The Late Hector Kipling (30 page)

I slide it from the packet and roll it around in my fingers. I examine it closely. The speckled filter, the millimetre seam, the ochre leaves squeezed into the barrel, the word ‘Camel’ and the word ‘Light’. I gaze at the flame, violet and lemon, passing into amber and grey. I take it in
and, at long last, the smoke, it seems, has little resonance with the shape of my ghost.

The clang of the lift. His Docs on the tiles. His key in the lock. My lofty sublimation. My transcendent otherness. My arse on the wood, ten feet off the ground. I don’t care. I really don’t care. I will forgive him.

‘Eleni!’ I shout. ‘Eleni.’ My mortification is so fantastically spectacular that the stepladder is suddenly incapable of maintaining the perpendicular and I find myself flailing through space into some biblical abyss and smash my skull on the sharp edge of Eleni’s piano.

‘Hello, Hector,’ she says, nonplussed at my shabby descent, as though she expected nothing less. Her face is ravaged by tears. The word ‘erosion’ springs to mind.

‘Eleni,’ I groan, cupping my head, ‘what are you doing here?’

She drops her bags and collapses to the ground. Her hair completely covers her face, hanging down, brushing against the boards. She looks like she’s just been picked off by a sniper. I’d say that she’d passed out were it not for the fact that her fingers are clawing at the wood – her nails chewed down to the wrists. I suspect she doesn’t like my new haircut.

It wasn’t like I expected. Like everything else in life it failed to live up to expectations. When Eleni finally announced that her mother was dead I felt like my brain (or my heart – what
is
the difference?) sent out dishevelled and ill-equipped search parties in a quest for a shard of emotion. As it went, Eleni presented her predicament and I responded with a specific degree of equanimity that might well be read, by some, as a kind of inhuman indifference. I don’t know, I’m still trying to work it all out. All I can say for now is that I lit another fag.

Sofia, extinguished by fire, had struggled, in vain, with the cheerless shadow. Yiorgos had drunk himself into the last corner of his taverna and shrunk to the size of a seed. Meanwhile Eleni had wept the length
and breadth of Crete, dismantled and scattered, whispering to her shoes, spitting at insects and praying on her knees to the cruel and idiotic Aegean Sea. All this as I had busied myself, back home, scaling the twin faces of cowardice and lust. Well done, Hector. Nicely done.

‘Where have you been? Why haven’t you called me? Why did you never call me?’ She’s back on her feet. Actually that’s not quite accurate. She’s back on her knees. But I interpret it as being back on her feet, considering.

‘I’ve been in hospital!' I plead. ’I've only just got back from the hospital!’

‘What?’ she whimpers, through a fat bubble of tears.

‘When the lunatic attacked my painting I was knocked down by a car. I chased him from the gallery and I was hit by a car ... a Volvo, and I’ve been in hospital ever since.’

Eleni wipes at her face with her exquisite little hands. I love Eleni. I love her more than breath. Eleni would never set fire to my nipples.

‘Eleni... Eleni, angel, I’m so sorry’ I hold her in my arms, rocking her.

‘Oh, Hector,’ she wails, ‘Mama is dead. My mother is dead.’

Yes, well that’s obviously terrible news. Horrible news. No, I mean it, really, really, the most awful, atrocious, abominable and tragic news. But all I can think of right now is that just a few feet away – just a few minutes away – Rosa Flood is naked, tattooed and recumbent in my bath. Our bath. My and Eleni’s bath. Oh Good God! Oh Jesus Fucking Costello! I take a deep sniff of Eleni’s hair. It smells of aeroplanes and luggage. It smells of Bibles and morphine. It smells of distance, lentils, Chianti and death.

‘Why have you come back?’ I say. The moment it leaves my lips I know that it’s the wrong thing to say.

‘I had to come back for some documents and keepsakes. And to see you,’ whispers Eleni, ‘I have to fly straight back tomorrow. I need
to be there for my father. He’s very lost. I just need to pick up a few ... Hector, Hector, please ...’ she sobs, ‘Hector, please come out with me. I need you. Hector, please come back with me.’

‘Of course,’ I say, and kiss her scalp. ‘Of course I’ll come back with you.’

‘Oh, Hector,’ she moans, ‘oh, Hector.’

‘Eleni,’ I whisper, ‘Eleni, Eleni, Eleni.’

She looks up at me. ‘What happened?’ She sniffs and wipes at her eyes. ‘What happened to your hair? You’ve shaved off all your hair.’

‘They did it at the hospital.’

‘Why?’

Good question. ‘Er ... they thought they were going to have to operate, but at the last minute I perked up a bit and so . . . they er . . . apologized. Gave me it in a bag. Y’know, like they do with gallstones.’ What the fuck am I talking about?

I don’t know what’s going on with Rosa. Maybe she’s asleep. Maybe she’s heard everything and is just keeping still and silent. I don’t know. I have no idea. Let me announce it now, once and for all: I, Hector Kipling, have not one fucking idea about how to proceed.

‘And what is this?’ says Eleni, clocking the butchered settee.

‘It’s Lenny’s new piece. Lenny’s left Brenda and I’ve told him he can stay here till he sorts it all out.’

She gazes through her tears at the whiskered flesh settee and frowns. ‘It looks like skin, hairy skin.’

‘I think that’s the idea. Naked Settee. There are ten million stories in the Naked Settee, and this has been one of them.’

‘What?’

‘
Naked City,
it was an old American TV show.’ She just gawps at me, askance. ‘Forget it, it was a bad joke.’ I suppose this is no time to be cracking bad jokes.

She walks over and examines it a little more closely. ‘Why does it have a window?’

‘You tell me.’

She puts her hands up to her face and resumes her grief, hopeless and small.

‘Eleni, don’t,’ I whisper, walking over and taking her back into my arms. ‘Please don’t.’

‘It reminds me of my mother,’ she sobs and I can feel her tears soaking through my shirt and onto my breasts. I don’t really understand how Lenny’s horrible settee reminds her of her mother. What does she mean? Was she a hairy woman?

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t explain. Everything is reminding me of my mother. She was naked when she died, I don’t want to see this thing.’

‘Listen, I don’t want to see this thing. And I very much doubt that the Turner judges or the Great British public will want to see this thing, but we’re all lumbered with it.’

‘She was naked and burned and the hospital was so hollow and cold. There were people screaming in every room.’

Reminded of my own recent experiences, I blurt out, a little indelicately perhaps, ‘Oh! Oh, yeah, Kirk’s in hospital as well!’

‘Kirk?’

‘And Dad! So is my dad.’ Sensing that I might be sounding inappropriately buoyant, I add,‘... as it happens.’

She pulls away from me and looks up, deep into my eyes in such a baffling manner that I am not sure whether she is issuing consolation or revulsion. It seems to go on for hours. At last she looks away and asks, ‘Why is your father in hospital?’

I tell her the whole tale of the settee and Monger, and the burglary and Sparky’s murder, and she seems to soften a little, though she still seems a mite suspicious about some of the holes in the story, regarding how I was able to stage-manage this whole conceit, involving numerous phone calls, when I had just told her, no less than five minutes ago, that I had only just been discharged from hospital, where they had shaved
my head and let me take the hair home in a bag. And who can blame her for suspecting that this whole picaresque fable is nothing other than the desperate ravings of an emotionally challenged halfwit? Not me, for one. What a girl.

At the conclusion of my exemplum she utters not one word, but lights a cigarette, gathers up her bags, kicks the hairy settee with unnerving ferocity, and shuffles off in the direction of our bedroom.

In the wasteland between my throat and my groin, all hell has broken loose. I’m lying on the floor staring at my fatuous red and black canvas. I begin to wonder how I might get my hands on a flamethrower. Eleni’s still in the bedroom, presumably changing out of her clothes. Fuck knows what Rosa’s up to. I haven’t heard one squeak. My life has become a ticking bomb. I suppose that one’s life is always a ticking bomb, nestled in the breast, but my bomb has never ticked as loud as this. Tin fists and jackboots down Blackpool’s gravel promenade. I can see no way out of this, and it’s making me tremble. It’s really quite upsetting, all this trembling business. Trembling and sweating, I begin to sneeze, just as I’m beginning to imagine how, precisely, the axe might fall – for fall it must.

‘Hector, what is this?’ says Eleni, emerging from the bedroom in her clean peach pyjamas.

‘What’s what?’

She’s carrying a red rucksack. She marches over and lays it at my feet. ‘This,’ she says, and frowns.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘what is it?’

‘Hector, I don’t like this.’

‘What don’t you like?’

She fluffs open the shiny nylon edges of the bag, revealing bottles and tubes. ‘Hector, all my things are in this bag. I find this bag in the bedroom cupboard and all my things from the bathroom are in here.’

I want to vomit.

‘Are they?’

She grips the bag at its base and upends it. ‘Hector, why is all this in a bag?’

‘Because er . . .’ I say. ‘Because er . . .’ I reach out to her. I try to smother her in my arms. ‘Eleni, Eleni, I’m so sorry about your mother.’

‘You’ve put all my things ... all my things from the bathroom into a rucksack. Why have you done that, Hector?’

‘Because I was packing. I was packing, ready to come out and see you, and ... I thought you might want some of this stuff, so ...’

‘And why are there no sheets on the bed?’

I hug her even tighter. ‘Because I was in the middle of changing them.’

‘But why is the mattress all stained? There’s blood on the mattress.’

‘Because I was hit by a fucking Volvo, remember?’ This is shouted into her ear. It is the most ridiculous sentence of my life thus far.

She pulls away, violently away, and strides off to the other side of the room. She slumps down in the chair and curls up into a ball. I decide not to follow.

Silence.

‘So you’ve stopped doing big heads?rsquo; says Eleni, and I assume she’s talking about the new painting.

‘I’m thinking about it,' I say. ’I'm thinking about stopping the big heads.’ I look over. Her back is turned to the painting. She’s not talking about the painting. She’s sat up in the chair with my sketch pad open on her lap.

‘Who is this?’ she says.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I say. ‘It’s just a study from a photo in a magazine.’

‘A pornographic magazine?’

Oh, if only my confession were that simple.

‘No, it looks like that, doesn’t it? I know. No, it’s from some art magazine. I was just studying form.’

She looks closer and begins to shake a little. ‘If this is from a magazine, then why is the corner of this chair in the picture?’

‘Er ...’

‘Hector,’ her voice is breaking up, ‘Hector, who is this?’

‘I’ve told you,’ I say, rising through the octaves, ‘I have no idea. The er ... chair is there to suggest a sense of scale. To lend it... depth, er ... perspective.’

She stands up and runs across the room. ‘I’m going to be sick!’ she declares, her hand over her mouth.

‘Eleni,’ I call after her, ‘Eleni, I’m telling you the truth,’ though I don’t know why I bother, cos she’s on her way to the bathroom, and in about three seconds the sham of the remark will be exposed by fact. I follow close behind.

At first she doesn’t even notice. She runs directly to the toilet and collapses onto her knees. I put my arms around her waist and hold on tight as she empties her stomach into the pan. Awful, bestial, liquid convulsions, one after the other, four in all, and then she keeps her head down, awaiting the fifth. Her abdomen spasms beneath my fingers and I turn my head to look at Rosa. Now there’s a painting. The mistress of all masterpieces. Fuck Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Leonardo, fuck ’em all. Rosa’s face in this moment. What new, cruel species of smile is this? She makes the enigma of
La Gioconda
look like Lucille Ball. I can’t believe I’m here, living in this century, residing at this address, kneeling on this floor, holding onto these hips, staring into those eyes, suffering the punches of this worthless heart. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. But there you go, I’m stuck with it. I press my head against Eleni’s shoulder and vomit down her back.

It’s all going very well.

Idea For a Piece: Large white gallery furnished to resemble a hospital ward. Six empty beds. On the seventh bed lies the artist of the piece, dying. Catheters and masks. Books and flowers. Grapes and machines. The glowing green blip of a monitor. The bleached floor. The finished
meal. A solitary bluebottle, let loose. Footless slippers. Rings removed. The artist dying. Really dying. Call it
About Time.

I’m out on the street with Eleni. Will this rain never stop? The taxi is waiting, its diesel purr echoing against the cobbles.

‘Eleni, don’t go!’

‘Of course I must go!’

‘No, no, you absolutely must not. Not now.’

‘How can I stay?’

‘In a million ways!’

‘There is not one way I can stay!’

‘You have to let me explain.’

‘No, Hector, you have to let me explain. You have taken everything that was having a past, and everything that was having a future, and you have screwed them up into the ball and kicked this ball through a sewer so it has turned into nothing. You have treated me without respect, you have abused everything that we ever had. Well, I hope that you have now what you were looking for, for all this time. I hope now that you can paint, Hector. I hope now that you can paint with the passion, as much as anyone has ever painted. As long as you’re sure that my mother is enough for you.’

‘What do you mean, am I sure that your mother is enough for me? What does that mean?’