Feeling like an athlete superstitious about looking at the finishing line until they were right on top of it, he essayed an inexpert version of the military right-turn he’d learned at Boy’s Brigade and saw to his immense relief that there were only three more decorative hurdles between him and the propped-open doorway, between him and freedom. Better still, the first of these, which he was currently confronted by, was small and simple. On an insubstantial sheet of what looked very much like typing paper, tin-tacked to the nursery wall as if it were the work of a precocious child on parents’ day, there was a fluid and expressive pencil drawing with a wandering line as natural as April weeds. Not even bothering on this occasion to attach a separate label, Alma had just scrawled The Jolly Smokers at the top left corner of the piece itself, in chlorophyll. The drawing was a spindly and fragile detail of St. Peter’s Church, the front porch of the disused building with its honeyed stone and the black wooden ribcage of its roof, a strand of wheatgrass straggling from between the slabs outside its open entrance. In the shadowed recess a recumbent figure slumbered, trainer-soles towards the viewer and all other indicators of the person’s body-type, age, gender or ethnicity concealed beneath the slippery tucks and undulations of the unzipped sleeping-bag spread over them. Silvery graphite traceries uncoiled and trickled lovingly across the quilted contours, the implied form motionless beneath, digressing to investigate the intricate topography of each plump fold. The more Mick studied the deceptively spare composition, the more he found himself questioning his first assumption that this was a study of a homeless person, merely sleeping. With the bag pulled up and covering the face there was a mortuary aspect to the imagery which could not be ignored. In its veiled stillness, that of dream or of demise, the slumping shape inhabited a hesitating and ambiguous borderland between those states, much like the one suggested by that physicist who’d either gassed his cat or hadn’t. Mick could come to no conclusion other than an observation that, in disagreement with its title, the depicted scene was far from jolly and appeared to be non-smoking.
Moving northwards once more he progressed to the next picture, which he realised with a leaping heart was the penultimate exhibit. A square work in oils as spacious and resplendent as its predecessor had been meagre and without assumption, the attendant taped-on tag revealed its title as Go See Now This Cursed Woman. What at first appeared to be a maddeningly regular and even geometric abstract, the imagining of Milton Keynes by a despairing Mondrian, resolved on close inspection to an intricately-realised reproduction of a game-board, a generic layout on the Snakes-and-Ladders model of a lavishly embellished grid, each box emblazoned with a decorated number or iconographic miniature. He realised with a minor start that the game’s focus seemed to be the mink misfortunes of Diana Spencer, the familiar tabloid Stations of the Cross — sun through a thin skirt showing off her legs; posed at the gate with Charles; a coy glance up at Martin Bashir or her final public smile before the rear doors of the Paris Ritz — reduced to outsized postage stamps. The game-board layout, with its numbered spaces, loaned these incidental moments the uneasy sense of a relentless, hurtling linear progression to a predetermined outcome: an arrival at that final square, sooner or later, irrespective of the falling die, an outcome obvious from the commence of play or, indeed, from the opening of the cellophane-sealed box on Christmas morning. What had startled Mick was the unlikely coupling of board games and Diana Spencer, just as in his sleepless ruminations of the night before. It was quite clearly no more than coincidence and, now he thought about it, not particularly memorable at that. The idea of the blonde from Althorp’s life as a bizarre and fatalistic form of Cluedo was not that much of a reach, all things considered. Still, it had him going for a moment there.
Stealthily, he began to move toward the final lurid obstacle that stood between him and the gaping nursery door. Internally, he played a game where he and all the other gallery-goers were a surly crowd of culture-convicts, shuffling around the exercise yard, wondering if wives and sweethearts would still be there waiting for them on the outside after all this time. Unnoticed, hopefully, by the imaginary machine-gun towers that he’d by then positioned at the corners of the room, he inched towards the unlocked prison gate and genuinely gasped to feel the warder’s heavy hand fall on his shoulder from behind.
“Here, Warry? Have you got the lighter?”
Mick turned to face the dipped glare of his big sister’s headlight gaze, that of a sulky and uninterested basilisk who couldn’t be arsed turning people into anything except stone cladding. Alma seemed preoccupied and, worryingly, too distracted to insult him. Even in her mention of “the” lighter she appeared to have reclassified it as their mutual property and not an object that belonged to her alone, which in itself seemed to suggest a softening of policy. Was Alma ill? He fished inside a pocket of his jeans for the requested artefact. Handing it over, he felt duty-bound to ask.
“Warry? Is everything okay? You don’t seem quite your usual self. You’re being reasonable.”
Taking the lighter from him without any kind of thank you, which at least was more her style, his sister shook her hanging-garden head in the direction of the table-mounted model of the Boroughs, like one of the district’s rodents in that, famously, you never got more than six feet away from it.
“It’s this. It’s still not right. It isn’t saying what I want it to. It’s saying ‘Ooh, look at the Boroughs. Wasn’t it a lovely place, with all that history and character?’ All of the local photo-books I based it on are saying that already, aren’t they? This needs something else. Cheers for the lighter, anyway. I’ll bring it back soon as I’m done with it.”