A Sculptor's Gift (part 2)
4
It is now the sculpture’s third day and I’m sitting up in my sculpture so nobody can move it. The Chief Municipal Health and Safety Inspector himself is here with workers in blue overalls and reflective waistcoats: they are looking up at me and even I can tell they’re not very pleased. Orange plastic cones are being put round my sculpture and a hoarding is being raised around the base. The hoarding is six feet high, roughly the height of an average adult male.
The Municipal Chief Health and Safety Inspector is not an art lover: call it a sixth sense, but I can tell these things.
And now there's another microphone: I've got my patter off pretty well, now and all the attention is making me a bit cocky.
"There is a fear that too many people will like my sculpture, as if, at some critical point of numbers, a seesaw is going to irrevocably tilt and slide us all into anarchy and Armageddon!"
"Er, thank you. And now it's back to the studio." Unfortunately, the chance of it being George Clooney or Johnny Depp back at the studio is pretty slim. If it were Johnny Depp behind the desk, I would get a fair hearing and, once his shift was finished, he’d be straight over in a taxi to crack open a flagon of rum with me and wave his cutlass menacingly at the traffic warden who has just stuck a parking ticket on my sculpture.
There are those who reckon I chose this time of year to get better publicity, that I have taken up residence to get in the papers. Actually, the main reason I am sat astride it is to make it more difficult to move it. And what does the Mayor get out of it? A new reputation for humanity and tolerance, perhaps? A chance, maybe, to appeal to the liberal, intellectual voters who have not found his policies very palatable.
But now I have been made an offer.
By a local crackpot smack-head.
And curiosity gets the better of me.
I am in a third story flat and sitting down to eat, wedged between a lady called Hettie and her quiet partner, a thin man with earnest eyes, randomly-shaved brown hair and a beard. Hettie, it transpires, is a botanist and her partner is an artist. If she thinks this commonality is going to open up a flood of conversation between her man and me, then she hasn't bargained for the fact that we are both shy and just sit there awkwardly while she scribbles on a pad and looks at me occasionally, wild-eyed and determined.
"Oh yes, baby, we're going to make you a packet - another sculpture like that and you'll never have to work again!"
There is a rough approximation of my sculpture in the middle of the kitchen table made out of a cut-up cereal box and sticky tape. A rectangle representing the edges of the town square have been drawn on the Formica-topped table with an indelible marker. Hettie, whose flat it is, is pouring a pile of pasta from a jar and spreading it around the sculpture: these, apparently, are 'the people'.
This Hettie wears a grubby man's waistcoat, a yellow hunting one that would once have graced a rural dandy as, after placing his stirrup cup back on the servant's silver salver, he trotted down his drive with a mounted throng and led the day's ride to hounds. Said waistcoat is now draped over the neglected, angular body of a grubby woman in her late thirties, the piercings making her ear look like a shower curtain with its rings attached. Smoke is drifting up from a spliff propped in the ashtray, the roach end pushed towards her partner and me. We both let it be – it would appear that neither of us have any appetite for her drugs (nor I for their germs).
Hettie's movements are, despite her set of herbal brakes, more agitated, aggressive, even. I am nodding off now and I see her, as she bends over her model of the square, like one of those Greek gods leaning out from their cloud that you see in school books.
"I say, Zeus, those humans have been very naughty. What say you? How's about we smite them?" That's it as far as Zeus is concerned and he nods in agreement, dipping his hand in the massive jar of pasta on his kitchen table and casting it onto the vast coffee-stained laminate surface of the Earth. Mere mortals scatter in fright and find shelter behind the pepper pot.
"These," gasps Hettie, nudging me awake and reaching over the table to scatter more pasta, "these are the punters. I reckon we (we?) had at least eighty there today and that's not counting the tourists, the curious, or the beggars who are always there - they don't count. No, I'm talking about the ones with a cause, the ones you have touched." The ones I have touched? This really has gone too far. Picking up pace she gets faster, louder. "Yesterday there were twelve, the day before, three." She stares at me, manic, and grips my arm so tightly it hurts.
She's nuts.
"You have done it!"
"Pardon?" I am feeling a little sick in my stomach now, not quite sure what I have done. Just what terrible thing am I responsible for?
"The zeitgeist. You have captured the moment! You need an agent." She prods her bony chest. "You need me."
That she should know I have ‘the Zeitgeist' and I don't doesn’t surprise me, as I have usually been out of step with what others seem to know, are interested in. Down the pub, other people are watching the match on the big screen but I am the one examining how the stains in the carpet make different hues of colour. I need a comfort zone, something familiar, so I scrabble around in my bag for an appropriate bit of memoir:
When my school friends looked to the clean and new, it seemed that I was the only one who found beauty in the grimy factory chimneys at the edge of town. I took a brick home but that brick looked as out of place as a factory worker who, in dirty overalls, has been dragged along to a dinner party for the momentary titillation and amusement of jaded guests.
I'm so knackered I keep drifting off, only to start dreaming again. This time it is the imaginary Edwardian drawing room in my memoirs.
"Goodness, darling - what is that?"
"This, my dearest, is a workman. He does work."
"He does what?"
"Something called work, darling. Look, I'll wind him up and then we can all see him um, er..."
"Work?"
"Yes, that's right, dear, work. There, look - see how he is digging a hole in the carpet?"
"Heavens, how positively enchanting!"
"If you just pass me that box, I'll show you one that shoots: comes with its own gun and everything."
"I'm not sure about that, dear - it sounds dangerous."
"Oh, it's quite safe, darling, you won't get hurt. Right, just a quick look at the instructions... Ah, Simpkins... Be a good chap and go and stand by the fireplace, would you?"
"Yes, me lord."
Hettie shakes me awake again.
It is only now that I finally admit I have some quality or other that I have not been aware of.
Am I really to owe that awareness to Hettie?
Hettie cocks her head and looks into the distance. She swears, throws me my coat, takes me down the stairs past the bicycles and the piled-up post and bundles me out of the door at the back of the block of flats. Holding up her hand, she halts us at the bins and then scuttles across the grass with me in tow. I look at the skinny woman as she darts about and realise that, if Hetty is anything to go by, a big plus about being paranoid is that it certainly keeps you active and fit.
"Some bastard's tipped them off! Time to go, anyway."
"Who? Where?"
"Shut up and just do what I say –“ I do my best to create a ‘stubborn’ face. Hettie falters. “Er, please."
Hmm… stubborn face worked. Must file away for future use. I look in the distance and see the market square is lit up with green lights.
I imagine people drifting towards the lights, men called ‘Norman’ and ‘Sidney’ with not a Brylcreemed hair out of place as they stand stoically in their woollen dressing gowns and striped pajamas, each looking up at the alien green glow and sucking on pipes before removing the stems from their mouths and shouting.
“Now look here, you alien Johnnies - we won’t put up with your funny ways, d’you hear? You come here, lowering the tone with your tatty, death-trap intergalactic spaceships and stick them just anywhere, flouting resident parking left right and centre and shooting off your death rays any old time of day and night. As for impregnating our womenfolk – sorry, but that’s just not cricket so you can turn round and toddle off back where you came from, there’s good chappies!” I turn to tell Hettie because I think the idea of the green lights being aliens is really cool but she raises a finger to her lips.
"No - just keep it shut and follow me!"
We turn a corner and Hettie scans an all-night cafe across the street.
“Looks okay; everyone there who should be and nobody there who shouldn’t be.”
"I'm not sure abou -"
Hettie mimes a zipper across her mouth. I can (remarkably for me) tell I'm really pissing her off now but I don't know how to remedy it. Nodding towards the only shop front with its lights on, she beckons me to follow her over the road to a café advertising all-day breakfast.
Seeing us come in, the cafe owner signals me to sit down while setting a coffee in front of me with the correct one sugar in. How did he know? I'm not sure I want people to know everything about me.
The cafe owner, large and black-haired with three days’ beard, sits as the lord of all he surveys. In his chef's outfit, he sprawls back on a chair with his legs apart, his hand perilously near the swelling in his grimy chequered trousers. With a podgy fist on his fat knee, he commands the floor and takes centre stage like a tavern keeper in an opera about to tell us all how he went on a quest, crossed the sea and wooed the Sultan Of Somewhere’s daughter before returning home to cook oven chips, warm through Cornish pasties and pull tepid pints for the locals.
The proprietor, ignoring his own notice above the coffee machine, takes a crumpled cigarette packet from his pocket and offers it round. Shrugging at the lack of takers apart from Hettie, he lights up and pitches a match at cold tea in a long-dead cup.
There are four others sat down already. One is Father Barry, small, wiry, with frizzy grey hair and untrimmed sideburns stuck to his head between a faded black beret and the frayed hood of a duffle coat. He looks very guarded this evening, like a wizened old terrier that has wandered into the macho kennel on the block, the one labeled ‘Gym’ with muscly Mastiffs doing bench presses. Next to him is Mr. Pritchard from the Temple of the Divine And Blessed Light on the industrial estate.
The other two I do not know, but it soon transpires that the one in the duffle coat is a poet and the one in a suit and cashmere overcoat is a human rights campaigner: I have seen them all at some time or another at the base of the sculpture. It is Father Barry who speaks first.
“Now, young man, we all love your sculpture –“
“Actually,” interrupted Mr. Pritchard, “some of us would like to go further and say what a truly a great honour it would be to be granted the ultimate privilege of installing your masterpiece in a very prominent position at the Temple of the Divine and Blessed Light. I am most confident that sufficient subscriptions could be raised from our materially blessed disciples, of which I – sorry, we - have many.”
“Money?” sneered the poet, who quite clearly did not have a surfeit of it. “Is that what it's always about? And you're, - and excuse me while I laugh - a spiritual man then, are you? That sculpture should stay where it is, for the benefit of all!”
"If I might be so bold,” interjected the human rights campaigner, “I see it in an even more prominent position, perhaps outside the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Actually, I was there only the other week! Just say the word and I'll have a chat with my pals at the Ministry... Hush hush, if you know what I mean.” Removing a sleek aluminium laptop from his briefcase, he merely opens it but that is enough as it affords him mystery, not a little clout and a barrier against the Unwashed around him.
“Excuse me”. Five heads turn my way and stare at me with rapt attention. They look like apostles in a painting as they wait for their Messiah to speak. I don't want to be the Messiah, though, I want to be the artist painting him. The central figure would be not myself but an angel (naked Baroque-style with his/her/its dignity preserved by a chance scrap of fabric caught on a breeze), a celestial man/woman/thing striking the sculpture with a vital mercy blow from a heavy hammer, a winged messenger ready to render the last couple of weeks invalid, that action endorsed by a celestial rubber stamp that shakes the very mountains. “To be quite honest," I continue, "I think I want to destroy it, all the trouble it’s causing.” Hettie leaps forward.
I'm shattered and in a cafe with five fruitcakes at four in the morning when I should be at home. .. In bed... Aslee -.
I wake up to Hettie banging her fist on the table. Seeing ten eyes staring at me, I panic; just how long was I asleep for? What's more, did I snore? Mind, my reputation has been hyped up so much recently that I could probably fart and some smart-arse, raggedy-bearded mystic would pop up from under the table to tell us that my flatulence was predicted thousands of years ago by a prophet and that it’s a long-awaited fanfare to open The Portals Of Fate and herald in Armageddon. Hettie stands and paces up and down the cafe.
"What else can you do? What else can you make?" Perplexed, I'm not quite sure what she wants to know. Do I tell her about my banjo playing, or my skills at snooker? Perhaps this would be the appropriate time to regale them with fascinating tales of how I spend my days as a stocking designer?
Hettie sits down, exasperated, and runs a hand through her close-cropped hair. I notice it is blonde but blue at the roots, almost as if the blonde is growing out and she is growing back a natural colour of bright indigo.
I am so absorbed by Hettie's hair that I do not notice we have an extra person in the cafe, a slight young woman in a cocktail of clothing as if grabbed in a random fashion from rails in a charity shop. She is in tweed trousers, a man's shirt and an enormous snuff-coloured jumper with holes. On her feet, a pair of cheap supermarket plimsolls, grubby white with mismatched brown and black laces.
The cafe proprietor has relaxed at last but stiffens again at the sight of the young adult clutching a doll and shuffling towards us with minute steps. The woman is slight, with long dark hair hanging down. It is, like the rest of her, in need of a wash. She is pale, thin-faced, beautiful.
Annabel had a ‘fed-on-meat’, wholesome kind of beauty: if she were a Superhero, she would be scaling rocks and batting away eagles as she climbed up past their nests. Her costume would consist of Lycra and a stout pair of walking boots and her special powers would include reading minds, finishing off people’s sentences and showing hapless Scouts how to fashion a useful shoe tidy out of twigs.
But not this girl.
No - hers is the fragile beauty of ethereal refinement and yet she gives the impression that she is even stronger than Annabel, that she is so removed from the crude physics and limitations of this world that just one push of a slender finger would be enough to crush the large chrome coffee machine as if it were foil. The girl-woman has a fixed grin and is gazing into the distance, her expression unbroken as we all stare at her moving slowly towards our table. Then she sits down opposite me and stares. She is looking not so much at me but through me, to some distant object behind my head.
"Now Charlotte," admonishes the cafe proprietor sternly, " you know you are not supposed to be out here, don't you?' The doll has been forgotten by its owner now and allowed to slide off the strange girl’s lap where it lies on the floor and stares up at the lumps of chewing gum stuck under the table. The little rag figure isn’t, however, the only mute with a bland, static expression – Charlotte continues to stare and, picking up a menu without even looking at it, she whips out a pair of scissors from her trouser pocket and snaps at the air with them.
We shrink back, but the cafe owner shakes his head and looks at the rest of us with heavy shrugs and a pantomime expression of helplessness. Sighing, he raises his eyes heavenward and smiles indulgently as Charlotte starts snipping away at a menu.
"Ha ha, poor child; that is all my niece has in her life - she means no harm." Soon the dessert section, the choice of pizzas and the beverage price list are arrayed in front of her in what looks like a meaningless jumble. The others get back to bargaining but I just watch the girl.
Cutting into the pieces, Charlotte slots them together and carries on staring, expressionless, but it’s not weird, obsessive Charlotte who gives me the creeps – no, I get that kind of behaviour. It's those around the table, they are the ones who trouble me. And now the cafe owner is getting twitchy.
"Hey, that's enough! Those things cost money, you know." Charlotte's fixed grin has gone. Yes, something is irking her and it's not the plump man in the stained apron: no, it is the sculpture. It is not right and there is the ghost of a frown. She glances at the garish lighting tubes on the sticky, fat-grimed ceiling and moves her construction slightly. She looks my way and it is actually at me this time, not through me. She nods slowly, vacantly at her creation: she wants me to see it from her viewpoint.
I go over and Charlotte gets up, very slowly, as if exercising a Tai Chi move. It is difficult, but I try to curb my impatience as she vacates her chair and it is when sitting down, at last, that I see what she sees and there it is, a delicate balance. The merciless fluorescent lights are throwing shadows from all different directions, but Charlotte has harnessed their utilitarian sterility to produce order, a perfect composition. She says nothing but she is obviously aware that she has made something very beautiful.
I put my hands either side of the sculpture, noting carefully where it is placed and I line two grains of salt with the front corners. Charlotte knows I'm asking permission to move it and she nods ever so slightly, still sporting her fixed grin... Except that it isn't a grin but a smile. Twisting her construction first one way and then the other, I find that all harmony is lost. I even try to put it back in the same place by lining it up with the grains of salt, but it's not the same.
Sitting down again, Charlotte looks thoughtful and nudges the sculpture. Without warning, the cafe proprietor screws up the delicate piece and, getting up, pitches the crushed ball behind the counter. He raises his eyes heavenward but Charlotte grins and she is staring at the same spot on the table as if nothing has happened.
There is a tear, though. She keeps grinning, but the minute drop falls on the on the Formica. But I have been so absorbed in Charlotte and her sculpture, that I have not been paying attention to what has been going on. This is a summit meeting, a convention of the Cabinet and it’s now clear to me that my job was simply to provide the opportunity, that I am now surplus to the huddle over the increasing rows of numbers on a piece of paper.
Sod them.
Making as little noise as possible, I get up and walk towards Charlotte. Hettie raises her blue-blonde head and looks at me momentarily but says nothing. I follow Charlotte behind the counter and up the narrow stairs to an attic room.
Charlotte's room is converted loft space. There are no walls as such, merely the roof slanting to the floor. It is lined with plywood and resembles a large wooden tent - the inside of a pauper's coffin would surely not look that different. There are random pictures from magazines: fashion plates of models in white, white minimalist interiors, a snow scene and even a simple white sheet of A4 pinned to the wall as if the mere colour of the paper is enough. Although it is very narrow, the loft space is long and only a third is taken up by a bed and an upturned box (obviously the skint artist’s default boudoir accessory) on which there is a pair of scissors, a pile of old menus and a torch. I look in vain for refinements like a wardrobe or a chest of drawers.
This is the abode of someone afforded little dignity. There is another cardboard box on the floor with a spare shirt, some more men's trousers and a couple of pairs of pants… It is as if the mere presence of female attire would seem frivolous, immoral even. Charlotte has no qualms about showing a complete stranger her state and she displays no embarrassment as I look around.
Charlotte grabs my arm as, in the gloom, I am about to tread on something. It is a construction about the size of a shoebox and next to it is a yellow cellophane sweet wrapper on a complicated diagram with faultless ruled lines, impeccably written instructions and obsessively drawn directional arrows. She consults the paper and shines a torch through the yellow plastic at a certain angle - the experience is breathtaking. She notes my reaction and smiles, nodding slightly. Charlotte does this with six other constructions and purple, rose, blue, orange and two clear illuminations are demonstrated. She has the calmness and assurance of one who knows, quite simply, that what she does is right, that it has merit.
"Yes, this place allows my creativity but do not think that I am happy here." Her voice has authority. That she has a voice at all is, at that moment, remarkable. Dropping the mask of the foolish grin, her face is animated and responds to my picking up her art. She is happy for me to do so, but she snatches the last one away and looks me in the eye.
"I brought you up here because we think the same, because you are being taken for a ride and I pity you with your naivety, because I trust you, because I trust you enough to keep my pretence to yourself. Why do I pretend to be stupid? To be left alone, to make sure that Signore Donizetti - my uncle - sees no value in my art. To him it is a hobby, the harmless activity of an imbecile. If he thought it had value it would be there for sale between the rock buns and the sausage rolls. Just you remember, it is mine - it is not his, it is not yours, it's mine." She shows me a poster for an exhibition in the neighbouring city, a display of work by 'mental health clients' of the Grange Street Day Centre. Her work is in the middle of the poster, slotted card on a bright white plinth in the grand, open space of an ultra-modern gallery. Charlotte reads my expression.
"I'm a fraud? Perhaps.” Charlotte looks me up and down, not terribly impressed by the vista interrupting her view. “And what about you?" I make as if to speak but she taps an imaginary watch on her pale, skinny wrist and points to the stairs down from the attic.
Back in the cafe, the poet proffers the human rights campaigner a knowing smile and nudges me before screwing up his face to execute a massive conspiratorial wink. Signore Donizetti eyes me suspiciously, but then he remembers why I am here and he smiles again, beckoning me to a chair next to him. Hettie sighs as if disappointed in me but her mind is really elsewhere. She tears a piece of paper into four and deals them out.
"Right... Remember, this is a unique opportunity and it will never come your way again!" Hettie shakes my arm and whispers, grimacing excitedly. "Hey, am I going to make you some money!"
"But - " It’s then that Hettie kicks me, her foot striking the table leg as it returns to squash mine... And just to make sure her message is loud and clear, she stares hard into my face.
Charlotte shuffles in slowly. She is the soldier in the chicken-wire camouflage tree, the one observing all but the one who isn’t seen. Charlotte is hiding from view behind her awkward walk, her grimace and her doll and yet she is the only one who sees everything. Charlotte stands by the counter, apart.
Hettie is suspicious of Charlotte and perceptive enough to realise that she is not quite what she seems, that there is threat in the air. I mentally demonise Hettie. I know how indefensible that is, but I kid myself that I am doing so because I want to protect sweet, lovely Charlotte. Hettie opens the others' folded pieces of paper and shakes her head.
"Sorry, you'll have to do better than that."