Looking more closely at the painting I could begin to make out the shape of Justine’s face, surfacing from the incoherence of the contradictory colours and the vehement brushwork. But her face had been deformed. Cut into blocks. And the delicacy of her drawn-back face had been smashed, turned into flabby slabs of thick oil paint. Her lucid eyes had been slit into grimaces of malicious intent. The soft wide mouth prised open into a twisted scream. All traces of her aloof serenity had been eradicated, instead this monstrous defamation of feminine beauty was all there intrusive, demanding and repulsive.
‘There are different versions of Justine,’ Jack said. ‘That is mine. Who’s to say which one is right? Justine’s sister, Juliette, looks just like her. But whereas Justine demands nothing from me, Juliette pulled, like a child, at my soul. But who’s to say that Juliette isn’t just another version of Justine? The version that I hurt.’
‘But what about Justine? She must know which version is right?’
‘I care what Justine thinks as little as you do.’
FIFTY
Jack brought out a hammer from one of his jacket pockets.
‘What’s this for?’ I asked.
‘For hammering a nail into the wall. I thought I’d help you hang the painting.’ He placed the hammer on the window sill. He then sat down cross-legged on the carpet beneath the painting and I sat down beside him. He poured me a glass of malt whisky from the bottle that he had brought. His nails had puce red paint beneath them, the exact same shade of red that Juliette had had on her cheek, the day I first met her at the National Gallery. But she had told me she had not seen Jack again since he had left her for Justine. So how could it be the same red? It had to be a different red.
‘You remind me of myself,’ Jack said, ‘when I first met Justine – besotted. She was like a blank canvas on which I could paint my desires. I ended up with that.’ He pointed to his painting of her.
I looked at the painting again. The picture was confirmation that he had to die. I had to kill him to save her image from his superficial vision. This man had turned her beauty into a misshapen monster. He, in that representation of her, had systematically mutilated, murdered her beauty. He was indifferent to the single truth of Justine. That was why his hands were bloody with red paint. He did not need, as I did, the image of her beauty to breathe.
A smile had crept over Jack’s mischievous face – he had the charm of the devil. The stench of the painting was starting to emanate from its creator. I watched aghast, as his hands began to grow long and thin, the skin of his body translucent. His features started to concave before my unwilling eyes. The sides of his eyes ran down his face, dipping into the upward sardonic curve of his mouth which was rising impossibly high up the side of his face. The shadows of his features hardened into black lines as the skin grew paler. He now looked like a two-dimensional sketch of a pattern of black ink on a white page, unreadable but with its own internal logic.
At that point it became clear what I had to do. I had to return the incoherence of his face to a pattern that made sense. But just by looking, I couldn’t restore the symmetry back to Jack’s face. The lines shifted around, became even more unintelligible, the harder I stared. I turned round to look at the portrait of Justine for help.
Someone somewhere said my name.
From where I was sitting on the carpet I looked up at the window sill. The hammer was lying on it. The hammer was of standard design: an oak handle, dark metal. It only took a second to reach up and take it down. It seemed unnaturally light. I had the sensation that the hammer might float out of my hands unless I held onto it tightly. I clutched at the handle tightly, trying to feel it. The tool now seemed like a phantom limb. A necessary part of me that I had lost and now didn’t really exist: an instrument of let’s-pretend.
It was heavy enough. Jack watched me, silently, taking a sip of his whisky. He looked at me in amusement as I stood up, raising the hammer above my head. He looked as if he were about to ask me a question.
FIFTY-ONE
The first blow only knocked him unconscious. I looked down at his face as he lay on the floor. He looked vulnerable, fair, his outstretched arms flung up behind his head where he had tried to fend me off. A tenderness overcame me. My anger dissipated, seeped away, like the trickle of blood that was now seeping from the side of his head. Seeing Jack’s body lying there, abandoned, I was overcome by a kind of desire – not for him but to be him, to be that sexual, that prone, that oblivious to life.
I brought the hammer down over his face again. I brought the hammer straight down on his face, splintering the nose and feeling the iron head sink into the cheekbones as if they were made of paper. It was only when the iron met bone did the weapon finally judder into existence. And I felt a surge of power, a sure sense of rightness. The handle seemed to course into my bone. Instead of it being a phantom extension of me, I became the phantom extension of it. I became as strong as its iron head, as ungiving and virulent. Blood splashed over the room, over my face and clothes and over Jack’s painting of Justine, just adding another colour to the colours that were already there.
From above the mantelpiece, Justine watched the scene that was taking place in front of her, with equanimity. Her presence now promised moments of pleasure as soft as melting snow.
FIFTY-TWO
But Jack’s face: instead of mending the asymmetry, I had smashed it even further, shattered his identity into pieces of bone. I had done what he, in his painting, had already done to Justine. But at least it was an asymmetry that I had created. Its design was mine. And my identity remained intact while Jack’s lay in pieces on the floor.
The blood sprouted from him in spirals and pretty curls like ivy growing across the floor, where there is no sun for it to grow upwards. His flowing blood was the only sign of life or movement. The blood was spiralling across my carpet. Watching it decorate the floor in scarlet lines it suddenly occurred to me that if I wanted I could bend down and dip my finger into its stream. Before I was conscious of what I was doing the tip of my finger was hovering over the surface tension of the blood, then breaking down through it to the soft hot liquid beneath. I lifted the red-stained fingertip to my lips. The blood tasted salty, warm and meaty, the blood tasted of life.
I went into the kitchen and fetched a knife. Kneeling down beside the body, I carefully carved out the skin around the area above his heart. I wanted to find out if the heart, the temple of love, went on beating just a little while after death, if the heart, like the blood, carried on the momentum of life. I lifted up, like a heart-shaped hinged lid, the serrated flesh of Jack’s chest. But there was no heart beneath. In the place where the heart should have been there was just an empty space.
FIFTY-THREE
Once I had completed my task, the physical attributes of Jack were unrecognizable. I had had to use a saw to dismember the limbs and sever the head. It was unlikely that anyone would connect me with Jack, but I had spoken to one of the wardens at Kew Gardens, and Juliette also might prove unreliable. I didn’t want the body identified. I put the pieces of Jack’s body in a black bin liner, together with the hammer, the knife, my bloodied clothes and the saw. Having bathed and dressed again, I slipped the photograph of Justine into my pocket, tied the bag up and with difficulty hoisted it over my shoulders like a bag of swag.