The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  ‘Did you have a sleep? Did you have a little nap, lass?’ says Mum, going at her with a big spoon spotted with steaming rice.

  Eleni blinks her eyes, looks around and smiles. ‘Oh, hello,’ she says, as though she’s only just woken up that very moment. Sheba used to get up in a foul temper. Sheba never woke up and said, ‘Oh, hello.’ I used to dread her going to sleep.

  ‘Hello, madam, wakey wakey,’ says Mum.

  I walk over to Eleni and put my arms around her. I kiss her on the top of the head. Her body’s all warm and she smells of sleep. I want to fuck her.

  Here’s how we met: in 2004 I was living in flat 65, Pomfret House, Box Street, Bow. Eleni Marianos lived in number 67. I would often hear her piano through the door. We’d pass in the hall sometimes and say hello and blush and shuffle and drop things. In number 66 lived Mr Godfrey Bolton, an elderly, shifty-looking fella who, faced with the threat of a prison sentence regarding a violent attack upon a racehorse, one day saw fit to hang himself. The chair, falling against a candle that Mr Bolton had put on the bedside table (to illuminate his brief note?), caused a small fire to break out. Detecting the fire at an early stage, I burst out of my door, only to be met by Eleni Marianos bursting out of hers. Whereupon, with little discussion, we set about bursting through Mr Bolton’s. Having put out the fire with my dressing gown (leaving me naked), we stood back and discovered our neighbour suspended from the ceiling by an equestrian bridle. Eight months later we decided to buy his flat and, since by then we were in love, knock it through at both ends to form one big flat. Some of our friends thought all this a little creepy, and said so behind our backs.

  ‘Photo Finish’ said Godfrey Bolton’s note, and there was a small cross that might have been a kiss or a crucifix, it wasn’t clear. ‘Photo Finish’, signed ‘God Bolton’.

  The four of us sat down with our various meals and watched a baffling sequence of soaps back to back. Mum tried to fill me and Eleni in as to what was going on in each one, but the more she explained the more we missed what was going on in the one we were watching, to the point where even Mum became confused and kept fiddling with the volume, as though that would make things clearer. My dad just sat there, taking it all in, tutting and shaking his head at the goings-on on the screen, as though he’d never known such debauchery. Eventually it got to half nine and he announced that he’d taken his tablet and was going upstairs to watch a documentary about Rasputin. Sparky followed.

  ‘Do you not watch much telly back in London?’ says Mum.

  Me and Eleni are curled up on the settee. I’ve got my hand down the back of her skirt but we’re hidden. ‘Not really, Mum, no,’ I say.

  ‘Me and your dad do nothing else.’

  ‘Are you watching this?’ I say, nodding at Celebrity Fit Club.

  ‘This?’ she says, sniffing. ‘I’m not bothered about this. They’ll still be fat in a month.’

  ‘There’s a programme on Channel 4 about Tracey Emin,’ I say. Eleni pushes her arse back against my thighs and purrs like she might go to sleep.

  ‘Ooh, not her,’ says Mum.

  ‘We don’t have to watch it,’ I say, ‘I’ve seen it before but Eleni’s not seen it.’

  Mum gives in. It’s the mention of Eleni that does it. She loves Eleni. ’Turn it over,’ she says. ‘I’ll watch owt.’

  I pick up the remote and Tracey Emin’s sat up on her settee smoking and drinking saying’Fuck this’ and ’Fuck that’, ranting on about her abortion. And then she’s trotting through some park, feeding squirrels, saying how we all need something small to look after. I steal a glance at Mum and she’s just gazing blankly at the screen as though she’s watching a magic act and trying to work out how they’ve done it. Eventually she pipes up. ‘Good God,’ she says, ’what’s she like?’

  ‘I know, Mum, she’s a nut,’ though I don’t really mean it.

  ‘Do you know her?’ says Mum.

  ‘I’ve met her a few times.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Mum.

  Eleni pushes herself up on one elbow. ‘Are you all right there, Connie? You want to lie on the couch?’ She hasn’t quite picked up that we call it a settee.

  ‘No, no, love. You’re all right on there. You two nestle up. I’m fine where I am.’

  Eleni settles back into my arms. I stroke the fringe out of her eyes, look down at her, smile and kiss her on the nose. She smiles back and squeezes her eyes together like a cat. I want to go to bed soon and fuck her, quietly; the way we always have to whenever we come back to Blackpool for a few days.

  Tracey’s pointing a video camera around her flat and it’s a right fucking dump. I look over to Mum. Her eyebrows are up and she’s chewing on her knuckles.

  ‘They want to be doing a documentary on you, Hector. You do better stuff than this.’

  ‘I expect they will, Mum.’

  ‘Well, I should think so. I mean, at least you can paint. Look at her. Look at them drawings. They look like they’ve been done by a half-baked monkey.’

  ‘It’s concept, Connie,’ says Eleni, and because of her accent it doesn’t sound pretentious. It sounds like she was born to utter things like ‘It’s concept, Connie’, like she has no choice, like she should never say anything else. I love Eleni.

  ‘What do you mean?’ says Mum, not taking her eyes from the screen.

  Eleni props herself up again. ‘Well, she’s being honest. She’s making an effort to be as honest as she can be. And she is calling that art.’

  ‘Well, what do you think about that, Hector?’ says Mum, and I know that she’s really referring to my paintings and how that’s what she thinks of as art. But it’s the same as the conversation about chicken. We’ve been having it for twenty years. She knows very well that I’m happy to call all sorts of things art, even to the detriment of my own paintings. It’s that bit she doesn’t like. She wants me to stand up for what I do; she wants a passionate hero, affirming his patch; and that’s all well and good, but the fact is I’m totally open-minded on the subject. If Marc Quinn wants to freeze his own blood in the shape of his head, or Jake and Dinos want to stick dicks onto kids’ chins, then it’s all fine by me.

  ‘I like her, Mum,’ I say, as Tracey’s talking about pulling a foetus out of her pants, ‘I think art should be honest.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to bed,’ she says, ‘I think she’s a bloody fruitcake.’

  She goes into the kitchen and rattles a few things around, turns off the lights, delivers a careful list of instructions about how to turn off the gas fire and how we’re not to unplug the fish tank, and shuffles off out the door, nodding back to the telly. ‘She’s dirty,’ she says, ‘she’s a dirty bloody lunatic, that lass. I’m lost.’

  Me and Eleni watch the rest of it and when it’s over we unplug everything but the fish tank and start kissing. I’ve had a few beers and all I want to do is kiss her for hours. We can hear my dad snoring upstairs and we undress as much as we dare and fuck, right there on the cream settee that my dad, based on nothing, is allergic to.

  The next morning, Sunday, we’re awoken by the sound of hammering. Not like someone’s hanging a picture or putting a nail into the floorboards, but intermittent, heavy, laboured hammering, and the sound of falling masonry, as though my dad’s knocking down the fireplace. I pull on a sweater and yesterday’s underpants and wander downstairs to investigate. And there’s my dad, stripped to the waist, huge grey sledgehammer, knocking down the fireplace.

  ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ I say.

  ‘What?’ he says, looking at the television.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He swings around and sees me. ‘I’m knocking down the fireplace,’ he says and runs the back of his hand across his brow. We’re both stripped to the waist: him from the neck down and me from the feet up. Sparky’s tucked away behind the curtain on the window ledge, choking on the dust and shaking like he’s developed a chronic case of doggy Parkinson’s overnight.

  I remember whe
n this fireplace was built, sometime back in the seventies, back when Mum and Dad were still aware of trends and still supple enough to follow them. Irregular slabs of purbeck stone and polished grey slate. I remember the plans laid out on the dining-room table and this bloated Italian bloke who stank of pork pointing at them with a translucent yellow screwdriver. Mum and Dad nodding and asking questions. Mum wanted a trapezium over the flue, Dad wasn’t so keen. And now here he is: rid of it at last. He’s spread a dustsheet out over the carpet and he’s up to his ankles in broken rock and plaster. He puts down the hammer, wipes his hands on a towel and slumps into his chair. Jiggered, as he would say.

  ‘Bloody hell, Dad. What you doing that for?’

  ‘We’ve decided it’s to come down,’ says Dad, nodding at Mum, who’s sat in the conservatory scanning the colour supplements.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I say again. ‘Fucking hell’ is what I’m thinking, but ‘Bloody hell’ is what I’m saying cos I don’t swear at home. It’s not what we do. The air’s gone mad with dust. Sparky’s spasms are making the windows rattle.

  Mum looks up and smiles. ’Well, look who’s here,’ she says, puts down her magazine and pushes herself up out of her little wicker chair. ‘What do you think, then?’ she says, putting her hand over her mouth, like a schoolgirl who’s just sprayed something rude on the wall. She’s chuckling.

  ‘You’re knocking down the fireplace?’

  ‘We’ve decided it’s old fashioned.’

  Dad’s got his head down and he’s preoccupied with breathing.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting someone in to do this?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, your dad’s strong,’ she says, ‘he’s knocking on but he’s still got some energy left. Haven’t you, Derek?’

  And Dad looks up, all red in the face, mouth open, fist to his chest. ‘Eh?’

  ‘I was just saying to Hector, you might be seventy-eight but you’ve still got it in you.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ he says, ‘I’m not beat yet.’

  I worry about this.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘Bacon?’

  ‘Don’t start, Mum.’

  ’Is Eleni getting up?’ and she’s all frisky, like she’s excited just to say her name.

  ‘I think so, yes. The hammering woke us both up.’

  Mum scampers over and takes me in her arms. She smells all clean. I return the embrace. ‘Oh, and I do love you, Hector. I’m so glad you’ve come up to see us. I do love you.’ She’s got me in a clinch and I can barely move. ‘Don’t we, Derek? Don’t we love him?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ Dad says, and grips onto his sweating purple head, staring at the floor. Always did.’

  ‘I love you too, Mum,’ I say, ‘I love you both.’

  ‘And we love Eleni. She’s smashing, is Eleni. You can have right nice natural conversations with Eleni.’

  Right nice natural conversations are important to Mum. She never had right nice natural conversations with Sheba. I had right nice natural conversations with Sheba, at first. And then ...

  ‘What do you think?’ says Mum, nodding towards Dad’s demolition. ‘Do you think we’re mad?’ She hugs me again and I hold my breath cos I don’t want her to smell last night’s beer on me.

  Eleni’s put on her best clothes and we eat our toast and beans in the conservatory. That’s what Mum calls it: The Conservatory. Basically it’s a little extension built onto the back of the house overlooking the small lawn and rockery. Mum’s filled it up with plants. They’re everywhere, climbing up the walls, twisted around the brass light fittings. Mum’s good with plants. And whenever she mentions me and my painting and says, ‘Eee, I don’t know where you get it all from,’ I always credit it to her and how she’s so good with plants and how that’s a sort of art in itself. I don’t say this as a platitude. I mean it. I’m useless with plants. Eleni’s useless with plants as well. They die. Perhaps it’s the fumes. Or perhaps it’s just that we’re useless.

  ‘I was just reading this, Eleni,’ says Mum, pointing with her big bitten finger to the newspaper.

  ‘What’s that, Connie?’ says Eleni.

  ‘About some woman called Frida Kahlo,’ says Mum, rhyming it with callow.

  ‘Ah yes,’ says Eleni, smiling, beautiful, uncomplicated in her enthusiasm for whatever Mum is about to profess.

  ‘Madonna’s got a lot of her paintings, it says here.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ says Eleni, awaiting Mum’s point.

  ‘It says here that she was Mexican.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Eleni, realizing that there may not be a point after all. Or perhaps it’s just me who realizes this.

  ‘She was knocked over by a bus,’ says Mum, stroking her chin like she’s a man with whiskers, ‘like Beryl next door.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Beryl Short next door.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Beryl was knocked over by a bus. She’d gone all giddy on medication and just stepped out. She told me she thought she was stepping out to take a little paddle.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘A little paddle in the sea. But she wasn’t. She was in the middle of Waterloo Road.’

  Eleni and me look at each other and smile. I take a sip of my tea. Mum takes a sip of hers. And she’s off again ...

  ‘Now you see she was very personal with what she painted.’ Oh, so she has got a point after all. ‘She believed in honesty ...’ here it comes, ‘but the difference with her and that lass last night, that Tracey... what’s she called, Hector?’

  ‘Tracey Emin.’

  ‘Aye, Tracey Emin. The difference between her and this Mexican lass is that with her – Frida Kahlo – you might want to hang some of this on your walls. I mean, I wouldn’t, but some folk do. Madonna does,’ and then, ’for example,’ and she looks up and lowers her specs and she’s finished. Eleni’s on the spot.

  ‘Well, Connie,’ says Eleni, mopping up her bean juice with her last triangle of toast, ‘all art does not have to be hanging on walls.’

  ‘Well, I know that,’ says Mum, ‘I know that you can have statues and . . . and er . . .’ She’s stuck on statues and she’s taken off her specs and she’s searching her brain for something else that you don’t have to hang on walls, finally relaxing and digging up ‘. . .sculptures.’ I take another sip of my tea. ‘Sculptures and all that. I know that.’ Eleni’s nodding, Mum’s kicked off her slippers at the heel and she’s waggling them on her toes. ‘But when it comes to the likes of that lass last night, that Tracey Emin, well, you can’t put what she does on a wall, can you?’

  ‘Well, some of it you can,’ says Eleni, ‘her drawings, whatever. But if you don’t want to, then that’s fine. Art is whatever you want it to be.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want it to be that.’

  ‘And that’s OK,’ says Eleni, and bites down on her toast. She sniffs the air. ‘It smells so beautiful in here, Connie.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Mum, and looks back down at the paper. She’s not finished with us yet. Dad’s in the lounge watching the build-up to the Belgian Grand Prix, which is doing nothing to abate Sparky’s wretched convulsions. Mum clears her throat. I suspect she’s just getting started.

  ‘There’s a painting of hers here called – ’ and she straightens her specs and leans in ‘The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, painted by Frida Kahlo in 1938.’ Mum’s sounding a bit academic now, which is weird. She carries on: ‘Shows a young lass who’s flung herself from a building.’ She holds the paper up to her face. ‘The Hampshire House building. Shows her falling and shows her fallen. There’s blood on the frame, it says here. Ex-Ziegfeld showgirl ... Dorothy Hale.’ Mum looks up and pulls off a pantomime shiver. She lowers her specs, frowns, looks at us both. ‘Ooh, imagine that: throwing yourself off a building. Can you imagine throwing yourself off a building, Eleni?’

  ‘No,’ says Eleni.

  ‘Can you, Hector?’ says Mum.

  ‘No, Mum,’ I say
.

  ‘Ooh, neither can I. I can imagine taking a lot of pills, or sticking your head in an oven, but I can’t see throwing myself off some big building.’

  All this is a bit of a revelation. I’m a bit shocked. I don’t know why she just came out with such a thing. I steal a glance at Eleni. She’s just looking at the floor. We sit in silence for a while. I mean it’s not really silence cos Dad’s got the telly up loud and there’s a lot of cars screaming around Spa-Francorchamps, but it feels like silence, and given what’s just been announced, it is.

  And next thing you know ... ‘I mean it’d be like me throwing myself off Blackpool Tower. Imagine that. I mean I’ve never been up the Tower. Lived here forty-five years and never been up the Tower. I mean I can imagine taking pills and all that, but throwing myself off the Tower? Give over.’ She smoothes out the paper on her lap and cranes her neck to read more. Eleni bites into her toast and suddenly I’m irritated by the sound of her chewing. What’s going on? Why’s Mum talking about throwing herself off the Tower? And why am I irritated by the sound of Eleni chewing her toast?

  I look at Mum. She’s scanning the article like it’s a big fancy puzzle but she’s not giving up. Her lips are moving a bit and I see her make an ‘F’ and then I see her make a ‘K’. And then ‘Frida Kahlo’, silently, to herself.

  It won’t have gone over her head, all this. Next time it comes up she’ll remember exactly who Frida Kahlo is. She’s sat there now reading about her, and you can be sure it’s all going in. Ever since I started to do well in the art world, ever since they started writing about me in whatever magazines she could get her hands on in Preston, then she’s taken an interest. She’s never once said, ‘Get yourself a proper job,’ or ‘I think you should be careful’ No, she’s just enjoyed my fame and made an effort to understand. She’s got an opinion about it all, has Mum. She thinks Jake and Dinos are really seriously poorly, and possibly dangerous. Not dangerous in the way a critic might call them dangerous but like Mum calls them dangerous. Like maybe the police should get involved. Sarah Lucas is butch and rude. Damien Hirst’s dirty and cruel. Rachel Whiteread’s got some good ideas but it’s all a bit dull once you’ve got the gist of it. She likes Gillian Wearing cos she’s pretty and looks a bit like Eleni, but she didn’t like that transsexual caper. And all them policemen idling about would have been put to better use out on the streets catching folk. Catching Jake and Dinos for a start. And as for Gilbert and George, well ... now they should get a proper job.