Little Black Book of Stories (7 page)

“Hello. What are you doing here?”

The small face went through various thought processes without finding a suitable answer.

“I’ve been trying to find you. I’ve got a kind of a part-time job I thought might interest you.”

“What kind of a job?” Suspicious, ready to run away.

“Can you spell?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I was always a good speller. Either you are or you aren’t. I am. I always get ten out of ten in those competitions for spelling things like harass and embarrass and sedentary and minuscule, I don’t boast of it. It’s like being double-jointed.”

“Are you interested in work?”

“I’m an artist.”

“I know. This is part-time work that would interest an artist.” He wanted to say, a hungry artist, and smile at her, but he stopped himself. He saw her as a hungry child. She saw herself as a woman artist.

DAISY AND MARTHA were installed in the Collection. They put on white hospital overalls and white cotton gloves, and set about the discovery of the treasures and horrors. They worked Friday afternoons. When Damian was not working, he sometimes dropped in to see how they were progressing. All three exclaimed over a bottled foetus wearing bead necklaces around neck, wrists and ankles, or a large cardboard box that proved to contain the wax heads and hands of a group of nineteenth-century murderers, all looking remarkably cheerful. Damian took Martha out to dinner—to return the first invitation, and to discuss the artist in residence. They also discussed Daisy, quite naturally, and partly in this context.

Damian asked whether Martha thought Daisy could be the required artist. Martha said Daisy did not discuss her own work, and she, Martha, had no idea what it was like. Daisy was good at the conservation work—deft, quick-witted, with a good memory. “She says funny things about terrible things,” said Martha. “But I feel she’s sad. She says
nothing
personal. I don’t know where she lives, or who she hangs out with. She seems to haunt the hospital.”

“I think she scrounges. I think she doesn’t get enough to eat. She’s got a boyfriend. She says she lives on his studio floor.”

“She intrigues you.”

“She was in the Gynae Ward herself, last year. She had a bad time. I looked her up. It was a bad time that—that the hospital didn’t exactly help—”

Martha said every woman must wonder what it felt like to be a man who saw so many women. In extreme situations.

Damian said his profession had made him unnaturally detached. I see them as lives and deaths, he told Martha, as problems and dangers, and sometimes as triumphs. Not mostly as people. I’m not good at people, said Damian Becket.

Martha smiled at him in the candle-light, and the lights on the river bobbed and swayed. She said:

“You’re very kind, for a detached man.”

“I’m kind
because
I’m detached. It’s no trouble to be kind, if you remember to think of it. And I had a religious upbringing.” He hesitated. He stared at the dark water. He said:

“It’s odd what persists of a religious upbringing. I’ve no God and I don’t want Him, I don’t miss church and all the smells and singing. But I do somehow still consider myself married to my wife, though we haven’t seen each other for four or five years now, and hope never to see each other again.”

Martha understood very clearly that she was being offered something. She frowned, and then said:

“I’ve never had a religion, and never been married—never even come close—so I—have to use my imagination. Does your wife consider herself married?”

“She’s an actress and a Catholic. That’s a daft answer. Do you know, I don’t know
what
she thinks.”

ONE DAY, looking for Martha, he arrived to find the Collection in darkness and both women away. He began to wander amongst the shelves, when his foot squelched on something. He looked down. It was a potato chip and it was warm. He looked around and saw two more, at intervals. He bent down and touched them. They were both warm. He listened. He could hear his own breathing and what seemed like the sounds of the myriad dead things and outdated artefacts, shifting and settling. But he could hear breath, when he held his own, light breath, breath trying to be silent. He began to search the Collection, listening for a giveaway rustle, and heard nothing, except, breath, breath, silence, gasped breath, breath, silence. He stalked quietly, and between a long row of upright packing cases saw another potato chip, and what might be the opening of a burrow. So he peered into the darkness and took out the torch he always carried, and waved the pinpoint of light around in the mouth of the tunnel. Something white trembled vaguely at the other end.

“Don’t be frightened,” said Damian kindly. “Come out.”

Louder breathing, more trembling. Damian went in, and illuminated a nest, made of white cellular blankets, the sort that are on hospital trolleys, old pillows. Daisy sat in the midst of them, oddly clothed in her white coat and gloves. A plastic box of chips nested in the folds of the blankets. Damian said, “If you eat those with those gloves on, you completely destroy the point of the gloves being sterile—”

Daisy sniffed.

“Are you
living
here?”

“It’s temporary. I got kicked out of the studio.”

“When?”

“Oh,
months
back. I sleep here and there. I sleep here when I can’t find a floor to sleep on. I’m not doing any harm.”

“You’d better come out. You could get arrested.”

She scrambled out, a curious bundle of disparate garments, hospital white, vaguely Eastern underneath. She said:

“It’s cold down here. It’s hard to keep warm.”

“It’s designed to produce an ambient temperature for the Collection, not for squatters.”

Daisy stood up and stared at him.

“I’ll go then,” she said, hopefully.

“Where? Where will you go?”

“I’ll find somewhere.”

“You’d better come back with me. And sleep in a bed, in a bedroom, if you can bear it.”

“You don’t have to sneer.”

“Oh,
for God’s sake,
I’m not sneering. Come on.”

DAMIAN COOKED PASTA, whilst Daisy padded round his flat, studying his prints, with a slightly defiant, assessing look. He found he couldn’t ask her what she thought of them. He didn’t want to know what she thought of the floods of colour and delicate round harbours of his Herons, the lacquered reds, the gold and orange, the strange floating umber. He put food on the table, and kept the conversation going by asking her questions. He was uneasily aware that his questioning sounded very like a professional medical examination. And that she was answering him because she owed him for the food, the shelter, for not kicking her out of the job or out of the hospital. So he learned that she’d quarrelled with the boyfriend, after and probably because of the complicated abortion. He asked if she’d minded losing the baby, and she said it wasn’t a baby, and there was no point in minding or not minding, was there? He asked her if she ate enough, and she said well, what did he
think,
and then recovered her good manners, and said grittily that a hospital was a good place for scrounging, you’d be surprised how much good food went to waste. He asked if she had a grant, or any other source of money than the work at the Collection, and she said no, she did washing-up in restaurants now and then—and officecleaning. She said, economical with the information, that when she got her degree, if she got it, she might think of teaching, but of course that took time up that you might want to spend—need to spend—on your art.

He asked her what sort of work she made, and she said she couldn’t say, really, not so he could imagine what it was like. Then she was silent altogether. So he turned on the television—his ex-wife flickered across the scene, playing Beckett and he changed channels quickly—they watched a football match, Liver-pool against Arsenal, and drank a bottle of red wine between them.

IN THE SMALL HOURS he heard his bedroom door open, and the pad of footsteps. He slept austerely in a narrow single bed. She came across the room in the dark, like a ghost. She was wearing white cotton panties—he had felt quite unable to offer her any garment to sleep in. She stood and looked down on him, and he looked more or less at the panties, through half-opened eyes. Then she pulled up the corner of the duvet and slid into the bed silently, her cold body pressed against his warm one. Much went through Damian Becket’s half-drowsed mind. How he must not hurt her. Not offend her. She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple. The piercing repelled him. He thought irrelevantly of the pierced hands of the run-of-the-mill man on the cross. She began, not inexpertly, to caress him. He was overcome by a wash of hot emotion—if he had had to name it, he would have called it pity. He took her in his arms, held her to him, made love to her. He felt her tighten and stiffen—thank God there were no more intimate studs or rings—and then she gave a little crow and settled with her head on his chest. He stroked the colourless fluff of her hair in the dark. He said:

“You’re more a dandelion than a daisy.”

“An old one then, a dead clock.”

That threw him, for he thought of the dispersal of dandelion seeds and then of how inapposite this was to him and her with her ruined tubes. He said:

“You know, I have to say, all these studs and things, in soft body tissue—there’s a considerable possibility they’re carcinogenic.”

“You can’t worry about everything,” said Daisy Whimple. “What a thing to say, at this particular moment.”

“It’s what I was thinking.”

“Well, you could keep it to yourself for a better moment.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s OK.”

He lay on his back, and she lay curled on top of him, and he waited for her to go away, which after a time, perhaps sensing the waiting, she did.

She stayed a week. She came to his bed every night. Every night he stroked the pierced and damaged body, every night he made love to her. At the end of the week she said she’d found a place to go, a friend had a spare sofa. She kissed him for the first time in the daylight, with her clothes on. He felt the cold metal of the ring in her lip. She said, “I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of me. You like your own company, I can see that. But it’s been good for you, what we did, for a little bit?”

“Very good.”

“I never know if you mean what you say.”

ONE RESULT of Daisy’s brief habitation was that Damian allowed himself to know that he desired Martha. He wondered briefly if Daisy might have confided in Martha, and concluded that on balance, she would not. He went down to the Collection himself alone, and removed the blankets, the pillows, the food trays. He thought, in a week or so, when his flat was his own again, his sheets were laundered, his solitude with his images re-established, he would invite Martha there. She was a complicated person who needed slow, slow movements, he thought, not really sure why he thought these things. He too needed to move slowly, in a deliberate, considered way, he thought, putting behind him the vision of the white panties, the memory of the metal taste of the nipple-rings.

MARTHA’S BEHAVIOUR suggested she knew nothing either of Daisy’s brief habitation of the Collection, or of the events in Damian’s flat. Damian did not mention Daisy to Martha in any context. Martha said she thought she had found an artist in residence, a young woman called Sue Basuto.

“I think you’ll like her work because it’s elegant and colourful and kind of abstract. And I think she’d benefit from a hospital residence because she works with dripping water and pulses of light, in transparent boxes and tubes. She’s part of a group show at the St. Catherine’s Gallery in Wapping. Would you have time to come and look at it? We could perhaps go on and have supper or a drink if you’d like that.”

Damian said he’d like that very much.

They had reached a point where they embraced decorously, cheek to cheek, on meeting and parting.

ST. CATHERINE’S GALLERY turned out to be a cavernous decommissioned red-brick Victorian church, perhaps ten years older than St. Pantaleon’s Victorian buildings. Damian and Martha went to the opening together: most of the assembled company were art students, in tight black clothes, with pink or shocking blue hair. Their voices were small and shrill under the vaulting. They were given transparent plastic beakers of red Australian wine from a winebox, and potato crisps on plates.

Sue Basuto’s work was just inside the door. It had a humming motor, and resembled an Escher woodcut of impossible flow patterns, tipping green floods into crimson funnels over shining slides which balanced finely and reversed the flows. Damian liked it but wondered if it was more than a toy. The people in the church were all gathered to stare at an installation on what had been the altar-steps, under the rood screen. It was hard to see, because of the crowding, and from a distance seemed like a termite heap, or carefully crafted rubbish tip.

Damian and Martha stayed where they were for some time, sipping the wine, which wasn’t bad, asking each other whether Sue Basuto’s work did or didn’t have any reference to the circulation of blood and lymph in the human body. They decided to go and have supper and talk about it. They drifted over to the centre of excitement, before leaving.

IT WAS A REPRESENTATION of the goddess Kali, who was constructed like an Arcimboldo portrait out of many elements. She was enthroned in what resembled—what was—a seventeenth-century birthing chair, below which, under the hole into which the baby would drop, was a transparent plastic box full of a jumble of plaster Infants and plaster Mothers from crèches old and new. Kali’s black body was a painted
écorché
sculpture. Her head was a waxwork
Vanitas,
half smiling lady, half grinning skull, lifesize, crowned with matted ropes of seemingly human hair. Her four arms were medical prostheses, wooden or gleaming mechanical artefacts, ending in sharp steel and blunt wooden fingers, and one hook, from which hung what looked like a real shrunken head, held by the hair. Her earrings were preserved foetuses, decked with beads, enclosed in mahogany-framed glass jars like hour-glasses. She brandished a surgical saw in another hand, and the final two arms were crocheting something in an immense tangle of crimson plastic cords. Her crochet hooks were the tools of the nineteenth-century obstetricians, midwives and abortionists; the dreadful formless knitting glittered like fresh blood. She wore, as she traditionally does, a necklace of tiny skulls— apes’, rats’, humans’—and a girdle of dead men’s hands, in this case wax clasping plaster of Paris, clasping skeletal fingers clasping what looked like the real thing. Her legs were constructed of interlaced forceps and probes. Her feet were prosthetic—one booted, one a miracle of mechanical joints. She was signed, at her feet, with a flower-shape, a daisy, composed of a circle of the exquisite tiny ivory women round what, on inspection, could be seen to be a yellow contraceptive sponge, about as old as the church.