‘I really do have to get going,’ Allan said, getting to his feet. ‘Mike… Calloway’s part of your past, remember, and probably best kept there.’ He glanced in the direction of the bar.
‘I can look after myself, Allan.’
‘I’ve a parting gift for you, too,’ Gissing interrupted. Another page from a different catalogue was handed over. Allan Cruikshank’s mouth fell open.
‘Better than any of the Coultons in your own bank’s portfolio,’ Gissing said, reading Allan’s mind. ‘I know you’re a massive fan – and there are half a dozen others to choose from, if these don’t suit.’
Seeming still in a daze, Allan found himself taking his seat again.
‘Now,’ Gissing continued, satisfied with this reaction, ‘the painter I was going to tell you about… a young fellow of my acquaintance. He goes by the name of Westwater…’
7
Hugh Westwater – ‘Westie’ to those who knew him well enough – was sitting comfortably amid the chaos of his top-floor tenement flat, smoking yet another joint. The bay-windowed living room had become his studio, grubby bedsheets draped over the old sofa and chair that Westie had claimed from a skip. Canvases rested against the skirting boards, newspaper cuttings and magazine photos were taped to the walls. Greasy pizza cartons and beer cans littered the floor, some of the cans torn in half to provide makeshift ashtrays. Wonder was, Westie thought, ‘they’ still let you smoke in the comfort of your own home. These days you couldn’t smoke in pubs, clubs or restaurants, or at your place of work or even in some bus shelters. When the Rolling Stones had played a stadium gig in Glasgow and Keith had lit one up onstage, ‘they’ had considered prosecution.
Westie always thought of the authorities as ‘they’.
One of his first portfolio pieces had been a manifesto, printed in black against a glossy blood-red backing.
They Are Out To Get You
They Know What You Do
They See You As Trouble…
At the very bottom of the canvas, the printing had switched to white-on-red for Westie’s coda: But I Am Better At Art Than Them.
His tutor had only just agreed, scoring him a ‘narrow pass’. The tutor was a big fan of Warhol, so Westie’s next piece had been calculation itself: a stylised Irn-Bru bottle against a custard-yellow background. The mark had been more favourable, sealing (though he couldn’t know it then, of course) Westie’s fate.
He was in his final year now and had almost completed the portfolio for his degree show. It had struck him only recently that there was something odd about the whole notion of a degree show: if you studied politics or philosophy, you didn’t attach your essays to the walls for strangers to read. If you were going to be a vet, you didn’t have the general public watching as you put some poor animal to the knife or stuck your arm up its backside. But every art and design college in the land expected its students to parade their shortcomings to the world. Was it attempted humiliation? Preparation for the harsh realities of life as an artist in twenty-first century philistine Britain? The space for Westie’s showcase had already been allocated – deep in the bowels of the college building on Lauriston Place, next to a sculptor who worked with straw and a ‘video installationist’ whose main claim to fame was a looped stop-motion animation of a slowly lactating breast.
‘I know my place,’ was all Westie had said.
Influenced (retrospectively) by Banksy, and spurred on by his experience with the Warholesque Irn-Bru bottle, Westie’s stock in trade was pastiche. He would copy in minute detail a Constable landscape, say, but then add just the tiniest idiosyncrasy – a crushed beer can or a used condom (almost his signature, according to the other students) or a scrap of wind-tossed rubbish such as a Tesco bag or crisp packet. A Stubbs portrait of a proud stallion might feature a jet fighter in the distant sky. In Westie’s version of Raeburn’s The Reverend Walker Skating, the only perceptible difference was that the man of the cloth now found himself sporting a black eye and stitches to a cut on his left cheek. One of his tutors had gone on at length about ‘anachronism in art’, seeming to think it a good thing, but others had accused him of simple copying – ‘which is by no means the same as art, merely capable draughtsmanship’.
All Westie knew was that he had a marketable-sounding nickname and only a few more weeks to go before the end of term. Which meant he should either be applying for postgraduate places or else looking for gainful employment. But he’d been up half the night working on a graffiti project: stencils of the muffled face of the artist Banksy with the words ‘Money In The Banksy’ and some dollar bills painted above and below. The stencils were anonymous. He was hoping the local media would pick up on the story and make ‘the Scottish Banksy’ a fixture in the public imagination. It hadn’t happened yet. His girlfriend Alice wanted him to become a ‘graphic artist’, meaning comic books. She worked front-of-house at an artsy cinema on Lothian Road and reckoned the way for Westie to become a top Hollywood director was for him to start drawing cartoons. He would then move into promo videos for indie rock bands and from there to the movies. The only problem with this – as he’d pointed out to her several times – was that he had no interest whatsoever in film directing… she was the one who wanted it.
‘But you’re the one with the talent,’ she’d responded, stamping a foot. That gesture said quite a lot about Alice – an only child raised by doting middle-class parents who had praised her in everything she’d ever attempted. Piano lessons were going to turn her into the Vanessa Mae of the keyboard; her songwriting would see her sharing a stage with Joni Mitchell or at the very least K.T. Tunstall. She’d thought herself a prodigy as a painter, until her teacher at the fee-paying high school put her right. Having dropped out of university (Film and Media Studies with Creative Writing), she was pinning her scant hopes on Westie. The flat was hers – no way he could have afforded the rent. It was owned by her parents, who dropped by sometimes and never failed to be unimpressed by their daughter’s choice of live-in boyfriend. He’d overheard them one time asking her a heartfelt question – ‘Are you quite sure, dear?’ – knowing they were talking about him, their golden child’s bit of rough. He’d wanted to barge in, trumpet his working-class credentials – the Fife coalfields; Kirkcaldy High. Nothing given to him on a plate. But he’d known how it would sound to their ears…
Cretins.
Another time, he’d told Alice about a screen academy that was setting up in the city – she could do it part-time, learning all about film-making. Her excitement had lasted until a trawl of the internet had revealed the potential financial outlay.
‘Mummy and Daddy will be happy to pay,’ Westie had suggested, and she’d blown up at him, accusing him of accusing her of being a leech, of bleeding her poor parents dry. Another stamp of the foot and she’d bounded out of the room, slamming the door after her and causing one of his drying canvases to fall from its easel on to the floor. He’d managed to calm her down eventually with tea and a cuddle in the flat’s cramped kitchen.
‘I only need to work for another ten years and I’ll have savings enough,’ she had sniffled.
‘Maybe I can bump up my prices at the degree show,’ Westie had offered. But they both knew this wasn’t exactly feasible – he was probably going to sell next to nothing. No matter how good his draughtsmanship, in terms of actual artistry he was still that same ‘narrow pass’, at least in the eyes of the people whose marks counted most. The head of department – old Prof Gissing – had never been a fan. Westie had looked up Gissing himself once and had found that the grumpy old sod had pretty well stopped painting in the 1970s, meaning all he’d done these past thirty years was write articles and give boring lectures. Yet people like him, they were the ones who’d give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to Westie’s whole future as an artist. Westie, the son of a postman and a shop assistant, sometimes felt that there was a conspiracy afoot to stop the lower orders being recognised as any sort of creative force.