I Came to Find a Girl (24 page)

I nodded in agreement. “It seems weird it’s all over. I’ll miss it – well, not all of it, but some things.” I meant him and he knew it, because after a moment’s silence we kissed. It felt right.
Why did it take so long to get to this?
Few people were around, of course – no one in the way for once. We drank and talked and drank some more.

“Shall we go?” I said, and we walked back to the house we’d shared for two years, up to my room at the top where we lay down together and he touched me tenderly as if it were an act of worship rather than merely two friends saying goodbye.

The following morning we did it all again.
I like him. He likes me. It’s too late
.

I gathered up my clothes. “I’ve got to finish packing.” I edged out of the bed.

I’d taken down my artwork and half-packed a couple of boxes and a suitcase of clothes but there were still piles of books, files, art equipment and other rubbish that had to be dealt with. “I can’t believe how much stuff I’ve got.”

“You’ll sort it,” he said.

A car horn sounded.

Spencer went to the window. “It’s Graham – he’s got the van for my stuff.”

I stared at Spencer’s tall, strong, naked frame.

“Stop looking at me like that.” He grinned.
 

The horn went again, and Spencer forced open the sash and waved down. “Give me a minute.” He pulled on his jeans, and shook out his T-shirt. “I’m going to have to go.” He stroked the back of his shaved head. His soft brown eyes glanced around my shabby, part-packed room. “When are you coming back?”

“I’m not,” I said. And he looked away, towards the rectangle of bright light at the window, and then back into the shady room, a soft, sad smile on his lips.
 

“I’ve got your number,” he said.

We kissed again and I followed him down the three flights of stairs and helped him load up the van, ready to go.

Thirty-seven

The boredom of Bumblefuck hit me again. Stowe-on-Sea is somewhere safe you retire to if you can’t afford anywhere more interesting, but even there I couldn’t avoid Flood because thanks to his relationship with pop star/style icon Pax, he was news.

They had been photographed taking drugs together in the VIP lounge at top London club Fabric. In a grainy black and white shot, he could be seen smoking a glass pipe with Pax next to him, wearing oversized shades and a spaced-out smile.

The story developed and two days later, Flood was a TV news item: ‘Artist Jack Flood is charged with possession of class A drugs’. And there he was, dressed in black and looking wan outside a large stone building, Thames Magistrates Court, while Marcus Hedley in a cream suit guided him down the court steps, and through a scrum of waiting photographers.

“Jack, over here,” someone shouts.

“Where do you go from here, Mr Flood?” a reporter asks.

Flood puts his hand up in front of his face and, jostled by the crowd, momentarily disappears from sight.

“Is it true you’re going into rehab, Jack?” a journalist asks.

“Mr Flood will not be making any comment today, thank you.” Marcus Hedley tries to wave the press pack away.

“Do you believe the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Mr Flood?”

“I said no comment, thank you,” says Marcus Hedley, guiding Flood into a waiting car, and he is driven away.

Thirty-eight

Mike Manners called. I was out at the time, walking the dog along the beach thinking about Jenny as I always do whenever I’m near water.

Mum took the call. “He wants you to contact him as soon as possible.”

I imagined him in his light-filled office next to the studio, cowboy boots up on the desk. Fearing the worst, I took the handset to the dining room and dialled.

“I have some good news,” he said. “We’ve sold your work.” There hadn’t been a whisper of interest during the college show, but once it moved to London there’d been an approach from a third party. “Most unexpected,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, affronted.

“We do sell a fair amount of work, but it’s unprecedented that anyone should want to buy a student’s entire output.”

“They want all eleven pieces?” I pictured the eleven embroidered works hung in series at the degree show.

“They want everything: your sketchbooks and preliminary work as well as your finished pieces. It’s remarkable – not even Graham’s work sold so well.”

“Everything?” I smiled as I said it. “Who is it?”

“No idea. An intermediary made the approach. There has been some haggling, so I assume he’s a dealer working on behalf of a client. The buyer wishes to remain anonymous.”

“Why?”

“Religious reasons – I’m told the works will be shipped to Dubai and must be handled in a low-key way due to the suggestive nature of the work.”

It was weird.
Who is this creep who can’t even admit to liking what he likes?

Mike said, “It’s not unusual for buyers to remain anonymous, especially when collectors are bidding at auction.”

“It’s hardly a bidding war.”

Mike laughed. “You haven’t asked about price?”

It seemed beside the point, but of course I did want to know.

Finally, I’d received some validation for my work. I’d sold something, or rather everything.
I am an artist. I can truly call myself an artist.

More importantly, the money meant I could escape from Stowe-on-Sea, and join Tamzin in London. She’d been staying with an aunt in Putney up to that point. But, as soon as I’d been paid we went in search of a flat together and eventually signed a short-hold tenancy agreement on a small two-bedroom basement flat down that curl of slimy steps, opposite a sauna/massage parlour in Hammersmith.

Our ‘Garden Flat’ was half-underground. There’d be no more watching people as I had from my top-floor window in Nottingham. From our barred front window I was limited to seeing only the legs of passers-by.

In need of a steady income I found a waitress job at Chihuahua’s, a Mexican-themed restaurant off Regent Street. I hoped it wouldn’t be too taxing and that the shifts would allow me enough time and energy to devote to my art.

Sunday, on my first day off from Chihuahua’s, all I could hear was Tamzin and her latest boyfriend Greg going at it
. I’ve got to get out of here
. I dressed: jeans, T-shirt and Converse, and caught the tube into central London.

London, by the river at Embankment, is brilliant: Big Ben, the London Eye, the Savoy, St Paul’s and the Gherkin, all shiny above the greenish brown water. I passed skateboarders, a man with a dreadlocked beard sitting on the ground with an upturned hat at his feet and his hand on a large brown dog, as well-fed seagulls flew above the river. Sunlight glistened on the water and as always I thought of Jenny, because to me she is forever in every river, pond and sea.

Tate Modern – power station turned art monolith was my destination. I took the escalator up to the galleries. There had been a recent, much-publicised rehang, and contemporary works jostled for attention alongside the established modern greats.

No one can like every work of art. This is where people get confused. They assume that if they don’t like one contemporary artist then they can’t like any, but it’s not like that. Not every piece will speak to you, but if you look at a variety of work and give it all a chance, something will resonate.

The dreamy blue of a Miró attracted me first, then I moved on to a painting of a dark, foreboding wood with a childlike bird:
Forest and Dove
, 1927, Max Ernst.

The next room housed violent Bacons and Picasso’s
Nude Woman with Necklace
1968 with all her dangerous, swallowing orifices. And then there was Dora Maar – Picasso’s
Weeping Woman
1937. He made her cry, I thought.

Marlene Dumas’ fresh and challenging watery paintings had their own room and in the corner next to her female nude,
Lead White
1997, hung a long dark curtain, through which people passed. I presumed it was video art and went in and sat on one of the box stools next to a group of young Japanese women, as the night-time exterior of an English urban street with redbrick terraced houses filled the wall-sized screen.

The camerawork is fast and shaky as if the artist/filmmaker is running, while the soundscape of someone breathing becomes heavier. And the back-to-back terraces continue, until the camera takes a turn into a back alley and then another and another. They criss-cross and appear as confusing to the cameraperson as to the viewer.

The breathing is shallow and panicky, as if someone is being pursued or at least thinks they are. There is discarded rubbish: a shopping trolley, bin bags ripped open by animals, spewing nappies, beer bottles, plastic bags – and an old wheelbarrow, abandoned stepladder and branches cut from a tree.

Back out into the open streets, and the breather gets some relief. It’s another seemingly endless row of redbrick terraces. It’s nightmarish – a sense of entrapment. The camera moves on and the streets become familiar as the camera lingers on a short brick wall with a spray of white graffiti and bricks falling from one end.
It’s the waiting wall – the waiting-for-a-trick wall, on my old street in Nottingham
. I hold my breath as my heart pounds inside my chest.

Onwards – across the crossroads and round the corner, past the corner shop and beyond to more terraced housing, an alleyway, a dead end – the camera stops, moves around.
Who is in pursuit?

There is nothing, until a semi-naked girl emerges and freezes, as if startled, and you know she’ll go, run anywhere within a moment, but for that second or two she’s there on the pavement wearing only a purple bra, mismatched pink knickers and a furry, full-headed fox mask.
My knickers? My bra? Why a fox mask?

My throat was tight, and sweat broke out across my forehead, while all around me noise was muffled
. This isn’t right.

Fox-girl is perhaps in her early twenties, her hair long, brown and deliberately unkempt over her shoulders, her feet bare, her face obscured by the mask.

And now at her feet: fresh, bright flowers in fantastical, lurid colours piled on top of others that have rotted down to brown paper mulch within their wrappings of faded cellophane.
It’s Flood. It has to be Flood’s work. He’s got me again? How has he made it into Tate Modern?

Somewhere, there will be a small discreet card – I have to read it.

The film had finished and was about to start again. The four Japanese women began to chatter as they made their way out. I rose unsteadily to my feet and followed.

The Japanese girls gathered to take a photo outside the cubicle next to a wooden cabinet containing the fox-head mask.

I searched for the name of the video piece. A card stuck to the wall just outside the cubicle read:
The Last Haunting
, videotape on continuous loop. Jack Flood.

Why the ‘last’ haunting?
I spun round, my head reeling. I needed to sit down. The whole room was full of Flood’s work. There were old-fashioned wooden cabinets positioned on two sides of the room in an L-shape, with large information boards that detailed Flood’s working processes.

I considered heading to another adjacent gallery, one with a bench.

The gallery assistant in the corner, a woman with a heavy fringe and a large mole on her upper lip was watching me, perhaps aware of my unsteadiness. I peered into another glass cabinet. There were small sketches: a naked woman, face down on the bed.
Oh my God – the underwear?
It was a dismal purple and pink combo from M&S. And next to it were test tubes holding nail cuttings, some hair and other detritus.
Is it mine? The hair’s the same colour
. It was like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities with small sketches and collections of objects in pots and jars: hair, nail clippings and buttons.

Buttons? Are any of them metal? Yes, there’s one and it says ‘Diesel’. It’s the missing button from my favourite jeans.

On the wall, to the right, was a photograph of an artist’s studio: a large, light-filled room with white walls on one side and exposed brickwork on the other. It’s messy, with canvases leaning against the wall and open pots of paint on the floor. While in the corner, half hidden, are brown paper packages, one of them torn open – peeking through is one of my embroidered pieces from my graduation show.

Flood’s the mystery buyer. He bought my entire show.

My head was spinning; I felt faint and needed to sit down.
 

A guide entered and stood in the centre of the gallery. She was about forty with a gentle wave in her dark bobbed hair. She began to address a group of about ten people. “Jack Flood is one of the leading British artists working today. This particular piece follows his much lauded work:
She Had Her Whole Life Ahead of Her
.”

I can’t listen to this.
“Excuse me.” I squeezed past. People looked askance. I was sweating –
everyone in my way, like they’re walking right at me. Get out of my way. Let me pass. I’ve got to get out.

The lady, the nice lady who had a black plait, dark lipstick and a Portuguese accent, told me I had fainted. I’d been taken to a small medical room and given water and a comfortable seat. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

I shrugged and tried to smile as if I were fine.

“Have some more water.”

“I need to get going.”

The lady pursed her lips, like she was reluctant to let me go, but I wanted to get out and escape – get as far away as I could from Flood’s godforsaken trophy art.

Thirty-nine

Seventeen films of seventeen different women were found on Flood’s computer, laptop and phone following a police raid. And each file was clearly labelled: Jenny Fordham, Mia Jackson, Loretta Peters, Connie Vickers, alongside another thirteen names.

The police managed to trace most of the women. Two, however, are as yet unaccounted for – missing, presumed dead.

I was so grateful to DC Jan Wilson. She was so patient when I called from outside Tate Modern. I had exited the gallery in a panic and stopped at the railings by the river, looking out towards St Paul’s, while the Thames below had turned grey and choppy, and there, as always at the back of my mind at the sight of any river, was Jenny. The sky had clouded over to form a solid sheet of dark metallic grey. A storm’s coming, I thought, and made the call.