by Alan Moore
“Hur hur. Fuck my arse. What does she think this is, Agoraphobics fuckin’ Anonymous, or what? She’s never been on the same page as everybody else, has she, your kid?”
Mick turned and grinned at the preposterously sturdy-looking ne’er-do-well and chancer, somehow still glaringly ginger even now that his remaining hair was grey.
“Hey up, Bert. Tell the truth, I think she’s in a different book. It might even be in a different language, more than likely one that she’s made up. Here, is the lady that I saw you standing next to earlier your mum? I heard her talking. I’ve not heard a Boroughs accent like she’s got in years.”
The landlocked pirate bared his handful of surviving teeth, a sledgehammered piano keyboard, in a fond smile.
“Ah, yeah. She don’t look a bad old gal for eighty-six or whatever the fuck she is now, does she? Grew up around Compton Street just off Spring Lane. Me and me brother and me sister reckon she’ll outlive the lot of us, just from sheer Boroughs bloody-mindedness.”
Mick followed Bert’s eyes, azure chips of castoff china ditched below the oxidising privet of his brow, and spotted the self-possessed pensioner in question on the far side of the makeshift gallery, in animated conversation with a captivated Lucy and Melinda. All he caught was, “Ooh, yiss, I remember ’ow we use ter git dressed up un’ goo dayn tayn”, but that was all he needed to submerge him in a recollected aural floodtide of genetically defective vowels or missing-and-presumed-dead consonants; of chip-shop queue confessions and school-gate soliloquies. To hear a Boroughs woman of that vintage talking was to feel beneath your fingertips the embossed lettering on oval Co-op milk checks, penny-coloured and quietly dependable in value. Marvelling, he returned his attention to the erstwhile gasfitter, knife crime early adaptor and Dodge City plumber at his side.
“You’re lucky to still have her, Bert. Who were those women I saw with her when I turned up earlier? Are they two mates of hers?”
The rusting caterpillar eyebrows crept together for a puzzled face-off.
“You’re not talkin’ about Mel and Lucy?”
Shaking his head like a wet dog, Mick surveyed the cramped premises papered with his big sister’s hallucinations hoping he could point the pair out, but they’d either left already or had nipped outside to get away from all the noise and people, not that you could blame them.
“No, these were both older than your mum. They looked like they’d been living round here quite a while, how they were dressed.”
Bert pushed his lips out in an oral shrug.
“I never noticed ’em. I know that Rome, Rome Thompson, ’e was goin’ out ’round all the flats and sheltered housing yesterday to tell ’em about Alma’s exhibition, so most likely it was two old dears from this patch come to ’ave a butchers and see what was up.”
They both agreed that sounded about right and made a cast-iron aspiration to talk later before conversational convection currents dragged the genial urban ogre off into the grunt and mumble. Watching Regan borne away, Mick made a mental note to ask his sister how things were progressing with Bert’s hepatitis-C which, last he’d heard, had failed to budge even after two blackly suicidal interferon courses, last-chance remedies far uglier than the disease. Returning his attention to the copious vomit of ideas and colours tricking down the walls of the establishment, he picked his way through the next several pieces in disgruntled search of some tenuous thread connecting Alma’s peacock technical display with his own near-death episode, coming up empty-handed.
With Rough Sleepers, next of what appeared to be a largely arbitrary sequence, he found himself looking at the riotously hued gouache delineation of a pub’s front bar, conceivably the Old Black Lion, where luridly bright customers listed in an inebriate over-familiarity or threatened to unhinge their lower jaws in raucous laughter, both the fleshy sprawl of social drinkers and their colour-saturated habitat distorted and exaggerated till they bordered on the abstract. Sat unnoticed and ignored amid the gem-like greens and purples of a braying modern clientele was an anachronistic 1950s tramp rendered entirely in warm stubble greys with lamp black in his creases, wet titanium on a rueful eyeball. Almost photographically realistic in comparison to the oblivious Weimar grotesques surrounding him, his newsprint tones contrasting starkly with their Technicolor, the itinerant clearly existed on a separate plane to all the other careless revellers represented and appeared to be invisible in their beer-goggled sight. The single figure present with no glass before him or in hand, alone amongst the garish throng to meet the viewer’s eye, he looked out from beneath his battered hat-brim and the picture’s depths with a sad, knowing smile, possibly aimed at the insensate horde about him, or the painting’s audience, or both. An oddly poignant scene that was, again, nothing to do with Mick.
Next up, X Marks the Spot, was realised as what he believed might be a lino-print, the solitary pilgrim it portrayed made out of fractured slabs of solid Indian red on heavy watercolour paper that was yellowed, flecked with age or tea. The monkish form was stooped beneath the burden of a heavy-looking and most likely allegorical sack hefted on one buckling shoulder, struggling up an incline recognisable from the intrusive quilt of modern block-cut signage in the background as halfway down Horseshoe Street. Frankly, Mick didn’t have a fucking clue, and item six was hardly more enlightening. On board roughly two feet by one was what appeared from a few paces off to be the grainy head-and-shoulders portrait of a hat-clad Charlie Chaplin, but which on approach dissolved into mixed media collage. A large industrial watch-part cog, perhaps clipped from a technical or scientific magazine, described the upper semi-circle of the silent star’s iconic bowler, while its band and brim were a rectangular munitions factory and a silhouetted barbed-wire fence respectively. The face beneath, pasted together from torn photo-scraps of carefully composed and graduated half-tone densities, was an incongruous carnival of Dior models, shell-shock victims, stockpiled gasmasks, Punch cartoons skewering contemporary art and what appeared to be a period street-plan of Lambeth. The left cheek was bleached-out poppy fields, one eye a face that Mick identified as the young Albert Einstein and the other one a lifebelt ring from the Titanic. The moustache, he thought, might be Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s notorious Sarajevo motor vehicle. He didn’t even bother looking at the hastily scrawled ballpoint afterthought that gave the gimmicky assemblage its no doubt clever title.
On it went, a steeply angled ladder of estrangement. Clearly only there for its shock-value, Mick decided, the next exhibit depicted the bare back of an adult black male, in an ingeniously-crafted frame precisely contoured to contain the muscled curvatures of the rich purple and mahogany expanse. Distressingly, the skin in question appeared lately flogged, possibly by a cat-o’-nine-tails that had left close-spaced red horizontal lines across the glistening shoulder-blades. It came to him belatedly that these marks were intended to suggest a terrible musical stave on which what had seemed random blots of gore revealed themselves as carefully placed notes in some appalling composition. Queasily, he cast an eye over the nearby makeshift label. Blind But Now I See, apparently, although Mick couldn’t for the life of him. Although entirely certain that his sister would not have intended any such thing, he thought this particular piece might well be construed as racist, or at least as racially insensitive. He wondered what Dave Daniels would make of it, and next wondered if wondering that might in itself be racist.
Then there was a pencil-crayon study of somebody who looked like Ben Perrit ambling disconsolately at the bottom of an ocean, clouds of sediment arisen from his heels and what seemed to be murky fragments of St. Peter’s Church protruding from the seabed in the background, weed in ribbons trailing from the gaping mouths of Saxon monsters in relief below the eaves. Next came a larger work accomplished in a medium which Mick distantly remembered was called scraperboard, a steeply-angled vista looking up towards a silhouetted figure standing straddling a roof-ridge with some kind of glass or crystal sphere held up aloft in either hand, and lower the black sur
face scratched away in random smudges to reveal prismatic tinfoil underneath. There followed not a pictorial work of any kind but rather a white apron, hand-embroidered at the hem with unexpectedly uplifting butterflies and bees. It looked as if a lot of effort had gone into it, but once again he found he’d no clear notion as to what, if anything, the crisp white linen was meant to be saying beyond “Everybody look at me. I can embroider.” Nor was item ten, identified by a desultory biro scrawl as Hark the Glad Sound, any more enlightening. Rendered, conceivably, in oil pastels it depicted a young woman clad in 1940s clothes, alone and sitting in a gas-lit parlour playing a piano. Only after several moments did he realise that Titanium White highlights on the figure’s cheeks evoked refracted tears. If anything it looked a little sentimental; chocolate-boxy even, like that bloke who did the picture with the singing waiter, Vettriano. Once again, no reference to Mick himself was anywhere in sight. Had all that been just one of Alma’s barely comprehensible or indeed noticeable jokes, only remotely funny to a somehow-sentient encyclopaedia who’d never heard any good gags?
It was at this point that the object of his musings once again materialised at his side, ostensibly to give him back his borrowed lighter, though in actuality to see if she approved of his reactions to her paintings. This made him feel vaguely apprehensive, then annoyed that Alma should invert the usually understood relationship between art and its audience. Granted, he hadn’t been to many exhibitions, but he’d come away with the impression that at these gallery openings it was the artist who was nervous about being judged, not the attending public. Once he’d arm-wrestled his lighter from her lacquered talons he raised this point with his sister, although not as lucidly as he had managed in his head. Her flue-brush eyes regarded him with genuine puzzlement.
“Why, Warry, what a wonderful and otherworldly notion. Do you know, that honestly never occurred to me before? A piece of art is obviously pronouncing judgement upon everyone and everything that’s not the piece of art. Well, my art is, at any rate. Can’t speak for anybody else.”
Starting to notice his own critical deficiency of nicotine, Mick’s comment was perhaps more sharp in its delivery than he’d intended. Still, this didn’t matter, Alma being oblivious to rebuke.
“So it’s not art that’s judging everybody, Warry, is it? It’s just you, being judgemental.”
She stared at him for a moment and then, lowering her eyes, she sighed.
“Ah, Warry. Why is it always the wisdom of subnormal children that’s most humbling? But I’m not entirely certain why you raised the issue in the first place by suggesting I’d be critical of any negative reactions. What’s your own reaction so far, Warry, that’s caused all these troubling and unaccustomed thoughts?” Head cocked to one side, Alma eyed her brother both forensically and quizzically, a watchful poisoner alert for the first telltale symptoms of success. “It couldn’t be that … well, that you don’t like these pictures that I’ve taken great pains to create especially for you?”
It was exactly what he’d dreaded and he’d brought it on himself. Her drug-dilated pupils, nested in the pissed-on ashes of her irises, were welded to him and her eyelids seemed no longer to be functioning. His tongue had dried onto his palate and the punchline to a Roman Thompson joke across the cramped impromptu gallery became the raucous dinner-etiquette of crows. Alma still hadn’t blinked. There was no way to quit the field with honour, so reluctantly Mick struck what he hoped was a pugilistic stance as he went on the conversational offensive.
“But you’ve not, though, have you, Warry? How are these especially for me, particularly Charlie Chaplin made of World War One and watch-parts? What links me with Charlie Chaplin?”
Her seemingly lidless gaze swung to the ceiling as if in consideration, and then back to Mick.
“Well, you’re both much-loved symbols of a betrayed proletariat, and you both walk like people with explosive diarrhoea. So there’s that. But Warry, really, what’s all this about, this truculence? It wouldn’t be that you’ve formed your opinion after seeing only the first six or seven pieces, would it?”
Widening her mill-wheel eyes enquiringly, Alma awaited his affirmative reply so that she could kick off at him and somehow make her random, disconnected paintings his fault. Fortunately, this time Mick was ready for her.
“Warry, you’ve completely underestimated me, as usual. I’ve seen the first eleven.”
Belatedly, it struck him that this sounded as though he’d watched a school cricket team. He could perhaps have phrased it better and yet felt the basic point was sound enough. The corners of his sister’s mouth, however, steadily migrated to the region where her ears were last reported.
“Oh, yeah, right. The first eleven. So you’ve not seen number twelve?”
That dreadful smirk. What did it mean? He said that no, he hadn’t, and the rictus became even broader, to the point where he feared that the top of Alma’s head would separate and slide off slowly, falling with a wet thud to the nursery floor. She aimed one blood-dipped fingernail towards a point behind him on his left, and with heart sinking he turned to confront the exhibition’s twelfth display.
A by-this-point anticipated ballpoint tag announced the large acrylic work as Choking on a Tune. Mick’s own sandblasted features following his accident at work filled the enormous canvas top to bottom, edge to edge, a post-apocalyptic landscape with a peeling nose and a surprised expression. Watering eyes, wet blue and aggravated red, were aerial views of toxic puddles sunk in a corroded junkyard face. The vivid orange dust that the collapsed steel drum had breathed all over him submerged the portrait under swarming cayenne pinpricks, sore and fiery, carefully applied in pigment that he later learned was not only the earliest available source of the colour but was also in itself fatally poisonous. Dots of fire-opal teemed on a ground-zero physiognomy in speckled rivulets, in rust swirls eddying around and in between pink discus blisters, dolly-mixture pustules ranging in size from full stops to bullet points erupting from the chemically abraded epidermis, each bump bulging from the surface and accentuated with a vanishingly minute fleck of highlight Chinese White on its meniscus. Understandably, Mick found the picture hard to look at, painful in all its painstakingly depicted paining pain. It was a shocking image, certainly, of striking technical proficiency, but it seemed heartless like the flayed black shoulders of exhibit seven. With a sick pang of familial disappointment he was almost ready to consign his sister to the same chill gulag of disdain where he had almost every other soulless and attention-seeking modern British artist already confined and on a diet of their own shoes, when his attention was seized unexpectedly by something in the constellated pimples fanned across the doppelganger’s cheeks and forehead. He leaned closer. It was almost certainly his pattern-finding faculties at work, like when you got those snarling leper-monkeys in mahogany, but there existed something tantalising in the texture of the raw depicted skin with its precision re-enacted burns. Annoyed now, he leaned closer still.
The painting opened, flowering with new planes and perspectives like a stupefying pop-up to enclose him. Nose perhaps ten inches from the picture it became apparent that the tiny cerise boils and intermingled motes of caustic tangerine hid pointillistic Seurat miniatures, entire scenes emerging from the inflamed dermal mist. Below the portrait’s horrified right eye, the back yard of his childhood home swam into mottled definition, where on the cracked checkering of the constrained enclosure’s upper level his mum Doreen sat in profile on her high-backed wooden chair, caught in the act of popping something small into the baby-bird mouth of the dressing gown-wrapped infant balanced on her lap. Spreading across the shaven area above the painted face’s upper lip, a russet-dusted bubble wrap of blistering resolved into a vista of almost ecclesiastical solemnity, with to the left his tearful mother passing the limp form of her dead-looking toddler to the worried worker leaning from his lorry’s cab there on the right, one of the lifeless bundle’s bare legs dangling poignant in the central philtrum. The visage’s j
awline was from ear to ear a necessarily distorted overhead view of the makeshift ambulance’s route from Andrew’s Road to Grafton Street, with Regent Square now centred on the dimple of his chin, across the Mounts to York Road and the hospital, this last a reproduction on the left jowl detailed and complete down to the birdshit-crowned bust of Edward the Seventh which adorned the building’s northeast corner. It was for the brow with its receded hairline, though, the broadest unobstructed space in view, that the most striking vignette was reserved: the hot rose stipple and corrosive ginger peppering arranged into converging lines, perhaps the upper corner of a room where a firm-jawed girl of approximately ten wearing a fetid boa of dead rabbits was somehow suspended, reaching down with one hand to the viewer. Startled, Mick recoiled, pulling away, and everything immediately melted once more into boiling acne.
He was back, back in the room, back in his body and no longer with awareness part dissolved in an impressionistic rash of citrus polyvinyl. Backlogged sensory answerphone messages received during his absence flooded in like Virgin broadband offers, the olfactory grapefruit tingle of whatever Alma had used on her hair that morning and Bert Regan’s laughter, ugly as an airlocked drain. Bright afternoon light toppling through the west window sparked a fire of detail, bald spots, single earrings trembling on a lobe, or T-shirt slogans fading in the mind and cotton blend alike. Eyes blinking as if to expel the smarting residue of imagery he turned back to his sister, standing with one hip dropped and angora arms tangled together, clocking his reactions with the lead eyes of a Nazi lab assistant.
“So, then, Warry. Warts and all. Is that what you were going for?”