Guerillas In Our Midst

by Claire Peate

  I stood and looked at him.

  Finally he put down the guitar. “I’m sensing anger.”

  “Well,” I buttoned up my shirt, “there’s anger because there’s hunger. I haven’t eaten for hours.”

  He strode over to me, kissed me sluttily and asked was I sure I didn’t want to do that— No. No I did not.

  “Fine, fine. I’ll shower and then we can go. Mix yourself a drink or something. I’ll have a JD and coke if it’s going.”

  Guy bounded down the spiral staircase to the tiny shower room below leaving me alone on the mezzanine. A door shut and a few seconds later I could hear the shower running.

  I turned to the studio. The pull of it was irresistible.

  This time I walked further into it than I had before, beyond the stacked canvases and the pots of emulsion and on to a more cluttered area that I hadn’t reached on my first foray. Behind an old paint-splattered photocopier there was an enormous purple folder labelled Carbon Paper A1. Checking in case Guy had come up the stairs I lifted the lid of the photocopier and turned over the paper inside. It was a client’s photograph, with the giant blown-up photocopied version lying on the table, a letter paper-clipped to it: please find enclosed a photograph of my daughter and her fiancé …Guy had enlarged the photograph to the canvas size using the photocopier.

  Fascinated I followed the paper trail, ducking and stretching and walking the length of the table to uncover more. It began with the photograph of the subject, along with a cheque for two thousand pounds. The photograph was put onto the photocopier and enlarged to the appropriate size. Then I could see that the outline of the subject and key features were traced from the photograph onto a canvas using carbon paper. Once the traced image from the photo was transferred, the paints – already chosen by the customer, depending on the décor of the chosen room the picture would hang in – were applied in blocks of flat colour. I stared at the table in disbelief. All of this was just painting by numbers. But without the numbers.

  Guy was not an artist! The pouting, dark-eyed artist who had to be consumed by his muse and feel the white-hot wave of his inspiration wash over him was a fraud, a sham, a cheap fake who was making a lot of money out of a gimmick. Guy painted by numbers!

  I returned to the newspaper pinned to the wall that I’d read the first time I’d stayed over at his house.

  FARROW AND BALL PORTRAITURE by Arts Editor, Roger Wendell

  “… one of the hottest things in the art world … a big favourite with celebrities.”

  So Guy’s attitude towards his art was a complete fraud – his work was a production line of coloured-in copies and nothing more. But what if … what if the fraud didn’t stop there? What if the fraud extended to how Guy was promoted and publicised? Because Roger as the Arts Editor of a national newspaper was promoting Guy in the paper and the paper had sponsored Guy’s exhibition, which had taken place that morning. What if Roger did it not because Guy was an up and coming artist – but because he owed Eustace (and Eustace’s friends) a favour. Such as being given the opportunity to buy a house in Brockley at an unbelievably cheap price. Eustace had told me the arrangement the day I had worked at V-2. He’d told me that it was a good idea to get a journalist on his side as journalists were important.

  So Eustace gave Roger a deal on a house, Roger gave Guy publicity, Eustace gave me a knot garden, I helped out with the guerrilla gardeners. Everyone was indebted to everyone else and that was where Eustace’s power came from. That is how he manipulated everyone, by managing the debts.

  I was sitting on the edge of the crumpled bed, staring at the studio. And the shower had stopped.

  Shaking with something like excitement and maybe a little fear I scurried down the stairs to mix drinks.

  Unmasking Guy as an artistic fraud had instantly broken the spell he had over me. Guy didn’t come from another more glamorous world than me – he came from the same world as me: he was just another guitar-strumming, emotionally distant bloke. And he had a particularly skewed version of himself: I have to wait days, weeks, for the inspiration to capture me before I start a commission.

  What complete crap. The only waiting he had to do was for the photocopier to warm up.

  And what an idiot I had been, believing all the things he had fed me.

  What I wanted to do more than anything was to rush back to my house and say, “Hey, Robert, guess what I found out!” but after our big barney, rushing back home to him wasn’t the most appealing option. Better to let the dust settle. And anyway, there was no way I was going to give up the opportunity to eat, and for free. Better to go along with the plan tonight and get fed. And tomorrow I would apologise to Robert, apologise to Finley and then reveal Guy’s big secret and – most importantly of all – the other purpose of Eustace’s secret society.

  “How do you know the owner of the bistro?”

  Guy and I were walking past my house and I was overcome with the desire to look happy and carefree just in case Robert was looking out of the window. I wanted him to see how unbothered I was that we had rowed.

  “Claude? He’s a friend of Eust’s.”

  “He’s not a gardener?”

  “He’s helped out a couple of times. But he’s not one of us per se. You know you really shouldn’t—”

  “Yes. I know. I’m sorry.”

  “So your lodger’s still at your house, then.” He leant in and nibbled my ear. “What is he – a tax collector or something?”

  “No!” I batted him away, irritated. “He’s a teacher. A history teacher.”

  “Ha!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know which is worse: tax collector or dusty old history teacher.”

  We walked on, past Fox Estates, the Petit Marché, the launderette.

  “Pardon?” Guy leant in to me. “Did you say something?”

  “I said a tax collector. It’s worse to be a tax collector than a history teacher.”

  “You’re still thinking about what I said about your lodger?” He laughed.

  “Yes.”

  “So, in your opinion, it’s better to be a regurgitator of tired old history facts to kids who only want to go out and make out?” he said.

  Oh.

  My fists balled in my pockets and my heart was racing. How dare he be so superior when all he did was paint by numbers and get his commissions from dishonest promotions? As if he were somehow better than Robert who worked hard at what he did and didn’t go on about his talent all the time.

  We walked down the Brockley Road in silence: or rather me in silence and him quietly and huskily murmuring the threads of songs like a tracheotomy patient trying out karaoke. Now that I’d seen him for the fraud he was this vagueness and disconnected attitude was really irritating. Just how good was a free sample menu? How many vol au vents would make up for having to spend more time with Guy tonight? There should be more to a man than a pretty face, a great body and a mews house, after all. We walked past the Chinese takeaway and I felt the urge to veer into it to take something home instead of going out to the bistro. But no – I was dressed up and ready for the free food. And at least, after the opening party tonight, I would have something to discuss with Babs over the garden wall. When I’d mentioned the event earlier in the week she’d told me many tales of the former pub that the bistro had replaced and if the party spilled out around the back of the bistro I was definitely going to look out for the line of bullet holes in the brickwork where members of an infamous South London gang had been lined up and shot in the 1960s. Maybe the New Brockley owners had made a feature of it and underlit it with Heals spotlights.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” I said, having decided to interrupt Guy’s stream of conscious tunefulness, “that all the shops and bistros and cafés that have opened in the last few months all look the same?”

  Guy thought for a moment. “I don’t see how the deli looks like the bookshop... Sausages. Dictionaries. Very different.”

  “I mean how ever
y single one of the new businesses have bay trees outside them. The deli, the bookshop, Fox Estates, the beauty salon, V-2. They all have the trees chained in tubs outside. And even Mr Iqbal was given bay trees by Eustace as part of his shop’s facelift.”

  “So?” Guy looked slightly cagey.

  “And all the new shops are painted the same set of colours.”

  “Oh, come on, Edda,” Guy stood before me, bringing me to a halt, steps away from the bistro and the free sample menu. It was a dangerous tactic to come between me and my food. “The shops are new and they’re on-trend. Of course they’re going to choose currently fashionable palettes. And I can tell you that on-trend right now is Charleston Grey, Pelt, Shaded White … and the bistro here is done out in Brinjal and Oval Room Blue.” He laughed, seeing my expression. “I work in Farrow and Ball, Edda. I know Farrow and Ball.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “So let’s…” but he trailed off. He was staring at something across the road and I followed his line of sight. He crossed the road and I followed, intrigued by what had caught his attention.

  It was one of my stencils: a woman in a wedding dress and the suggestion of a billowing veil blowing in the wind, holding aloft a giant AK-47 and weeping. Sprayed in black and white there was a pool of crimson blood at her feet and spattering the hem of the wedding dress.

  “Now that really is quite good.” Guy traced my stencil with a finger, “The movement, the feel of despair. Look at that gun, Edda, it’s so realistic, just picked out with one or two highlights, but it’s enough to be realistic.”

  “Probably drawn from real life,” I said, remembering with a smile a bizarre afternoon sitting at Babs’ house with one of Tyrone’s AK-47s laid out on a lace covered side table beside a plate of bourbon biscuits on a doily. “You know these South London gangs.”

  But Guy wasn’t listening to me. “Finally Da Notorious Baron is producing something of merit.”

  “Great. Does this mean Eustace isn’t going to pursue him and drag him to art college?”

  “God, no. Graffiti’s a powerful weapon and Eust will no doubt want to control it, you know what he’s like. He said to me the other day that he wants gentler themes that aren’t going to upset the gentry moving in with their children. I mean, for all this artistic merit you can see here you’ve still got firearms and blood. That’s not going to sit very well with the Middle Class Young Family is it?”

  “You really think it has artistic merit?”

  “No doubt about it. Why are you looking so pleased?”

  “Oh I’m not. No. I’m just pleased for Brockley. That we’ve got our own Banksy…” I petered out.

  “Come on in.” He grabbed my hand, kissed the palm, and led me across the road, up the steps of Bistro Brockley, passing the suspiciously fairy-lit bay trees in their chained-down wooden tubs.

  Twenty-one

  Bistro Brockley was stifling, crammed with glittery, sequined people. Guy led me through the masses and towards the bar, holding my hand through the crowds in case I got lost. The décor was dark: exposed brick and charcoal-painted walls lit by orange pendant lights hung from a concrete ceiling. Who the bleedin’ ’ell would eat in a place what looks like the workin’ class pub it was in the sixties? All that brick an’ cement: looks like a doss ’ouse. The bloke’s a bleedin’ nutter. Babs had been her usual eloquent self when discussing the décor earlier in the week.

  “Come and meet Claude.” Guy looped his arm around my waist and I felt a sudden gladness that I was there with him and he was taking care of me. It was very overwhelming, so many people and no one I’d seen that I knew.

  I was dragged further across the room, towards a wall of red-lit champagne bottles where Claude, the chef-patron, was talking animatedly to a journalist. He had to be a journalist: he was holding a Dictaphone one millimetre away from Claude’s mouth. I prided myself on my perception.

  “Edda, Edda, Edda! Buona sera! It is nice to meet you!” The tanned and perfectly presented Claude shook my hand energetically. He tried to put a hand on my shoulder but, as he was probably just shy of five feet, he gave up.

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “But not at all! A friend of Guy’s is a friend of mine! We are all in it together, yes? Yes? Have you eaten? Have you tried the figs they are divine! I say it myself but—” he stopped. A fraught cry from the kitchens caught his attention. “I go! Enjoy! Eat! Drink!” he backed away to the crisis, winking at Guy.

  “He’s Italian,” Guy said, nonchalantly as he helped himself to a platter of meats. “Third generation. There’s loads of them in Lewisham. Did you know that? They all came over a century ago when things got tough in Italy or whatever the country was called in those days. I have no idea about that history shit: I’m no dull as dishwater history teacher am I?” He looked pleased at the joke. “But they’re good foreigners, if you see what I mean.”

  “Pardon?” Had I heard him straight? Had he just said they were ‘good’ foreigners?

  “You know,” he waved his glass in front of me, “they don’t cause trouble like the— ”

  “Guy!” A blonde woman fell into his arms and planted a kiss on his stubbled cheek. “Darling!”

  “Hello you,” he put an arm around her lazily and kissed her. “How’s things?”

  “Oh, God, frantic…” And she launched into why her life was frantic, still with his arm around her waist, and, I noticed, her thighs resting between his thighs as he leant against the bar. Neither of them noticed me.

  The Italian immigrants don’t cause trouble like the what? What had Guy been on the brink of saying before this woman with the thighs had thrown herself between us?

  I stood for a few more moments, wondering whether Guy would surface and introduce me: Hey blonde-thing, this is my girlfriend Edda/ this is my lover Edda/ this is Edda… whatever I was to him and he to me, but Guy was completely lost in the blonde and, like the meat platter, I had been forgotten.

  I turned my back on them and walked away. There was no point standing there like a lemon.

  I was niggled but not upset. And that didn’t surprise me… Because I wanted to get home. I wanted to speak to Robert and say a whole series of things including I’m sorry and I’m really sorry.

  “Canapé?”

  “Oh, God, yes!” I gave in to my famished Red-Cross-package feeling and scooped up an obscene quantity of canapés and set to work on them.

  “Edda! Edda, my absolute saviour and favourite person in the world!”

  “Neil!” Before I could put down my prawn toasts I was caught up in a bear hug with the beads of his dreads slapping my head. He smelt of coffee.

  “Thank you so much for helping me out the other day.”

  “It’s fine. Honestly.” I took a champagne flute from a passing waitress. I was now going to be an official freeloader. “Have the staff returned to help you out?”

  “No. I’m only allowed to pay minimum wage and they’ve got better jobs. It’s fucking shit.” Neil ran a hand through his dreadlocked plaits. “My life is over, I tell you. I thought it would be this great way of life but all I ever do is grind beans and foam milk.” He stared with glazed eyes into the crowd behind us.

  “What about Pembrokeshire?” I whispered to him.

  Neil shot a panicked look around. “I don’t know, man. We’ve got, like, no money. How are we going to set up in Pembrokeshire with no money? You’ve got to have money, man. When we came here and Eustace offered me this café deal, well I nearly bit his hand to get it. But there’s not going to be any deal if I move back to Pembrokeshire. That’s it, man. It’s here or nowhere.”

  “So why don’t you just tell Eustace that you don’t want it any more? He’ll find someone else.” I even had, in the back of my head, thought that I might step into his shoes. Hadn’t I always wanted to work in a café and here, possibly, was an opportunity waiting to be grasped? But then by taking up the V-2 I would be putting myself entirely in the hands of Eustace Fox – and th
e prospect of luxury accommodation would not work on me.

  Neil grabbed another glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

  “But presumably you pay rent to Eustace. He didn’t just give you the café and the flat.” I said.

  “Oh he takes everything. All of it! I get to live rent free and in return I put in eleven hours a day seven days a week and get pocket money: hardly anything. I’m a fool, I know I am, for making us do this in the first place. Anja and I work like dogs and he’s got me by the short and curlies, because how would I live any better elsewhere? I couldn’t even dream of opening up my own café. Not in a credit crunch, and definitely not in London.” He looked at the floor and wavered. “I didn’t read the small print, Edda. Don’t they always tell you to read the small print? I just saw the fancy apartment with its chandeliers and wet rooms and I was seduced.”

  “Champagne? Orange juice?” The waiter came over and broke Neil out of his dark thoughts: the free spirit obviously didn’t like being owned by the man in the sharp suit across the road. The leash around his neck must have felt very tight.

  “I’ll just take two,” Neil winked at the waiter – or rather he thought he did, he was so drunk he actually closed both eyes, “in case I miss you when you do your rounds again.”

  The waiter smiled sarcastically and looked like he’d heard the same excuse for freeloading a hundred times already that night. The look he gave Neil irritated me, so I took two drinks as well.

  “Where is Anja, tonight?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t come.” Neil downed a glass in one gulp. “She won’t go anywhere near Eustace now if she can help it.” He gave an intoxicated laugh. “She just wants us to go back. Even though we’ve got no money – she says that doesn’t matter. Says we’ll muddle through. Go back to our knackered old caravan and make do until we find our feet again. I just don’t know if I can go back…”

  There was a sudden roar of voices and Neil and I looked up. Eustace Fox had walked in and people were clapping. As he entered a camera flashed and he shielded his eyes, “No! No photographs! Please! Claude! Claude this is fabulous!” he ducked out of the way of the cameraman, but not before he shot the man a dark look. I found myself frowning as I watched him. Why didn’t Eustace Fox want to be photographed? Surely he was the master of socialising and networking: wouldn’t having it evidenced in the papers be right up his street?