Apartment 16 (23 page)

Squinting against the smell of Harold’s breath that was virtually being panted across her face, Apryl leant down closer to Alice. ‘His flat? Where did you dance? At Barrington House? Was that when you saw the puppets?’

But Alice was oblivious. ‘No, no, no. All rubbish, he used to say. All rubbish. It’s not the figures, it’s the background that counts. The stuff behind it you can’t see. Very clever man. Of course he was right. He tried to help us to see it too. I used to take my clothes off for him, dear. But clever men have bad tempers. And they were all against him in the end, dear. He showed them so much, but they never appreciated him. They were afraid of him. But you just had to trust Felix. He was an artist. One must accommodate such. They’d all seen the pictures. No one had seen anything like it before. And the walls, dear. It’s a part of it all, you know. All joined, you see. The background.’

What with Harold’s continued exhalations behind her neck, Alice’s disconnected thoughts, the effect of the Merlot she drank too quickly on account of her nerves, and the hot air saturated with the smell of incense and neglect, Apryl began to feel faint. She had to stand up. ‘Harold, please. I’d like to get up. Please. May I? Thank you, Alice,’ Apryl said, feeling an even greater need than ever to get away from Harold and the confused lady, whose recollections were next to useless.

Harriet’s round face appeared behind Harold. ‘The talk is about to start. Quick.’

Apryl stood at the rear of the crowd in the living room, not far from the front door, as Harold introduced a wizened creature in a shabby brown suit: Doctor Otto Herndl from Heidelberg. The doctor was the author of a small-press anthology of essays called
Gathered on the Right,
and the editor of some occult journal she missed the name of when the elderly man in front of her was racked by a coughing fit.

Otto Herndl began by saying something about the early philosophical influences on the precocious teenage Hessen. ‘Particularly Professor Zollner, who asserted the existence of a fourth dimension, and used the paranormal phenomena of the time as proof.’

While he struggled to translate his thoughts into English, Apryl was distracted by the man’s oddball appearance. The broken zipper of his trousers. A tatty briefcase resting against one scuffed shoe. His hair was razored up the back and sides of his head to a grey copse on top, then combed into a severe side parting. And he managed to convey the impression of being unsteady on his feet and about to topple over, without ever doing so. His brown, excitable eyes moved frantically behind his thick round glasses and his hands hovered out in front of him, as if strings had been attached to his wrists and were lazily controlled from above. It appeared he hadn’t shaved for days.

When he began to talk about ‘Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth’s five volumes of
Genesis,
a white supremacist treatise on eroticism, Bacchanalia, sexology and libido’, she lost the thread of his argument and her thoughts wandered back and forth, in and out of the lecture, and settled on comparing his ideas about Hessen with what she’d learned from reading Miles’s book.

She’d read how the young Hessen had been obsessed by Wotanism, the pagan cults and the millenarian sects of nineteenth-century Austria and Germany – racist mystical ideas that influenced Germany’s ideas of nationality between the wars. Hessen seemed to have approached it with the same passion modern kids follow rock or rap music. But Miles had been baffled as to how it had informed Hessen’s studies of cadavers, his grotesque primitivist sketches of animal-human hybrids, and his ghastly puppet triptych of the 1930s. That interest, surely, must have come from his schooling in medicine.

But Herndl insisted that Hessen’s sketches represented ‘a middle-class reaction to the industrialization of Europe’. They showed, he claimed, how he was predicting both the bovine passivity in urban man and the loss of control and will ‘zat ve see around us today’.

That contradicted what Miles had written. According to him, Hessen eventually mocked his own youthful interests in remote and rare folk movements, and acknowledged that they marked a young outsider’s flight from mainstream culture. As did his dabbling with orientalism, hypnotism, and fascism. They were all part of his detachment and alienation from the status quo, a terrible force that he saw as the antithesis of original creativity. And as Miles had pointed out, Hessen’s drawings reflected nothing of Nazi neo-classicism, or Aryan folk art. There was nothing idealistic or mythical in his art. It drew deeply from a complicated but brilliant imagination. Or whatever it was he saw in the shadows, or looking out from the murky windows of abandoned basements.

Miles Butler believed Hessen’s disappointment with the Nazis and their nationalist occultism, after travelling to Berlin, was colossal. He’d pursued one subculture too far and hated the reality up close. Hessen never understood anti-Semitism, and
Vortex
championed Hebrew mysticism.

His failure in Germany and then his imprisonment signalled his final withdrawal from society, its ideas and purposes. But despite the inconvenience of prison, Miles suspected that everything he’d experimented with until 1938 was mere preparation for the Vortex. It was the source not only of his inspiration, but of nightmares, melancholia and despair too: ‘the society of tragedy’, Hessen called it in volume 4 of
Vortex,
which was entitled ‘A World Behind This World’.

For her to be able to contradict Otto Herndl in this way, Apryl realized with horror, meant she’d remembered far too much about the man who’d cast such a spell over her great-aunt. The painter was fast turning into an unhealthy compulsion. She could even vividly recall what Hessen had written about the Vortex, because it seemed uncomfortably relevant to what Lillian had recorded.

I just want to dip my face into it. Now and again. And to paint what I see down there. But sometimes it shows itself to me: coming through the walls, or inside a laughing mouth, behind a vacant stare, or gathering itself in a wretched place. Either I am getting closer to it, or it is drawing nearer to me. Sometimes I can feel its breath on my neck. And my sleep is filled with it. Though my conscious mind banishes it, as if it has an in-built resistance to such things. But it is always there. Waiting. When I look over my shoulder, or walk past a mirror quickly and absently, I see it. Or when I slip into a torpor, it will creep into the room like a strange dark animal looking for food.

After an hour and fifteen minutes of the lecture Apryl sat on the dirty floor, behind a sofa. While Herndl barked out the names of summoning rituals Hessen had purchased from Crowley and had performed ‘with abzolute success’, her head spun. Fatigued by the heat, the nervous excitement, and the thin, dirty air of the city, when she heard the smattering of applause and a final cessation in the bewildering broken-English monologue of the speaker, she rose to her feet to leave. But Harold was upon her before she could find her coat.

‘Leaving so soon? No, you can’t – we haven’t had our little chat about your great-aunt yet. And if you go now you’ll miss the best part – the interpretations. Or, as we like to call them, the ‘study of dreamers in a room’. You see, the Friends share their connection to Hessen’s vision through a recounting of their dreams experienced under the influence of his art. We all try and find the missing paintings via trance. People resort to all sorts of means to get within the presence of the Vortex.’

‘Really? Amazing.’ Apryl barely had the energy to speak. ‘I must get on. I have plans for dinner.’

Harold wasn’t listening. ‘You’ll see why it’s so important.’

At the front of the room, as soon as Harold called for order, a forest of tatty arms shot into the air to begin the procedure. The music was turned off. The chatter died. A shabby-looking man wearing an overcoat, and with a white chinless face and bulging eyes, was the first to take the floor. ‘I returned to the same place twice. Lit up, but not with natural light.’

There was a murmur of acknowledgement. Or was it unrest?

‘And in the gases, that were yellow, I saw the clothed face again. A tall figure briefly walked forward, at me, with its face covered in red. Then it stopped and seemed to be suddenly some distance away from me. It repeated the movement several times. Then I woke up and thought I was having a heart attack.’

Before he could continue, Harold pointed to one of the young men wearing cavalry boots and a trench coat.

‘I was in my front room fasting and had deprived myself of any visual stimulation but the
Puppet Triptych IV
for two days and two nights. And when I slept, I glimpsed figures about a fire. Stick figures. Some of them fell in.’

There was a great impatience in the room. They weren’t exactly dismissive of each other’s dreams or hallucinations or visions or whatever they were, but each clearly felt his or her own to be more significant.

‘. . . I saw hateful faces. Black and red with rage.’

‘. . . they looked like clowns in dirty pyjamas.’

‘. . . two women and one man, dressed in an Edwardian fashion. But they had no flesh on their bones. I couldn’t wake up or run from the two women, who were unfurling the nets from the front of their bonnets.’

‘. . . crouching on all fours, in the corner of a basement. The walls were wet, made from brick.’

Thirsty, Apryl gulped at a second glass of wine. It was a mistake. She hadn’t eaten and felt light-headed. They were all jabbering out disjointed fragments of nightmares that had punched them from sleep and into the dreary alienation of their lives. What was the point of it all? Of them? The close stale air and the woollen heat and the crazy surrealist ranting of the guests made her move once again for the door.

‘. . . teeth like an ape. Eyes completely red. But no legs. Just dragging itself about in the sawdust.’

‘. . . The whole city was blackened by fire. Ash and dust in piles. But freezing cold. No sign of life—’ The gentleman wearing a cloth cap that shadowed a purple face was suddenly interrupted by Alice.

‘And they’re all about my bed!’ she wailed. ‘They come out of the walls, you see! No use in talking to them. They’re not there for that.’

‘I object to this!’ the figure in the cloth cap roared. ‘Must she always interrupt?’

Other voices murmured their assent. Harold appealed for calm. ‘Now, now, if you please. There is time—’

But Alice was not to be stopped. ‘Swirling up, all around, with backwards noises. Up in the corners of the rooms. I saw them once before the war and they never leave you.’

Irritated, the crowd began to chatter.

Harold leant towards Alice, a tense smile on his face while his eyes flitted about looking for the dissenters in the crowd. ‘Alice, my dear, we agreed you should talk last. The others must be allowed to have their say too.’

The man who had stared at Apryl’s legs and offered to take her to the Hessen pubs elbowed his way towards her. His fat face was shiny with sweat and it grinned lecherously. ‘I wouldn’t bother with this lot again,’ he said. ‘You should come and see us. The Scholars of Felix Hessen. Not so dreamy. This is a circus.’ His fat fingers rustled inside a leather satchel that hung from one shoulder. He produced a flyer and pushed it at her. ‘On the hush hush, we’re breaking away. This lot won’t get anywhere. Harriet’s too wishy-washy and Harold puts far too much faith in Alice. She’s as mad as a snake.’ He laughed, unpleasantly.

On the other side of the room Alice had begun to sing ‘Roll out the barrel’ in a childlike voice. Others had begun to shout over her. Through the chaos Apryl caught sight of the little figure of Otto Herndl. His grin was wide but his eyes were full of confusion. He seemed even more unsteady on his feet, as if someone had finally severed the strings.

‘I really don’t think so,’ Apryl told the leader of the splinter group. She struggled into her coat.

‘Can I see you again?’ he said.

‘I, I shan’t be in London for much longer. I’m very busy.’ But in the din she wasn’t sure he had heard her. She turned and pushed her way to the door.

Outside, the cold air rushed in to stifle her. It seemed unnaturally dark by the tower blocks and on the main road the traffic was relentless and moving too fast. She headed towards the lit-up area, to the centre of Camden Town. She wanted to get into a normal environment with normal people, and began walking away from the unlit buildings and ugly cafes, the empty fast-food restaurants and decrepit sunken pubs.

The meeting had depressed her. She’d expected the Friends to be eccentric after reading bits of their obscure website, but this fancy-dress party with its internal politics, splinter groups, and ludicrous claims of mystical dream connections struck her as adolescent. It was all fantasy. A gaggle of misfits attaching themselves to an artist who they imagined was a representation of their own alienation. They did nothing for Hessen’s reputation, while masquerading as guardians of his legacy.

Apryl huddled deeper into her scarf and pulled the collar of her coat up, but it was as if a residue of the meeting’s surreal dysfunction still clung to her. And pulled things in.

A junkie with a dirty whitish blanket across his shoulders ran across the road at her, narrowly avoiding two cars that sounded their horns. The violence of the sudden sharp sounds startled her. She held her breath, and then felt her skin ice with fear at the approach of the beggar. His thin, ashen face was scarred with purple lumps. A scrawny woman wearing a white baseball cap waited for him on the opposite side of the road, holding a can of beer.

‘Can you spare us firty pee for a cuppa tea? Just to keep warm, like.’

She hadn’t anything smaller than a ten-pound note. Apryl shook her head without looking at the beggar and increased her pace. He didn’t follow, but she heard a long sigh of disappointment and frustration before he said, ‘Oh fucking hell.’ It wasn’t directed at her, but at the cold, relentless misery of his life. At the dirty streets, the grey ugly council housing, the bent iron railings and the dying black grass, only lit up in part by the thin orange light of the street lamps that shrunk in the dense absorbing shadows all around the edges of anything solid.