured either a monkey or a midget, or even, as in the Veronese they’d seen that afternoon, both. The classic double, he called it.
‘She comes in every day at noon and orders a half of cider. Sits just over there.’
‘With the Mirror.’
‘Right, and her Dunhill Lights.’
‘With a mirror? Why does she bring a mirror?’
‘The Daily Mirror newspaper. And it used to be her husband, Ray, who’d come in for a Guinness every afternoon, but Ray’s dead of a heart attack. I’d never even seen her, Irene, before. Then on the first day she came in she sat and cried.’
‘She’s on pilgrimage really, honouring his memory. Didn’t Raleigh’s wife carry his head around with her for years?’
‘In a velvet bag,’ added David.
‘She likes to do the crossword. And she told me once the flat was just too empty without him.’
David, who had heard the story before, had seen Irene for himself. She’d had her pack of Dunhills propped open beside her and was filling in a puzzle book, pencil poised, one eye screwed shut against the thread of smoke unspooling from the fag clamped between her lips. The mouth itself was caved in and gummy like a tortoise’s. The smoke, and her thinness, had left the impression she might actually be evaporating. Helmeted with a lavender-grey perm, draped in a shapeless maroon cardigan, she had an untied lace on one of her child-sized Adidas trainers, and the loose, lank, trailing thing struck David as desperately sad. The thin gold wedding ring on her finger was not a symbol of devotion but a statement of loss: it said what youlove you will lose, and for ever. When she’d shambled to the bar and bought some cheese and onion crisps, the whole effect was somewhat spoiled. According to Glover, Ray had been an absolute bastard: he said Tom had always called him Wifebeater No 1, which led David to presume there were others.
Ruth was meeting Larry at eight, so David walked her down to the cab office on Greek Street. As he kissed her goodbye he pressed his fingertips, ever so gently, against the small of her back. When he got home he googled disegno and wrote an entry about it on The Damp Review. It was the Italian word for drawing but meant, apparently, much more than that. As Michelangelo had perfected it, disegno was a sublime kind of problem-solving, and the work of art an ideal solution, reconciling the often conflicting demands of function, material, subject, verisimilitude, expressivity…David got bored with typing the list out, and cut and pasted the rest of it…formal beauty, unity and variety, freedom and restraint, invention and respect for tradition. He also posted a second entry prescribing a trip to the National Gallery for anyone bored with shopping, or Hollywood, or crappy weekend newspaper supplements.
Collective nouns (#ulink_5b12afb4-0e17-5d14-bc62-9323b45320b5)
On The Damp Review David posted critiques of films mostly but also his thoughts about books, TV shows, plays, restaurants, takeaways, whatever took his fancy. Or didn’t. He found it easier to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still. And it was his: they might have the television, the newspapers, the books, but the internet was his. Democratic, public, anonymous—it was his country and he felt grateful to be born in the generation that inherited it. He didn’t tell his family or friends about his site. Not even Glover knew what he got up to in his bedroom.
He’d begun another little project recently, gathering information on all the people he’d lost touch with over the years. He didn’t contact anyone directly but followed the footprints they left on their strolls through the virtual world. His nemesis from primary school had become a scuba instructor in the Virgin Islands. He found some photos on Rory’s brother’s Flickr account that showed a burnished and shaggy dropout hoisting a tank of air, thick-skinned as a seal in his wetsuit. David and he had been love rivals for Elizabeth S——, who he also found, eventually, on Facebook. She had retained her tragic, android beauty, though she was now holding a kid of her own.
He’d joined Friends Reunited under the pretence of being another boy from his class, the only person he’d ever hit, now a leading banking litigator. David took his bio from the law firm’s website, where a photo showed him still to be the vulnerable and round-eyed, slope-shouldered boy he’d known. Then he searched MySpace for students at PMP, the private college where he taught, at the same time as checking Arts & Letters Daily, where he found an interesting article on the life of Chaucer. He printed out eight copies for his A-level group and was trying to staple the sheets together when he heard Glover come in from church.
An old western was on the television in the living room. Glover had changed his clothes and now lay on the floor with one arm tucked up into his red T-shirt. The shape of his fist bounced gently off his chest, like a beating cartoon heart.
‘I think this is bust.’
Glover looked up as David wagged the black stapler, pulled the arm out from under his T-shirt and motioned for David to throw it. He caught it neatly, sat up and turned it over in his hands, as if looking for its price. Then he snapped it open and nodded.
‘It’s jammed. I can see it. The magazine can’t push up to the top.’
‘The magazine of staples?’
‘Yep.’
‘That’s very nice.’
‘One of the best.’
Last year David had photocopied the list of collective nouns for animals from his old dictionary at school and stuck it to the fridge. Glover and he had got into the habit of repeating them, and occasionally testing each other. (‘A sloth?’ ‘Bears…A fluther?’ ‘Jellyfish.’) David didn’t know exactly why he’d grown so fond of them. They seemed to hint at all the differing ways to proceed. A labour of moles. A zeal of zebras. A shrewdness of apes. With Glover, from the very start, David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both. Glover worked the offending staple out with the point of a biro.
‘Ah, cheers.’
‘Interesting yesterday, with Ruth.’
‘Was the Bell not pretty empty for a Saturday?’ David clacked the stapler lightly a couple of times.
‘I know it sounds stupid, but I never considered a painting as representing, instead of just straight depicting.’
David thought it did sound stupid and it made him feel fond of his friend—it was these little reminders of Glover’s very average mind that made his good looks so much easier to stand.
‘If I’d had a teacher like that I might have done my homework.’ Glover lay back down on the carpet, where two cushions angled his head to the screen. They watched four men on horseback ford a river, then arrive in an empty one-street town. A man dived through the window of the saloon and began shooting at them.
David said, to no response, ‘Sugar glass.’
Glover had slipped his hand back up into his T-shirt and was gently tapping on his chest again. The cartoon heart. He was always in such a good mood after church. David didn’t think it was righteousness particularly, or smugness; more that he’d done his duty and could now relax. Still, it was intensely irritating. David felt excluded from his happiness, his secret. Over another burst of gunfire he said, ‘How was God today?’
‘Fine. Thanks.’
‘What did you learn? What was the sermon?’
Glover sighed and blinked hard at the screen.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Ermm, something like, without a shepherd sheep are not a flock.’
‘Correct. They’re not. They’re autonomous.’
‘They’re sheep.’
‘Autonomous sheep.’
An outlaw was hiding in a barrel with a shotgun, staring out through a knothole in the wood. David prodded again. ‘You don’t have to sneak off, you know.’
‘I don’t sneak off. You’re not up when I leave.’
What’s the opposite of coincidence? What’s the word for nothing happening that might suggest a hidden plan? Glover found significance in the darkest corners of his life. Whatever found him could not have missed him, whatever missed him could not have found him. Once, when David had been turned down for the job of Deputy Head of the English Department, Glover had assured him that everything happened for a reason. David hadn’t protested, but at that moment some deep tectonic movement had occurred. They might share the same flat but they lived in different universes. Folk-tale determinism! David was not surprised by much in the routine progress of his days, but that surprised him. If life turned on any principle it was haphazard interaction and erratic spin. He thought it much too obvious for argument: you make your own luck.
They were silent as the adverts came on. Glover and David considered themselves expert judges of the female form. There was an unspoken question when a woman was sighted which required a binary answer. It seemed as if they were simply being honest, and it made David feel masculine—not macho, not manly—to talk that way. Often, if they were in a bar or on a street, it would be a nudge or a directed glance to alert the other’s attention—although Glover was picky. A beautiful Indian girl in full sari was selling teabags to them now and, without prompting, Glover said no, her shoulders were too wide.
The drogue (#ulink_3b7b210f-34f3-5989-b98d-fea3bfe48036)
They had met in the Bell two years ago. David was trying to mark essays when the barman put some folk music, extravagantly loudly, on the stereo. Miming how to twist a dial, David said, ‘Sorry, mate, could you turn it down a bit? Too much accordion for me.’
‘My dad used to play the accordion.’
David smiled weakly, showing no teeth, trying for polite dissuasion.
‘He met my mum at a church concert. Without the accordion I wouldn’t be here.’ The barman grinned—a kind of slackening that made his face charming.
‘Does he still play?’
‘On state occasions.’
Wearing a grey T-shirt and dark blue canvas trousers of the sort David associated with plumbers, the barman was athleticlooking with very square shoulders; and these he hunched forward as he rested against the glass-doored fridge, so his T-shirt hung concavely, as if blown on a washing line. The hair on his head was short, black, artfully mussed with wax. David’s mother would have said he had the forehead of a thief, meaning it was very low, but his eyes would have won her over. They were widely spaced and a light, innocent blue. The way his heavy eyebrows sloped towards a neat, feminine nose seemed to grant his face sincerity. David liked him—James Moore Glover—at once. A friendship, too, is a kind of romance.
Glover did all the newspaper crosswords when it wasn’t too busy, and since David always sat at the bar, marking at lunchtimes, or for an hour after work, he was often on hand to help. And talking in the sardonic, ruminative, unhurried way of two men who happen to be in the same place, they discovered that they made each other laugh.
A few months after Glover had started in the Bell, he looked up and scratched unthinkingly at his cheek, where light acne scars were still visible, and David noticed he wasn’t working on a crossword. He was circling flat-shares in Loot. He’d been staying with his boss Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, but the couple were splitting up and selling their flat; he had to move out.
After a pint and a half of German lager David said, ‘Mate, you know, I’ve a spare room. You could stay there if you’re stuck.’
Glover arrived with Tom, his worldly goods in the boot of the bar manager’s BMW. It turned out the bar manager was also Glover’s cousin. David and he disliked each other instantly. Tom remembered him from the pub, he said, as if that was somehow damning and odd, and he walked round the flat with a cursory, dismissive air; he’d seen it all before, or if not exactly this, then something close enough. He said, ‘Going to make tea for us then or what?’ and as David carried the tray through to the living room, he heard him whisper to Glover, ‘You’d best make sure you’ve a lock on your door.’ After he’d left, David had made it plain that this certainly wasn’t that kind of set-up, and Glover appreciated, he thought, his candour. James had six wine boxes of books, several bin bags of clothes and a five-foot bay tree in an earthenware pot. The tree had a slim trunk and a perfect afro of thick, waxy leaves. The pot got cracked on the door jamb and they replanted it into the plastic red bucket David used for the mop. It was still there now, in David’s living room, in its temporary home.
Glover’s stopgap fix also settled into permanence. Initially circumspect, tidying up, knocking on doors, apologizing for polishing off the milk, they quickly developed the shorthand of flatmates. Glover came from Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast and his low-pitched voice had the slightest suggestion of an East Anglian accent: he lengthened vowels and weakened the second syllable in thinking, drinking, something. He didn’t take sugar in his tea. His sudden violent sneezes seemed to come in threes.
He was muscular, and stayed fit by running every day along the river and the wind-picked streets of south-east London, his iPod strapped to his waist, his footfalls keeping time with his soundtrack of deep house. Glover claimed that he used to be a lot bigger, meaning fatter, and then at the end of his first year in college at Norwich he’d taken up jogging, and now greeted each day with the devotions of a hundred press-ups and sit-ups. David disliked and admired and envied that disciplined part of his flatmate. Glover’s orderly mind was dominated by its left hemisphere. His toiletries stood grouped at one end of the windowsill, all their labels facing forwards; David’s were scattered throughout the bathroom, or propped upside down in various corners, distilling the last of their contents into their caps. While Glover wired plugs, changed fuses, replumbed the leaky washing machine, David made cups of tea and hovered. He could ask Glover about cold fusion, about the white phosphorus the Americans were using, about a car’s suspension, about enriching uranium, and Glover would explain it with a nerdish enthusiasm. The television occasioned some of his greatest triumphs. A programme about land speed record challengers led to an explanation of how those parachutes that shot out behind the vehicles worked. He fetched an A4 pad and a pen from his room, drew some diagrams to illustrate the dynamics of a drogue (his word). His measured speech, with its tiny lilt, sped up with excitement, and David felt he was one of those swollen, empty parachutes, dragging behind, slowing him down.
David liked the fact that Glover knew, that someone knew, how everything functioned. It was reassuring. These exchanges of information were interspersed with the usual male distractions: anecdotes, comparisons and lists, the one-upmanship of clambering humour; someone would say something funny, and the other would take the conceit one step further. And when Glover cracked up, the husky rev of his laugh never failed to ignite David’s. Watching him put up the shelves that had been leaning in the hallway for three years, David asked if he ever thought he might go back and finish his degree: he’d dropped out of a mechanical engineering course. Glover had a screw in his mouth, and it fell on the laminate floor, hitting his foot and skittering across to the doormat.
‘Yeah, thing is, I came back after the first summer looking a bit different. It was weird. I’d lost all the weight and was taking these antibiotics for my skin—and I couldn’t get over the fact that people suddenly changed. People who wouldn’t give me the time of day in the first year were now all over me like a rash. I didn’t feel like anyone was real. I hated it.’
The recycling box (#ulink_60e65d89-307b-500c-8b11-22e55b75b9b6)
Monday morning began with a double period of David’s A-level group, where he distributed his printouts and they discussed the symbolism of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Lunchtime brought no respite.
Aside from occasionally letting a student borrow his cigarette lighter at the steps by the side entrance, PMP’s debating society was David’s only extra-curricular activity, and since the teacher who ran it had gone on maternity leave, he was now required to attend every weekly meeting. This House Believes that America No Longer Leads the Free World.
The in-house genius in the debating society was little Faizul, the Egyptian. He proposed the motion, voice fluttering between outrage and plea, hands frantic as shadow puppets. The rebuttal was provided by myopic, ungrammatical Clare, Queen of the Home Counties, and David watched the fifty golden minutes of his lunchtime tick away.
Before afternoon class he checked his email in the computer lab and found Ruth had replied to his message thanking her for the trip to the gallery. He’d also asked her if she fancied catching the latest ridiculous Hollywood remake—she’d mentioned her inexplicable weakness for blockbusters—and she suggested Wednesday night. And did he want to ask Glover, since he’d said he wanted to see it as well?
The movie was exceptionally poor, David thought, though Ruth claimed to agree with Glover’s verdict of ‘silly but fun’. As David walked out onto the pavement ahead of them he was already writing The Damp Review’s post in his head: Never remake monster movies. It’s always a mistake. One can upgrade certain things—special effects, sets, costumes, even the actors—but one cannot get the better of nostalgia. One can’t improve on memory: that subtle, slanted light.
Ruth and David lunched the next week, and he met her for a drink after she’d been to a gallery opening. And so it continued. He would sit opposite and watch the internal weather of her emotions play on her beautiful face. She lived at the surface of her life. Nothing yet had happened between them but David felt the sheer intensity of their interactions precluded his role from being the usual one of confidant. Sometimes she held his look for a second or two longer than necessary, and sometimes she smiled in an impudent, daring way that David would think about later. In the meantime she was laden with a great deal of emotional baggage—this dancer called Paolo, still calling from America.
One chill November night the three of them saw Othello at the Globe and, after hailing a cab on Blackfriars Bridge for Ruth, the flatmates began the footslog back to Borough. The streets were almost deserted, plucked clean by the cold, and the icy pavements glinted like quartz. The play had not been good and David was extemporizing. After a pause, occasioned by his comparing the director to a back-alley abortionist, Glover said, ‘How do you really feel about Ruth? I mean honestly.’
‘I really like her,’ David said, mimicking his emphasis. ‘Why, don’t you?’
‘Of course, but I was wondering if you were going to do anything about it.’
David knew what he meant immediately, but something in his tone—some hint of irritation—offended him. Glover was always trying to push him into the world, offering to try internet dating with him, suggesting they reply to the newspaper personals, telling David to walk up to girls in pubs. He thought Glover considered him inert, as if he just needed a shove in the back to start rolling forward, but David was acquainted with rejection. He could only proceed at his own pace.
‘We’re old friends, you know? Really old friends.’
A crisp packet scraped along the pavement, worried by the wind, and Glover kicked at it. It flipped up over his track shoe and settled back, face down.
‘I suppose the question is whether you’re attracted to her.’
David bristled again and sighed with impatience. ‘Anyone can see she’s attractive.’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
He didn’t reply. What was it to Glover? They’d reached the front steps of their flat and the conversation was parked there, by the wheelie bins and the recycling box in which someone had dropped a half-eaten kebab.
Like road maps, abandoned (#ulink_2c52e9f5-4b9f-5b65-ac7e-1cf30b7e5be0)
On a wet, dark, interminable Wednesday, one of those winter days that lacks an afternoon, Ruth emailed to invite David to dinner. He’d never been asked to her flat before, to the Barbican, and Glover’s email address didn’t feature in the recipients’ section. Her note was casual and he matched the tone, replying with one line: Sure, that’d be nice. Probably nothing would happen, but the night before he was due for dinner, he ironed his skyblue shirt. This action carried a certain evidential weight: he loathed ironing, its peculiar blend of fussiness and tedium, and got away with wearing round-neck jumpers at school. However, that particular shirt, according to his mother, brought out his eyes. He was childishly excited to see Ruth’s natural habitat. He’d never known her to cook before and was envisaging something plain, unfussy. Italian perhaps. Zucchini. Basil. Pecorino. Fruit to finish.
The day itself was a write-off. The only thing achieved was managed after hours when David, on the rota to supervise study group from 4 to 6 p.m., helped Susan Chang, who smelt of vanilla ice cream, remove a paper jam from the photocopier. He felt delighted by his small victory, and to celebrate, and in preparation for the evening, he decided to smoke some of the emergency weed he kept hidden in the locked drawer of his desk. He visited the staff toilet, perched on the edge on the flippeddown lid and skinned up. The joint was small, heavy on green, pointy as a golf tee, and would take the edge off the nervousness he was feeling. It was not beyond reason that it might be tonight. Ruth was unaccustomed to being alone.
