How to Be Good (31 page)

There's a chair in front of the picture, and I walked towards it to have a sit-down. And as I got closer, I could see that the picture was made up of hundreds – thousands, maybe millions – of little squares, like the mosaics I pinched from the Roman ruins. And when I got really close, I could see that these millions of little squares were actually little pictures, and every single little picture had at least one female breast in it. So  . . . you know those pictures that are made up of dots? Well, that's how this Jesus picture was done, except all the dots are nipples. And that's what the picture's called –
NippleJesus
. There were big breasts and small breasts, and big nipples and small nipples, and black breasts and white breasts. And some of the pictures had as many as four breasts in them, and I could see then that all of the pictures were stills from porn mags, and he'd cut them all up and stuck them on. Must have taken him years. So now I understood what the sign was about.

I hated the picture then. Two minutes ago I'd liked it, now I hated it. And I hated the bloke who'd done it, too. Wanker. I went to have a look at the name of the artist, and it turned out to be a woman. Martha Marsham. How can you be a woman and do that? I thought. I could have understood some bloke doing it, some bloke with too many dirty magazines and no girlfriend. But a bird? And I hoped that someone did manage to fuck the picture up somehow, and if they did, I said to myself, I wouldn't try to stop them. I
might even give them a hand. Because that is offensive, isn't it, a Jesus made out of nipples? That's out of order.

One thing I forgot to say before: this was about six o'clock in the evening, and the exhibition hadn't opened to the public yet. It was opening the next day, but we'd been called in to do the first-night party. I was actually still looking at all the little pictures when the first people came in, holding wine glasses. I felt a bit of a tosser, like I'd been caught looking at dirty pictures, which is actually what I was doing, if you think about it. Or even if you don't. I stopped looking, quick, and stood by the chair with my hands behind my back, looking straight ahead, like I was on sentry duty, while these two people, a man and a woman, looked at the picture.

'It's rather lovely, isn't it?' said the woman. She was about my age, short hair, quite posh.

'Is it?' The bloke didn't seem too sure, so I decided I liked him more than her, even though he had floppy hair and braces and a suit.

'Don't you think?'

He shrugged, and they left the room. There was none of that stuff, the stuff they take the piss out of in TV comedies, where they stroke their chins and talk bollocks. (There never is, in my experience, which has now lasted two days. Most people don't say anything much. They look and they go. If you ask me they're scared of talking bollocks, which pisses me off, because once I was sat here for a while I wanted the bollocks. Something to laugh at. But there isn't any.) The next couple were younger, early twenties, studenty types, and they were more interested in me than the picture.

'Fucking hell,' said the bloke.

'What?'

'Look at him.'

And the girl looked at me, and laughed. It was like I was part of the exhibition, and I couldn't hear what they were saying.

'Well,' she said. 'Can you blame them?'

And then they went, too. By this stage, I was starting to feel a bit sorry for this Martha woman. I mean, you spend fucking who knows how long doing this thing and people come in here, look at me, laugh, and then fuck off again. I might ask her for half her royalties, or whatever it is she gets.

The moment the students left, the curtain swished back, and I heard this woman's voice going 'Ta-ra!', and then a whole group of people came in – two younger guys, an older couple, and a young woman.

'Oh, Martha,' the older woman said. 'It's amazing. That'll get them going.' So I looked at the group, and straight away I guessed it was her mum and dad, her boyfriend, and maybe her brother. Martha is about thirty, and she doesn't really look like I thought she'd look – no dyed hair, no pierced nose, nothing like that. She looks normal, really. She was wearing this long, green, sort of Indian skirt and what looked like a bloke's pinstripe jacket, and she's got long hair, but. . . she's nice-looking. Friendly.

I wondered for a moment whether her mum and dad knew about the nipples and all that, because I liked the picture when I first came into the
room. But then I realized that was stupid, and she would have told them something about it before they came, or ages and ages ago. So what kind of parents were these? I know what I would have got if I'd told my dad I was making a picture of Jesus out of women's breasts. He probably would have wanted to see the breasts, but he would have given me a pasting for the Jesus bit. So I looked at Martha's mum and dad and tried to work them out. Her dad was tall, and wearing jeans, and he had long grey hair in a ponytail; her mum was wearing jeans too, but she looked a bit more like somebody's mother than he looked like somebody's father. They all looked like they were artists, though. They looked like they all sat around at home smoking dope and painting. Which was why no one had given her a back-hander for making a Jesus out of porn, probably.

'I want a photo,' Martha said. 'With all of us in it.' And then she looked at me. 'Do you mind?'

'No,' I said.

'I'm Martha, by the way.'

'Dave.'

'Hello, Dave.' We shook hands, and then she gave me her camera, and I took a picture of them all, standing there grinning and pointing, and I didn't know whether it was right, what with the kind of picture it was. But at that precise moment, I wished that I knew them better, or people like them, because they seemed nice, and happy, and interesting. I wanted a dad with a grey ponytail instead of a miserable old git who was always going on about the fucking Irish and the fucking blacks; it seemed to me that if I'd had a dad like that, I wouldn't have ended up going into the Army, which was the worst mistake I ever made.

I wanted to ask them questions. I wanted to ask her, Martha, why she'd wanted to do what she'd done, and why it had to be nipples, and why it had to be Jesus, and whether she actually wanted to upset people. And I wanted to ask them whether they were ashamed of her, or proud of her, or what. But I didn't ask anything, and nothing they said made me any the wiser; after the photos they talked about where they were going to eat, and whether someone else that they knew had come to the party, and then that sort of thing. Before they went, Martha came over to me and kissed me on the cheek, and said, 'Thank you.' And I went, you know, 'Oh, that's OK.' But I was really pleased that she'd done it. It made me feel special, like I had a proper, important job to do.

Martha smiled, and I was left on my own again. I told Lisa about the picture when I got home that night, after the party. She couldn't believe it – she said it was disgusting, and how come it was on the wall in a famous gallery. For some reason I found myself sort of defending it, taking Martha's side. I don't know why. Maybe I fancied her a bit, maybe I liked the look of her family – maybe I trusted them, and, like, took my lead from them. Because I knew they were nice people, and if they didn't see anything wrong with
NippleJesus
, then maybe there wasn't anything. And anyway, the stuff that
Lisa was coming out with  . . . It was just plain ignorant. 'You should take it outside when no one's looking and smash it to bits,' she said.

'After all that work she's put in?' I said.

'That's got nothing to do with it,' she said. 'I mean. Hitler put in a lot of work, didn't he?'

'What harm is she doing you?' I asked her. 'You don't have to go and look at it.'

'Well, I don't like knowing it's there,' she said. 'And I paid for it. Out of my taxes.'

Out of her taxes! How much of her taxes went towards
NippleJesus
? She sounded like one of those lunatics you hear on radio phone-ins. I got twopence out of my pocket and threw it at her. 'There,' I said, 'there's your tax back. And you're making a profit.'

'What you gone all like this for?' she asked.

'Because I think it's good,' I said. 'Clever.'

Lisa didn't think it was clever. She thought it was stupid. And I thought she was stupid, and told her, and by the time we went to bed we weren't speaking to each other.

 

So yesterday morning, I get on the bus to go to work, and I pick up the paper that someone's left on the seat, and there it is, my painting, all over page seven. 'PROTESTERS TARGET SICK PICTURE', it says, and then there's all this stuff about what a disgrace it is, and people from the Church and the Conservative party going on about how it shouldn't be allowed, and someone from the police saying that they might want to interview Martha and maybe press charges of obscenity. And I read it, and I think, I've never been in the news before. Because it is me, sort of. That's my room there, my private space, and I've even started to think of the picture as mine, in a weird sort of way. Probably no one apart from Martha has spent as long looking at it as I have, and that makes me feel protective of it, kind of thing. (Which is just as well, when you think about it, seeing as that's my job.) I don't like these people saying it's sick, because it is and it isn't, and I don't like the police saying they're going to charge Martha with obscenity, and I don't like the idea that they're going to take it out of the exhibition, because it says outside the door that you shouldn't go in if you think you might not like it. So why go in? I want people to see what I saw: something that's beautiful if you look at it in one way, from a distance, and ugly if you look at it in another, close up. (Sometimes I feel that way about Lisa. When she walks into the room when we're just about to go out, and she's got her make-up on and she's done her hair and that, you'd think she could be a model. And sometimes I wake up in the night and I roll over and she's an inch away from me, and she's got bad breath and she's snoring a bit, and you'd think  . . . Well, never mind what you'd think, but you wouldn't think she'd make much of a model, anyway. So maybe Martha's picture, it's sort of like that a bit.) But if these people have their way, no one's going to see
anything, and that can't be right. Not after all that work. All that cutting up and sticking on.

 

Did you know you couldn't smoke in an art gallery? Neither did I. Fucking hell.

 

When I got there, there was already a crowd outside. Some of them were people queuing to see the exhibition, and some of them were protesters – they had placards and they were singing hymns – and there were TV crews, and photographers, and it all looked a bit of a mess. I just pushed through them and knocked on the front door and showed my pass through the glass and one of the guys let me in.

'You're in for a busy day,' one of the others said when I went to change into my gear, and I thought, yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Nothing much happened at first. A steady stream of people came in and looked, and a couple of them sort of clucked, but what's really clever about the picture is that you have to get close up to get offended, because if you stand at the back of the room you can't see anything apart from the face of Christ. So it makes the cluckers look like right plonkers, because they have to go and shove their nose up against the painting to see the nipples, and you end up thinking they're perverts. You know, first they have to ignore the sign on the door telling them not to go in, and then they have to walk the length of the room, and then they go, 'Oh, disgusting.' So they're really looking out for it.

After about an hour, I got my first nutter. He looked like a nutter: he had chunks missing from his hair, like he'd been eaten by moths, and he wore these huge specs, and he kept blinking, like some demented owl. And he dressed like a nutter too: even though it was a hot day, he was wearing a winter coat covered in badges that said things like 'DON'T FOLLOW ME – I'M LOST TOO' and 'I'M A SUGAR PUFFS HONEY MONSTER'. He stank, and all. So it wasn't like he was hard to spot. He wasn't an
undercover
nutter, if you know what I mean.

He stared at the picture for a couple of minutes, and then he dropped to his knees and started praying. It was all, 'Heavenly father who gave his only son Jesus Christ to us so that we might be saved please deliver us blah blah blah', but what was weird was, you couldn't work out whether he was praying because he was looking at Christ, or whether he was praying like they prayed in
The Exo
rcist, to get rid of the demons in the room, sort of thing. Anyway, after a little while I got pissed off with it and made up a rule.

'I'm sorry sir. We don't allow kneeling in the galleries,' I said.

'I'm praying for your immortal soul,' he said.

'I don't know about that, sir, but we don't allow kneeling. No flash photography, no sandwiches, no kneeling.'

He stood up and carried on muttering, so I told him praying was out, too.

'Don't you care?' he said.

'About what, sir?'

'Don't you care about where you are going?'

'And where's that?'