‘You’re crazy, Johnny.’
‘No, you don’t have to take everything off. Lie down on the bed over there, you can keep your underwear on.’
‘No, Johnny.’ Almost all of them call him Johnny, and he likes that; he loves John Lennon, he calls him Johnny too.
‘I’ll give you as many peaches and bananas as you like for a month.’
‘But don’t look at me so funny, Johnny.’
And Johannes Vettermann draws. Sometimes he stands for hours by the brightly coloured fruit and waits until the colours seep down into his head. He has oil paints in his bedroom too, but usually he just draws, pencil or charcoal, and leaves the colours in his head for now.
‘What lovely skin you’ve got!’ Johannes Vettermann, sixteen years of age, is standing between the women in their brightly coloured dresses, patting his cheeks and stroking his hair. ‘Peaches,’ he says, but they’re not interested in his fruit. They live in strange flats, and he stands at the big white walls and paints. Now the colours come from his head, he metes them out, sometimes forcing them back in again, and when he’s not painting the walls he dances with the women and their men, who wear dresses just as brightly coloured and have hair just as long, dancing with them by the big walls — ‘Johnny, Johnny, superstar!’ — he coughs and smokes, takes what they give him, and he sees the colours and the flies and sees something else entirely, which scares him terribly, there’s always something and somebody there, and he’s scared even though he’s dancing and laughing.
Johannes Vettermann notices he can no longer scream as there’s no air left in his lungs, and he takes a hectic breath, inhales water and spits and coughs and tries not to drown. How could it have happened, how could the big glass front of the large aquarium just break? There are very high notes that can shatter glass; maybe the strange, thin woman standing there in front of the glass sang very high, but he didn’t hear anything. Weren’t there lots of tiny cracks in the glass beforehand? Did the sharks perhaps smash the glass themselves? What intelligent animals, attacking the places with the cracks over and over … Johannes Vettermann beats around himself with his arms, has to calm himself down, he knows that, has to try to float perfectly calmly on the water so he doesn’t attract the sharks. Which is worse, he thinks — drowning or being torn limb from limb by the sharks? ‘Goodbye, Johnny, goodbye, Johnny, it was nice while it lasted … but sadly, sadly …’
Johannes Vettermann sees the sharks. There are red streaks on the water and now he feels the blood still flowing out of his nose. He has to stop the blood flow so he doesn’t attract the sharks. He sees them, in a tight huddle a short distance away. They seem to be occupied with someone else. There’s a big head floating on the water, shimmering white and pale blue, and strangely the water is almost transparent so Johannes Vettermann can make out the green surface beneath him. It’s not a human head, he thinks. The empty eye sockets are huge, the mouth is an O, and the ears — he doesn’t know anyone with ears that big. The head is bodiless, and now it submerges again and he watches it go. He’s always imagined that people have to disappear into the sea, one day. I have to paint the sharks and the sea, he thinks, and then they’re up close to him, he can feel their cold skin, he splutters and beats both arms against the carpet.
‘Father,’ he says, ‘why haven’t we got a house by the sea?’
‘What would we want with the sea, son? What do you want with the sea?’
He knows his father is scared for him; all he does now is paint, paint and draw, and although he still eats the fruit and he still likes the taste his father knows something’s changed. ‘If you want,’ says his father, ‘if you absolutely have to go to the sea …’
But his father doesn’t take him to the sea, doesn’t buy a house there either although that would have been an easy matter for him; business is going well. His father takes him to the art school, introduces him, his father has connections; business is going well. And Johannes Vettermann, seventeen years of age, stands facing the professors flicking through the portfolio of his drawings and pictures, and he sees gigantic insects above their heads. His father barricades him into a little room at the warehouse for a week, only fruit and steaks from the meat wholesaler next door. The foremen kept an eye out to make sure he didn’t run away, didn’t run to his painted walls where the women and men want to dance with him. So he danced on his own, in bed at night, there’s always something and somebody there, and he heard them, the workers and the flies. And he imagined what it must be like to live in the sea.
‘You have extraordinary talent, Mr Vettermann.’
‘But you must bear in mind that it won’t be easy.’
‘And you’d be the youngest student at the academy.’
‘But we have to be certain you’re prepared to adapt a little here, after that school business …’
‘I am prepared to,’ says Johannes Vettermann; their heads are peaches and apples and over-ripe pears. On one of the pictures lying on the table in front of the professors is a man holding a huge, brown mosquito in one hand and plunging the insect’s long sting into his arm, laughing, but his eyes are so vacant and white that the laugh is no longer a laugh.
‘I want to join the family business, father, I want to earn money.’
‘What about your pictures?’
‘There are no more pictures in art now, father.’
And Johannes Vettermann, twenty-two years of age, first-class student at the academy, stands up on the bridge, below him the crates and the fruit and the workers, it’s night, and the nights pass, and Capt’n Johnny sees all the colours, sees the fruit flowing, hears the workers and the trucks humming, it all disappears in his head and he doesn’t let it out any more — ‘There are no more pictures in art now, father.’
Some nights he thinks of picking up the brightly coloured fruit and putting it together, Mrs Apple and Mr Pear enjoying their evening off on a little wooden bench, and Mrs Pear wishing for nothing more than a particularly virile banana floating half-peeled above her, held by invisible threads. ‘Johnny Vettermann, the wholesale fruit artist, supplies the best and freshest and sweetest installations!’
But who cares about what’s been done before? Some nights on the bridge, the fruit flowing and the work humming below him, he still dreams of his apples and pears, bananas and peaches in New York and Paris, but then he thinks that it’s action that counts.
And Johannes Vettermann lies naked on the load bed of a truck, parked outside a gallery whose owner he knows from art school, in the middle of one of the town’s widest streets. He presses his face against the wood and can still smell the fruit and hears the slap of the whip, but he hardly feels the lashes, and later he looks in the mirror in surprise at his back, now scored with red welts. If he turns his head slightly he can make out the woman with the enraged face standing above him spread-legged, black leather and white fishnet stockings and her lovely skin. He hears cars beeping, voices, now and then calls; action, he thinks and presses his face back against the wood. And later, when the police turn up, he’s happy.