I didn’t mean to get into all that right now. I should be getting my head around doing my thing yet again at the Hammersmith Apollo this Friday. I’ve never been very dignified but I’m getting too old to climb out of a body drawer while the crew do Hammer Horror effects with dry ice. Mobile Mortuary is the name of the band and I’ve climbed out of that drawer in a lot of places I wouldn’t mind never seeing again. In some of them the dressing rooms smell about the same as the toilets and the sink is the safest place to pee. I have to knock back a little vodka to get my voice straight and the guys in the band use up the same amount of liniment, painkillers, and knee and elbow bandages as a football team but we still make money and they love us in Tirana. So it’s hard to stop but it really isn’t me any more, I’m not who I was when I started rocking around various clocks. What else is new.
When I’m not working my life is quieter than it used to be. Last year I became a patron of the Royal Academy of Arts and I’ve been buying art books. When I discovered Goya’s etchings I felt like starting a new band and calling it Los Caprichos. I didn’t though. Sometimes I find pictures that were already in my head or they seem to have been: various lithographs by Odilon Redon especially. There are all kinds of things it would be better not to see and he’s drawn as many of them as he could. Sometimes when I look at those lithographs I feel a bit queasy. It’s as if he knows something about me that he oughtn’t to know. Crazy thought. He’s been dead since 1918. So far I haven’t read anything about his life but I think there must have been a lot of blackness in it. His lithographs are called The Blacks, Les Noirs. Up to the evening I’m about to describe I had only that one book of Redon’s work.
Today I was at a private view of ‘The Symbolists’ at the Royal Academy and all of a sudden there was a painting by Redon, The Cyclops. I’d never seen any of his paintings, not even reproductions. Looking at this one I felt that I’d seen that cyclops before. Had I been to that place in dreams where I smell the salt wind and the sea? The naked woman lying there, maybe she’s been left as a sacrifice — is it me? She has her arms raised as if to ward off the stare of this huge creature that’s peeping over the edge of where she is, a monstrous misshapen head with one giant eye in the centre of it and a disgusting little mouth that you don’t want to think about. Or maybe she’s accepting it, opening her arms to it, I didn’t know, I couldn’t be sure about the woman and the cyclops.
There were a lot of people between me and the painting and I hadn’t yet finished looking at it when I noticed a man watching me from about ten feet away. Not a Mobile Mortuary fan, I thought. He was tall, nice-looking, definitely interested, and about fifteen to twenty years older than I used to pull. Well, the years are going by faster all the time, aren’t they. I had to smile, not at him, but because I was thinking that his taste in women was as unreliable as mine in men.
The people between me and The Cyclops were gone and I had a clear view of it again and stepped closer. It’s only about two feet high but it suddenly opened up and became huge in front of me. I was in a big silence and then I thought I could hear the sea far below me. ‘Oh,’ I said, as if I suddenly knew something that I hadn’t known before. Then the room started to spin and I just made it down to the ladies’ in time to throw up.
I was still shaky when I went back to the exhibition. I didn’t see Mr Interested but I wasn’t really in the mood for making new friends anyhow so that was OK. I didn’t look at The Cyclops again and I avoided Redon altogether. There were some good Bresdins that didn’t make me vomit and of course Moreau and Böcklin and others that I now know as the usual suspects in Symbolist art.
There were drinks after the show and a lot of champagne was being put away by people with money to spend on the arts. The catering staff, all young and all in black, kept topping me up and I kept emptying my glass, so I was feeling pretty free and easy by the time I bumped into Mr Interested or he bumped into me. He’d had enough bubbly to put a little heart into him and this time he smiled at me.
I said to him, ‘Komm tanze mit mir!’ What in the world made me say that? I remember that I had to grab his arm because I almost fell over. Champagne doesn’t do that to me, it must have been the vodka I’d had before coming to the Royal Academy, although I’d have thought my session in the ladies’ would have given me a clean slate. ‘Komm tanze mit mir!’ Did I say it twice?
He seemed surprised. ‘Are you German?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you?’
‘Half — my mother is. That’s a line from ‘Herr Oluf’. Why did you say it to me?’
‘I don’t know, I’m not responsible for everything I say.’
‘Are you the Erlking’s daughter?’
‘Maybe, but I don’t feel like dancing now. Anyhow, this is not a dancing situation, it’s a Symbolists do and symbols refer to something else. Like me.’
‘What do you refer to?’
‘Different things at different times. I have to pee.’ Off I went. I hung around the loo for a long time thinking about the line I’d quoted from ‘Herr Oluf. It’s a Loewe ballad and ‘Come dance with me’ is what the Erlking’s daughter says to Herr Oluf as he’s riding late and far to summon guests to his wedding the next day. ‘Komm tanze mit mir,’ she sings. He turns her down and on his wedding day he’s dead. I heard that ballad for the first time in Vienna at Adam Freund’s flat when he sang it to me stark naked. A weird guy, that Adam. What made me say those words to this stranger? It was as if there was a connection between us before we’d ever met. I was sort of spooked by that and I didn’t know how I felt about talking to him again.
I thought I heard a man’s footsteps approaching so I ducked into a cubicle. Mine was the only one that was occupied. There was a knocking at the door of the loo, and when he got no answer he came to my cubicle and said, ‘Are you all right?’
I said, ‘Yes, but I can’t talk any more tonight.’
‘When can I see you again?’ he said.
You’ll be sorry, I thought. ‘Write down your name and slip it under the door,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you.’
‘I don’t know your name,’ he said.
‘Not now,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Why was I doing this? I don’t know, I do a lot of stupid things. A scrap of paper came under the door: ‘Elias Newman’ and his phone number.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, and his footsteps walked away.
When I came out the lobby was pretty empty. I got my things and went outside. The air was cold and seemed heavy with snow that was almost ready to fall. I walked across the forecourt, under the arch, over the road and hailed a taxi. Piccadilly was full of lights and traffic, with a lot of blackness around the lights. When we turned into Park Lane the cars rushing through it looked as if they were emptying London; soon there’d be no more people, only driverless cars hurrying into the night. The trees in Hyde Park were pale under the lamps, with cold black shadows. Bayswater Road stared at me as if I were a foreigner. When we got to my place in Notting Hill the street was deserted, the lamps were dim. I’d left lights on in my house but they looked like lights in an empty house. I could hear a helicopter quite close, then farther away, then close again. My cat Stevo came out to meet me and we went inside together. Before I closed the door I looked back at the street and it was like a photograph of something that was gone. I shook my head and locked the door. I didn’t think I’d be phoning Elias Newman.