Art and Lies Read online

  ‘I get upset when she dies,’ he said, cutting through the pectoral webbing.

  The sun had dropped on to the roof of the train and bloodied the grey metal. They were travelling slowly to save fuel. The man twisted his head to watch the spilt sun trickle down the window. The train that had been grey was sheathed in light. The sun made a wrapping of light that gave the dead grey bullet dignity and a purpose other than its destination. The man thought of the prophet Ezekiel and his chariot of cherubim: ‘Go in among the whirling wheels underneath the cherubim; fill thy hands with living coals and scatter them over the City.’

  Shall I tell you something about my City? My City, and long trains leaving.

  The First City is ceremonial. Ceremonies of religion, monarchy, law. There are palaces in planed proportion built by the Golden Mean. Urgent steeples, pennants, weathervanes, an upward rising of assumption and power. This is the old city and it has been the most destroyed. The churches are empty and many are ruined. When the Church of England was disestablished it was a clever way for a government to ignore the crumbling beauty of a passion no longer felt. The old city was built on faith, vanity, and fabulous piles of cash. We have none of those and the poor in spirit must learn to be humble.

  We still build. We build mean houses with low windows resentful of light. An architect can be judged by his fenestration; let it be grand, profligate, various, bold. No, his windows are as regular as clipboards, dull as computer screens, we have no architects now, we have little men who like to simulate. Smart models, they call it, and it has nothing to do with long-legged ladies with degrees, those are still avoided after hours in favour of the dumb kind. No, smart models are a way of constructing the building on a three-dimensional screen. A Virtual Model allows me a tour of the building before the first navvy gets out his spade.

  ‘Bring me the drawings of the ground plan and front elevation will you?’ I asked the bright young architect in spotted braces. I was in charge of the detail for the new private cancer hospital we were building.

  ‘Drawings?’ he said, as though I’d asked him to empty bedpans. ‘Here, have a look at the preliminary video, I’ll give you the data-line on the headphones channel and if you get hot about the concept, we can build up a few simulations on the edit channel.’

  What?

  I saw him later, swinging through the double doors in his American trenchcoat and trilby.

  ‘How’s the Brief?’ asked his friend.

  ‘Having a bit of trouble with the old crocodile that’s all.’

  The old crocodile. I suppose he means me. Do I look like a Leviathan? Do I look like Hobbes? I hope not. It might be flattering to have a philosopher’s jaw but I’d rather be mistaken for Descartes. I know you’ll think that is because he was a Catholic, it’s not, it’s because he did his best thinking inside a stove. I’ve never had much patience with Hobbes. I can work with a man who is a) an atheist, b) a monarchist, c) a nominalist, d) a materialist, but I can’t work with a man who is all of these things at the same time.

  Well, Hobbes’s bastard shade is having its day out in the City. We are all atheists, materialists, nominalists, now. Oddly, we seem to be turning into monarchists too, there’s nothing as effective as abolishing a King to bring out the worst of royalist sentimentality. The antique shops are crammed with fading Union Jacks and coronation mugs. The richer men buy gewgaws from Windsor Castle. It’s too late, can’t turn the clock back, ticks the cliché, although, God knows, we turn it back day and night when it’s a matter of prejudice. No, in the dreary Hobbes world, where religion is superstition and the only possible actions are actions of self-interest, love is dead. That young man in the spotted braces thinks me a fool to listen to opera, to go to Mass, to sit quietly with a book that is better than me. What use is it? What use is it to love God, to dig my hands in the dark red soil of my home, and feel for it a passion which is not possession but recognition? What use is it to believe that beauty is a Good, when metaphysics has sold her in the market-place?

  Of course we have romance. Everyone can see how useful romance is. Even the newspapers like romance. They should; they have helped to create it, it is their daily doses of world malaise that poison the heart and mind to such a degree that a strong antidote is required to save what humanness is left in us. I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes their place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.

  Isn’t it well known that nothing shocks us? That the photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them? More vivid, more graphic, more pornographic even, is the newsman’s brief. He must make us feel, but like a body punched and punched again, we take the blows and do not even notice the damage they have done.

  Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? ‘Terrible’ you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass every day. Hasn’t he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?

  And still we long to feel.

  What’s left? Romance. Love’s counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favourite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don’t we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.

  I was standing at the station waiting for the train, when a woman approached me, with a wilting red rose in a plastic wrapper.

  ‘Buy it for your lucky day.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘The day you fall in love. I see romance for you. A tall blonde lady.’

  ‘Romance does not interest me.’

  She stared at me as though I had uttered a blasphemy in church, and I suppose we were in a church of a kind, the portable temple of sentimentality that can be flapping about your head at a moment’s notice.

  She walked away, hawking her exhausted roses around the others, some of whom were glad enough to buy. I don’t blame them, the dead world greedy of feeling, but there must be another way.

  My own austerity, some might say severity, is like those magic girdles that knights used to wear when fighting dragons. Irrelevant, certainly, but it protects me by reminding me of what things I value. And the things I value are not the fake attentions and easy affections of a world unmoored from its proper harbour. I too long to feel, but feeling genuine and deep. My colleagues think me a remote sort of man, but, if I do not know what feeling is, at least I have not yet settled down into what I know it is not.

  My thoughts were lost in the Byronic roar of the 325. The $50,000,000 bullet train braked by permanent oil shortages to a stately fifty miles per hour. Still, it has a romantic pathos, don’t you think?

  The man knew that the train was travelling steadily towards the sun. His arms and face were burning. He was becoming the thing he feared. He feared the red rays, the swabs of heat, he feared the scalding tongs on his temples. He feared the hot hard hands pulling him out, pulling him out of the dark carriage, where he had been safe.

  He heard the clatter of tin trays and the tinny voice of the obstetrician splitting his mother’s legs into two metal tracks. There was no escape, only the boom boom of the blood in his ears and the blood red sun overhead. />
  He fainted.

  The baby was translucent when born. The doctor held him up against the window and watched the light dappling the tiny liver. The baby was beautiful and for a moment the doctor found himself looking through a lens into an unacknowledged world. But the sun was too bright and he was obliged to close the curtains.

  One night I was called out to a mother in labour. It’s not my field. I don’t care for the stirrups and razors, forceps and condom-thin gloves. I had to go, I have an obligation to a charitable trust I try to help, I had to go. It was late, I had returned from the opera, foolishly I still wear white tie.

  It was winter. The Clean Air Act stops where the slums start. The slummers burn what they can; rags, tyres, bodies. The crematorium is very quiet. I crossed the river at Tower Bridge. The great paved jaws of the bridge had been opened to let through an invisible fog-bent boat. I heard the clang of the bell and the slow clatter of the bridge on its huge chains. I thought I heard drumming, drumming, footsteps marching in dead motion to the Tower. I could see the thin grills fixed in the thick stone. Did I see a face?

  Underneath, the river ran in grey floods, thumping against the abandoned wharves. I knew my way well enough. My mother had often taken me to the Tower in my school holidays. One of our ancestors was executed there, like me, he was a Catholic.

  I knew my way well enough, but the roads, like all the roads in the City, were under constant repair. When they were not being repaired they were closed in case of demonstrations. Closed in case of bombs. Closed for the Public Good. There was so much good being done to the public in those days that I am surprised we are not all saints.

  I have no celestial power and I had forgotten my street atlas. Finally, out of tiredness, finally, out of despair at another fluttering orange ribbon, another set of abandoned cones, I turned the wrong way into a one-way street where the narrow houses loomed like cudgels. Darkness, fog, squalor, an old woman pushing a high-wheeled pram. I swung to avoid her and beat the car into a brick wall. Never mind, it’s only a Daimler.

  Never mind, within the blank uncurtained windows, spattered with television light, I found the rooms I wanted. Electricity is expensive but you can still see to make a cup of tea by the flicker flicker flicker of the TV screen.

  ‘When you grow up Handel, you must do some good in the world.’ I held my mother’s soft hand and ran beside her cuban heels. I saw her only once a day for our walk at three o’clock. She was a tall column of silver fox. My father was a monument of tweed. I had no idea that there was such a thing as vulnerable flesh.

  The woman lay uncovered on the bed. She had torn off her cotton dress. The man with her was using it to wipe her head. The room was unlit but for a smouldering kerosene flare. The kind they use in garages.

  I asked for hot water. None.

  I asked for clean cloths. None.

  I wanted to scream at them ‘What do you think this is? Dickens?’ They were both staring at my evening dress. What do I think this is? Dickens?

  I took off my jacket and starched tie, my waistcoat and stiff shirt. I cut the shirt into six clean squares and gave the man money to buy hot water from a neighbour. He left, the room was quiet, the woman looked at me.

  ‘It’s stuck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I knelt down and let my hands across her triumphant belly. Why doesn’t she split? I know why she doesn’t split, I’m a doctor, but why doesn’t she split? Her skin was stretched over her with upholstered zeal. She was smooth, perfect, no frills, no tucks, only the supple leather of her body, tobacco pouch round, tobacco pouch brown.

  She opened her legs, I knelt between them, unhappy. I have never seen a woman’s a woman’s… what shall I call it? Vagina? The endless cross-sections, the exploded diagrams, the formaldehyde specimens, the shrunk-up sun-dried vagina. Beaver? No good. It looks nothing like a beaver or a pussy or a fox. Cunt? Is that the best I can do for those delicate labial folds and the monkish cowl that hides…, that hides…, a bead, a pip, an acorn, a pearl, a button, a pea …

  ‘Please hurry.’

  To engage the head I must enter her but my hands are not clean. What if I infect her? What if she infects me?

  She started to cry out as the baby tried again to force itself round. If I took her to hospital they would certainly take the child from her and she was probably illegal.

  There was a bottle of vodka on the floor. Thank God it wasn’t gin. Too Dickens.

  I held it up quizzically. There was an inch or so left in the bottom.

  ‘That’s mine for the pain.’

  I poured it over my hands and washed them together.

  ‘Are you Jewish?’ she said.

  ‘Just be glad I’m not an obstetrician. I’d have slit you down the middle by now.’

  That shut her up and her screams too. She was quiet while I pushed my hand into the blood-packed warmth of her body. Quiet and dignified and wide. I was the one bent over, sweating, my back arched, my head down. My hair fell forward on to her thighs.

  She began to give birth. It was a gift, a gift of life in that cold dead room, on the cold dead streets. The baby was ready. The baby was skimming down the birth canal and into the windy world. Gently, gently, I brought her forth as if she were my own. I felt that she was my own. I cut the cord that moored her and she was free, her own, laid on her mother’s belly in a little coat of blood.

  The man came back with a washing-up bowl of lukewarm water and two bottles of vodka. To his intense horror I took one bottle and poured it into the bowl down to the last drop.

  ‘He is Jewish,’ said the mother.

  Carefully I washed her thighs and the long dark stretches of her cunt. I dried her with the rest of my shirt and covered them both in a blanket from the car. I was going to wash the baby and then I thought, ‘The smell is all she knows, the smell is all she has, go away now Handel.’

  I put on my jacket, collected my things and closed the door, promising to return in a couple of days. I left them some money.

  The moon was up and the cold had frozen the fog into brown slabs. I reversed the car down the slimy street dark under the unlit lamps.

  The Second City is political. Politics of slums, apartments, mansions. The correct balance must be maintained. On no account should there be too many mansions or too few slums. Apartments hold the balance; the rich are terrified of being reduced to one, the poor dream of owning their own. The political city thrives on fear. Fear of never owning an apartment. Fear of owning merely an apartment.

  Homelessness is illegal. In my city no-one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabiliser.

  I parked the car outside my house and pushed through the thick sticky fog thinking of old ladies’ curtains. Where the fog parted, the tarry light still lay on the city, dirtying it, exposing it, the harrowed city, beauty pawned, and irredeemable.

  I threw myself into my white bed and fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed that my body was transparent and that the sun drummed on my liver and tuned my spine in yellow octaves that I could play with both hands.

  A few days later, as I had intended, I went back to the house. On the opposite side of the street a bunch of squatters were watching the security patrol welding a steel door over the slumped entrance. I walked up to the patrol and asked one of them what had happened to the people who had been living there. He shrugged and carried on with his work. I realised that, like all security men, he had long since lost the power of speech. He pointed his oxyacetylene torch at a closed blue van.

  There were two men in the front of the cab, feet on the dashboard, bodies sagging into the sagged seats. They stared unblinkingly through the filthy windscreen, the radio on full volume, they were both about twenty-five. They appeared to be dead. I tapped on the window and one of them turned his head slowly, slowly,
and looked down at me as though I were a human being. I flashed my medical card and slowly, slowly, he wound down the window.

  ‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m trying to find the people who used to live in that house.’

  ‘Got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Do you know where they are?’

  ‘No.’

  He raised the window, but then his mate said something to him, without moving his lips, and the window was speedily lowered again.

  ‘You from the Pest Destruction Office? Were they an ’Elf Azzad?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Did they have the fucking pox?’

  ‘No, but one of them had a baby.’

  I’m not a sentimentalist. Every week life and death passes under my hands and that has given me a certain serious reserve. Intimacy with death has produced, in some of my cruder colleagues, a kind of danse macabre. Daily contact with what seems to them a horrible fate, horrible because unrelieved by any spirituality, fate because inevitable in the chanciest, cruellest ways, has grown in them a love of the grotesque. There is something of the Middle Ages in these modern men, who must be forever caricaturing the suffering they fear. Morbid practical jokes and a pleasure in the corrupt is the hallmark of many of my eminent colleagues. I look at them and I see, not the confident wonders of modern science, but a fearful fourteenth-century face carving a Death’s Head in a gloomy village on the Rhine.

  And for myself? I, who have often leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, the traces in the face of what was slight or mean or superficial, begin to disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, and those in a great indifference. It is possible to be comforted by death in its distinction. Pause now, before this transitory dignity breaks up, and there is left, not horror, not fear, but profound pity. The pietà of the Virgin Mother over the dead body of Christ. Madonna of the Sorrows. The pity of the mother for the child.