Imajica

‘No. He just fucked around too much.’

Taylor made a non-committal grunt, then said: ‘I get these night-sweats now, you know, and I have to get up sometimes at three in the morning and let Clem change the sheets. I don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep half the time. And all kinds of memories are coming back to me. Things I haven’t thought about in years. One of them was that. I can hear him, when I’m standing there in a pool of sweat. Hear him talking like he’s possessed.’

‘And you don’t like it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Memories mean different things to me now. I dream about my mother, and it’s like I want to crawl back into her and be born all over again. I dream about Gentle, and I wonder why I let all these mysteries in my life go. Things it’s too late to solve now. Being in love. Speaking in tongues. It’s all one in the end. I haven’t understood any of it.’ He shook his head, and shook down tears at the same time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I always get maudlin at Christmas. Will you fetch Clem for me? I need the bathroom.’

‘Can’t I help?’

‘There’s some things I still need Clem for. Thanks anyway.’

‘No problem.’

‘And for listening.’

She threaded her way to where Clem was chatting, and discreetly informed him of Taylor’s request.

‘You know Simone, don’t you?’ Clem said by way of an exit, and left Jude to talk.

She did indeed know Simone, though not well, and after the conversation she’d just had with Taylor, she found it difficult to whip up a social soufflé. But Simone was almost flirtatiously excessive in her responses, unleashing a gurgling laugh at the merest hint of a cue, and fingering her neck as though to mark the places she wanted kissed. Jude was silently rehearsing a polite refusal, when she caught Simone’s glance, ill concealed in a particularly extravagant laugh, flitting towards somebody elsewhere in the crowd. Irritated to be cast as a stooge for the woman’s vamping, she said:

‘Who is he?’

‘Who’s who?’ Simone said, flustered and blushing. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just some man who keeps staring at me.’

Her gaze went back to her admirer, and as it did so Jude was seized by the utter certainty that if she were to turn now it would be Gentle’s stare she intercepted. He was here, and up to his stale old tricks, threading himself a little string of gazes ready to pluck the prettiest when he tired of the game.

‘Why don’t you just go near and talk to him,’ she said.

‘I don’t know if I should.’

‘You can always change your mind if a better offer comes along.’

‘Maybe I will,’ Simone said, and without making any further attempt at conversation she took her laugh elsewhere.

Jude fought the temptation to follow her progress for fully two seconds, then glanced round. Simone’s wooer was standing beside the Christmas tree, smiling a welcome at his object of desire as she breasted her way through the crowd towards him. It wasn’t Gentle, after all, but a man she thought she remembered as Taylor’s brother. Oddly relieved, and irritated at herself for being so, she headed towards the drinks table for a refill, then wandered out into the hallway in search of some cooler air. There was a cellist on the half-landing, playing In the Bleak Midwinter, the melody and the instrument it was played upon combining to melancholy effect. The front door stood open, and the air through it raised goose bumps. She went to close it, only to have one of the other listeners discreetly whisper:

There’s somebody being sick out there.’

She glanced into the street. There was indeed somebody sitting on the edge of the pavement, in the posture of one resigned to the dictates of his belly: head down, elbows on his knees, waiting for the next surge. Perhaps she made a sound. Perhaps he simply felt her gaze on him. He raised his head, and looked round.

‘Gentle. What are you doing out here?’

‘What does it look like?’ He hadn’t looked too pretty last time she’d seen him, but he looked a damn sight worse now. Haggard, unshaven and waxy with nausea.

There’s a bathroom in the house.’

‘There’s a wheelchair up there,’ Gentle said, with an almost superstitious look. ‘I’d prefer to be sick out here.’

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It was virtually covered in paint. So was the other, she now saw; and his trousers, and his shirt.

‘You’ve been busy.’

He misunderstood. ‘I shouldn’t have drunk anything,’ he said.

‘Do you want me to get you some water?’

‘No, thanks. I’m going home. Will you say goodbye to Taylor and Clem for me? I can’t face going back in. I’ll disgrace myself.’ He got to his feet, stumbling a little. ‘We don’t seem to meet under very pleasant circumstances, do we?’ he said.

‘I think I should drive you home. You’ll either kill yourself or somebody else.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, raising his painted hands. ‘The roads are empty. I’ll be fine.’ He started to rummage in his pocket for his car keys.

‘You saved my life, let me return the favour.’

He looked up at her, his eyelids drooping. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.’

She went back inside to say farewell on behalf of herself and Gentle. Taylor was back in his chair. She caught sight of him before he saw her. He was staring into the middle distance, his eyes glazed. It wasn’t sorrow she read in his expression, but a fatigue so profound it had wiped all feeling from him, except, maybe, regret for unsolved mysteries. She went to him, and explained that she’d found Gentle and that he was sick, and needed taking home.

‘Isn’t he going to come and say goodbye?’ Taylor said.

‘I think he’s afraid of throwing up all over the carpet, or you, or both.’

‘Tell him to call me. Tell him I want to see him soon.’ He took hold of Jude’s hand, holding it with surprising strength. ‘Soon, tell him.’

‘I will.’

‘I want to see that grin of his, one more time.’

‘There’ll be lots of times,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Once will have to do,’ he replied softly.

She kissed him, and promised she’d call to say she got home safely. On her way to the door she met Clem and once again made her apologies and farewells.

‘Call me if there’s anything I can do,’ she offered.

‘Thanks, but I think it’s a waiting game.’

Then we can wait together.’

‘Better just him and me,’ Clem said. ‘But I will call.’ He glanced towards Taylor, who was once more staring at nothing. ‘He’s determined to hold on till spring. One more spring, he keeps saying. He never gave a fuck about crocuses till now.’ Clem smiled. ‘You know what’s wonderful?’ he said. ‘I’ve fallen in love with him all over again.’

‘That is wonderful.’

‘And now I’m going to lose him, just when I realize what he means to me. You won’t make that mistake, will you?’ He looked at her hard. ‘You know who I mean.’

She nodded.

‘Good. Then you’d better take him home.’

2

The roads were as empty as she’d predicted, and it took only fifteen minutes to get back to Gentle’s studio. He wasn’t exactly coherent. On the way, the exchanges between them were full of gaps and discontinuities, as though his mind were running ahead of his tongue, or behind it. Drink wasn’t the culprit. Jude had seen Gentle drunk on all forms of alcohol: it made him roaring, randy and sanctimonious by turns. Never like this, with his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, talking from the bottom of a pit. One moment he was thanking her for looking after him, the next he was telling her not to mistake the paint on his hands for shit. It wasn’t shit, he kept saying, it was burnt umber, and Prussian blue, and cadmium yellow, but somehow when you mixed colours together, any colours, they always came out looking like shit eventually. This monologue dwindled into silence, from which, a minute or two later, a new subject emerged.

‘I can’t look at him, you know, the way he is …’

‘Who?’ Jude said.

Taylor. I can’t look at him when he’s so sick. You know how much I hate sickness.’

She’d forgotten. It amounted to a paranoia with him, fuelled perhaps by the fact that though he treated his body with scant regard for its health he not only never sickened but hardly aged. Doubtless the collapse, when it came, would be calamitous: excess, frenzy and the passage of years taking their toll in one fell swoop. Until that time he wanted no reminders of his physical frailty.

Taylor’s going to die, isn’t he?’ he said.

‘Clem thinks very soon.’

Gentle gave a heavy sigh. ‘I should spend some time with him. We were good friends once.’

There were rumours about you two.’

‘He spread them, not me.’

‘Just rumours, were they?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’ve probably tried every experience that swam by at least once.’

‘He’s not my type …’ Gentle said, not opening his eyes.

‘You should see him again,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to face up to falling apart sooner or later. It happens to us all.’

‘Not to me it won’t. When I start to decay, I’m going to kill myself. I swear.’ He made fists of his painted hands, and raised them to his face, drawing the knuckles down over his cheeks. ‘I won’t let it happen,’ he said.

‘Good luck,’ she replied.

They drove the rest of the way without any further exchange between them, his passive presence on the passenger seat beside her making her uneasy. She kept thinking of Taylor’s story and expecting him to start talking, unleashing a stream of lunacies. It wasn’t until she announced that they’d arrived at the studio that she realized he’d fallen asleep. She stared at him awhile: at the smooth dome of his forehead, and the delicate configuration of his lips. It was still in her to dote on him, no question of that. But what lay that way? Disappointment and frustrated rage. Despite Clem’s words of encouragement she was almost certain it was a lost cause.

She shook him awake, and asked him if she could use his bathroom before going on her way. The punch was heavy in her bladder. He was hesitant, which surprised her. The suspicion dawned that he’d already moved a female companion into the studio, some seasonal bird to be stuffed for Christmas and dumped by New Year. Curiosity made her press to be allowed in. Reluctant as he was, he could scarcely say no, of course, and she traipsed up the stairs after him, wondering as she went what the conquest was going to look like, only to find that the studio was empty. His sole companion was the painting that had so filthied his hands. He seemed genuinely upset that she’d set eyes on it, and ushered her to the bathroom more discomfited than if her first suspicions had been correct, and one of his conquests had indeed been disporting herself on the threadbare couch. Poor Gentle. He was getting stranger by the day.

She relieved herself, and emerged from the toilet to find the painting covered with a stained sheet, and him looking furtive and fidgety, clearly eager to have her out of the place. She saw no reason not to be plain with him, and said:

‘Working on something new?’

‘Nothing much,’ he said.

‘I’d like to see.’

‘It’s not finished.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a fake,’ she said. ‘I know what you and Klein get up to.’

‘It’s not a fake,’ he said, a fierceness in his voice and face she’d not seen so far tonight. ‘It’s mine.’

‘An original Zacharias?’ she remarked. ‘This I have to see.’

She reached for the sheet before he could stop her, and flipped it up over the top of the canvas. She’d only had a glimpse of the picture as she’d entered, and from some distance. Up close, it was clear he’d worked on the canvas with no little ferocity. There were places where it had been punctured, as though he’d stabbed it with his palette knife or brush; other places where the paint was laid on with glutinous abandon, then thumbed and fingered to drive it before his will. All this to achieve the likeness of what? Two people, it seemed, standing face to face against a brutal sky, their flesh white, but shot through with jabs of livid colour. ‘Who are they?’ she said.

‘They? he said, sounding almost surprised that she’d read the image thus, then covering his response with a shrug. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘just an experiment,’ and pulled the sheet back down over the painting.

‘Is it a commission?’

‘I’d prefer not to discuss it,’ he said.

His discomfort was oddly charming. He was like a child who’d been caught about some secret ritual. ‘You’re full of surprises,’ she said, smiling.

‘Nah, not me.’

Though the painting was out of sight he continued to look ill at ease, and she realized there was going to be no further discussion on the picture or its import.

‘I’ll be off then,’ she said.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ he replied, escorting her to the door.

‘Do you still want to have that drink?’ she said.

‘You’re not going back to New York?’

‘Not immediately. I’ll call you in a couple of days. Don’t forget Taylor.’

‘What are you, my conscience?’ he said, with too small a trace of humour to soften the weight of the reply. ‘I won’t forget.’

‘You leave marks on people, Gentle. That’s a responsibility you can’t just shrug off.’

‘I’ll try to be invisible from now on,’ he replied.

He didn’t take her to the front door, but let her head down the stairs alone, closing the studio door before she’d taken more than half a dozen steps. As she went, she wondered what misbegotten instinct had made her suggest drinks. Well, it was easily slipped out of, even assuming he remembered the suggestion had been made, which she doubted.

Once out in the street she looked up at the building to see if she could spot him through the window. She had to cross the road to do so, but from the opposite pavement she could see him standing in front of the painting, which he had once again unveiled. He was staring at it, with his head slightly cocked. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked as though his lips were moving; as though he were talking to the image on the canvas. What was he saying, she wondered. Was he coaxing some image forth from the chaos of paint? And if so, in which of his many tongues was he speaking?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1

She had seen two people where he’d painted one. Not a he, a she or an it, but they. She’d looked at the image and seen past his conscious intention to a buried purpose, one he’d hidden even from himself. Now he went back to the canvas and looked at it again, with borrowed eyes, and there they were, the two she’d seen. In his passion to capture some impression of Pie’oh’pah, he had painted the assassin stepping from shadow (or back into it), a stream of darkness running down the middle of his face and torso. It divided the figure from top to bottom, and its outer edges, ragged and lush, described the reciprocative forms of profiles, etched in white from the halves of what he’d intended to be a single face. They stared at each other like lovers, eyes looking forward in the Egyptian manner, the backs of their heads folded into shadow. The question was: who were these two? What had he been trying to express setting these faces thus, nose to nose?

He interrogated the painting for several minutes after she’d gone, preparing as he did so to attack the canvas again. But when it came to doing so, he lacked the strength. His hands were trembling, his palms clammy; his eyes could only focus upon the image indifferently well. He retreated from the picture, afraid to touch it in this weakened state for fear he undo what little he’d already achieved. A painting could escape so quickly. A few inept strokes and a likeness (to a face, to another painter’s work) could flee the canvas and never be recaptured. Better to leave it alone tonight. To rest, and hope he was strong tomorrow.

He dreamed of sickness. Of lying in his bed, naked beneath a thin white sheet, shivering so hard his teeth chattered. Snow fell from the ceiling intermittently, and didn’t melt when it touched his flesh, because he was colder than the snow. There were visitors in his sickroom, and he tried to tell them how cold he was, but he had no power in his voice, and the words came out as gasps, as though he were struggling for his last breath. He began to fear that this dream condition was fatal; that snow and breathlessness would bury him. He had to act. Rise up from the hard bed and prove these mourners premature.

With painful slowness, he moved his hands to the edge of the mattress in the hope of pulling himself upright, but the sheets were slick with his final sweat, and he couldn’t get a firm hold. Fear turned to panic, despair bringing on a new round of gasps, more desperate than the last. He struggled to make his situation plain, but the door of his sickroom stood wide now and all the mourners had disappeared through it. He could hear them in another room, talking and laughing. There was a patch of sun on the threshold, he saw. Next door it was summer. Here, there was only the heart-stopping cold, taking a firmer grip on him by the moment. He gave up attempting Lazarus, and instead let his palms lie flat on the sheets, and his eyes flutter closed. The sound of voices from the next room softened to a murmur. The noise of his heart dwindled. New sounds rose to replace it, however. A wind was gusting outside, and branches thrashed at the windows. Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation. He opened his eyes again. The bed had gone, so had the snow. Lightning threw into silhouette a man who stood watching the storm.

‘Can you make me forget?’ Gentle heard himself saying. ‘Do you have the trick of that?’

‘Of course,’ came the soft reply. ‘But you don’t want it.’

‘No, what I want’s death, but I’m too afraid of that tonight. That’s the real sickness: fear of death. But I can live with forgetfulness, give me that.’

‘For how long?’

‘Until the end of the world.’

Another lightning flash burned out the figure in front of him, and then the whole scene. Gone; forgotten. Gentle blinked the after-image of window and silhouette out of his eyes, and in doing so passed between sleep and waking.

The room was cold, but not as icy as his deathbed. He sat upright, staring first at his unclean hands, then at the window. It was still night, but he could hear the sound of vehicles on the Edgware Road, their murmur reassuring. Already - distracted by sound and sight - the nightmare was fading. He was happy to lose it.

He shrugged off the bedclothes and went to the kitchen to find himself something to drink. There was a carton of milk in the refrigerator. He downed its contents - though the milk was ready to turn - aware that his churned system would probably reject it in short order. Quenched, he wiped his mouth and chin and went through to look at the painting again, but the intensity of the dream from which he’d just woken made a mockery of his efforts. He would not conjure the assassin by this crude magic. He could paint a dozen canvases, a hundred, and still not capture the ambiguities of Pie’oh’pah. He belched, bringing the taste of bad milk back up into his mouth. What was he to do? Lock himself away, and let this sickness in him - put there by the sight of the assassin - consume him? Or bathe, sweeten himself, and go out to find some faces to put between him and the memory? Both vain endeavours. Which left a third, distressing route. To find Pie’oh’pah in the flesh: to face him, question him, have his fill of him, until every ambiguity was scoured away.

He went on staring at the painting while he turned this option over. What would it take to find the assassin? An interrogation of Estabrook, for one. That wouldn’t be too onerous a duty. Then a search of the city, to find the place Estabrook had claimed he couldn’t recall. Again, no great hardship. Better than sour milk and sourer dreams.

Knowing that in the light of morning he might lose his present clarity of mind, and it was best to close off at least one route of retreat, he went to the paints, and squeezed on to his palm a fat worm of cadmium yellow, and worked it into the still wet canvas. It obliterated the lovers immediately, but he wasn’t satisfied until he’d covered the canvas from edge to edge. The colour fought for its brilliance, but it soon deteriorated, tainted by the darkness it was trying to obscure. By the time he’d finished, it was as if his attempt to capture Pie’oh’pah had never been made.

Satisfied, he stood back and belched again. The nausea had gone from him. He felt strangely buoyant. Maybe sour milk suited him.

2

Pie’oh’pah sat on the step of his trailer, and stared up at the night sky. In their beds behind him, his adopted wife and children slept. In the heavens above him, the stars were burning behind a blanket of sodium-tinted cloud. He had seldom felt more alone in his long life than now. Since returning from New York he had been in a state of constant anticipation. Something was going to happen to him and his world, but he didn’t know what. His ignorance pained him, not simply because he was helpless in the face of this imminent event, but because his inability to grasp its nature was testament to how his skills had deteriorated. The days when he could read futurities off the air had gone. He was more and more a prisoner of the here and now. That here, the body he occupied, was also less than its former glory. It was so long since he’d corresponded the way he had with Gentle, taking the will of another as the gospel of his flesh, that he’d almost lost the trick of it. But Gentle’s desire had been potent enough to remind him, and his body still reverberated with echoes of their time together. Though it had ended badly he didn’t regret snatching those minutes. Another such encounter might never come.

He wandered from his trailer towards the perimeter of the encampment. The first light of dawn was beginning to eat at the murk. One of the camp mongrels, back from a night of adventuring, squeezed between two sheets of corrugated iron and came wagging to his side. He stroked the dog’s snout, and tickled behind its battle-ravaged ears, wishing he could find his way back to his home and master so easily.

3

It was the oft-stated belief of Esmond Bloom Godolphin, the late father of Oscar and Charles, that a man could never have too many bolt-holes, and of E.B.G.’s countless saws this was the only one Oscar had been significantly influenced by. He had not less than four places of occupation in London. The house in Primrose Hill was his chief residence, but there was also a pied à terre in Maida Vale, a smallish flat in Notting Hill, and the location he was presently occupying: a windowless warehouse concealed in a maze of derelict and near-derelict properties near the river.

It was not a place he was particularly happy to frequent, especially not on the day after Christmas, but over the years it had proved a secure haven for Dowd’s two associates, the voiders, and it now served as a Chapel of Rest for Dowd himself. His naked corpse lay beneath a shroud on the cold concrete, with aromatic herbs, picked and dried on the slopes of the Jokalaylau, smouldering in bowls at his head and feet, after the rituals proscribed in that region. The voiders had shown little interest in the arrival of their leader’s body. They were functionaries - incapable of anything but the most rudimentary thought processes. They had no physical appetites: no desire, no hunger or thirst, no ambition. They simply sat out the days and nights in the darkness of the warehouse and waited for Dowd to instruct them. Oscar was less than comfortable in their company, but could not bring himself to leave until this business was finished. He’d brought a book to read: a cricket almanac that he found soothing to peruse. Every now and then he’d get up and refuel the bowls. Otherwise there was little to do but wait.