Chapter 1
Ross Dunkerton hesitated at Heathrow and again at the underground terminal. Something about the flood of people, the scale of the buildings, the confinement of the plane. He wasn’tsure he could face London again after a seven year absence and memories of an endless blue sky left behind in Adelaide still fresh in his mind. This sky was overcast, a solemn grey flatness denying objects a third dimension, relieving them of their shadows. He balked at the cost of the train ride, the cost of the hotel and in the end gave in to a kind of fatalism, of the inevitability of things. The underground map above his head hadn’t changed much but the order of stations curiously threw him and he got off more by instinct than rational decision a full two stations early and found himself standing outside Earls Court.
He thought again about Ben as he had done for the entire journey. Ben had had a theory about the underground; that it was a metaphor for life. He talked endlessly about stations through which you had to pass like rites of passage, of travelling in circles, seeking destinations, meaningful and meaningless journeys – but then he was always coming up with these odd aphorisms, bits of philosophy, obscure writings. He liked to call it ‘the stuff of a gentleman’s room’ after a nineteenth century writer. But despite the copious amounts he read, he wasn’t the intellectual he would liked to have been. He was a sponge, soaking up information willy-nilly, understanding to a point but inevitably lost in the bigger picture. He would have liked to have gone to university but for all his diligence and capacity for work he lacked the power to analyse what he absorbed and so filled his head with an undisciplined mass of information which surfaced at the slightest stimulus.
It was one of the sides to his character that was most endearing because behind the facade was an almost innocent naivety, an honesty where thoughts grand and grandiose tumbled over each other. There was no pretence but it was as though some essential flaw in his character drove him to become two people, neither of whom he could identify as a whole person. People invariably laughed at his witticisms when they didn’t know him, or when hequoted Joyce or Proust at length, or turned away with sadness when they did. Because Ben was an artist of extraordinary ability they forgave him anything and galleries fell over themselves to show his work. For all that though there was a deep-seated envy which he would never have recognised. The man knew no guile. The barrage of words and other peoples sentences flowed from his tongue with such ease that they might have been his own. That was not to say that he had none of his own, merely that he subdued his own expressed thoughts, saving them for propitious moments when the audience ceased to be a crowd. For crowds he talked with his hands as well, cutting and slicing the air with his boney fingers, tracing patterns in the air like a conductor’s baton. He might have been conducting an orchestra, manipulating the emotions around him, embracing and cajoling, bringing people together through his very presence. On occasions when there was only one other person in the room the fingers lost some of their elegance and stiffened to the point of rictus as he attempted to grapple with his own emotional state and articulate what was for him the inexpressible. Words were in the end blunt tools where meaning slipped and shifted. He said that was why he became an artist and not a writer. No one expected clarity. Ambiguity was par for the course. He often quoted Picasso in that the world to the great artist didn’t make sense even in his day so why should he paint pictures that did.
Neither his hands nor his face bore much sign of hair so unlike so many of the students with which he surrounded himself he never grew a beard and so maintained this permanently
youthful appearance. It had its advantages. Most women and female students wanted to mother him, the bane of his life, while most men found him unworthy of jealousy or rage. Everyone liked him but ask any of them why and a hundred different answers would come back as they attempted to come to terms with the chameleon that he was.
Nevertheless, to Ross, the effect he had was one of saviour. Ben engendered a belief in the possibility that anyone could aspire to great heights and succeed. His success was widespread, unlike the other lecturers at the college who scratched for a living,so the college made active use of him as a drawcard featuring him prominently on the prospectus . He was flattered to see his name first on the teaching list and enjoyed being used in this way. He had no need of the salary and asked little in return. In fact he seldom talked about money at all and it was generally assumed that he had plenty stashed away in a bank account even though they saw no signs of ostentation. He dressed in the same black leather pants and t-shirt most of the time. The army greatcoat buttoned up in winter or slung over his arm for the rest of the year defined his shape.
And what of his background? That was something else he didn’t talk about, or his family, although he kept a collection of sepia photographs of World War One soldiers in his kitchen. The gilt frames seemed oddly out of place on the checkered tablecloth. Ross thought every time he saw them that they couldn’t be immediate family, that there was no family resemblance at all and that there were too many different men of all ages. The pictures stood on a curved row just beyond the cruet set, objectified images smiling and serious, removed from their time and yet oddly eloquent. Ross had asked about them once and received a mumbled reply. He had not pursued it.
At one time they had spent a lot of time together outside the college once they found that they were neighbours. That had been a long time ago and another continent’s distance away for each of them. While Ross had gone to Australia, rushing away to the end of the earth as he saw it, Ben had gone to America tired of the small pond he perceived around him in London, anxious to test himself. He had made a pilgrimage to New York taking littlewith him but the clothes he stood up in and a truckload of work carefully packed in wooden crates. He had spoken about the new ‘Grand Journey’ as he romanticised New York as the art capital of the world and then exchanged the traditional boat and carriage for Concorde.
Once Ben had persuaded him to take the Circle Line full circle so that he could elaborate on a theory he had been evolving around pub tables. He had been reading psychology and sociology and forensic science. He never made clear exactly what. Ross had been literally dragged by the arm down onto the platform. He had been reluctant to go; these excursions inevitably ended in frustration and seething anger on his part. The anger was always internalised until Ben was out of sight and hearing and then it exploded. More than once he had sworn there’d never be another one but there was something about the little boy expression Ben employed which made it difficult to refuse.
As he left the underground and its throng of restless commuters, familiar buildings rose up to greet him from the shadows. The Earls Court Road had always been dirty, not just thesurface but the air itself. A fine grit swirled and stung his eyes until the skin felt grimed and greasy. Cars flashed by stirring up the dust on the road followed by a welter of trucks growling and barging their way through. He blinked ferociously looking for anything that had changed, anxious to establish some parameters, a vocabulary, but seemingly either time had stood still or his memory was faulty and selective. He could neither see with fresh eyes nor recall emotions clearly. Rubbish bins overflowed. Small things jarred and grated to distract him. An old man doubled over and obviously fragile scavenged through the abandoned food still in its wrappers, watery eyes vacant. Stuffing some precious find into plastic shopping bag he carried under his arm he shuffled away. A denim clad youth and his stringy blonde girlfriend stretched out their legs across the pavement to block his path. The old man descended to the gutter amid taunts and jeers.
Ben, leading faster than the escalator, pulled him bodily down the stairs two at a time and into a waiting carriage. He even selected the seats they were to occupy. With no one able to sit in front of them, he had a clear view of each person entering or leaving. He soon became excited as he saw his theory falling into place and then deflated as more people than he could possibly classify crowded into the small space between the blocks of seats.
His pointing and staring drew comment, enough to have Ross cowering in his seat ready to crawl away and die. Suddenly Ben became animated, cupping his hand over Ross’ ear.
‘See that guy, born criminal. Look at the line of the jaw, weak and irresolute.’
Ross couldn’t see it at all and wanted to point out that all the criminals he’d ever seen in films and on television were very resolute and that half the beards grown at the college were there to hide irresolute jaws and that hardly made them criminals.
‘That one is an athlete. See the way she walks. And that one has problems with women. Look at the way he looks at the floor all the time.’
Ross had already become confused as much about the lack of proof attached to this assessment, as to his ongoing role in the process. By the fourth or fifth station all interest had gone but the tugging and prodding continued regardless. Ben hardly seemed to notice that the replies had descended from ‘interesting’ to abject silence. Only the accidental rapping of his fingers on the metal stanchion during a particularly animated outburst brought him to a halt in a fit of pain. He wrung his fingers for ten minutes afterwards.
‘You really out to pay more attention Rosco, this is good stuff. What I need is a Boswell,’ he stated with his throbbing fingers in his mouth, ‘someone to write down everything I say. It could be published posthumously. I could be the genius of the age and my words are being lost for all time. That sounds pretty arrogant but it’s not meant to be.’
It was different when they went to exhibitions openings. Ben was always getting invites They’d play this game of scathing criticism and doing it so loudly that it became a public discussion. The painter would be accused of having no colour sense or that someone noted for his or her line work couldn’t draw or that everything in the exhibition was derivative with Ben naming dozens of possible sources. Being asked to leave only added fuel to the fire and inevitably there had been his standard speech from the doorway about philistines. Nevertheless the invites continued to arrive. He said that it was because he was a necessary commodity, the voice of unreason, and that Picasso was right. The world was mad.
Ben kept up the Boswell idea for weeks, once even producing a leather book complete with gold trimmings and a clasplock. The leather was worn and had a delicate patina of ground-in dirt but the pages were brand new. Ross had weighed it in his hand and been impressed by its obvious antiquity. Inside Ben had written in his cramped style
The Life and Times of Benjamin Truman, Arsehole.
‘Got a nice ring to it hasn’t it?’
Ross couldn’t work out whether he was serious or not and the sight of the luscious, creamy pages made him wince at the thought of writing down some meaningless gibberish when the book cried out for some deep insight into the human condition to be stored under glass in the Victoria and Albert as an icon, like Turner’s sketchbooks.
‘Tell you what Rosco, I’ll buy you a decent meal and you make an entry dated today. ’
A gold tipped Platignum pen slid easily from his pocket into his hand and unscrewed apparently without human intervention. Ross took it gingerly, shook it a little to get the ink to flow and tested it in the back of his hand.
‘Look, I don’t know about all of this, my writing is practically illegible,’ he professed lamely and feeling acutely embarrassed at the confession. They made their way to a park bench, Ben on the point of pleading. The book now lay between them like a naked threat. ‘So what do you want me to write then?’ Ben sucked in a lungful of air, his eyes flickering as he composed the words in his head.
‘Synergy, yes, Synergy. Write that down.’ He waved his boney hands, eyes fixed on some distant point in the sky.
‘How do you spell it?’
‘S...energy, but change the first e to a y. It means - I’m not going too fast for you am I? - that the behaviour or the appearance of the whole cannot be predicated on the behaviour or appearance of any of its constituent parts.’
Ross wrote painstakingly, making sure he completed all the loops and having the uprights standing upwards instead of sloping forward as they usually did. Someone had told him about the urgency in his writing before, wanting to get to the end before he’d started, leaving things undone in his wake. In places he squeezed the words between palate and tongue as though articulating them would slow down his natural style. If he was going to be Boswell then no handwriting expert in the future was going to classify him as some sort of idiot.
‘And what’s all that mean then ?’
’I’m coming to that. Every - ready?- every experience is finite like the single frame of a celluloid film and has as such, its own parameters - can you spell that?- I’m not being patronising, just trying to help. Comprehension means identifying all those constituent parts and the interrelationship of those parts, to discover the focal points. However, the single frame does not give us a clue to the whole film and nor is the nature of the film predicated on the definition of the existence of the notion of film.′
‘Ben, you’ve got to be joking. You sound like one of those writers who write all that pretentious art theory. Even you said that it’s all a load of bollocks from people who could never be artists themselves.’
‘I thought it was all quite straight forward, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, come on, where did you get all this from? You can’t tell me that you just thought all this up on the spur of the moment.’
‘I didn’t say that did I? It’s a loose adaptation of something Buckminster Fuller wrote on saving the world or being in a Spaceship, or something. It sounded just right to me. What do you think?’
’Keep thinking Ben, you’ll get the hang of it one day. Any more gems?
Ross surrendered the book and pen through a wall of hostility and watched them disappear into an inside pocket never to be seen again. Later he regretted having said anything. Somehow the idea of being Boswell appealed. He couldn’t work out why.
He took out the magazine again. He hadn’t intended to return to London at all, preferring to consign it to the past, but this periodical had turned up quite by chance on a newsagent’s shelf in Adelaide. It had been a long time since he’d paid much attention to such things, seldom getting past the glossy cover before being consumed by guilt about his own lack of creative output. Somehow the pretentiousness of the writing always put him off, its meanings wrapped up in words he didn’t understand leaving him believing that he barely spoke the English language. He didn’t want to know where the work fitted into the scheme of things,just what motivated it and how the artist had developed the idea. Not being able to trust his own senses had only reinforced his sense of alienation and as his own creativity dried up he found reading about someone else’s success ultimately depressing. He had lost track of the number of times some direction he’d abandoned long had ago turned up as a major new direction in some other painter’s hands.
This magazine had been mostly gallery reviews with stable lists of artists prominently printed below the illustrations. It was dated months before. He flicked through more in surprise than anything else at finding a familiar publication. On the back was Ben Truman’s name under a painting in full colour. Two children sat at one end of a couch on a sloping chequered floor with everything in soft focus. The tiles stretched into the corners of the room with striated patterns that contrasted with the plumply, softened forms of the cushions. He couldn’t see Ben’s hand in this, and yet ... no, there was too much humanity. For someone who had spent years reconstructing the world from a single repeated mark devoid of colour or warmth, a density of atoms which drifted in stellar clouds this painting was too different.
Most of the early drawings had been based on shadows not the objects themselves and yet here he was in a world inhabited by human beings. What could have prompted such a change in style? He couldn’t imagine. It made no sense. This was a private world as though the artist was a voyeur viewing the scene from some hidden place curtained off by hanging drapes. Ben had always hated decorative art as much as a house overdressed in fabrics and fanciful furniture. He had always lived in a Spartan austerity by choice.
A tantalisingly familiar smell of cigarette smoke, percolating coffee and boiled milk assaulted his nostrils. It did more than initiate a sensory response, it was memory itself. He stood outside an espresso bar hardly believing that such places still existed. Had it always been there?
The news stand was a different matter. There had always been a news stand. Surely it had been closer to the entrance?
The canvas and metal frame structure was loaded down with publications which lined its entire inner and outer surface. Only the face of the man behind the stacks of newspapers was visible. His cloth cap covered his eyes like a protective blind but the skin below the rim was rugged and weather-worn with deeply etched lines converging in clefts. Ross checked his watch to find that almost half of Saturday had gone. How long had it been since he’d landed? People brushed past him, seeking newspapers and he was forced to move under the lee of the building. The bricks were cold and damp to the touch. As a patch of blue sky suddenly opened up above the buildings opposite he anticipated sunshine and his mood lifted. The gap in the clouds closed as quickly as it had formed.
News headlines in smudgy type stood in a wire rack some distance away, the headlines curiously detached from reality. Some political figure had been caught with his pants down; a distant place had surrendered its identity for that of a cyclone with a woman’s name, while a footballer had commanded a king’s ransom for a transfer. Little of it registered as news.
It was all too foreign and strident - more a cacophony of noise. Across the road a talking head was repeated on a dozen similar screens in an electrical goods shop but silent at this distance. He absentmindedly paid for a newspaper he would never read.
He stared at the window of the coffee bar. A menu was stuck to the glass and beyond many tables stood empty with condiments and napkins arranged in their centres. He suddenly felt hungry as though breakfast were a day behind him instead of a few hours. He scanned the menu but nothing sprang out as appetising. Still jet-lagged, he thought, stomach doing somersaults in protest. Pushing open the door he was conscious of the music wafting from hidden speakers.
Inside, faded American movie stars looked down from the walls. James Dean glowered beneath a turned-up collar on a rain-soaked boulevard; Bogart stared from behind a raised gun; Marilyn caught with that famous dress as it rose in the air current. All just as potent as when they were alive. Was Bogart dead? He couldn’t remember. A small jangling bell continued to jangle above and behind him. He looked up at the offending object until it stopped moving. Fragments of disjointed memories flickering too quickly to make any sense. Had he been here before?
Paint peeled in places high up on the walls. The lights did nothing to dispel the feeling of solitude. For a moment he was put in mind of Van Gogh’s Night Café with its garish yellow poisoning the night and the emptiness of the tables. Two couples seated near the doorway looked up together, their hands resting on the plastic tablecloths like lumps of meat. Momentarily he met their searching eyes. They turned away, losing interest immediately and returning to their four-way conversation, heads down in conspiracy. He was the intruder.
The overweight boy behind the counter did nothing to dispel the feeling. Eighteen or nineteen, he stacked cups in a bored fashion, his eyes vaguely following the passage of people in the street. He spoke without looking at Ross, something which served to aggravate more than his offhand manner and appearance.
‘You want something?’ Ross was going to say, ‘I’m not here for the convention,’ in his most sarcastic tone but it hardly seemed worth the trouble.
‘Coffee, white, and one of these eclairs.’
He pointed at the plate and waited while the sloth-like boy found a pair of tongs and gingerly inched the cake out onto a smaller plate. Ross dared him silently to touch the eclair with his hands. The coffee took longer. As it too passed over the counter the boy became surprisingly chatty but the manner was affected, the underlying tone one of lack of interest.
‘Might rain,’ he concluded, eyeing the fragment of grey sky visible above the building opposite and scratching at his blond head. Flakes of dandruff fell and settled gently on his shoulders. The Led Zeppelin T-shirt, black with a gaudy design, looked brash and rebellious. He brushed at his shoulder absent-mindedly but the boy was no rebel.
The five pound note was taken without a word or mention of the price. The change was returned as a heap of coins tossed onto the counter. Still there was no eye contact. His immediate role over, the boy turned and headed for the kitchen door, the tea towel slung over the same shoulder he had removed the dandruff from minutes earlier. The rolls of fat became much more noticeable as he walked and the faded denims looked as though they belonged to someone much taller as they rucked above his sneakers. Ross watched him out of sight and the door continued to swing until it settled not quite level with its frame, the spring obviously stretched.
The buzz of conversation behind him ceased abruptly and it was followed by scraping chairs. All four rose as if on cue pulling their clothes into line with little tugging motions. Ross turned his head, cup and plate in hand, and there was again a momentary meeting of eyes before they hurried for the door.
‘Hope it was nothing I said,’ muttered Ross turning back. One of the men glared in his direction in mid-stride. They went through an after-you-after-me routine before moving single file through the door and into the street where the proprietorial men hooked each woman around the waist and guided them away. Forsome reason which he couldn’t decipher, Ross envied them their intimacy.
From his wallet he extracted Ben’s address for the umpteenth time since boarding the plane in Adelaide. Any outward journey had to be through Melbourne or Sydney so the Ansett flight had taken him the extra hundreds of miles in the wrong direction first, linking up with the Qantas flight in Sydney. He’d had plenty of time to consider options and work through reasons. The address became just a meaningless string of numbers and letters as he stared at it. That he had come all this way for no fathomable reason, in search of an address which may or may not be current, to find someone who could be dead for all he knew, was not an original thought. The foolishness of the enterprise crept out of the shadows and paralysed his thought processes. The gallery that he’d called from Australia had been particularly unhelpful. They claimed exclusivity of Ben’s work but also claimed to know nothing about him .The woman had repeated over and over again a standard speech about protecting privacy and denied that they even had an address. In the end she had reluctantly agreed to pass on a letter if he cared to post it but wouldn’t promise anything. At that point Ross had begun to berate himself for ever making the call and was ready to give up but the obsession was more powerful than reason. In the end he went to the library in the city and found the telephone directory for London, checked possible listings with the international operator and came up withone number in South Kensington. It was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Surely the proximity to the house in Earls Court suggested a real connection, he said to himself, preparing to accept the converse. So he had come.
He began to feel foolish again, so close to rediscovering something that may never have existed that he could taste it. What was friendship anyway? They hadn’t spoken in seven years, hadn’t written either. He hadn’t known if Ben had departed for America. Certainly he had talked about it and made the decision to go at some point in the future but there had never been any definite date. The thought that his own departure might have been a catalyst surfaced not for the first time, but he dismissed it. Stupid, he thought, to believe that anything he did could influence another human being into a course of action.
A hand touched his shoulder. He shuddered, his heart racing. A figure stood between himself and the window, partially a silhouette, no more substantial than an ephemeral presence. There was something familiar that his brain refused to grasp . The face in front of him revealed two rows of white teeth from which appeared two hands dismembered and floating. He felt the pressure as the hands gripped his shoulders and the sallow face swam into focus.
‘Thought it was you. When did you get back, how are you? ’
‘John?’
‘Course it is, who’d you think it was? Forgotten me already. Some friend you are.’
‘I haven’t forgotten, How are you?’
‘I asked first.’
They both burst into raucous laughter wrapping their arms around each other in a bear hug. Even through the jacket, Ross could feel the raised spine and ribcage. John had always been painfully thin.
‘I mean it. Last time I saw you they’d given you about two weeks to live and the local undertaker was measuring you for a coffin. The art world was getting ready to mourn your passing and those bastards who hand out the grants were threatening to retrieve unspecified amounts from your corpse. In fact, as I recall, the medical profession was quoting a dissolute lifestyle and an appalling taste in women as the principle causes of your ultimate demise.’
‘You remember, how touching. Very funny. No, all cured. The evil black stain has gone forever - remission, well as long as I behave myself. It’s one of those miracles of modern medicine and I’m about to be declared a saint by the Pope and me not even Catholic.’
‘Not even in taste. Don’t tell me you’ve got religion.’
‘Don’t be so bloody daft. I’m my own miracle.’
‘So you’re not stuck with those little packets of white crystals any more.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘So how come you still look like death warmed up?’
When Ross had first met John Trenwith he’d looked like a corpse, gaunt, black hair down to his shoulders and a permanent smile. Rimless glasses were always perched on the end of his nose so that he had to look over them, and the small screwdriver he carried in the fob pocket of his waistcoat was used to make minute adjustments to the securing screws around the nose pieces. Clothes hung off him like tents since his body didn’t have enough substance to fill them and he patently refused to buy new ones until the old wore out. There was always this unspoken hope that he’d grow back into them and he always said that if hewasn’t going to be around for much longer the old ones would do in any case. He’d also been the first person to greet Ross at the college, an old hand in his third year.
‘Well, Ross Dunkerton, you haven’t assumed a new identity or anything have you? Not known as Bluey now? I hear all Australians go through a renaming ceremony to forget their pasts.’
’Ross grinned. ‘Where’d you hear that load of bullshit?’
‘There you go, into the lingo. Got your didgeridoo with you,cobber? We’ve all had Rolf Harris on the box slapping a bit of paint around.’
‘Know a lot about Australia do you ? Who’s the Prime Minister? What’s the capital?’
‘Don’t know on the first and Sydney on the second.’
‘Wrong on both counts. It’s Malcolm bloody Fraser and Canberra, if you must know.’
‘We live and learn. How come you didn’t write to us? Sylvie’ll have your hide for not keeping in touch. And for not being there for our wedding. Very fond of you in her own perverted way was our Sylvie.’
‘So you two are married. Still together?’
John sidestepped the question without a hint of having heard it at all.
‘Where were you anyway? The only time you told us anything you were in Sydney looking for a job and that was seven years ago. See I kept count of your indiscretions.’
‘Moved about a lot, the last few years in Adelaide.’
‘Good place?’
’If you like conservatism. It was just starting to come out of being a cultural backwater with a Labour government. It still puts more faith in monuments to the past than in living artists. Anyone worth their salt packed up as soon as they were able to walk and shipped out to the eastern states. From there they’d send back the odd exhibition if they bothered at all. Talk about cringe politics. The only half decent newspaper called itself The Advertiser and it made no bones about its intent. The only time it got excited was during the footy season.′
‘So, of all the gin joints in all the world why did you have tocome Waltzing Matilda into mine?’ The allusion to Bogart wasn’t lost.
‘Yours. You own this place?’
‘Lock, stock and every maggot ridden corner.’
‘I’m impressed.’
John Trenwith had been the golden boy at college with a reputation for inventiveness and small scale works on paper. Part collage, part photograph, somehow illusive in their imagery and self-referential, he appealed to a time of self-discovery. He hadn’t been married the last time Ross had seen him but the engagement had been announced. The early episodes with Sylvie had been protracted. Small and blond with a large bust, she had drained the will out of John one minute and fussed like a nurse the next. She had an emotional need bordering on hysteria, or so Ross remembered from the outside. He had often thought that in there somewhere there was a background of emotional deprivation that made her cling like a lost child. She was looking for someone to mother and a sickly John fitted the bill. Not that there was anything malicious about her or that John didn’t appreciate the care and attention, but in the end they became mutually dependent on each other, something each mistook for love. Even with an impending marriage on the cards, Ross could see how far they had drifted apart, how they had each changed.
They had met when Sylvie was seventeen and first time in a city. She had been a secretary then but not a good one because her spelling was indifferent and her social skills non-existent. The best she could offer was as a copy typist so she had been consigned to the typing pool. Being in a room full of women discussing their lives, their boyfriends, their sex lives, with monotonous regularity had crushed her completely. Sylvie had no experiences to draw upon. John had come across her at an end of year party. He must have needed something too because they clung to each other all evening. At twenty he was close to death from a lingering consumption. John Trenwith was waiting to die and Sylvie was looking for someone to look after, anyone, to care for.
‘Now, why on god’s earth did you come back? Not that I’m not pleased to see you, just astounded.’
‘You’re not going to believe this but I’ve come back to see Ben. He’s living in South Ken I think.’
‘You mean you’ve come thirteen thousand miles to see some rich bastard who’s probably forgotten us all by now.’
‘Seems like it.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been asking that same question ever since I boarded the plane in Australia.’
Ross unfurled the magazine on the counter. Two small children glowed luminously from the back cover.
‘See, here is some of his recent work.’
An uncomfortable pause ensued where each held his breath waiting for the other to speak. John blinked in incredulity.
‘Yes, I see it, what’s it got to do with anything? He always was a pretentious prick.’ John walked away his hands twitching. The magazine went back into its pocket, sliding in beside the newspaper. He was regretting the whole conversation.
‘How’s Sylvie then, you didn’t say?’
‘No I didn’t did I? She changed after you left, became a different person, insisting she wanted a life of her own. The little bitch probably screwed everything in sight and thought I didn’t know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, unable to find anything better. The Sylvie he knew had no guile at all and had been the epitome of faithfulness. It sounded as though they were talking about two different people. ‘What happened between you two ? I thought you were going great guns.’
‘All illusion.’
Once again he muttered ‘sorry.’
‘Not your fault, mine I suppose, too selfish by half. I wanted her the way she was in the beginning and she grew up before I could stop her. I suppose it was inevitable really. What about you, ?’
‘If you mean married, no.’
‘Still painting?’
‘The odd wall in low sheen. It took me no time at all to realise that I had nothing to say so I gave it away. Haven’t picked up a paintbrush in anger in years.’
’You’re kidding. All that ability and you gave it away. Considering the plagiaristic no-talents we went through college with who took their ideas straight out of Studio International and worked on the principle that no one else ever read them, you’re a genius. They all envied you. Truman included.′
‘Now that is bullshit.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘How did you work that out?’
‘You think all the attention he lavished on you was for real. He was jealous. You had more talent in your little finger than he did in the whole of his pretentious body. He wasn’t trying to be friends cause he liked you. You were the opposition, he was trying to learn from you.’
‘You got your head on the right way round? Him learn from me? What did I have to offer?’
‘You had what he couldn’t have, the ability to translate emotion into paint. Van Gogh had it, Ben Truman didn’t. He worked to a formula, esoteric stuff, intellectual doodling if you like, not real things like people. This is some of his new stuff is it?’
He pulled the magazine roughly from Ross’ pocket and flattened it out with his fist. He stuck his nose only inches from the surface and tilted the glossy image towards the light. ‘Seems to me he’s joined the human race after all. All that I’m-a-genius-stuff-and-I’m-going-to-the-big-apple-to-prove-it... he was running away.’
’I don’t remember it like that. If anything the idea of exposing himself to a new audience frightened the life out of him. He had faith in what he was doing. It was never the money and he wasn’t running anywhere. When did you ever see signs of self-indulgence? He didn’t own a car, travelled everywhere by tube and hardly ever bought clothes. I suppose in your eyes that made him cheap?”
‘You said it not me.’
Two children gleamed in a locked world. The tiled floor sloped away merging with the plant life in the middle ground. It could have been a nursery, an ornate sun room, a conservatory, a repository of a forgotten empire.
‘Why children? Do you suppose they’re his? He’s the last person I would have expected to be indulging in parenthood.’
‘Who knows. America is a strange place. Look at Jennifer. You know she’s married, sent me a wedding invitation from Los Angeles, probably some Neanderthal beach bum with a dick the size of an elephant.’
‘She wasn’t that bad.’
‘Says who. I recall you just a wee bit upset with ol’ Jennifer’.′
‘That was different.’
‘Anyway she’s probably fifteen stone by now, bum the size of a house and five screaming kids in a caravan park on the edge of town. Don’t they call them trailers over there?’
‘Sure do pardner.’
Ross fired off an imaginary gun and blew smoke away from the barrel before returning it to its holster.
Customers entered and leant on the counter looking for service. They were agitated to find no one in sight and began to make moves to go. John wasn’t about to fill the void himself and leant over the polished edge until he could see the floor. ‘Oi,’ he yelled in obvious annoyance, ‘you’ve got customers.’ The bustling fat boy appeared at the run, out of breath and wiping his face with the tea towel. He proceeded to write a pedantic order for coffee,
forming the letters with precision, blowing at already dried ink from a biro. The girl customer and her friend winced at his slowness and the rolls of fat bouncing inside his T-shirt. He smiled weakly in their direction avoiding all eye contact with his boss. Cream had blobbed on his cheek and as he opened his mouth they could all see the chocolate staining his teeth. John turned away from the sound of coffee percolating and spoke into Ross’ ear loud enough for the boy to hear.
‘He’s got to go. Thick as a brick and twice as slow. You don’t want a job do you?’
‘Working for you. You’re the original sweatshop employer. What’s it pay anyway?’
‘Enough to keep body and soul together, even his body, fat turd.’
‘Sounds marvellous. Maybe I’ll give it a go. Come on let’s get out of here, I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘Steven, you’re in charge, god help us. Make sure you lock up and stay out of the eclairs. You hear me?’
The couple at the counter winced in unison. Steven deflated with a voluble hiss of air from his bloated lips, hauled in his stomach and shrank as though to disappear before their eyes.
‘Yes John,’ he murmured inaudibly into his T-towel wiping sweat from his forehead, eyes darting everywhere, humiliated.
‘What did you say, I can’t hear you?’ The couple squirmed in their seats. Steven raised his downcast head a little and reiterated the words to John’s retreating back.
‘That’s better,’ shouted John as he closed the door.
