Art and Lies Read online

  I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving-bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish-tank. I may not have a very bottom, I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage.

  I, Handel, ask questions but can’t answer them, I’m not a hero, only a chessboard knight hoping to be swifter than the game. While I kept my life to a series of clever moves, I felt well, almost happy, I left no time for reflection. I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. The tight chain of events began to separate, not physically, I was as busy as before, but emotionally, spiritually. I began to slip between the gaps, the reassuring stepping-stones were pushing farther and farther apart. Handel, holding himself above the water with a pair of forceps, Handel, whose faith did not prove to be a life-belt. When I could no longer cling on, I let go, with some terror and yet some relief. Let go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone.

  The train was hosed in light. Light battering down on the roof. Light spraying over the edges in yellow bladed fans. Light that mocked the steel doors and broke up the closed windows into crystal balls.

  The dull straight lines of the dull straight station bent under twists of refracted light. The station buckled. The small smug cube of the ticket office shattered. The man waded over to it, he thought he was in a field of buttercups, the light up to his knees and rising. He tried to buy a ticket, but the confident coins melted under the heat of his fingers. The man wrote on golden paper and gave it to the golden clerk. He trod through the light and on to the golden train.

  Picasso

  PICASSO, easel, brushes, bags, waited for the train.

  On the dark station platform, lit by cups of light, a guard paced his invisible cage. Twelve steps forward twelve steps back. He didn’t look up, he muttered into a walkie-talkie, held so close to his upper lip that he might have been shaving. He should have been shaving. Picasso considered the guard; the pacing, the muttering, the unkempt face, the ill-fitting clothes. In aspect and manner he was no better than the average lunatic and yet he drew a salary and was competent to answer questions about trains.

  Picasso decided to ask him one.

  ‘What time shall I expect the arrival of the 9:15?’

  He looked at her with undisguised contempt. It was his duty, she was a passenger, he was a guard. He held up his hand in an authoritative STOP sign, although he was the one moving. Picasso waited patiently until he had walked the twenty-four steps that reunited them. She repeated her question. Dramatically he lowered the phone from his upper lip and pointed to the passenger information board.

  ‘Yes,’ said Picasso. ‘The board tells me that the 9:15 will arrive at 9:20. It is now 9:30.’

  The guard looked at her as a priest looks at a blasphemer. His answer was spiritual and opaque.

  ‘When it arrives you’ll know what time it’s due.’

  He began again, pacing, muttering, pacing.

  Picasso went over to the refreshment kiosk, ‘NOW SERVING FRESH COFFEE.’ What had they been serving previously?

  Her father had said, ‘A woman who paints is like a man who weeps. Both do it badly.’ He had a right to call himself a patron of the arts. He had commissioned fifty-five pictures over the years, all of them self-portraits.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about art,’ he had said, although Picasso had never tried, ‘I know about art.’

  Sir Jack had refused to send Picasso to art school. On her eighteenth birthday he had given her a pair of beige rubber gloves and a long beige apron.

  ‘You can start in Mustard,’ he said.

  Picasso did. Denied paints she painted in mustard. At night, when the last shift had gone home, Picasso had the run of the giant factory. She switched off the heavy neon lights and rigged up a couple of inspection lamps above the small circle of her ambition.

  She was ambitious, but she did not confuse her desire to paint with an ability to do so. Under her own cruel inspection lamp she questioned herself without remorse. She could learn, she could learn all there was to learn and be a modern Landseer. Talent and application could pitch her in the Royal Academy, genius was certain to bar her from it. She knew she could never be satisfied by approximation. Either she was an artist or she was not. She had no patience with notions of fine art or popular art, second-rate art or decorative art. There was art and there was not-art. If she was to be not-art, she would prefer to be something else, someone else, altogether, she would fall on her own sword.

  Against the blank crates, plastic-wrapped pallets and vinegar vats, Picasso painted. The factory clock ticked factory minutes. She hardly slept. Her nights were spent in a white disc of light, a supplicant on a Communion wafer, and outside, the vampire dark.

  She went to look at paintings. She looked at them until she could see them, see the object in itself as it really is, although often this took months. Her own ideas, her own fears, her own limitations, slipped in between. Often, when she liked a picture, she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture. She shied away from what she couldn’t understand, and at first, disliked those colours, lines, arrangements, that challenged what she thought she knew, what she thought had to be true. It was an ordinary response to an extraordinary event. The more she looked at pictures the more she saw them as extraordinary events, perpetual events, not objects fixed by time. In the rambly old text books there was talk of ‘The Divine’.

  There was a day when Picasso understood. The only comparable day had been when she was a little child learning to read. The forms of the letters had hurt her eyes, she found them ugly, crude, arrogant, nothing. She longed to be out in the sun. She was good at games, the form of her body was a form she knew, it had shape and meaning. When she jumped and ran and swung herself in wild surprises, she was a young cat in summer. When she had to return to her desk, she was only an awkward child, with a wintry face.

  She stared at the page. It meant nothing to her.

  She stared at the page. It meant nothing to her.

  She stared at the page, and, without thinking, she read it. The harsh closed letters sang into being. Sang into her being. She could read.

  After that, she could not be separated from her books. Her mother, who had worried that her agile child might be backward, now fretted that she would lose her looks behind thick spectacles. Her mother tried to get her interested in fabrics, but Picasso cut up the gingham and chintz and floral and fleck, and used them as rags to wipe her brushes. When she could not read about painting, she painted paintings, copying carefully the things she loved, learning through sincere imitation.

  Colours became her talismans. At the end of each black and white day she dreamed in colour. At night, she soaked her body in magenta dyes, scrubbed herself with pumice of lime. The pillow was splashed in crimson by her black hair. She slept under a cloak of Klimt.

  She pulled down her mother’s ruched blinds, and put up a plain canvas blind, on which she painted from time to time. ‘It’s so crude’ complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshippers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn’t quite sure what it was but she was sure it was Important.

  Picasso’s father didn’t mind how much his daughter read. It was the painting he disliked. He felt it revealed an excess of testosterone and he wanted his daughter to be well balanced like himself.

  When Picasso looked at a Cézanne apple, she felt all the desire of Eve standing on the brink of the world, paradise falling away.

  ‘She lives in Paradise,’ said Sir Jack, whenever he thought of his daughter. ‘You live in Paradise,’ said her mother, when Picasso told her that she was leaving home to paint. ‘What’s wrong with this house?’

  The past stands behind me as a house where I used to live. A house whose windows, from a distance, are clear an
d bright, but strangely shaded as I come near. A friend says, ‘Show me where you used to live’ and we hurry, arm in arm, to that street, to that house, to that time, which no longer exists, but which must exist, because I can find it again.

  My past, my house, is linked by two staircases; the one I use, and the one other people use. My private staircase leads me from the low basement of my infancy, through small bare rooms, rooms with only a table, rooms with nothing but a single book. Rooms soaked in colour, heavy with red, fierce under chrome yellow. Winter rooms of polar white, summer rooms, where the fireplace is crammed with flowers.

  The public staircase is a broad certain sweep, that moves in confident curves upwards, from the ground floor. It is made of reclaimed oak. Not a single tread of this easy public route has been laid by me. My mother, father, brothers, uncles and aunts, have laid it over the years, and literally laid it over the years, so that time is trapped beneath the smiling polished boards. They have climbed it step by step and they do believe that it is the only way up through the house.

  ‘You were always a difficult child,’ said my mother, leaning over the firm banister rail. She strained her eyes to look back into the dim vanished kitchen where we used to spend our days. She saw herself, young, kind, overworked, patient, neglected by her husband and abused by a silent toddler who would not understand that bananas are the only fruit.

  ‘I did everything for you,’ she said, and suddenly, she was back on her hands and knees, and I, a grown woman, was back in the hated high chair, swinging impotent legs above a shiny floor.

  ‘You’ll never know the sacrifices I had to make,’ she said, as she prepared to tell me about them once again. She ran up the complicit stairs and into one of her favourite memory rooms, the family parlour.

  It was here that Sundays were played out with magnificent genteel sadism. Here was the shuttered room, obscenely clean, the Dresden shepherdesses leering at one another, across the backs of prim sheep. There was an oil portrait of my father in military uniform, there were no portraits of his mistresses. The clock tick-tocked the tortured minutes into columns of despair. My brother and I, counting, counting counting. On the hour, it chimed its lecherous gurdy music, and out shot a soldier, drum propped on his swollen penis. My brother kept his hands in his pockets.

  ‘And you smashed that beautiful clock,’ said my mother.

  It was here that I had begged her for my own bedroom.

  ‘When you get older,’ she had said, throwing paper flowers on to the fire. Until I was fifteen, my brother used me, night after night, as a cesspit for his bloated adolescence. That place is sealed now. My own narrow stair stops outside the door and begins in a new direction. My mother’s staircase sweeps past the door without stopping. There is no door there, she says, no room beyond.

  ‘Why don’t you go and visit your brother and his wife?’ and then, ‘You were always difficult.’

  I have tried to follow her as she passes from room to room. I have tried to remember the things she sees with self-justifying power.

  At Christmas, when all my family line up for the annual guided tour of the house, I try to keep up, but I fall further and further behind. When they gather on the bottom step of family life, to weep a few tears over the babies they used to be and the mother and father they used to be and the dinners cooked and squabbles mended, it’s easy to be drawn in. They do draw me in, they scribble me in all their pictures, then lose their temper when I don’t recognise myself.

  ‘Wasn’t she pretty?’ (my mother again). ‘Of course in those days she had long hair.’

  My brother likes to get roaring drunk on Christmas Day, and when he’s drunk he begs his little sister to come and sit on his knee. ‘Get lost Matthew,’ has been my seasonal reply, which might have been a mistake because, no sooner have I said it, than my entire family of uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, charges up to the nursery, headed by my father. My mother, sentimental on sherry, tells everyone how her children used to play together like puppies, even fall asleep in the same bed. She wipes away her twelve-month tears. ‘We were a happy family,’ she says. ‘Take no notice of Picasso.’ As if any of them ever did.

  Late at night, when each member of the family had gone to sleep in their rightful family bed, Picasso crept out on to her narrow stone staircase and felt the cold under her feet. Cold not comforting like the broad wooden boards her family trod upon. Cold not comforting, the way lies are comforting, so long as they can be believed. Solid, honest, private cold. She was away from the humid babble of voices. She was out of the stoked-up conspiracy to lie. The fantasy furnace, where truth was chopped into little pieces, and burned and burned and burned.

  She climbed the stairs. She hated her brother. She climbed the stairs. She loved her mother. She climbed the stairs. Who were those loud fat people, who filled the spaces so that there was never enough air to breathe, never enough light to see by? Who were those people who used the past like a set of rooms to be washed and decorated according to the latest fashion? Who were those people whose bodies were rotting with lies? They were her family. She climbed the stairs.

  She was out now, over the slates of the house, out beyond the silent chimney pots and the crackle of the satellite receivers. Out past the upper branches of the huge plane trees that had fronted her house for more than three hundred years. She was way out past good behaviour and common sense.

  She was level with the crane that hung over the stockyard. Every day, in hard hats and goggles, men welded at impossible heights. The air hissed, gold sparks spat the silver steel, the smell of burning skin. Every day there was a little more of the cancer hospital, a little less of the stockyard.

  The crane waited. Tomorrow it would bend down its yellow arm and scoop up the blue cattle gate. The gate was blue, but for the top bar, worn shiny through years of forearms. It was a blue cattle gate painted with history, not war or politics, but blood stock, beer prices and the occasional broken heart, 1710–1995. Since then, the yard long abandoned, the gate had been alone. Not tomorrow. Out now, over the steel, the concrete and the dumper trucks, carefully into the back of the lorry, and away to the agricultural museum. The grid beneath would be recycled.

  The city recycles everything, but, it has not yet found a way to separate the materials from the memories. As houses have been demolished to make way for more and more roads, people have begun to roam in posses, looking through the city skips for a part of their past. For many, the new developments hardly exist, the people look through them into lost terraces and low tenements, where they were happy.

  Men and women who used to live nearby, before the Compulsory Purchase Orders, like to walk back on a Sunday afternoon to point out their ghostly homes. Nobody knows why. Psychologists suggest a medical parallel; those who lose a limb, either through accident or amputation, continue to feel pain in the non-existent part. Some claim that their vanished arm is still hanging by their side.

  People have found it hard to live without the personal landmarks they recognise. They can’t say, ‘Look, this is where it happened.’ Now, they have no means to the past except through memory. Increasingly unable to remember, they have begun to invent.

  Picasso climbed the stairs. There was nothing solid under her now. She was balanced on the girders of her imagination.

  I was on the roof. My hair was lank. My skin dull from ill-use. Only my eyes were bright. I thought I was standing on a cliff top waiting for a ship to pass under the white clouds. I had feared all the ships were gone, everyone travels by aeroplane these days, I had feared all the ships were gone, this high dizzy place the last standing room of my heart. Then I saw a mast and gay sails. Your firm sides, your hold stashed with cargo. You were a deck of colour in a pale world. Red lipstick, green eyes, hair swarming bees. You were a spice ship and I could smell you on the wind.

  Your scarf fluttered out like a pennant. You were wearing a canvas jacket and I wondered if I could paint you, but already you were the colours of the rainbow, your purple hat
cocked. You told me your name was Nelson, but that was much later, long after I knew mine was Hamilton. I knew that night that I wanted to be your mistress and sail the seven seas in your little coil of rope. I put my eye to the telescope and regarded you. A minute can still alter a lifetime.

  ‘Victory’ I said that night.

  ‘Victory’ as I climbed the long climb back to my studio.

  ‘Victory.’ The word undressed me. The word took off the neat blazer and low shoes I wore to family parties. I looked at my body in the mirror. It was not pukka-proud the way you strutted yours. It was a body unused to light.

  My shoulder blades were sharp rebukes. My belly was an unploughed field. Weeds had grown over my pubic hair. I was a nun among nettles.

  ‘Victory.’ I picked up my paint brush and began.

  I painted my uncertain breasts with strong black arrows and ran a silver quiver down my spine. I took out my lipstick and drew my lips into a red bow bent. You were my target.

  I painted my legs with dangerous yellow chevrons and bathed my heels in mercury. I would need to move fast. I circled my buttocks with gold rings and gave my navel its own blue diamond. Thinking of your Victory hat I dyed my hair purple.

  As I painted, intent on umber and verdigris, cinnabar and chrome, the colours, let out from their tight tubes, escaped under the studio door and up and down the public staircase to the black and white family rooms. My mother broke from her flannelette sleep to cry out the name of a man she hadn’t seen for twenty years. She reared up from her matrimonial sheets, infidelity colouring her cheeks. My father slept in purple.

  Matthew, slug-fat, snail-slow, worm-pink, had a nightmare. He was walking down a busy street looking for a pick-up. He saw a woman he liked, chocolate nipples and race-track thighs. He crossed towards her, his wallet sticking out, she touched his face and said, ‘Hello dear, you’re Picasso’s sister aren’t you?’ He looked down at himself, and saw that he was wearing nothing but a tutu, dyed envy-green. He reached frantically for his wallet but it had gone.