How to Paint a Dead Man (18 page)

In four years Annette has learned many things. She has learned that customers are more likely to buy flowers on a day of clear skies and moderate wind, rather than of fog or thunderstorms. She has learned to navigate the invisible pathways of the town, and to trust her noisy, vigorous brothers. She has learned to listen with her head cocked, like an owl, and to predict her body’s cycles. She has learned that the items of the world have various definitions, and if one is hidden, others will manifest with greater strength. A fire is its warmth on her skin and its spitting, clapping dance. The birds are their different songs in the morning in the courtyard. She has learned that people in the market give the correct change whenever they can, that Elemme is kind and lonely, even though she is married. All people smell differently, like the cardamoms, and nutmegs, and Spanish chillies in the spice jars at the market. Tommaso smells of burnt milk and hyacinths. Maurizio like candle wax, chicken skin, and sometimes cologne from the pharmacy where he has flirted with the girl behind the counter. Her mother’s voice always has an undercurrent of dark blue, like the night sky of the Nativity.

She has learned how to find the juiciest fruits in the market’s woven punnets. She has memorised the sufferings of the saints–the agonies and banishments and poverty. And, if someone is looking at her, her head will automatically turn towards the gaze like the magnetic needle of a compass. She has learned to live carefully inside the rooms of Castrabecco, in the alleys of the summer theatre and between the hot panes of the greenhouses; to walk carefully along the streets to the church of San Lorenzo and up the steps to the cimitero di campagna. She knows not to dress and undress at certain areas of her bedroom with the shutters open, or to invite trouble from boys and demons. She knows there are rules. But she knows also that life is more complicated, that the dimensions of her mind are endless.

On Sundays she continues to tell her papa the small domestic news of Castrabecco and recounts the affairs of the town. This week, Mauri has learned to do one hundred and fifty keep-ups with the football; she counted them for him, listening to his left foot twisting on the ground as he hopped round and the leather slapped against his thigh. At one hundred and eight he went skittering across the courtyard and skilfully recovered the wildly spinning ball. Afterwards, he told her what the shepherds used to do to their goats in the building in which they live, before it was a house, and that night she had a terrible dream in which the men of her family were lined up, in front of the castration blades. Tommaso has been training for the bike races, wearing a rubber swimming-cap, donated to him by his teacher, and with Vaseline on his legs and chest. He is as slippery as a fish and cannot be caught by their mother when it is time to eat. Uncle Marcello has found him a little odometer for the bicycle spokes so that he can know the distances pedalled. For two days the training has been suspended due to a head-cold. Uncle Marcello has prepared a mallow infusion for his sore throat. Another contagion brought from the South on the
treno del sole,
her mother declared when Tommaso began to sniff and cough.

The tourists have arrived again, asking where the best restaurants are, and the pharmacists, the museums and shrines and the sites of the miracles, the stigmata and the bleeding hearts. They wear inappropriate attire to enter San Lorenzo and Father Mencaroni spends much of an afternoon removing baseball hats and asking ladies to cover their legs and heads. The visitors spoon gelato from little cups and look for sweet bunches of fragola to adorn their rented tables. ‘How preferable life is here,’ they say. In the market on Wednesday a cheer suddenly went up and Elemme told Annette that the railway workers were going to strike for better pay. Uncle Marcello is still battling with the invasion of greenfly. He suspects these to be of foreign origin, having come in with the shipments of orchid bulbs sent by Vincenzo from South America. They are making Chantilly patterns out of all the leaves. In defeat, he has ordered chloroform to clean the bottoms of the trays. She feels the minuscule legs creeping on her neck and ears when she goes to the greenhouses, or, if it is not the flies, it is Mauri. Such are their lives.

The cimitero di campagna is deserted. Overhead swallows flit and flurry, going to and from their nests under the tiled roofs of the ruins. The sky is busy with feathers. It is a hot day. Annette takes off her scarf and puts it into her pocket. Also in the pocket is a wooden rosary, given to her by the nuns at her confirmation ceremony when she was twelve. It is cheap. Its beads pinch the skin of her neck, and she does not like to wear it. The sun begins to melt like warm caramel through her hair. She wonders again exactly what colour her hair is, whether it has lightened or darkened over the years. Her mother will not confirm whether it is corn-yellow, or flax, or the auburn of summer wheat. It is a vanity to ask such things, her mother says, and what does it matter if she can’t see it? But there are so many subtle colours in Annette’s head. They span like rainbows across her mind.

Annette can hear the fizzle and tock of fireworks, and the minute laughter of the boys down at the lake. Mauri will be with them. Perhaps he will be diving down through the cool water in search of lost jewellery. Or he will be lying, naked as Adam, on a green rock. After her report, she says a prayer for her father and crosses the cemetery to visit Signor Giorgio.

She still does not know if Signor Giorgio has a family to care for his niche. In the classroom he never mentioned a daughter or a granddaughter, living close by, or in the north. The sole evidence is that Tommaso has seen a weeping woman leaving the tomb. Annette has only ever heard someone taking a photograph close by-the pop of a shutter, the clicking of winding gear. Perhaps an admirer of his paintings. She wonders if the other children remember the artist as she does. She does not often see her old friends to ask. When they rush past her in the market on their way to school or on the way to mass they call to her, ‘Hello Netta, goodbye Netta.’ That is all. Perhaps they have forgotten the lessons, on how to copy a figure, how to paint the foam of the breaking sea. She sometimes pictures the Dutch still-lifes. She imagines elaborate bouquets, containing cherries and nesting parrots and English willow, all of this held in a large transparent urn, like a world made of glass. She can recall her tutor’s gentle instructions. ‘Do not be afraid to paint the reverse side of the sunflower,’ he once said. ‘It is just as worthy of your attention. You will already know the strength of its neck, how it keeps turning to face the sun wherever the sun is in the sky.’

His shadowy tomb is like the third season, even though it is summer. Dry leaves have blown inside, and crisp and curl on the floor, and the place smells smoky, like the smoke of Signor Giorgio’s clothes. The rustling of the beech trees by the cimitero gate is hushed. She has already told Signor Giorgio that in previous times beech leaves were used to stuff mattresses, and that the voices of lovers who once whispered under the trees can sometimes be heard whispering inside the bolsters. The sepulchre is a good place to come. It feels restful. His bones must have settled, she thinks. Into the bottle, which he gave her and she has given back, she places a single chrysanthemum, the first of the season. They will continue to flourish through to All Souls’ Day. ‘You are already dead,’ she says. ‘I do not wish it.’

As she leaves the tomb she can hear that she is not alone after all. Someone is whistling nearby. The tune has no melody, and the scale slides randomly up and down. It is a strange sound for the cimitero. She is used to the recital of elegies, to crying or prayers. She has heard singing from the old women who come to sweep the pathways, but only hymns. The whistling is too bold. Perhaps there will soon be an interment, she thinks. Perhaps the peck-deads are working in the corner, preparing a new chamber. It is hard to know from which corner the whistling is coming. She turns and tries to place it. After a moment it stops. Perhaps the peck-deads have seen her. But there is nothing, no footsteps, no respectful salutation to indicate neighbourly proximity. She wonders, was it only the warbling and trilling of a bird in the tall beeches beyond the little city of the dead? Perhaps.

She puts on her headscarf and ties it under her chin. She should not have taken it off; it is an informality of which her mother would not approve. She calls good day and takes a step towards the gate. The whistling begins again, closer this time, directly behind her. Or no, directly in front of her. She stands still. How strange. The notes are so agile and light; they skim round the marble sculptures and commemorative pictures like something winged and flying. If Tommaso were not sick, if he were here, he could be playing a trick. But he has never really been able to approach her stealthily, even with bare feet. She can always hear the scrape of his heels, his rustling T-shirt, his excited breath. She is sure he is in bed, reading a comic, or writing a story about bicycle races.

Again, the whistling stops. The warm air drifts. She can smell an extinguished candlewick, or the tannin of the leather factory in the next valley, a brief bitter scent. A cloud sails overhead on a high, rapid current. The sun disappears and returns to its full heat. Someone is here. She can feel it. Someone is here in the cimitero but will not speak or be polite. There is another shadow. She feels pressure, a pressure no greater than the shadow cast by one of the angels on the marble plinths. But this is a shadow coming from beneath, or within. Though the sun blazes hot on her head, she feels the shadow creeping up her legs. It cools her insides. She catches her breath and tries to divine a presence. But there’s no ache in the air of someone following a lover. There is no mood of ill will, as when a pickpocket works the market. There is no gesture of friendship, like that of the accordion player from Toulouse, who sang ‘Remember Me’ to her after she had given him a coin.

The shadow has no mood or purpose. No one is advancing to rest a hand on her shoulder. No one is preparing to greet her or say, yes, the day is fine. No one is slipping shyly away through the rusty gates, leaving the hinges creaking softly behind them. The shadow has not moved–it is simply attending to her, chilling her warm skin, spreading into her core.

Her heart begins to shrink. Perhaps. Perhaps it is Him. But he has never come so far. He has never followed her further than the market, which is close to San Lorenzo, close to his slippery lair in the oil paint. If her little brother were here, he could hold her hand and tell her what he sees. He could even calculate the distance of the cimitero from the church, saying it is approximately a kilometre, or it is five furlongs, having copied the charts on the walls of the Montessori, and she might take comfort in this. How far can the Bestia walk when he stirs within the old varnish and releases himself from the tarnished cage? To the greenhouse garden where her father was killed? To the edge of the summer theatre where he watches Annette on her stool? Here?

If she were to reach down now would there be a trail of saliva on the dusty path, drooled from the gaping hole of his mouth? If she reached out a hand would she find the face with its contortion of muscle and its rasping thorns? Would there be the bloody stump of castration between his goat-hair legs? She listens to the almost silent, heat-slow day. She listens to the swallows overhead and a hawk crying over a warren on the hillside, to the droning of a long-legged insect between patches of ragwort and to the far-off detonation of fireworks. She puts a hand to her throat, but the rosemary spirit-stopper Uncle Marcello made for her is at home, lying safe in the drawer of her dresser. She would like it now, around her neck, or in her pocket, instead of the wooden rosary.

She holds her breath and steps forward. And then she steps again. ‘Is it you?’ she whispers. ‘Where are you? What do you want with me?’

There is no reply.

Last time you were up north, you went to see Nicki in the hospital. The truth is, you’d been avoiding it. You didn’t think you could face it, not with everything else that had happened, another dark chore amid so many. With Nicki you have always felt the urge to confess, to verbalise your troubles. She lies benignly in the starched bed, as if ready with atonement, and it’s easy to talk to her, easy to unload. Over the years you’ve confided lots of things. The rejected marriage proposal. Your feelings of fraudulency. How you might have been instrumental in the dissolution of a couple of Danny’s relationships. There’s no come-back. You are never judged. You aren’t even issued with penitentiaries.

But this recent corruption of life. Your brother’s accident. The fatalism. The infidelity. Where would you begin?

Anyway, you felt duty bound to visit her. You felt guilty. You’d just been to the cemetery with your mum and dad. It was a beautiful late spring day, warm by mid-morning. A few stray pieces of blossom were drifting from the trees alongside the crematorium. In the grounds of the cemetery, everything was shooting and budding, and the new lushness was like a country garden. There was a disturbing firmness to the headstones. The dead were staked down. Danny had been gone for seventeen weeks.

Your dad was limping around with his hands rammed into the front pouch of his denims, not really settling or saying anything, occasionally clearing his throat. You watched him pace a taut circumference around the grave, coming no closer than a few feet. There were patches of white in his sandy hair, nicotine stains on his beard. It suddenly occurred to you that your dad was old. He was heading toward seventy. You saw him reach into his pocket, take out a flask, and have a nip, and then another. He was blinking, as if he had grit in his eyes. Your mum set a jar of damson jam down next to Danny’s monument. She kissed her hand and touched the stone. Then she went to your father, took his hand, and brought his arm around her shoulders. They held on to each other.
We’ll see you back here in an hour,
your mum called to you.
Take your time.

You stood for a while, looking at the sprigs of grass trying to seed on the bald mound. There were cards and gifts, newly deposited. An unopened beer can. A takeaway fork speared into the earth. A ridiculous plastic toy with green troll hair. Debris left after a festival. There were messages too, like the notes that used to get pinned to the door of his flat at weekends-whimsical and un-profound.
Great shakes, Danny Boy, you wazzock. Hope you’re good and wasted now. Mackie. Still owe you a pint of Best, Daz.

After a few minutes you turned and walked out of the cemetery, through the park to the back of the hospital.

Nicki was in the same room that she has been in for years. She was surrounded, as ever, by photographs, teddy bears and flowers. On the table next to the bed was her CD player and the stack of albums she had listened to as a teenager. You inserted one and pressed play. You wondered how sick she was of hearing Joy Division. You sat down, picked up the hairbrush from the bed-stand, and ran it once through a lock of her hair. It was still beautiful.

An intense nausea flushed through you. You felt your face tingle and your mouth water. You fought against the sensation. The discomfort passed. You were surprised, the feeling was unusual-your stomach is strong and you are almost never sick. You pulled the brush through Nicki’s shiny hair once more, working a tangle loose. You looked at her, lying there. Her thin golden eyebrows, her snub nose, the skin smooth around her eyes. She is your age, but she looked like a girl, the muscles of her face blissful and unused. Again you felt like throwing up. You put the brush down and cupped your hands over your mouth, looked towards the door.

It came out of nowhere, the rage. Suddenly you wanted to slap her so hard. You felt such anger towards her. Her apathy, her indecision, her refusal to wake, get up and reclaim her life, or once and for all shut off. Surely there was some choice she could make, you thought, some flickering pilot light in her brain, that could be turned up, that could take charge, rousing her wasted limbs? All the years of stand-by, her visitors held like hostages in this room, ransomed by the slimmest of hopes, and equal to her in their impotency. All the years of dependency and money, waiting for her second coming.

Looking down at her, you couldn’t remember her at all, only that sharp feeling of terror as she struggled for air on the moor, as she buckled to her knees, her chest rising and falling massively, her trachea hissing, the snow blowing upwards around her. You couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like, only the words, when she called,
To you, Suze,
and passed the netball into the semicircle of the court so you could shoot at goal. You couldn’t remember her laughter in the toilets when you had to borrow tampons.

But you could remember Danny. You could remember counting all of Danny’s milk teeth with a finger, and wobbling the front ones loose, and how those pink dental tablets you were given to chew at school showed where he was missing plaque after he brushed. You could remember how he turned the pages of a book, pinching the paper together in the middle, and bunching each leaf over, and how his eyes seemed to bruise in their sockets after he’d been on a massive bender, and the way he would sneeze three times, always three, never just once or twice. You could remember a million tiny indelible details about his life, and all of this was useless, an encyclopedia of the redundant, because he was gone.

But there she was, on her back, blushing prettily, her hair growing longer every day. Nicki, still connected to life by some stubborn filament, holding the gift of the present with the loosest grip.

While you were sitting there, trying not to be sick, wanting to strike her, one of the nurses came in to rub her legs and drop saline into her eyes. She recognised you, asked how you were, thanked you for still coming all these years later. She chatted to you indiscreetly. She said Nicki had stopped getting periods now. They had done tests but there was nothing conclusive. It could be early menopause. It could be loss of bone marrow. She began to clean around the hole her food tube slotted into with a cotton swab.
Look. Your friend has brushed your hair, Nicki,
she said.
Isn’t that nice of her? I think it’s just like being Sleeping Beauty.

You wondered if that’s how the nurse really saw it: a coma like a fairytale curse. Meanwhile Nicki would be helped to eat and piss and cry. Her sores would be irrigated, her densities measured. Her family would bring her birthday cake and tell her the news and pretend she wasn’t catatonic. Inside the husk, she might be conscious of everything, the voices, the bathing, those morose repetitious lyrics. Her mind might be shrilling out its state of emergency in a pitch too high for the human ear to register.
Get me out. Get me out of here.
Or she might know nothing at all.

Next to her bed, as the nurse swabbed the distended ring of flesh, you bit your lip and hated her. You wanted to shout in her face, stick pins in her forehead, anything to get a response. You wanted to scream at her for not being Danny, stand up, and walk out. Of that day’s visits, you didn’t know which was worse-the flowering, planted graveyard to which you had just been, or this vacant form in the bed. Life is a joke, you thought. It is worthless. And there is no point. There is no point.

Your mum made a pot of herbal tea when you got back to the cottage and you sat with her at the kitchen table. The house was cold, the windows trickling with condensation. Neither of them ever notice the chill in the house the way you do now. The south is making you soft. Upstairs you could hear your dad clomping and banging in the studio, the deep drawers of his apothecary chest being jerked open and slammed shut.
Looking for something that probably never existed,
your mum said and smiled, all the tiny lines around her eyes creasing. She was tired, you could see that; her skin was unusually dry and her hair was greyer. Losing a son had altered her vitality; it had leached her lustre. But she was sitting erect in her usual chair by the range, her woollen jumper brightly flecked with blue and yellow, and she seemed to fit the room so well.

When you were a kid it was the same: she always matched the surroundings perfectly, wherever she was, in the garden, by the river, being blown about town when she was shopping. Sometimes she would seem almost to disappear, and then she would move, to fetch something or make something, and you would catch sight of her again, and you would be amazed by her camouflage. You always wanted to ask her how she could accept everything so gracefully, how she could belong?

She was your father’s exact opposite. Where he was extraordinarily plumed and song-filled, your mother was quiet and ordinary. They were like finches, the pair of them.

You watched her stirring the pot of tea, holding a strainer over the cup, the stream of yellow liquid directed perfectly, without a drop being spilled.
Do you want honey, poppet
? She asked as if giving you the option, knowing you take it, and already passing you the jar.

When you were younger she had experimented with Buddhism and had gone on a few retreats, leaving your dad to manage the household. You would hear nothing from her for three weeks. Sometimes you had imagined she’d left you all. No-left him, because he was so often overwhelming. The chaos was always restored within a few hours of her getting home; the beds straightened, the bread bin filled. She would talk about containers and cleansing, the way to breathe. Your dad joked that she was hinting about his homebrew and his rollies, but you could tell he was pleased. She was home and he was over the moon. Often you would see her meditating by the elm tree in the garth, cross-legged, in her moccasins.

She went with you every week to see Dr Dixon at the health clinic. She never went into town to kill the hour, was always there reading
Digest
magazines or bracken-control leaflets when you came back out into the waiting room. Or she’d be gazing at the stick insects twitching on their leaves, fascinated. You knew it bothered her, that she was not really convinced about the need for treatment. She was not one for interference. Later, she apologised for making you go.
We should have trusted you were going to be OK. I hope it wasn’t too awful. We weren’t trying to hurt you
.

She handed you the cup of tea and the wooden honey pestle.
Darling,
she said,
my darling,
and for a moment the maternal guard slipped, and you saw the rawness behind, as if half of her had been cut away. You stood up, walked round the table and hugged her. You were still hugging her when your dad came in.
Aha! Here you are, pet. In the artist’s fucking shoes, eh!
In his hand was a lumpy object wrapped in a piece of chamois leather. He stood in the middle of the room, shrugged his shoulders a couple of times like a magician preparing for a trick. Then he slowly turned back the corners of the wrapping, being a total ham. You were braced, as ever, for proportionate disappointment, for having to put up with some elaborate act, the gold-spun-from-straw routine. Inside the rag was a bottle. You looked at him blankly, waited for him to make his inevitable declaration, which of course he did.
It’s for the exhibition. I’ve hunted it out to loan it to you. Go on. Here.
He waved the bottle at you. After a moment’s hesitation you took it. It was a familiar item, the patchy glaze, the old-fashioned proportions. It had been in his studio for years, moving to various new locations around the messy, tobacco-stained room. For a while it had stood on the windowsill, then on the desk. It had been in the alcove next to the fireplace, holding his longest brushes and a dry teasel, part of the clutter, one of your dad’s many inexplicable collectables.
That old thing, Peter,
your mum said.

You heard yourself tut in that petulant way, and tried to explain the concept of the exhibition again. You tried to keep a pleasant tone, not turn into the sulky teenager you so often do when he makes a song and dance about something. You explained you couldn’t just put any old thing in the show. It had to have associative significance, and where possible, a certificate of authenticity. Van Gogh plus hanky. Magritte plus pipe. An instantly recognisable motif. The words came out wrong, sounded too harsh.

Silence. The usual, awkward interstices between you. You knew it could grow wider or it could come together, one of you had to make a move. Then your dad laughed a high-pitched, boomerang laugh that bounced off the ceiling and the walls and landed back inside him.
It’s not mine, Fanny Ann. He tapped his head. There is still a bit of computing left up there, you know. It’s Giorgio’s.
He rested a big paw on your shoulder, leant downwards conspiratorially and whispered.
Right though, you best say it’s from an anonymous donator, cause there was a bit of unofficial liberating
en Italia,
if you get my bloody drift.
He made a whistling sound. You heard yourself sigh.

You’d been there before, in this theatre of operations, a hundred times and more. Rationally, you knew what to do. Usually, it was not what you would do. What you would do was refuse to believe his yarn, his hokum, his stupendous bullshit. You’d tell him you weren’t seven years old any more, when your dad would go overboard trying to convince you he had known Wallis, Hughes, Warhol, all of them old pals, chums, brothers in arms. You would spit, and shout, and be irrationally annoyed. And this, in the fourth decade of your life, was still the usual drill.

But out of the corner of your eye you saw there were still a few old scabs on his knuckles from breaking stone in the quarry the day that Danny died. They were brown and cracked and dry, and it looked as if he had been worrying them. He had broken one of his own beloved rules–
An artist must always protect his hands
–and so you surprised yourself. You agreed. You said you’d check with Angela and if she had no objection, it could go into the show.