How to Paint a Dead Man (20 page)

When he gets home the house is quiet. No one is inside. He walks through the kitchen and the sitting room and goes out the back door. Lydia is in the garden retying beanstalks, with oversized canvas gloves on her hands. She seems engrossed in what she is doing, intent on the binding. The air is very still around him but her dress is rippling madly against her arms. Her straw hat keeps threatening to blow off and, under it, her hair is snaking about, tying itself in knots. It’s not the right time of year to be worrying about reinforcing the vegetables, but she has a sense for the turning of the weather and he can see that she herself is stormy, so perhaps it is all right. He waves to her. ‘Are we expecting a gale?’ She doesn’t look up. She flops a gloved hand towards her hat, too late, and it flies off her head and into the distance. There is a shaved patch on her crown. She tautens a length of string, as if about to garrotte the beans. She bends down among the frothy green runners and disappears.

‘Hey,’ he calls. He steps over the lettuces and onions, and the row of stunted marijuana plants that have failed again. In the place Lydia has been kneeling there is a little plastic doll with bald genitals and empty sockets where the legs should be. A string has been wound around its neck.

Peter knows he is dreaming. Part of him is all too aware that he is lopped over on the wet rocks, his chin on his chest, awkwardly asleep. He can almost hear the owl, calling from the fence post above the Gelt ravine, almost feel the cold tightening around him, but he doesn’t want to return to the harsh waking world. He would rather the surreal, disquiet of the subconscious, with its soft threats and lies. So he commits to it.

He’s wandering round the outbuildings, unlatching the door of the barn and going inside. The barn is perpetually shedding its skin. Some time soon he is going to get a quote for re-plastering it. He is going to convert it into a gallery, and have people look round when they call on him, instead of traipsing through the cottage, leaning on the bookcases and fiddling with Lydia’s bowls of sea glass. There is a distinct odour in the barn, a birdy, limey pungency. Strange light infuses the structure, admitted through the four narrow slit windows, between the bolts and slates and the open doorway. The walls are audibly crumbling. Flakes of mud and grout slough off and drizzle down. The floor is soft with feathers and sediment, years of debris. It feels pliant when he bounces on his heels.

Susan is there, in the corner. She is wearing her little purple jeans and her hammer-and-sickle T-shirt. She is small, perhaps five years old. She points down. ‘We’re on the back of it,’ she says. He looks and it’s true. The floor of the barn is soft fur: between the tufts there is yellow skin, a smattering of follicles. It is rising and falling slowly, breathing. The barn has been built on the back of a slumbering behemoth. ‘Shhhh,’ she says, ‘it’s going to wake and ride us away.’ They hold hands and stand very still. Dust is in Peter’s nose. He wants to sneeze. Every rustle and skitter of crumbling plasterwork sounds like the stirring of the Baba Yaga barn beneath them. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he whispers. ‘Where’s Danny?’ Susan grins.

He looks around. In the corner is the dilapidated agrarian equipment he rescued from the old farm down the road. There is a huge iron roller, which looks heavier than the world, and an apple-press with a broken handle, its pulping bucket full of bird shit. The rusty industrial frame of something unknowable, perhaps a thresher or a mangler, hulks in the corner, casting a shadow shaped like a bear. The massive slab of piebald marble he had shipped over from a quarry in Italy leans against the gable. Everything is moving up and down as the floor inhales, and exhales. There’s the flap of wings in the rafters above, the slow warbling drill of a pigeon. ‘Shall we go and find Danny?’ he asks. ‘OK,’ she whispers. They start jumping furiously.

Blackness when he opens his eyes, as if he’s buried in a rough stone coffin, as if his eyes are stitched closed and laid over with coins. Where is he? He hears oars in water. Someone’s laughter. What is this hard thing beneath him? Ah, yes. He is here. In this hellish position, in the empty dock of night. The dark is so dark. Nothing will ever be created from it again. If he thinks too clearly he will ache from the twist of his hips, the strain of his neck, and the brace of his good knee against stone.

So, don’t think of it, Peter. Don’t go back to those tired legs, and that dry tongue. Don’t enter the wakeful mind with its helpless honesties. Be kind. Come away. Yes. A sweet voice, so comforting. It is not his, though it is familiar.

The sky has a slight wash of green to it when he wakes up. The first streak, like a chemical development. After wanting dawn so badly, he was sure it would never come. There is stiffness throughout his body. Cramp in his side, a chill in the marrow of him, and pain. The very gift he asked for an hour or so ago is back in his ankle. It is good. Nice and sore. Nice and living, clearing his head, making him sharp. The night is draining and he feels rinsed of the panic and fear.

It is pain of a genuine variety, that’s for sure, and competing with all the other pains he has experienced in life. Root canal infection. Bacterial meningitis. Hangovers. They were simply trials for this, the real thing. How much pain can a person withstand, he wonders? They used to saw off limbs on board ships and on battlefields. They used to hold folk down, dose them with spirits, then saw through shanks of bone with blunt unsanitary instruments. They used to cauterise the stumps with tar. Some of them survived.

An interesting thought now, and one that is surprisingly alluring: he could get rid of it. He could cut off the leg. If he had the little red-handled knife he uses for trimming the block of resin in his tobacco pouch, he could get to work. There are plenty of stories about outdoor types having to remove frostbitten lumps of themselves. Plenty of farmers sever hands and arms in combine harvesters then, heroically, carry the mangled limb to hospital in hope of reattachment. Amazing what the brain tells you to do in an emergency. Amazing what is imperative.

He could do it. He’d go at it quickly, just below the knee, where things might be reasonably tidily separated. No hacking with the blade and making a mess, but carefully scouring through the flesh, and jointing the bones, like dismantling a rabbit. Yes, if he had the little red knife that’s up in the car, he could most certainly do it, right now.

Howay! Of course he couldn’t. Every fibre in him would revolt. There would be a mutiny upstairs and Captain Kneejerk of the
Black Amputation
would be made to walk the plank. Honestly, what kind of desperate lunacy is this? Lack of food and water and warmth is messing with his higher faculties. He has mentally buckled. The facts of the matter are embarrassingly simple. He has not been here that long. He has not been here long enough to contemplate mad acts of self-butchery. He will be found, eventually.

He’s almost quite sure he told them where he was going. He thinks he can recall at least one conversation with someone in the family before leaving, that indicated he was coming to the ravine to work. Perhaps Lydia. Perhaps they rolled down the windows of the cars as they passed each other on the moor and he said, ‘Hiya, love, I’m just heading to the gorge. Won’t be long. If I’m not back for supper something is definitely wrong.’ No. Blatantly false. Total self-delusion. How about Danny? Did he talk to Danny-Dando? Danny was in the bath, then the boy went to town on the bus, maybe with his guitar, but they didn’t actually say goodbye. In fact he really only saw Danny when he was in the buff, passed out at the bottom of the stairs.

Then it was Susan he told, the disgruntled daughter. It was One of Two. Yes, it was definitely her. He can remember the exchange. He can picture the scene. He can rerun it again like a film and find the exact moment when he told her where he was going, which will be vital evidence in the case of the missing father. Rewind. Play.

It is two o’ clock yesterday. He’s in his studio, surrounded by clutter. On the desk, chunks of crystal, microliths, pen holders, papers. Under this tip, somewhere, his computer. He is leafing through ingots of loosely bound envelopes, letters bundled together year by year and secured with elastic bands. His fingers are walking up and down their edges to reveal geographical franks, recognisable or forgotten handwriting. He is considering the value of more shelves and drawers, though where he would put them is a mystery; the room is full to the gills already. He has been lost to his thoughts while searching. ‘The spirits have lifted you, lad,’ his mother would always say, peppering a herring, shaking flour over it and patting it down, while he stared out of the window on to Alnwick Street, wishing for what exactly he did not know. ‘I wonder when the spirits will drop you back to us, Petie.’ His mother, with her nylon pinnie and her tired eyes, beginning to forget things, saying, ‘Where’s Nev gone, why’s he working on a Sunday? Has the pit collapsed?’ Walking the street in her slippers and wetting herself. Oh, Dorothy.

Cut to the present. He is sitting at the desk in his studio looking for a letter to show the children. He can’t find it, but he has turned up old first drafts of Donald’s poems and some photographs. He has found his and Raymie’s wedding certificate from the courthouse in San Francisco and, stapled unromantically to it, a receipt from the Justice. The staircase creaks. ‘Hello Rumplestiltskin, where’s your gold?’ He looks up. Susan is standing there, a cup and saucer in her hand. ‘Hiya, love!’ he almost shouts, because he is pleased she has come into the studio to see him. He reaches round her bum and hips and squeezes her in a side hug, rattling the teacup in her hand.

She glances round. ‘Looks like a bomb’s gone off in here, Wilse.’ He laughs. ‘I’m looking for something to show you.’ To illustrate his point, he continues to flick through the stiff envelopes. She raises her eyebrows, looks about at the rubble-some room, at her father’s dishevelled hair, at the poor state of things generally. ‘Right-o, well, here’s a brew. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’ No, please don’t go, he thinks, and rises halfway out of the chair. ‘Wait on. It’s a really special letter, probably worth a fortune. It took years to reach me. Came halfway round the world! You’ve got to read it.’

She steps back. She sets down the tea and it ripples, as if a little stickleback has just swum across it. She crosses her arms and tips her head to the side, her brow lowering. Uh-oh. He knows that look. She’s annoyed. The room’s annoyed her. The fish in the cup’s annoyed her. He’s annoyed her. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Whose letter are you looking for, Dad? Another famous colleague and chum?’ Seldom misses when she aims, his daughter. He jerks his chin up and reaches for his pouch, pops it open. Yes, he knows this tone of hers. It says, ‘Oh Dad, not this nonsense of yours. Ding-dong, let’s humour you, shall we.’ Doesn’t she know, doesn’t she realise, it’s all for her? It’s all just to impress her and make her smile. He’s simply playing for affection, like Danny busking by the bandstand. What else can he do?

He slots a diff into his mouth and tosses the pouch back on to the desk. He spreads his arms wide, as if to take a deep, flamboyant bow. ‘I am looking for instructions from the bottle man. Remember, I told you about him when you were little. Made completely out of glass. Glass hands, glass legs, glass eyes. Everything he drank you could see in his tummy. Wherever he went you could hear him clinking and clanking. Poor old fellow fell out the tower of Pisa and shattered on the pavement below. Terrible, terrible tragedy.’

God, he adores her. God, he infuriates her.

There is silence. His arms remain outstretched, mid-flight. She lifts her hand up to her face. She rubs her right eye, pulls out a stray eyelash and looks towards the easel. ‘You’re painting the gorge again,’ she says.

Scene ends.

Green morning light. What a relief. In another hour it will be bright enough to see properly. It will be officially day-the right time for something benevolent to happen. Soon he can make a proper assessment. He can see if there’s a puddle of red around the boulders. He can look around for a stick with which to crowbar the rocks apart. Maybe in one of the little trenches and gullies between stones something will have gotten caught. Maybe even now he can find it. There are always brobs lying about on the floor from the trees leaning out above the ravine. Yes, he’s sure he’s seen them, many times, hundreds of them, just waiting to be retrieved. If he stretches his long arms, he’ll be able to tease one to him with his fingertips. He’ll haul it out of its rock setting like King Arthur and bloody Excalibur. It will be there. It will be waiting for him. And it will be a beauty-he can picture it-a thick firm staff, not too brittle, not too weak, a holy rod, entirely suitable for digging down under the boulder and exerting more pressure than he alone could. Archimedes will save him, with his mighty lever. You are an absolute genius, Peter!

He begins to lean forward, reaching towards the ground. A spike of pain drives up the leg with such severity it takes his breath away. He yelps and punches his thigh. The head-rush, the pain whipping him, the urge to faint. He blinks and shakes his head, waits for it to subside. It hurts too much to move that way. It feels like he’s aggravating it, tearing something open, forcing the bone through a loose flap of skin. So much for cutting the fucker off, eh, Nancy. When the queasiness abates he adjusts himself, squats down on his good knee, and gingerly leans backwards. OK-it seems do-able that way. He begins to grope behind, along the channel of the two big boulders. He feels shale, mulch, and snail shells. He fondles the wells and fissures, checking the holes like a fisherman stroking for eels. There has to be one here somewhere. Where? But already the mirage of the stick is fading. He grimaces, stretches a few more inches in his reverse crab contortion. He can hear Lydia. ‘You should come to yoga, Peter, you know you’re very stiff.’ Yes, very helpful, love, thank you. He touches the corner cover of the sketchpad, which has slipped down off the rocks in the rain. It feels swollen and pulpy. He tweezers it between two fingers, tugs it out. The pages are damp and floppy, the charcoal lines have bled. All that work, wasted. Never mind, there are more important things. He sets the pad to one side on a rock. He tries the channel behind him again. There’s nothing. OK. He’ll just have to go forward again, slower maybe, so as not to trigger the fantastic agony.