Asunder (3 page)

Like some of our more frequent visitors, a handful of individuals who’d come in regularly to look at people, not paintings, I sensed that Crooke found an escape from solitude in our museum, drawn to the airy space and soothed by its ebb and flow.

Roland too loved the ebb and flow, or so he claimed, Roland the former speed freak in search of stillness. He was proud of his new set of teeth, years of savings turned to enamel, and after speaking he’d clench his jaw to make sure nothing had come loose. His real teeth had gone years ago, first to grinding and then to rot, but now he was calm, as if the accelerator had been removed from his system. Once Daniel left the Gallery he quickly became my favourite colleague, and certainly the most handsome, with a face that looked more painted than real. As he stood between rooms, tall and creaky like an old wooden puppet, I’d scarcely notice he was in uniform.

The 38 bus deposited me steps away from where Essex Road joins Cross Street, the stop and short route home so familiar I could trace them in my sleep, though I’d be loath to miss my nightly dose of Get Stuffed, the taxidermy shop on the corner. It was always closed—visitors by appointment only—yet through the rhombus-shaped grille, which broke up the already bizarre view into kaleidoscopic fragments, I would peer in to see a pricked ear, a snout, a stripe or a raised paw, and the lifeless tails, now little more than stopped markers of time.

Whenever I looked in my gaze would land on something disquieting, whether the two mounted zebra heads or the dangling bat with outstretched wings or the mother kangaroo with the motionless baby in her pouch. At night the shop would remain lit up, the only concession the owner made between his animals and the outside world. That evening I cast a sidelong glance as I walked past, then stopped and did a double take. For a few seconds I was certain I saw Leighton Crooke’s figure there at the back, stuffed and inert and sitting upright, but when I looked again I realised it was only the imprint left by the owner, a man with raccoon-ringed eyes whom I’d often see in the morning hunched over his desk at the far end, an uninviting silhouette surrounded by his menagerie.

I ran into my flatmate as soon as I walked through the door. She had either just arrived or been waiting impatiently for my return.

‘Have you been at the moths again?’ she asked, her lips and teeth stained red with wine. Jane worked as a scout and publicist at Hunchback Records, a small independent label; her evenings were filled with gigs and record release parties and she was rarely home before one. That night she was back early.

I removed my coat and shook my hair out from under my hat.

‘One of the strips in the living room’s missing.’

‘I may have borrowed it.’

‘You’re meant to replace them.’

‘I was going to, this weekend.’

‘Well, in the meantime who knows how many moths will get at my clothes.’

‘Jane, it’s November.’

‘You know every season is moth season here.’

She was right. We had them all year round.

‘I’ll buy you a couple of new ones tomorrow.’

‘Have you taken any others?’

‘No, I only needed one for now.’

Jane’s bedroom was divided in half by two clothes racks from which her shirts and dresses hung colour-coordinated, black items at one end slowly conceding to colour, and in the middle of each rack was an adhesive white strip on which constellations of little brown moths had met their fate. At least once a day she would check these strips, counting to see whether there were any additions, moths angled skywards, tiny papery aeroplanes grounded at takeoff, their antennae raised, bodies glued flat. She had also laid out strips in the living room and kitchen; for my own reasons, I would check on them too.

I promised I would replace it the following day.

Satisfied with my answer, she turned towards her room, but before leaving asked whether I’d like to accompany her to Camden the following Sunday to buy a corset. Despite having made a point, for years, of not returning to Camden, I said yes. I’d tell her about my semi-eventful day another time.

I crossed our small living room and closed the window Jane had left open, shutting out the traffic sounds. Our flat lay on the noisy Essex Road, directly above the Sea Dragon aquarium, whose Chinese owner, purveyor of cold water, marine and tropical fish, would spend his days in the entrance of his shop with his arms crossed. As far as I could tell this was his only activity, to gaze longingly across the street at the successful fishmonger Steve Hatt, purveyor of dead and for the most part monochrome fish with splashes of pink and silver, his merchandise infinitely more in demand than the living harlequin kind. We never went to either place; the closer you live to a shop, the less likely you are to enter.

In my room I headed straight to the shelf on the wall, to the right of my bed, and stopped. From one collection to the other, that was the way, and only very occasionally did I feel like prying open a space between the two in that nebulous area called real life.

There they lay, my eighteen miniature landscapes, in their current semi-random order, their slopes and plateaus rammed into smaller dimensions, their geological memory handed to them all at once. I picked up an eggshell and tilted it towards the light, admiring the autumn landscape that would never meet winter, fiery leaves the size of rice grains forever fastened to mini branches, the painted gold sky unsilenced by any solstice or atmospheric disturbance. This autumn eggshell was the first I’d crafted, before making spring, and, months later, winter and summer, always indifferent to the real season at hand.

I’d then fashioned a mountain, coated with real soil and faded grass, its peak a powdery white, a moth glued halfway up its steep face in perpetual ascent. And then warmer scenarios. A volcano with its upper and lower mantle, marbled crust and chamber of magma. A desertscape that lay somewhere outside time, its pinkish sand in permanent undulation.

Two seascapes: choppy waves of crystallised sugar, boats with slanted masts and torn sails of gauze. For the dark clouds pressing down on the horizon I’d rubbed cigarette ash on to tufts of cotton and flecked the borders with ink, then suspended them with nearly invisible threads. Skies hooked up to backboards, seas tethered to a tiny plank.

All was possible, and nothing.

After a year or two of open landscapes on boards I turned my attention towards interiors. The first was a grotto in an eggshell, with a jagged tooth from my parents’ old cat glued to the centre. Then, a cave with miniature wax stalactites and stalagmites inhabited by tiny liquorice bats. A pale blue eggshell with a small door gave on to an interior night sky, the stars dots of silver metallic marker on a background of Indian ink. A low Dutch horizon, with toothpick windmills, hinted at human presence and endeavour minus the actual humans to complicate matters.

No human figures. Only moths. The idea originated when I moved to Essex Road. First, from a sign in the window of Get Stuffed assuring customers that animals weren’t ever sacrificed in the name of taxidermy and that many of the specimens such as foxes had come from roadkill—and then when I saw Jane and her moth strips. Yes, cruel, but at least I put the cruelty to use. So I added these stilled lives to my still lifes, and I liked the results. Let them die for something.

With my pair of little nail scissors I would cut round the outline of their bodies, the fatal strip serving as a ready mount. At first I’d tried to detach them but their wings would crumble between my fingers. Once I’d cut one out I would then paste it on to a desert, mountain, a ship at sea.

Over the months the moth would slowly, very gradually, decompose, coating everything in a fine brown sparkly powder, and then the time would come to check on the strips again, the pheromones having continued to issue their wicked siren call. I don’t know what would happen were I to stop living with Jane, whether I would go out and buy them myself; it was simply part of the ecosystem within the flat.

The landscapes came naturally to me. From the start, it was as if a mysterious hand had taken hold of mine and directed it. Without the help of a manual I’d known where to cut an eggshell, in which direction to make the incision, how to gently detach a quarter or a half. First I’d make a hole at the top, tip the egg over and empty its final contents with a syringe. Once it was clean and dry I’d cut and fortify, with glued paper or varnish. At first I used the sharpest knife in the kitchen but after some research went out and bought myself an oblique burin, its steel blade slicing happily along the calibration lines I’d marked on the shell. I would carve through the centre halfway horizontally, then halfway vertically, and remove one of the upper quarters so that the bottom half remained, ready to welcome its features.

Emptied, strengthened, given a new horizon. A strip of blue paper, the sky. A strip of white, a coat of winter. A strip of green, an untrampled field. A square of black, a patch of night. I would insert mountains of cork, lakes of pressed aluminium foil, trees of cotton impaled on matchsticks. The stands for the eggshells were cardboard, little circular pedestals on which each oval was balanced.

By the end of each week a fine layer of dust would come to settle over everything, gathering more thickly in the gaps and ridges between topographical features, and I’d use a special cloth to remove it. This handmade collection of mine, eighteen and slowly growing, formed a nuclear centre into which everything fed back, and when I returned home from a day’s work or an evening out I would head straight over. Time was collapsed into them, the smaller, the more infinite, and every now and then I’d hold up a magnifying glass to one to see whether over the years some secret message had surfaced but I never found anything, and of course magnification tends to dent fantasy rather than enlarge it.

Sometimes I would adjust one, inspired by a detail I’d noticed in a painting or else simply aligning things with my current mood, for I hated bucolic landscapes when I was feeling stormy, and stormy landscapes when I was feeling calm. I’d tear off a few leaves and scatter them on the ground, or loosen some sand in the desert, tiny acts of immense satisfaction.

That evening I held up the volcano, one of my favourites, noticing how much dust had collected in the crater and how the moth on its side would soon have to be replaced, since a bit of its wing was missing or, rather, had crumbled away. I reached for a tissue and carefully cleaned out the crater’s mouth, the red paint intensifying almost immediately as if the volcano itself were becoming active.

Mornings when I’d emerge from Green Park Tube and into the thrum of Piccadilly towards Trafalgar Square I would often pause outside Fortnum & Mason with my coffee and stare at the lavish window displays, imagining the symphony with which the glass panes would shatter and splinter into a thousand tiny shards littering the pavement with fractured light, the same shop windows into which my great-grandfather Ted would’ve gazed decades and decades before, when he too was a warder at the National Gallery.

I considered myself fortunate to be connected via my lineage to one of the most significant incidents in our museum. Nothing could rival the story Ted had experienced first-hand, and over the decades the details, reviewed a thousand times in my mind, grew so familiar they almost became my own.

Until the last days of his life he could remember what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning of 10 March 1914, and the southerly wind that blew into London as he kissed my great-grandmother goodbye and set out for work. Yet Ted wasn’t the only one making his way towards the National Gallery at half past nine. As he travelled down Piccadilly a small woman in grey was taking the back streets, crossing Soho at a brisk pace, scarcely aware of the shops awakening around her, bisecting Leicester Square in a hurried diagonal. Small in size and fitted neatly into her skirt and coat, she cut a figure so demure that people would scarcely have noticed her.

Upon reaching Trafalgar Square she slowed her steps and entered the National Gallery through the main door like everyone else. Entry was free on Tuesdays yet it was still early, a few minutes past ten, and visitors had only just started to trickle in. She toured the rooms, taking in the familiar paintings, paused in Room 17, lingered elsewhere with her sketchbook.

Noon drew closer. People started heading out for lunch. The woman in grey returned to Room 17 and walked slowly over towards Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, which hung on the north wall on the right-hand side. Purchased for £45,000 by public subscription eight years earlier, the painting drew large numbers of visitors and was the artist’s only surviving nude. On the plush seat in front of her, two large men with broad shoulders sat staring ahead.

The woman started to sketch. One of the men rose from his seat and wandered out. The other crossed his legs and raised a newspaper to his face. This very paper, across whose front page her name would be emblazoned the following day, conveniently hid her from view.

The first blow shattered the thick protective panel. She was experienced in the shattering of glass, mostly in the way of shop windows, but marvelled at how easily it yielded. The plate, one third of an inch thick, cracked in all directions. At first, the seated man—a detective assigned, with his colleague, precisely because of the suffragette threat—thought it was the skylight, which was being repaired that morning, and rushed to where a ladder had been left propped against the wall. From the opposite end of the room a warder, alerted to the drama at hand, started to rush over but slipped on the polished wooden floor and, as is often the way in history, this slowed him down for a few critical seconds.

The next six or seven blows were to the canvas itself. With her meat cleaver the young woman started at the nape of Venus’s neck, then on to the spot between her creamy white shoulders, then downwards, aiming wherever her wrist felt pulled. She kept plunging and plunging, continually amazed at the efficiency of this small instrument she had bought with her last shillings at the ironmonger’s on Theobald’s Road. Fastened inside her sleeve with a chain of safety pins, a light tap to the last pin was all it had taken to release it.