Behind him he heard the faint emphysemic wheeze of the day nursery’s door and turned to note Ben Perrit and Bob Goodman, evidently previously acquainted, simultaneously fleeing the externalised interior of Alma’s head. Both men were laughing, probably because the bleary poet had made a cold start from nowhere and the club-faced actor had been unable to keep from joining in. Mick raised a hand in greeting but the gesture fell uncomfortably between the retrospectively racist buffoonery of How! and Hitler’s prototype high five, so halfway through he turned it into smoothing back a lock of hair which hadn’t been there for some time. Still chortling, the most upsetting children’s party double act imaginable made its way across the alopecia turf towards him.
“Alright, Benedict. Alright, Bob. Had enough?”
Ben Perrit’s rolled eyes were those of a bolting horse.
“Aha! If that’s the kind o’ things you see when you stop drinkin’, I don’t fancy it. Ahahaha!”
His thespian companion’s countenance appeared to be attempting to throw itself to the ground from off a stubbly chin, too vexed by human disagreeability to carry on.
“Do you know what she had me do, your fucking sister? She made me go out and dig up all this stuff that she already knew about, just so she’d have a reason to put an insulting picture of me in her show. I tell you, we’re as flies to wanton boys where she’s concerned.”
Nudged out of school for truancy before he’d really got to grips with Shakespeare, Mick was unsure how boys and their flies were relevant to this and merely nodded, as a safety shot. The ambient mania of Ben Perrit, fortunately, flooded in to fill any resultant voids left in the conversation.
“Ahahaha! She’s done me in crayon, at the bottom of the sea. I dunno if she’s saying that I’m not even washed up, or if she means I’m in the drink. Ahaha! ’Ere, Mick, I was going to give ’er this but never got the chance. Will you see as she gets it?”
The frequently barred bard held out a sheet of folded typescript, which Mick solemnly accepted without having any idea what it represented. Poetry stuff, art stuff, something of that nature.
“ ’Course I will, Ben. And don’t be offended, how she drew you. You ask me, you got off light. You saw that one of me where I was just a bag of pimples?”
The disgruntled actor curled a lip that everyone had thought was curled already, shaking his anti-Semitic cartoon of a head in sympathetic disapproval.
“Why d’you think she does the things she does? Is she just trying to start a fight, or what? She can’t be doing it because she needs the money.”
Mick considered this, absently staring at the day-care centre’s window. He could see the two old ladies that he’d noticed earlier, both standing cackling and nudging one another by the picture with the tiles around it. Dragging his attention back to Alma’s motives, he said the first thing that came into his head.
“Perhaps she’s hoping for a dame-hood.”
Goodman scoffed incredulously.
“What, by doing paintings? Dame-hoods, they’re for stage professionals, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Diana Rigg. What, so now Alma thinks that she’s an actress, does she?”
“Actually, Bob, I think they’re for women in the arts? There’s Nellie Melba, Edith Sitwell, Vera Lynn; there’s Vivienne Westwood, Barry Humphries. It’s not just for actresses.”
The veteran thug-impersonator, ever the professional, performed the first real double-take that Mick had ever seen and after that stayed silent as if processing this unexpected information. There followed an awkward interlude wherein Ben Perrit asked if Edith Sitwell had invented toast, then laughed uproariously, then said that he’d meant Nellie Melba. It seemed like a natural break, and Mick shook the men by the hand while reassuring Perrit that he’d not forget the folded sheet for Alma. The pair sauntered off past Doddridge Church in the direction of Marefair, the poet laughing and the actor audibly remarking, “Dames! Just when you think you’ve got ’em figured out …” before their outlines came to bits in Chalk Lane’s poppy camouflage.
Experiencing an upsurge of baffled affection, Mick concluded that the area’s nonsense was as vital a component as its love, its drink, its violence. Distant traffic vied with a crow altercation further along Castle Street. Stifling a momentary sense of trespass he unfolded the page that Ben Perrit had entrusted to him, and began to read.
This is a kingdom built from absences
The spaces between buildings, empty air
Where different birds sing now
Its landmarks prominent if nothing’s there
This is the principality of gone
With boundaries mapped in ink that disappears
A history of gaps
And peopled by names unpronounced for years
This is my page that the blank margins ate
Till only the eraser scars remained
An empty bag of holes
A silence by quotation marks contained
Mick felt even less qualified in having an opinion with regard to poetry than he did with regard to art, but he quite liked the shape and gait of it, a limping buffalo with one leg shorter than the others and a dignity especial to its stumbles. He refolded the sparse document and slid it into a hip pocket where it wouldn’t crumple, then, extinguishing his cigarette, turned once more to the nursery’s open door. It was a shame. He might have warmed up more to culture if it didn’t act quite so compulsory. Ah, well. There couldn’t be a lot more of this maddening exhibition left to see. Sighing resignedly he went inside to face the turpentine-thinned music.
This time, re-immersion wasn’t such a shock. The atmosphere appeared to be unwinding as the afternoon wound on, the crowd unclenching to become more navigable. As before, he was resolved to pick up from the point where he’d left off, and so retraced his clockwise path around the mirage-cluttered toddler corral. He could have gone the other way, gone widdershins, although that wouldn’t have seemed right: you didn’t find your place in books by flipping back through from the end, and Mick was already convinced that Alma’s barrage of illustrative non-sequiturs was meant to represent some sort of story, perhaps one so big and complicated it required an extra mathematical dimension to narrate it in. Or possibly her magnum opus had gone critical and he was looking here at the ballistic aftermath, at the blast distribution pattern of his sister’s weaponised and fissile head. In either case there was a tale being told, if only to the bomb squad analysts. Negotiating speed-date social interactions with a dozen people he’d already greeted, like distant acquaintances repeatedly encountered in successive supermarket aisles, he made his way around the central tableau-laden trestle to a station just beyond exhibit twenty-three, about three-quarters of the way along the pretend gallery’s east wall. With the infernal gob of the Destructor drooling sparks and toxic vapour-trails at the peripheries of vision to his left he did his best to concentrate on item twenty-four, the cryptic watercolour abstract that was directly in front of him. Its crank-green marque read Clouds Unfold. Perfectly circular, there was a saucer-sized disc of Byzantine hue and ornament placed just off centre in a large quadrangle of off-white stained by parabolas of ghostly dove-grey, strokes and blotches so translucent they were hardly there at all, visually weightless to a point where they could scarcely be called masses. In the corner at the bottom left a scalloped triangle of thin dishwater had collected, while a mackerel feathering of dusty floss intruded from the upper centre. Just beneath this, mounted vertically, was hung a torn-off owl’s wing or perhaps a wavering finger-tower of interstellar gas. At intervals, against the trackless ivory expanse there clustered flecks of darker neutrals, microscopic meteor shoals lost in a bleached or colour-reversed cosmos, while around the ball of blue-gold filigree were traced sperm-pale elliptical trajectories that … oh. It was an eye. It wasn’t abstract after all. Filling the area from edge to edge it was a Luis Buñuel close-up of an eye, but not one set in flesh. This was an orbit tooled from Portland stone, with a faint down of graven eyebrow creeping into view above and an abbreviated sweep of cheekbone to the left below. It was the non-functioning optical equipment of a statue and the satellite-ellipses were unblinking lids, those of a witness to catastrophe who could not look away. The barely-visible fanned plumage to the right fell into resolution as the shadow-trap to one side of the nose’s bridge, a chiselled bluff that dropped away into the dustbowl socket. Arbitrary specks revealed themselves as texture, a stone epidermis weathered and eroded by two hundred years of rain and airborne grit. And at the picture’s focus, in the gilded iris was a medieval planetary orrery picked out by auric threads against nocturnal indigo, the flight of moon or comet plotted with sun-coloured lines, projected through fixed sapphire time. It was the watch movement of a known universe, caught in an opaque and forever awestruck gaze. Mick noticed as an afterthought that the work’s basic composition was almost identical to that of the preceding shot, the dying bird’s eye view of an incinerator’s maw that simmered with particulates. He wondered if this elevating latter piece was placed in close proximity to the distressing former as a kind of ready antidote, the way it often worked out with dock leaves and stinging nettles. Feeling, at least, that the painting had gone some way to restoring his own equilibrium he sidled right into the canton of exhibits twenty-five and twenty-six, hung one above the other in the northeast corner.