Fascination (13 page)

Berlin gave me my name and was the making of me. Before Berlin everything was conventionally straightforward: I was born, I became a child, I went to school then college (media studies), then film school – nothing about my life was particularly interesting. In film school I wanted to be an editor (I yearned for control), but then changed my mind after a year and decided to become an art director (I was good at drawing). How do you know when your life is intrinsically uninteresting? You just do. Some people live quietly, unhappily, with this knowledge, others do something about it.

At a film festival in Hamburg, where a short film I had art-directed was being screened, I met my first husband, Georg. He was an artist and, after the festival, I suddenly, spontaneously, went with him to Berlin. I was twenty-two years old and I think I knew that this would be the beginning of everything. A month later we were married.

A man has just walked by leading a Great Dane and a Dachshund. How peculiar. (I am writing this in Amsterdam.)

Georg and some of his friends staged an exhibition called ‘Stunk’ (it should be pronounced with a German accent). They rented a floor of an office building for a month on the something-strasse and it became their art gallery. (Stunk-Kunst.) Georg asked me to
contribute and that was how ‘The Transparent Wardrobe’ happened, how Beulah Berlin came into being. After being Beulah McTurk for twenty-two years I knew that Beulah Berlin was bound to be more intriguing, altogether cooler.

Colour dominated my wardrobe in those days. I wore the brightest clothes – as camouflage. Now I wear only black, white and grey. At the ‘Stunk’ show I hung my garish clothes on chrome rails and wore nothing but a black brassière and panties. People then selected a combination of items from my wardrobe, wrote the request on a piece of paper and I wore whatever they had suggested for an hour. Black stiletto and a brown hiking boot; a leather jacket and a bikini bottom; a straw sombrero and pyjama trousers. I took a polaroid photograph of the combination and pinned it on a giant pinboard. I have to say that without Beulah Berlin and her transparent wardrobe the ‘Stunk’ show would be completely forgotten. Ninety-nine per cent of the press coverage was about me and my tireless transformations. By the time the lease ran out I had over a thousand photographs: the pinboard was a multi-coloured collage of various Beulah Berlins. Georg never really forgave me, I now see in retrospect, and from then on our relationship went steadily to the dogs.

Dogs are wonderful animals and it’s a source of endless regret to me that I’ve never been able to have one as a pet – because of my allergies. Who was it who said, ‘The more I see of men the more I come to value dogs’? Matthew Arnold, Nietszche? Somebody. Certainly I place dogs higher in my estimation than my ex-husbands. Well, my first and second exes, definitely, not necessarily my soon-to-be third ex.

‘Exudations’ was the name of Georg’s next show. We were still married, just, and I agreed to participate again. If ‘Stunk’ made me famous, ‘Exudations’ made me notorious. Georg’s plan was to remain indoors in our apartment for a year and to collect and preserve everything his body exuded. Everything, yes – I don’t need
to go into every detail – for instance, he strained his shaving water through muslin to recover the bristles. These ‘exudations’, bottled and boxed, hermetically sealed and carefully labelled, would then form the basis of a touring exhibition, the idea being that they provided an idiosyncratic but perfect historical record of his body over one year. I managed to last three weeks before I fell seriously ill with some gastro-bacteriological infection. Georg refused to leave the flat – his work was still in progress, he argued, and moreover he was in perfect health – and eventually the police had to break the doors down (neighbours were complaining also). Disinfection and fumigation followed, and ‘Exudations’ was no more than a brief footnote in the history of contemporary German art. I sued Georg for my medical bills (I was uninsured and he refused any contribution, claiming I had betrayed him) and, of course, our marriage didn’t survive. Georg went to live in a shack in Ibiza. I haven’t seen him since. I now realize that Georg was an accident waiting to happen, a faulty missile they forgot to test-fire.

‘Fire one!’ Cornelius exclaims each time he has his orgasm. Cornelius is my secret boyfriend – my U-boat captain. I used to think this was funny but it’s beginning to irritate me (Otto knows nothing about Cornelius). In fact fire warmed and illuminated my early life – or, should I say, fires. Our home was in Eastbourne, on England’s south coast. My father’s business was the fitting and installation of gas and electric fires. I once asked him why he liked Eastbourne so.

‘I hate it,’ he said.

‘But the people are nice.’

‘I hate them.’

When he became ill I blamed it on this lifelong hatred festering in him. He should have moved away, especially after he and my mother divorced. It was the place’s fault, this overcrowded south-east section of our small island. The place’s fault, England’s.

Glands, my father later claimed, were the root cause of his lassitude and weight loss. He was in no pain but it was clear
something was seriously, profoundly wrong with him. He started taking all manner of self-prescribed vitamin and health food combinations to battle his ‘gland’ problem. Ginseng and cod-liver oil. Nettle tea and royal jelly. Huge amounts of vitamin E and strange seaweed stews. He munched sunflower seeds all day. When I told Cornelius about my father’s habits he laughed. When I asked him why he said they were a perfect example of the humorous tragedy of existence.

I took the urn with my father’s ashes across the Channel to France and scattered them on the battlefields of the Somme. I thought he would appreciate being abroad, away from Eastbourne. I wandered about the meadows – it was summer – taking a pinch of ash from time to time and allowing it to fall from my fingers, carried away by the breeze. The air was full of the scent of freshly cut hay.

Hay fever suggests summer. Mowers in the thickening meadows and the pollens taking to the air as the grasses fall to the advancing scythe. Not in my case: for me hay fever is a spring phenomenon. Now I know why T. S. Eliot said ‘April is the cruellest month’ – he too must have suffered from early-season pollen allergies. But now my allergies are with me all year long. I open a newspaper and my nose begins to run; a woman passes me and her perfume causes my throat to contract. I cough and cough. (Why do these women douse themselves in so much scent? Why this love of chemical odours?) At night I lie in bed and my hip-bones ache as if I have arthritis. I’m not alone, I know, we’re all becoming slowly poisoned, over-sensitized. We are all, in our own ways, ill.

Illness casts a bright light, the rest of life retreats into the shadows beyond its refulgent glare. When my father was ill, no matter where I was, or what I was doing, I seemed to think about him a dozen times an hour. Eventually, there was nothing for it, and I moved back to Eastbourne to a bed and breakfast in the same street. He never went to hospital, district nurses used to visit him throughout
the day, while I provided him with increasingly deliquescent then entirely liquid meals. Soon all he wanted was beef consommé. ‘Ah,’ he would say, as I bought him the steaming bowl, ‘soupe du jour.’

Journal-keeping has sustained me since I was twelve. Over the last few years, however, I’ve refined the process. When I wake I write the first thing down that occurs to me and before I go to bed I write down the last thing on my mind. You should try it: it is astonishingly meaningful. Those two sentences define and plot your life in the most random yet illuminating way. I look back to 14 April 1999. Morning: ‘Gianluca is a pure unreconstructed bastard.’ Night: ‘I drank champagne all day today – not a bite to eat. I’ve never felt better.’ 22 November 1996. Morning: ‘Wintry sunlight makes my room look dirty’. Night: ‘Edith Wharton is good but boring, must resist the temptation to skip.’

Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a book called
Stalky and Co
. In it there is a character called M’Turk, which I suppose is a form of McTurk (though the apostrophe is something I have never seen before). It is the only evidence I’ve been able to find of a McTurk in literature.

My own name ‘Beulah’ comes out of a book, a book that my mother was reading before I was born.
The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe
, by William Alexander Carruthers, set in the antebellum Deep South. My mother was on a Deep South craze at the time, she loved everything about the romanticized vision of the place. I suppose it took her away from Eastbourne and my father’s shop of fire. ‘The Land of Beulah,’ she used to sigh, and thus I was named. But Beulah McTurk is all wrong. It suggests to me a plump and heavy woman, yet I am tall and very, very slim. Consequently, I was happy to become Beulah Berlin, to be named after a city. It suggests something steely, tougher, as if I surround myself with a protective forcefield, a non-stick coat of shellac, say, or teflon.

London: too weird and wired, these days. New York: too busy.
San Francisco: too healthy. Paris: too self-conscious. All these cities I have known well, or as well as any one person can know a city. There are times in your life, though, when relaxation is what you crave and I had to leave London, felt the panicked urge to flee. So where else would I go but Amsterdam? It drew me as a candle flame draws a moth.

Mother disapproved of my name change. She disapproved of my life as an artist, of Georg, my first husband and, I suspect, Otto, my third. I never told her about my second. But I have a feeling she would like Cornelius, my secret boyfriend: he is handsome, selfish and raffish, like a beau in a Carruthers novel.

Otto, my third husband, is English despite his Germanic christian name. He’s called Otto Carlyle and he repairs computers. He declines to use common terms of endearment like ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and calls me instead things like ‘my pragmatic monad’, or ‘my ambrosial liquor’. I rise to the challenge. When he leaves on his trips or when we speak on the phone we sign off like this:

Otto: ‘Goodbye, my fish and chips.’

Me: ‘Goodbye, bird with the coppery, keen claws.’

Otto: ‘All love to the slender gymnast.’

Me: ‘See you soon, windmill of my mind.’

Otto is very tall and after my father’s death I wanted, for some vague reason, to be with a tall man. He is six feet four, I am five feet nine.

Nineteen sixty-nine. The year of my birth. 27 March 1969. That week, the first Concorde was undergoing its test flights. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing their lie-in for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton. I am, just, a child of the sixties, and it seems to me only apt that I should now be back in Amsterdam. Full circle, after a fashion. A near-perfect O.

Otto has just called from Dakar. Whenever he’s abroad and he calls I place a photograph of him in front of me. It was taken at a
beach café in Antibes when we were staying with my then gallerist, Clive Count (the ‘o’ is silent, I used to say later, after he dropped me). Otto is wearing surfing trunks and a baggy t-shirt, his hair is wet and sticks up in spikes – he looks like an impossibly lanky waif. I’ve come to hate a disembodied voice, I hate talking on the telephone, but it’s never so bad when you’re looking at a photo.

Photography is the art form I practise these days – I took it up seriously after I stopped touring with ‘The Transparent Wardrobe’, in fact. Then I taught film studies at a private university in San Francisco for two years before I began to photograph people’s feet.

Of all our body parts the foot is the one we treat the most harshly. No other part of our body – faces included – shows with such brutal candour our individual ageing process. We stuff our feet into unsuitable shoes, we walk for miles, we barely minister to them, occasionally cutting toenails, occasionally painting said toenails. But the calluses, corns, chilblains, veruccae and steady deformations alter them year on year in the most visible way. I have twenty-five subjects (friends and acquaintances, young and old) and every six months I take a photograph of their faces and feet, juxtaposed. Already two have asked to drop out; they find it too distressing, they say, as if the ticking clock of their own mortality is manifest there at the end of their legs, hidden in their shoes. Perhaps you saw my exhibition in Ghent, or Basle, or the one in East Gallery East in London? Some people’s feet look like vegetarian growths, others like eroded landscapes. The exhibitions were great successes. Every morning before the doors opened there would be a substantial queue.

Qwertyuiop, that’s what I’m going to call my child, male or female, whenever I have him or her. He or she can then make any name they want out of that combination of letters. Trey. Opi. Yute. Power. I don’t care. I’m not sure, however, if I want Otto to be the father. I told him it was all over between us but he has followed me to Amsterdam and, somehow, is living in this flat I have rented
on the Kaisersgracht. He says that Schiphol airport is the perfect hub for his business, and I suppose it’s true. (The computers he fixes are huge and usually abroad: airports, hospitals, government departments, he was even hired by the Pentagon for two months.) In his spare time he’s writing a novel called
Garden Airplane Trap
(after the painting by Max Ernst. I think Ernst has the best titles in modern art). Otto’s often away doing his mysterious job and, even though that’s when I see Cornelius, I find I miss him. Then, when he returns, I resent him. I want his presence and also his absence. When he’s not at work he spends most of his time writing his novel and reading.

Reading is my great solace. I read a lot, but some years ago I decided, faced by the millions of books I hadn’t read, to make my reading systematic. So every year I chose a theme and only read books that fall into the specific category. For example in 1995 I only read books whose titles were women’s names. I read
Emma
,
Madame Bovary
,
Thérèse Raquin
,
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
,
Clarissa
, and some others I can’t remember. In 1998 I moved on to animals. I read
Kangaroo
,
Birdy
,
The Sandpiper
,
The White Monkey
,
The Pope
‘
s Rhinoceros
,
Travels with a Donkey
. This year I’m on cities:
Goodbye to Berlin
,
London Fields
,
L.A
.
Confidential
,
Last Exit to Brooklyn
,
Is Paris Burning
?,
The Viceroy of Ouidah
. Next year it’ll be abstract nouns, I have
Persuasion
and
Chaos
lined up ready to go on January 1st. More and more I find I like this way of giving your random, haphazard progress through time some sort of hidden organizing factor, known only to you, only understood by you, a personal encryption. It looks normal – somebody reading a book – but underneath you alone know the significance – your life’s private palimpsest.