by Ann Granger
Given the nature of the exhibit, it was hard to tell. I said it looked more or less straight to me.
‘We are reducing the world to a mountain of debris, the legacy of our life-style,’ he informed me. ‘And in doing so, we are reducing ourselves to mere accumulation of debris. Junk in. Junk out.’
Hence the scrap metal figure, I deduced. The thin man was staring fiercely at the frame created by Angus for my support. ‘I see your friend is a minimalist,’ he said. ‘The pure spiral, representing man’s spiritual search, guiding him to the heavens or dragging him inexorably earthwards, am I right?’
I was saved replying by one of the girls who had carried in the lurid canvas. She approached. ‘Oy!’ she hailed the thin man. ‘You’re in our square.’ She brandished a numbered card at him.
‘Find yourself another one,’ he retorted.
‘You find your own square!’
‘I can’t use my own square. Someone’s already in it!’
‘Reg!’ screeched the girl down the hall. ‘Come ’n’ tell this silly sod he’s in our square!’
Avoid other people’s fights is my motto. The bystander always gets hurt. I returned to Angus. ‘Where’s my costume?’
He handed me yet another plastic bag. I peered into it. It was the body stocking, dyed a fetching sludge green. It did, however, look reassuringly robust.
‘You’ll have to change in the women’s loo,’ he said. ‘But if you bring your clothes back here, I’ll lock ’em in the van till it’s over.’
A little later I emerged hesitantly from the washroom clad in the green body stocking. But I needn’t have worried that anyone would take any notice of me. They were all too busy arguing over floor space and setting up their exhibits. The woman with the purple skirt was running up and down in increasing hysteria. Her cries of, ‘No, no, you can’t do that!’ were alternated with appeals of, ‘Reg, do something!’ I had to admit there was a real air of excitement, just like the last minutes before a first night. I began to cheer up.
Nevertheless, things didn’t start too well, with Angus and I having a serious disagreement over the pineapple. To my horror, he intended this to go on my head, fixed with a wire crown. I flatly refused to consider it.
‘Look here,’ he said, getting truculent, ‘I’m the artist and you’re the model, right? We’ll get nowhere if you’re going to carp at everything. You agreed.’
‘I’ll model the rest, but not that thing, certainly not on top of my head! I’ve already heard one Carmen Miranda joke. I mean it. You’ll have no model at all if you insist.’
‘But it finishes the whole thing off,’ he protested.
‘Too right, it’ll finish it off. It’ll finish me off for a start. It’s naff, Angus. Forget it.’
He said crossly that it had cost a lot. I told him to take it over to Jimmie’s and sell it on to him. ‘He can chop it up, mix it with cottage cheese and stick it in the potatoes.’
He gave way with bad grace. Miraculously things sorted themselves out and we were all just about ready at ten thirty when the doors were opened to the public. The frame wasn’t that comfortable but it wasn’t actively uncomfortable. Angus, working from a diagram, had attached all the bits of greenery and some flowers, together with some large and beautifully painted paper butterflies and birds. Reg came along to watch. He looked impressed.
Angus positioned me facing the scrap-metal man next door and I felt it and I would be good friends by the end of the day.
The atmosphere, as Reg approached the doors, quivered with the vibrations from artistic nerves strung like violin strings. The first members of the public to drift in were clearly friends and supporters of the different artists. They clutched leaflets pressed on them by the organisers. In addition, they all had a private brief, which was to stand in front of their friend’s chalk square and express loud admiration, before moving on to the other squares and pronouncing all the other work rubbish.
Before our square they fell silent. I wasn’t sure whether this was because they were struck with awe or because, with Angus being brawny and wearing his Scottish football shirt, they didn’t feel it was wise to make the sort of sarcastic comments they were firing at other exhibits. They were rude about the scrap-metal man instead.
The thin man was soon pale with emotion. ‘Philistines!’ he howled. ‘Cultural cretins!’
After a while, genuine punters began to arrive – only a few at first, some carrying bags of Saturday shopping, but all of them seemed strangely attracted to our square. Angus had been right about the living sculpture. It – I – exerted a weird fascination over observers.
Word must have got around because a lot of people began to arrive and they all made for our corner where it became very congested. I concentrated on keeping still and soon realised how the Buckingham Palace guards must suffer.
Comments floated towards me. ‘She must be real, you can see her eyes blinking.’ ‘Poor girl, she’ll get terrible cramp.’ More mysteriously, I heard, ‘I expect she’s used to this sort of thing.’
Cameras began to flash. Angus was in seventh heaven and even the thin man brightened up, probably hoping that the photographers would include his sculpture in the picture.
The show closed for a lunch break between one and two. Angus helped me out of the frame and removed some of the less firmly fixed greenery and artwork.
‘You were right about the pineapple,’ he said generously.
‘Of course I was,’ I said.
I nipped along to the loo to struggle out of the rest and answer Nature’s call. There was a chair in the washroom. I sat on it in my bra and pants to drink a cup of coffee and eat a sandwich, which Angus had sent in care of the woman in the purple skirt.
‘It’s going awfully well,’ she enthused. ‘I do think you’re terribly brave.’ She hovered over me. ‘You won’t catch cold, will you? We have got the heating on.’
I promised her I wasn’t cold. In fact, inside the body stocking and all the attachments, it had been very warm in the hall. She told me again that I was brave and she wouldn’t have done it, not for the world.
I had to get back to my stand well before two so that Angus could reattach everything. The crowd was thinner after lunch. People had other ways of spending their Saturday afternoons. The exhibition was due to close at four thirty anyway, and by three fifteen I was beginning to think we might be able to knock off early. Even as I thought this, I became aware of fresh eyes staring at me.
I had quite got used to the gawpers, but this was a gaze so intent, it made my skin tingle. Worse than that, it sent out signals of recognition and of menace. It conjured up fear such as I’d felt in my underground bedroom. My night visitor – it had to be.
A bead of sweat trickled from my shoulders, down inside the clammy body stocking, running along my spine like the touch of a finger. I eased my head round just a little.
There were two of them, standing side by side: Merv and his mate. Merv, tall, pale and slab-like as ever, chewed gum impassively. I no longer cared about Merv. I was interested in the other. I was seeing him face to face for the first time. No smoky-visored biker’s helmet, no curtained window, no thick piece of opaque glass veiled him from my sight. I saw my ogre, fair and square.
In appearance he was disappointing, short, squat, olive-complexioned and losing his hair. His build was that of the glimpsed silhouette against my curtains. I realised, too, that this was the man Ganesh and I had seen with Merv the fateful evening they’d tried to bundle Albie into Merv’s car.
Hats or helmets, the man liked to cover his head. It could either be from vanity or because baldness is quickly identifiable, something even a confused witness would remember.
We’d foiled their attempt at a snatch that night, but later they’d found their quarry. This man, I knew, had killed Albie.
I expected to feel a surge of hate yet somehow it eluded me. The baldness remained disconcerting, a mark of human frailty. I don’t quite know what I’d expected of Merv’
s partner. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been ordinariness, even dullness. Yet everyone, they say, has one striking feature. With this man, it was the eyes. Enormous eyes, it seemed to me, like the eyes in an oil painting, and very slightly protuberant. In colour they were very dark brown, almost black, so that they seemed not to consist of iris and pupil, but just a large dark luminous disc in the surrounding whiteness of the eyeball.
I knew him and he knew I knew him. As I met his gaze of those unnaturally large dark eyes, they laughed at me, matching a mocking curve of his fleshy lips. My mind picked up his message clear as a bell. I had you running scared, gal . . . Now you see me face to face. Still scared?
You bet I was scared. Ordinary thugs are simple souls. This one was a nutter. Merv’s interest in me, I supposed, was professional. I’d got in the way of a job and he would remove me as any other obstacle in his path, animate or inanimate. It made no difference.
This other one’s interest was different, personal. To begin with, I’d cost him a valuable motorbike and with it, I supposed, his employment as a courier. Even if I hadn’t, his attitude would still be different to Merv’s. He’d enjoyed prowling outside my flat, or chasing me on that bike, as he enjoyed staring at me here. He was doing it for kicks.
Well, I didn’t for a moment suppose that either of them was an art lover. Nor did I think they’d give up an afternoon normally spent on the football terraces unless they had urgent business. The business, I was miserably certain, was finding me. Now they’d found me.
I didn’t how they’d tracked me down. Possibly Jimmie, meaning to advertise Angus’s work, had put the word around and by bad luck, it had reached Merv’s ear. Merv caught my eye and his chewing mouth stilled and then twitched nastily. My balding adversary continued to stare, eyes bulging with lewd interest, laughing himself sick inside as he watched me squirm there on my stand, dressed in my ridiculous costume, unable to escape. I must have looked like a butterfly impaled on a pin. It was an uncomfortable image. I could imagine this man as a child, pulling the wings off living insects, tying cans to dogs’ tails, interfering with the neighbourhood’s little girls. A really nice sort.
‘Angus . . .’ I hissed, as loudly as I dared.
But Angus was busy explaining what I represented to an interested audience of two middle-aged women and a girl with a baby in a buggy. The balding man shook his head at me chidingly. Merv was chewing again and studying me with puzzled care, as if he couldn’t work out what the hell I was supposed to be or why I was dressed like it. I was wondering myself.
When his questioners had moved on to the scrap-metal man, I tried again to attract Angus.
This time he heard my hoarse whisper and came over. ‘What’s the matter, Fran? You don’t need to go to the loo again? Can’t you hang on till the end? It’s only another three-quarters of an hour.’
‘Ring the police . . .’ I breathed huskily. My voice seemed clogged in my throat.
‘What?’ He put his ear closer. Merv and his chum began to move away.
‘Ring the police. Ask for Sergeant Parry. Tell him Merv and – and another man are here and have seen me.’
‘Can’t it wait till four o’clock? It’s going well and I don’t want to leave the stand.’
‘No!’ I found my voice and it emerged in a strange squawk. The scrap-metal sculptor looked across at us in surprise and some concern. Perhaps he thought some part of my anatomy had been pierced by a pin securing a liana.
‘Go and ring them now!’ I urged. ‘There must be a phone in this hall somewhere.’
Some more people had arrived and stopped to study me. ‘Excuse me . . .’ one of them said diffidently to Angus.
‘I’ll ring in a minute, when I get a chance!’ Angus promised me hurriedly.
There wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t see either Merv or his pal. My field of vision was restricted so I had no way of knowing whether they had left the hall altogether. Perhaps they’d heard my request for the police and decided to make themselves scarce. I hoped so.
There was a flurry of new visitors in the last ten minutes. Angus was fully employed and didn’t leave me, or not for long enough to have phoned. Then, miraculously, the public had gone and clearly weren’t coming back. Merv and the other had also vanished to my great relief. At four thirty, or just after, Reg closed the doors.
The woman in the purple skirt clapped her hands and shrilled, ‘Oh, well done, everybody!’
There was a huge combined sigh of relief from the various exhibitors. They turned to one another, offering congratulations or, in a few cases, recriminations. The two girls with the painting had fallen out over something. The thin man produced a hip flask and saluted his scrap-metal creation before taking a swig. I climbed down from the stand unaided.
‘Gimme my clothes!’ I gasped as I began to divest myself of paper birds and strings of greenery.
‘Hey!’ Angus yelped. ‘You’ll damage everything! Wait, let me do it!’
‘You can untangle the bits later. I just want to get out of this suit. Look, fetch my gear, will you?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, realisation dawning on his face. ‘Those two blokes have gone. They went ages ago. I don’t know what they were doing in here. Just a couple of creeps, I suppose, hoping for a free boob show. I didn’t ring the police, I’m afraid. I didn’t get time. Reg was supposed to keep the weirdos out. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t cause any trouble. You didn’t know them, did you?’
‘Believe me,’ I wailed, ‘they were very bad news. I’ve got to get out of here, Angus!’
It finally dawned on him that this was a genuine emergency. His forehead crinkled in decent dismay. ‘Sorry, Fran, didn’t realise you were really worried about them. I thought you just thought they were kinky. I’ll get your gear from the van,’ he promised. ‘Hang on.’
Back in the loo, I transferred myself into my own things in record time and emerged holding the body stocking, which was still festooned with birds and greenery. The corridor was empty. From the hall came noisy scraping and bumpings as the exhibits were dismantled. I started forward with the intention of returning the body stocking to Angus, who would be worried about it, and then making for the nearest phone.
I was vaguely aware that the door of the men’s washroom opposite was opening, but paid no attention. That was a big mistake but I was barely given time to realise it. There was a scuffling behind me and the next thing I knew, someone had enveloped my head and shoulders in a musty-smelling piece of cloth.
I dropped the body stocking and tried to shout for help and disentangle myself at the same time. My voice was muffled by the cloth and my arms were neatly pinned to my sides. I was trussed up as neatly as an oven-ready chicken with some kind of belt or rope, then hoisted by feet and shoulders. I was carried away full length and at a cracking pace, with no more control over what was happening than one of the exhibits in the hall might have had. (Amongst which, as I had time to reflect, I’d recently featured with such distinction.)
I was aware that we’d left the hall. We bumped down some steps and I could hear traffic. Without warning I was dropped, landing with a painful wallop that knocked the breath out of me. Doors slammed. An engine revved. My world, wherever it was, began to move around me, lurching and rattling. I’d been slung into the back of a van and was being driven away.
Chapter Fourteen
It wasn’t easy to keep my wits about me in the circumstances, but I did my best.
I reasoned with glum realism that no one would have paid any attention to my plight, even if they’d seen me thrown in the van. Everyone was busy with their own valued works of art, intent on dismantling and moving them out of the hall without damage. Oddly shaped articles of every kind were being lugged into the car park and a body form wrapped in a cloth wouldn’t attract even a cursory glance.
Angus would worry, though, if I didn’t come back. He’d go looking for me and the body stocking. I’d dropped that on the floor when my captors grabbe
d me and unless they’d had the presence of mind to scoop it up, it still lay where it fell and Angus would find it.
He would be bright enough to connect this with my earlier plea to call the police and with luck, he’d belatedly do just that. Whether this would help me or not was debatable. Lauren Szabo had been missing two weeks with the police hunting high and low and no one had found her.
I considered trying to bump my way along to the rear doors of the van and kick them open. On telly, captives do that kind of thing all the time. Believe me, it’s not so easy. I was being thrown around all over the place as it was, and organising myself to move in a controlled fashion quickly proved hopeless.
I was sweating profusely and my mouth was parched with thirst and fear. It was increasingly difficult to breathe. The cloth wrapped itself tightly over my face and loose fibres forced their way into my nose and mouth. It stank. Since there was no point in struggling and getting exhausted, I concentrated on not suffocating and conserving my strength for when we should arrive. Always assuming, of course, they didn’t intend simply to wait till nightfall and drop me off the nearest bridge. They’d already shown a tendency to dispose of inconvenient individuals in water. I tried not to think about that option.