How to Paint a Dead Man (14 page)

The temperature is dropping, and the night is beginning to get uncomfortable. After all, he has on only the flowery cotton undershirt and the overalls, and wasn’t expecting to have to use a coat–typical northerner, coming out unprepared. The chill breath in the gorge circles his shoulders, stealing the heat from his body. There is less pain in his leg now though, or perhaps he is getting used to it. For an hour he has been fighting the cold, blowing into his cupped hands, flapping his arms and going nowhere, like a clipped bird. He has been throwing punches out into the darkness, boxing to keep his blood warm. A song is lodged in his head, something the kids have been listening to over and over on the stereo–some Manchester band, something about wanting to be a dog. Not a bad tune compared to the other crap on the radio these days. For some reason it’s stuck on repeat, is going round and round, and he’s been humming it, nodding his head to its melody. It’s keeping his spirits up at least, giving him something to think about. He’s even caught himself laughing a few times at the idiocy of his predicament, and that’s made him feel better too.

It’s apparent tonight that this is the changeover season. He can feel summer’s end. There’s the memory of frost down in the earth’s membranes. The northern rivers are carrying a message to the Solway that winter is coming. It’s nippiest on his arse, where he’s leaning against the stone. Things are getting particularly numb down there. The rocks seem to have their own gelid circulation; they seem reptilian that way. But that’s rocks for you, Peter–creatures with a system all their own. Hasn’t he said it many times, in interviews, and to visiting collectors? ‘The rocks, the rocks are alive…’

Hoist by your own petard, daft bugger. The irony is not lost on him. To have wound up here, stuck fast in this landscape, pincered between two apparently sentient, apparently wilful obelisks. To have been caught out by this densest of environments, which he has spent a lifetime rendering. Yes. It’s just perfect. And if he doesn’t get out of here, if he gets hypothermia, starves, dehydrates, and carks it; if the rooks start pecking out his eyes and have away with his nose; if no one in fact finds him down in this semi-remote gulley for years, until he resembles an odd, upright bouquet of bones, they will all say it: what an ironic way to go. How fitting. How right, how totally bloody
meaningful!

He is not going to get hypothermia. This isn’t Everest. He is not icebound. Yes, he is thirsty. Yes, the injury is probably not very pretty; it may even be severe–a bloody bundle of skin and splinters down there, impacted, mashed, beyond repair. But this is a minor inconvenience in the scheme of all mountain disasters. Unlikely it will become legend. Unlikely he will have to eat himself to survive. It probably won’t make it past
Border News.
Yeah. He can see the smirking presenter now, turning the page for this last somewhat entertaining item. ‘Yesterday a local artist discovered there’s more to his landscapes than meets the eye.’ Oh Christ! How will he live it down? Maybe he can keep it quiet. If the Mountain Rescue aren’t involved. If there’s no filmed helicopter drama, no Ian Lumb or Adrian Bodger being winched down in a fluorescent helmet. ‘Oh, it’s you, Peter. How’re you doing, lad?’

I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be a dog.

On the other hand, if he’s honest, Mountain Rescue would be welcome right about now. His position is, in actual fact, intractable. It is fairly bloody miserable. And the leg is really sore. It isn’t the wild, contractive pain of a few hours ago; now it’s levelled off, and is just very tender. But a needle full of anaesthetic would be really good. And maybe this won’t hurt his profile at all. He could give an exclusive account to one of the art supplements. The mountain versus me! Maybe it’ll give him some kudos, it’ll be something to rival the urban set, always banging on about how dangerous and radical and cutting-edge they are.

Oh come on. Here he is, wedged under a lump of fell, and he’s being competitive with his peers. Don’t be so ridiculous, Peter, don’t be a clod. He’s got to put the testosterone to better use. He’s got to concentrate on getting free. ‘Bastard! Bastaaaards!’ Yes, that’s more like it. Diabolical, unhinged ranting. Very helpful, very gainful. Numpty. Dimwit. Bozo.

Right. No. He’s got to think positive. Got to gather himself. These stones are not his enemies. They are not vengeful organisms with creepy arctic blood and carnivorous appetites. They are his lifelong friends. He respects them. He must put the wounded, and frankly a little hysterical, side of his imagination away. This is not comeuppance. It is not self-prophesying fate. This place might presently be fucking him up quite savagely but he must remember he loves it. He has always loved it.

Beaches, mountains, rivers. These have all been his working provinces. Places where the weather intensifies. Places where the rock is clean–polished by water or rough air, with a texture older than dinosaur skeleton, so old it has moved beyond history. Corrie. Tarn. Glacier-run. Causeway. Craters. Ghylls. Sea runes. The Cumbrian hills. The coastlines. He has chosen places of rock over all else, rock in the majority-towering, teetering magma–or rock in paucity–sediments, submerged in sand and fluid. Stone is as honest as landscape gets. It is this that has governed his career, made him antiquated, then avant-garde, then antiquated again.

He still doesn’t know why, though he’s come up with plenty of interesting explanations over the years, some nonsensical, some verging on the supernatural. In his own head he has always struggled to define this obsession with substance, this sensibility. Ever since his father walked up the return, sooty-faced, with that marine fossil he had tapped out of the limestone above the coal seam, coming in and placing it on the table in front of his son, Peter has been held. The boyhood interest in cave art, hieroglyphics, the collecting of petrified roots and heathers, arrowheads, dobbies. The brickworks, the amphitheatres, the Greek marbles. Caspar David Friedrich, Brancusi. He can hear himself wittering on about muses, callings, proclivities; he can see himself drawing figure-eight infinities in the air with his smoking hand while the camera records him; and simultaneously that pedantic voice is saying, no, that’s not it, you’re talking rubbish. Never stopped him trying.

He is a bit dippy on the subject, admittedly. He is a bit evangelical, a bit happy-clappy. But there are the facts of the matter–the geomagnetics. Geiger readings tell strange stories in these parts of the British Isles; they are often high, very high. Their stoddering needles lend authenticity to theories of nuclear infection, blast-off sites or alien visitation, the hum of an energy not kinetic, not electric, not periodic either, but energy nevertheless, stoked into the earth’s layers. There is some undiscovered life-force, he is sure of it. Something living. Something assayable. The rocks really are alive.

He can’t tell people this of course, this nuttiness, this flapdoodle, science bastardised into conspiracy theory. Though he often does tell people, or tries to. Over the sticky bar in the Queen’s Head. Into the fuzzy microphone and the amused face of the journalist. It’s what he says and is known to say–eccentric, florid things. This is who he is–England’s traditional modern landscapist, full of brio and home-cooked whisky, working three thousand feet up and pretty close to the edge of entertaining psychosis.

Ivan Dyas understood it of course. Good old Ivan. A giant in his field and Peter’s only amenable tutor at the Liverpool art school. The prescient, sweaty man slapped him hard on the back when Peter revealed his peculiar fascination. ‘Excellent. Many would kill for such an infatuation, laddo. It’ll be this that does the business for you, if you let it.’ They were such good pals. All those trips to exhibitions. The hours spent in the pubs-The Throstle’s Nest, The Why Not, and Doctor Duncan’s. The debates and discussions, the drinking competitions, looking at the wannabes in Kavanagh’s. It all seems such a long time ago now. Ivan Dyas. ‘What a man. Council park sculptor, glassblower, bronze-scale northern Casanova. He remembers him manifesting in college one day like a lusty fawn god before the class, in a long leather coat and a porno moustache. Combining Mersey Beat style with tradesman’s knowledge. Espousing wisdoms on a come-and-see-me-after basis, theoretical and metric, practical and prophylactic.

Peter can still see him, sitting on the studio table, one knee flung wide, bollocks straining against the trouser plaid. He knew about rock all right-both kinds. ‘You can bang at flint and quartz all you want,’ he would say, ‘with your big wild swings. But it’ll never let you in. It’ll not undress for you. You’ll break a wrist first, and blunt your instruments, and the Chancellor’ll have a fit, but you’ll not make a single clean cut. Now. Watch this.’ And he would gently tap and pull the hammer and the chisel, as if he was stroking himself off. First Lesson: brute force is more likely to shatter a thumb than damage an igneous block. Not until they understood the grain, the compound, curve, and tensile strength, not until they understood the inherent direction of matter itself, would they progress any further in sculpture (and life, boys and girls, and life!). Sculpture was about respect and intuition, collaboration. Sculpture was seduction, like sex with a young lady (plenty of which was had by the man, much to his wife’s dismay).

Peter’s time there would have been a waste were it not for him. He’d arrived in Liverpool with scholarship grades and a second-hand donkey jacket, proud son of a miner. He was now, officially, an academic and a painter, two anomalies in the Caldicutt family and proof of the new social mobility. His was a conventional grammar education; he respected the canon and the system that had enabled him, and he would become something of a formalist behind the walls of the studio. But he felt guilty: guilty for his library card, guilty for wanting to read and for his admiration of classical things. He was fashionably working-class, fashionable according to those who weren’t. Another form of pity, his old man would have said, another way of telling you what you are, and aren’t.

People expected him to be radical, representative, a spokesperson. People ennobled his upbringing, thought his duty was anti-establishmentarianism-popular word back then: they all had to know how to spell it. Never mind his interests. Never mind his freedom. The tutors wanted him to paint in black. They wanted Lowry, they wanted grit. He was back to the mines, back to square one. All he wanted was to smell those heavy, stitched-leaf books and paint the sea. Some bloody revolutionary.

But Dyas was something of an atavist too, for all his current record collection, his praise of contraceptives and new European architecture. There was room for all creeds in his philosophy-Baroque to Bauhaus, Mondrian to Mitchell. Didn’t matter, so long as it had integrity, something poignant to say. He’d stride into class, dirty blond curls bouncing round his head, cunny-lip goatee suggesting nothing less than the female labia, and the lecture would begin. The kicking shut of the door-
boom.
A fist pounding the table-
bang.
His releasing of the projector roll-
wham, chugger-chugger-chugger.
‘So. You think Picasso didn’t have a clue about proportion then? Right. Put that pencil between your lips, Yvonne,’ he’d yell to the black-lashed kitten on the back row. ‘Go on, love, and give us a nice pout if you like. There you go. Lovely. Now the rest of you, the measurement from spirit level to eye…’

First on the dance floor, last man standing at the bar. An intemperate lover, except when he had loved Raymie. At the funeral four years later, divorced and wrung out from amphetamines, and from worrying about his wife’s casual, suicidal joyrides, Peter had missed the reconciliation he so badly desired. He had arrived at the cathedral half cut, and had spewed forth a beery eulogy, to the disgust of the family. ‘To my hero, to my bloody hero,’ and then he’d put his face on the dead man’s lapel and cried like a Spanish widow.

Dyas would get a kick out of this now, surely.
Seduce your way out of this one, Petie,
he would bellow, spreadeagling himself on a nearby boulder, and knocking the top off a bottle of stout. ‘Something of a predicament, eh. Something of a rum position, kiddo. Whatever shall we do?’ If he could decant the man from his memory into the world again, he would, no matter the bad history. The clouds have moved over and the darkness is intensifying. His mood of levity has left him and he is inalienably alone. Even the company of ghosts would do. Even if it meant standing trial, digging over the offences committed and hearing the charges read. Usurper. Bad friend. Thief. But the chance to apologise to Ivan-wouldn’t that be a fine thing, wouldn’t he risk unholy resurrection for it? The chance to say he was sorry, that he was cuntstruck, that he was too young to know better. Yes, he would raise corpses for it, Ivan’s at least, though maybe not the other one.

Maybe it’d all be water under the bridge anyway-so much time has passed. Maybe they’d just have a good old natter about the state of things. They could opine on various interesting developments. The
Piss Christ.
Mandela. Dubrovnik. Betting odds. Or they could reminisce like two old codgers. Remember the marble pissers in the Philharmonic? You could whizz like a king. Remember Dolores McArthur’s splendid tits? Oh yes. Epic. Maybe they would shake hands like decent friends, sit in the cold together and wait for the re-emergence of the stars. Dyas would be incisive, as always. ‘Hate to say it, Peter old son, but that sounds like rain.’

And true enough, there is an aspirin flavour to the air, an impending fizz. He can feel the first few drops arriving on his forehead, and then a steady patter begins. Peter looks up. There is just blackness and water. A few minutes, and he is soaked through. The wound begins to nip and sting, and he knows then that the flesh is open. He tears a wet strip from the hem of his shirt and ties a tourniquet at the top of his calf. He doesn’t know how much he is bleeding. He doesn’t know if he is scratched, or if his life is draining away. He can smell minerals being released from the stones all around, the perfume of the mountain.