“No. Flattery is one of the few things you can’t accuse her of. Here, that’s a Boroughs accent you’ve got, ain’t it? Did you used to live round here? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere.”
She allowed her jaw to sag until her lips were pursed reproachfully, regarding him from under lids half lowered as if he were intellectually unworthy of whole eyeballs. It was the expression which his mum had used so often when addressing him or Alma that he had to forcibly remind himself she didn’t always look like that. Bert’s mother tutted, more in pity than contempt.
“Well, ’course I’m frum the Burrers. Did yer think that I wuz frum the moon, yer gret soft ayputh? We lived up the top o’ Spring Lane, so I never got the slipper bein’ late fer school.”
When was the last time he’d been called a great soft ha’p’orth? A halfpenny-worth. He basked in the obscure abuse. It harkened back to a more civilised age where the harshest epithet was a comparison with recalled currency. Launched on a reminiscent torrent by the mention of her childhood home she carried on regardless.
“Ooh, it were a lovely place, the Burrers. That one o’ Spring Lane your Alma done, all ayt o’ glass, I think that one’s me fayvrit. An’ yuv got no cause for complaint, ’ow she’s done you. Not after the way she’s done me. No, a lovely place. Ayr dad lived down there, in Monk’s Pond Street, after we’d moved up tuh Kingsley. I remember when ayr William wuz only just walkin’, ’ow I’d take ’im dayn there, so as ’e could see where I’d bin brung up.”
Mick found himself stumbling in his attempt to follow her account. He thought she’d said there was a likeness of her somewhere in the exhibition, and had been upon the point of asking her about it when she’d thrown him with her mention of an unfamiliar name. His forehead corrugated.
“William …?”
Appling her cheeks she shook her head, correcting herself.
“Do you know, I never can remember, you lot, yer dunt call ’im that. Bert, what you call him. ’E once ’ad a teacher call ’im that at school, an’ ’e got stuck with it. Round ayrs, ’e’s Bill or William.”
Oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah, he remembered Alma saying something now, something to that effect: a football match at school; a teacher with a momentary lapse of memory who’d shouted the first working-class name he could think of and doomed William to a life of Bert. And there was something else about that story, wasn’t there? Some complementary detail to the anecdote that for a moment now found scrabbling purchase on the waste pipe of Mick’s memory. Something about … Bert, Bill, something about … no. No, it was gone, dislodged to fall away into the cancelled black of the forgotten, irretrievable. He was about to ask Bert’s mum, his newfound poster-girl for fortitude in deprivation, if she could recall his lost component of the tale, but at that moment their delightful conversation was truncated by the unselfconscious bellow of her son, acoustically equivalent to a wild pig loose at a wedding.
“Come on, Phyllis, ’e’s a married man, and yer not on Boot’s Corner now. Let’s get you ’ome, before yer show us up.” Bert’s luncheon-meat complexioned features split into a gap-toothed laugh, lecherous and suggestive even if discussing double glazing, a Sid James cascade of gurgling innuendo without object. His mother’s head wheeled like an antique Spitfire, nippy and surprisingly manoeuvrable, eyes looking bullets up and down her offspring’s fuselage.
“Me show you up? Yuh’ve bin embarrassin’ me ever since I ’ad yer. Since yer first drew breath yuh’ve saynded like a busted lav, and yer that ugly that they ’ad a job to tell yer frum the afterbirth. We’d got it ’ome and christened it before we realised. Show us up? I’ll gi’ you show us up, yer dibby bugger …”
Turning back to Mick she cut off fire from her machine-gums, offering him a radiant and endearing National Health smile.
“I’m gotter goo, it saynds like. It’s bin lovely meetin’ yer. I ’ope tuh see yer agen sometime.”
And with that she banked away into a sparking, chattering dive, closing the distance between her and her doomed but still chortling quarry, rubicund with giggles, a Red Baron.
“You wait till I get my ’ands on you, yer useless load o’ rubbish. Don’t think you’re too big for me to dash yer brains in with a brick while yer asleep!”
A whirling dust-storm of ferocious energy and neutral tones she rushed out through the open nursery door past the respectful cower of Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp, ball lightning following a draft, driving her errant son before her out into the disappearing neighbourhood. Mick shook his head in wondering admiration at this sighting of a genus thought extinct, this social-housing coelacanth. Watching her go, he found himself awash in poignancy from out of nowhere, ludicrously inappropriate for someone that he’d only managed a three-minute conversation with. It had felt more like meeting with a crush from junior school, that meaningless vestigial flutter of the heart, the sweet and pointless sadness for alternate universes that would never happen.
Mystified not for the first time by his own internal workings, he returned his commandeered attentions to the task of getting through the five remaining pictures in his sister’s gauntlet of enigmas. Picking up where he had so engagingly left off, he occupied the space vacated by Bert Regan’s mum — Phyllis, he thought that was what Bert had called her — just in front of item thirty-one. Cornered, apparently, according to its dangling viridian afterthought. A gouache work, it occupied a canvas roughly two foot square and seemed in many ways to be a partner to exhibit four, Rough Sleepers, even down to their almost symmetrical positions close to either end of the long sequence. Both works were contemporary pub scenes and achieved their major visual effect by juxtaposing grimy monochrome with colour, though whereas the earlier piece contained one area of black and white amidst a field of riotous hue, the painting he was gazing at effected the exact reverse. An overhead view looking down upon a crowded front bar that Mick didn’t recognise, down in the bottom left a solitary figure had been rendered in bright naturalistic shades, a tubby little man with curly white hair seated at a corner table, while the beery mob that filled the scene around him, wall to wall and edge to edge, were executed in a palette of charred fag-end and urinal porcelain, fingernail greys. The colourless inebriate jostle, cheery even in their drabness, nonetheless seemed drained of life and of contemporaneity as though they were the happy dead, the Woodbine wraiths of a persisting past. The figure at the bottom corner in his modern tints and fabrics seemed excluded by the heaving press of ghosts, if they weren’t all entirely in his mind; if this were not a picture of a haunted man, sat in an empty bar, surrounded by a magic lantern pageant of the disappeared. If that were so, then the whole throng became a thick, guilty miasma somehow emanating from the single flesh-toned individual at his table, cornered by a horde of zombie social issues, by the past, by memory.
He inched a little further to his right, progressing westward in excruciating increments, a wagon-train with palomino snails in harness or a one man continental drift. This brought him up against the nursery’s west wall at its most southerly extreme. Just half of one side of the building to complete and then he could with honour make good his escape into a comfortingly artless world. Exhibit thirty-two, apparently entitled The Rood in the Wall, was similar in its proportions to the previous piece and proved to be the image which had prompted the irate departure of Bob Goodman earlier, or at least that was Mick’s assumption. Though the great majority of painters mentioned by his sister were obscure to him, he had at least across the years achieved familiarity at second hand with the peculiar work of William Blake, and recognised the piece before him as a kind of composite, a modified amalgam of the Lambeth visionary’s cryptic images. Predominating blackness, conjuring a subterranean and funereal ambience, was punctuated in the watercolour’s upper reaches by illuminated alcoves in which labelled likenesses presided like memorial statuary in a mausoleum. Leaning closer, he perused the names on tattered paper scrolls like Gilray dialogue-balloons: James Hervey, Philip Doddridge, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, William Blake and a few others, sombre and reflective, candlelit with colour in the cemetery dark. Their pious, downcast glances seemed to be directed, more in pity than contempt, towards the crouching, naked giant at the bottom of the painting, crawling wretched on his hands and knees along a stunted, lightless tunnel, bowed head weighted by a heavy golden crown. Mick recognised the figure, although only through the agency of an Atomic Rooster album cover he remembered, as Blake’s penitent Nebuchadnezzar. The damnation-shadowed features of the fallen Babylonian regent were herein replaced, however, by the asymmetric physiognomy of his sister’s much put-on actor friend, whom Alma seemed to employ as a stress-relieving executive squeeze-ball, a receptacle for her interminable gusher of abuse if Mick himself were poorly or on holiday. The only other element of the arrangement, something he did not specifically recall from Blake, was the rough-chiselled cross set into crumbling stonework at the painting’s centre, just above the grovelling monster but beneath the sympathetic audience of Gothic saints above. It didn’t seem to have that much to do with his own brief encounter with infant mortality, or even with the Boroughs, but then you could say that about the majority of the supposed works of art included in the heavily confined yet sprawling exhibition.