How to Paint a Dead Man (12 page)

He sat with her a long time that afternoon. He told her about the artists of Holland who had created fanciful bouquets from their imaginations, with pineapples and quinces, the bounty of the different seasons combined together. In these paintings there would often be something sinister and cautionary in the corner, a little unpleasant danger, like a fly walking towards an apple, a snail on the lip of a jug, or some mould or blemish on the rind of a clementine. This was called symbolism. ‘It is like life,’ he said. ‘All things desist. All things are temporary.’ The Dutch artists were conveying the truth about nature, and reminding everyone that life was short, even while their paintings were impossibly artificial.

The next week he brought a large picture book with a canvas cover, full of the impossible paintings. He also brought a magnifying glass with a horn handle, which expanded the image beneath and lifted it from the page. She studied the images carefully. On one page there was a still-life picture with a bird about to peck at a fig. Signor Giorgio told her that such works contained many messages. Though everything seemed captured and held in a single chosen moment, the world beyond could be seen, endlessly. For example–he turned the page–there, could she see it? In the glass vase holding the pale pink rose was reflected the artist’s window, which was a window showing what was outside his studio. ‘Can you see?’ he asked, and Annette bent close until she could make out the four squares of light in the perfect glass.

For two weeks there were no lessons, but when he returned he brought a gift for her and said that she might take it home. It was a bottle. He said it had been one of his favourite tools and in it was all his life’s work. He said he was very glad to have met her, even so late in his life. She did not know why he had given her the gift or what he meant. It was an old bottle, with flakes of paint on it, but she cherished it. He came to the school only once more, and for that lesson he had to remain seated while the children carried their work over to his chair.

Until then Annette brought flowers into school for the drawing classes, which she stole from the stone storage room of Castrabecco. She would wait until her mother was talking with Mauri beside the van, then take a cutting. She would shake beads of dew from the stems, place them down inside her pinafore and button up her cardigan. If Uncle Marcello saw her hiding the blooms he would tiptoe over to her and hold his finger to his lips. ‘Shh. I will keep your secret. Don’t get pollen on your dress.’

Whichever the stolen item, Annette would tell Signor Giorgio about its folk history. ‘The first bell in Nola was made because a bishop saw these growing in a clearing nearby,’ she would say, pointing to the peal of campanulas on the table. Then she would gently tap the stem to make the flowers sway. ‘See.’ She would offer any such note of plant trivia her uncle had told her, and her tutor would clap his hands together and say, ‘Marvellous!’ When he died she felt as if she had lost someone very special, like a grandfather. She returned the bottle to him, placing it on his tomb in the cimitero di campagna, and continued to bring him flowers.

The worst part was having no idea-not an inkling, not the faintest glimmer of sadness, like dew in the corner of your dreams. You had no clue that Danny had veered his bike on to the motorway, that he was swerving cheerfully from the hard shoulder to the third lane and back again, like the apparition of an Edwardian soak, a century late for a midnight appointment. Danny, on top of that brilliant contraption, perfectly balanced, bare-chested and wearing moleskin trousers, making one of his impromptu nocturnal runs to the farm. Danny, high as a kite, kept warm by the ardent adventure that was his life and by the bowl of dope he’d smoked, the empty road before him, the winter frost and icy moonlight.

Now it’s clear. Now you can see it all. A man and a bike on the carriageway at night, like a silent-picture routine. The starry darkness. The lisping wheels of that revolutionary machine going, for fifteen immortal minutes, the perfect speed. Danny with the world to himself. Danny weaving, standing up on the seat. Danny steering hands-free. Danny flying. How close it must have been to rapture. Now you can see it all.

But that night you slept right through as he pedalled on. You barely turned beneath the covers or altered position. There were no terrors, no anxieties nesting in your brain; there was no unconscious euphoria as your brother freewheeled. You found out by the trilling of the telephone the next morning what had happened. Peter Caldicutt told you the news and he was gutted, hollowed out of himself. There was not a trace of the Geordie, no hint of the decades in Cumbria. All that came from him was that awful empty voice, immaculately reproduced down the wires, and caught in the same quiet loop, whispering over and over.
He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.
Then you heard gentle words and your mum took the receiver from him.
No lights. Danny had no lights on the bike,
she explained.
The wagon driver didn’t see him until it was too late. You didn’t know. We thought…we thought maybe…

They must have imagined that, subconsciously, something bad would have registered. That by the powers of gestational unity and the currents in your cerebella, you would already have known. But no. You didn’t know. All night your ear had been folded over like a clamshell on the pillow. You were switched off. Severed. Independent. Healthy. You didn’t sit bolt upright in bed, fumbling for the lamp and screaming. You didn’t even reach for the glass of water on the bed-stand as you usually do midway through the night, and feel, for one brief moment before falling away again, an inexplicable sadness, or phantom pain.

You were standing naked and damp from the shower, holding the phone. You’d slipped on the bath mat in an effort to get to it before it rang off. You thought it might have been work-related. In the stillness after you hung up, you felt a bead of water trickle across your stomach and down your hip, and then you felt that dissolving feeling you have had ever since.

Nathan had already left for work. You could have called his mobile and had him come home, but you didn’t. You stood dripping on the hall floor. You could feel your cells trickling away. Everything began to rush past. You put your hands on the phone table and the wood clucked under your grip, and you had to kneel.

When it passed you went to the bedroom and got dressed. You put on your best dress in fact, the one with the empire waist and the red silk panelling. You pulled on your brown leather coat and your sopping hair began to make dark stains on it. The closest bag to hand was an old satchel destined for the charity shop, propped by the front door. You put a few random things inside-underwear, jewellery, and your passport, inexplicably. You left your Leica in the studio, then, changing your mind, you packed it. You closed the door to the flat, locked it. You told yourself you were standing on the outside. You told yourself to move.

You have a car. It’s not often used in London, but it’s reliable. You could have driven, but you didn’t trust yourself to make the drive up country. Your hands were not working. You didn’t want to negotiate difficult traffic. You didn’t want to sit for hours on the carriageway in among the queues. And no, no, no, you did not want to pass the slip road on the motorway where Danny had begun his boyish joyride, which had led him, four miles later, to the axles of a lorry coming the other way.

You did not want to see a shrine. Radio Cumbria was broadcasting the news at ten now that you had all been notified. Across the county people would hear the announcement and pause, hands to their mouths. They would shake their heads, and they would say,
Ah no, not Danny Caldicutt, not dippy Danny, not Dan the Man. Not the crazy fella from the scrapyard. Not the bass player from Dogtale. Not him.
There would be flowers laid at the spot, you knew it, because Danny was known and was enjoyed by all; he was one of Cumbria’s favourite sons. Danny with his manic street introductions, his talkative pub personality, and his unsolicited lectures on ufology. Danny with his hemp bags and colourful shoes, the rounds-on-him and the experimental lentils, his given-away savings. Danny with his vast, reasonless smile. And one or two people would surely have clambered over the motorway embankment, slipped across the lanes between thundering commuters, and left a simple bunch of flowers on the median.

You made your way to Euston, stunned and silent, your body horribly disintegrating, but still cooperative. You found a discreet single seat on the Virgin main-liner, so that you wouldn’t have to face anyone. At Preston you were taken off by the train manager, then put back on the next one heading north, thirty-five minutes and one donated sedative later. You had cried so dangerously that all the other passengers had emptied from your carriage, as if they were afraid you were about to break the news, whispered in your ear by God himself, that the world was finishing, now, now, now.

No. This wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was not your inability to predict events, your failure to receive that dark neural information. It was not the five-hour locomoting asylum that passed through Wigan, Warrington Bank Quay, Lancaster, Oxenholme. It was not finding your dad up in the lime quarry, later that day, with a pick axe, exhausted, his hands pulped and bloody from hours of breaking stone, or seeing your mum, his mother, your mother, for once in her steady, meditative life turned inside out by grief, totally overcome. Even the funeral, which Nathan drove up for, was not as bad as you’d expected. The arrangements for Danny’s interment were fuelled by the adrenalin of having to do what needed to be done. With familial cohesion and endless pots of tea you bore the awfulness together.

It was going through Danny’s things in his flat in town that finally broke you. It was doing the job that people always say is the most difficult duty of bereavement. It was smelling him on his clothing, his signature odour: sweat, Obsession and pheromones. It was seeing his last cup of tea with its thick mouldering meniscus sitting next to the sink, half drunk–evidence of a man once thirsty, once living. It was dismantling the proof of Danny that hurt the most, pouring out the tea, washing the cup, packing his stuff up. You had, via the clearing of daily instruments and ordinary items, like his keys and his harmonica, his badly rinsed contact lenses and his strange vintage medical kit with its lint and gammy tube of silver cream, decreed that all the accoutrements of his existence were now meaningless, redundant. Not knowing his location, not knowing where to look, or how to find him, even though proof of his being lay all around, even though it seemed at any moment he might stumble home and be, as he always was, so pleased to see you: this is what put you face down on the floor, crying until you retched, crying until the corners of your mouth tore and bled, holding his old red trainers to your chest, and calling for him and calling for him. Some kind, internal mechanism saved you, provided anaesthetic. A switch flicked, your eyes closed, and your head went dark.

Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose.

He didn’t have much in the flat of course. He wasn’t one for hoarding junk, not domestically anyway. There was no extensive CD collection, no Dungeons & Dragons figures in their original boxes, no cufflinks belted down in their cases by elastic loops. His money went on other things: beer, dope, a pouch of Kendal Twist every week–like father, like son–buses to London, copper flex, a blacksmith course, and any piece of architectural salvage that spoke to him, demanding rescue. Chimney pots, stained glass, iron. Leaning against the walls of his yard were old gateposts and banisters, weather vanes and barbers’ poles. Stacked in neat piles under the washing line were painted Victorian tiles, enamelled cabinets and zinc watering cans.

The wheel of a gypsy caravan.

A brass pump-hose.

Danny the barrow-man. Danny the champion of bespoke and bygone things.

As you stood in the crowded yard you thought about that sixth-form trip to the V&A, when you and he had walked along the corridor of metalwork, under wrought black roses and ornate tulip brackets. Suddenly your dopey brother had woken up to the possibilities of art and craft.
Look, Suze. Look, it’s so beautiful. How do they do that?,
his pond-brown eyes wide open, pushing his dark carpet fringe to one side. He had sat down right there and written something in his dog-eared, doodled-over notebook, his legs sprawling out, getting in the way of tourists. Danny with his pubescent masculinity, who had only just grown into his chest and his height, whom the girls at school had only just begun to notice.

He’d stood up, put his hands either side of a great Meccano angel, and pushed gently. You don’t know why. Maybe because he always had to put his hands on things. The sculpture rocked back and the tip of one wing hit the arbour at its side. It clanged like a dropped bell.
Booooooong.
The muse had spoken. The look on his face. Stupefaction. Pure joy. Cue the guards, and the pair of you were chucked out of the museum, to the mortification of your teacher, who
thought better of you at least, Susan.
A typically Caldicutt disgrace of course. Your dad thought it was brilliant when you told him, one for the proles, and he kept the letter the school sent home, sticking it up on the studio wall.

Danny had a little yellow book–
Wrought Ironwork: A Manual of Instruction for Craftsmen
-that he carried everywhere he went. He would quote bits of it like philosophy, in situations where he considered it pertinent.
Metal worked on the anvil has grace which belies its strength,
he’d say on someone’s birthday, as if providing the answer to the universe. You found it on his living-room shelf next to the bong. You kept it-it was one of the only things you did keep. The rest–the bedcover smelling of incense, the farmboy overalls, the rusty saucepan and wok-you boxed up for Oxfam. Danny’s old boss at the scrappy had agreed to empty the yard. He’d offered you money but you said no.

Both Danny’s girlfriends had called round while you were packing things away, within fifteen minutes of each other, as if they’d coordinated their movements, and they probably had. Heather and Terry. Terry and Heather. At the funeral they had stood together, holding hands, giving each other tissues.

When she arrived at the flat, Terry had a piece of paper with her, on which Danny had constructed a ridiculous pissed-up last will and testament. He’d done it one night when they’d gone dam-diving at Thirlmere, she said. She thought it should be handed over, given to a solicitor, to see if it was valid. It was sealed, folded in half, and cruttered. She didn’t know what was in it, she said she hadn’t looked; she wasn’t that sort of person. You told her it probably wouldn’t be applicable if it wasn’t officially notarised, but you thanked her anyway.

You’d met her once before at the flat, her composure soft-soaked on Danny’s couch, smoke curling from the sides of her mouth as she let go of the pipe. She was pretty, wide-eyed, blonde.
Wow, you two look dead similar,
she’d said. It’s a bit spooky. Then she’d giggled.
I’ve never been with a woman.
Now she was looking at you soberly through strands of corn-yellow fringe, and again must have been seeing a lot of him in you. Your facial slopes and tones were always just about the same, give or take his square chin, your refined brows. You both wore a red blush just above your jaw-line in cold weather. You still do.

Terry wondered if she could take one of his photographs of the two of them together, to remember him by. She knew where there was one tucked in a dresser drawer, and it was a bit rude anyway. You didn’t tell her you’d already found it, under the ragged chaos of his T-shirts, that you’d seen the two of them, naked, in front of a Lakeland river, a place you recognised because you had swum there every summer of childhood with him. It was a place where the golden mouths of fish blew upwards in the brackish water while you sprawled on your stomachs on the bank and flicked them bread. The reeds grew long beards in the shallows, and you and he would wade through them in your plastic sandals. When you came out your legs would be covered in tiny green worms. You used to pick them off each other, as slowly as you could, seeing who could stand to wear the tickling creatures longest. It was in this place, aged eleven, you’d discovered how you were different, putting a hand there carefully, and describing what you felt.
Like a Chinese finger trap. Like gone-down balloons.

In the photograph they were wet-skinned after swimming and pink-shouldered from the sun, her with extraordinary chestnut nipples, his genitals like catkins. You’d put it back in the bureau face down, embarrassed, disarmed by its erotic quality. You’d wondered who had taken it, or whether it had been timed.

As Terry was leaving, she’d hugged you and said that Danny had gotten her off junk, and away from a man who used to clobber her senseless in Harraby. She said he was a darling to her; he made her think about being OK and being free. And as far as she knew he was always a darling to Heather too.