The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  I curled my sweating finger around the trigger and thought about shooting Monger right there and then. Wouldn’t it be easier if I did it whilst he was sleeping? I don’t know. I realized that I had to think very carefully about all this. After all, it’s not the sort of decision you want to make in a hurry – like buying a house or proposing marriage.

  I pulled the sheet away from Lenny and Rosa and looked at them both, all dead and wet. And dry, in a way. Dry in many ways. In fact, hardly wet at all.

  As I replaced the sheet, Rosa’s dead left arm dropped, her knuckles rapping on the bloody wooden floor. Upon hearing this, Monger’s eyes sprang open like a sinister and suspicious automaton – or a kind of natty cyborg, if you like. Whatever, I had awoken the beast and I really wanted to go to the toilet all of a sudden.

  Silence.

  Frozen.

  And then, at last: ‘Ah, Hector,’ he said, and reached for his gun.

  ‘Ah, Monger,’ I said, showing him the strange and fatal machine that I held in my quivering hand.

  Monger repositioned himself, smiled and straightened his tie. He removed his spectacles and threw them across the room. I watched them skid across the floor and come to rest by the leg of Eleni’s piano stool, shunting Rosa’s bloody green eye towards the bedroom door.

  I was about ten feet away. I lifted the gun and pointed it at the centre of his face. I wasn’t sure if I should be cocking it, or whether that was just something they do in cowboy films. I was pointing it at his face and, judging by his expression, was reasonably assured that no cocking was required.

  He straightened his cufflinks and cleared his throat. ‘Hector, you really are the most awful nuisance.’

  I came very close to pulling the trigger right there and then, if only in protest at his dreary verbosity.

  ‘Says you,’ I snapped back, rather petulantly, given the circumstances.

  ‘You are aware, are you not, that you look an utter fool standing there with a gun in your hand?’

  ‘Well, it’s your gun, Monger, and I’ve got it. So who’s the fool – eh?’

  ‘Still you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘Why not, Hector?’

  ‘You murdered Lenny and Rosa, you nut! Look at them! You killed them!’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he whispered and tilted his hat to shadow his eyes, ‘sorry about that, old boy. It was rather remiss of me, I know. But you see I caught a glimpse of the balding pate, thought it was you and saw no reason not to muck right in. I must say that I’m a little ashamed to have slain the great Lenny Snook. He was really quite a talent. How will history ever forgive me?’

  ‘Quite a talent? Lenny Snook, quite a talent?’

  ‘Well, a deal better than you, let us say.’

  ‘You know nothing.’

  ‘Well, I know what I like, as they say.’

  ‘Who gives a flying fuck what you like? I’ve seen your paintings, Monger. And I’ll tell you what, in my time I’ve seen many things. I’ve seen shit smeared on top of shit, literally, in a gallery in Tokyo, I saw literal shit smeared on top of literal shit, but even that wasn’t as shit as the shit that I saw in your house, not even close.’

  ‘Oh, so it was you.’

  ‘What was me?’

  ‘You, round at my flat.’

  ‘You know it was.’

  ‘Yes, and I had a charming tête-à-tête with your ridiculous mother.’

  ‘Monger, I am so close to shooting you right now that I really wouldn’t push it.’

  ‘Yes, she really is quite an unfathomable idiot.’

  ‘I want the money back! I want all that money back! And the case. I want Mum’s little travel bag back as well!’

  ‘I told her that I had happened upon you fornicating with a tattooed and gothic harlot whose language would shame the coalface. Well, you can imagine how well she took that. I think perhaps that you should call her. She was slurring a little. I wouldn’t be surprised if her head wasn’t in the oven by nightfall’

  ‘I er . . .’ I said, and swallowed, ‘I er . . . think I maybe about to shoot you now.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Monger, wafting his fag in the air, ‘go ahead and shoot me. I could do with a little excitement.’

  There was no fear in his voice. His eyes were shining and his teeth were brilliant white, as though I’d just asked him what he fancied from the bar. Beneath my finger I could feel the cool metal of the softly bevelled trigger.

  ‘Why have you done all this? Why are we stood here like this? Why am I about to kill you?’ I said.

  ‘Hector, calm right down. You are not . . . you are simply not about to kill me.’

  ‘But I really think that I might be. I really think that I am about to kill you. Fucking hell, you psycho, you invertebrate fucking bivalve, I really think that I may be about to pull this trigger!’ I closed one eye and corrected my aim to connect with the middle of his forehead.

  ‘Hector, you just haven’t thought any of this through,’ and he blew out two perfect rings. Then he closed his eyes and ran the tip of his little finger across one lid.

  ‘I’m about to kill you! I swear on . . .’ I couldn’t think of a life left to swear upon. I swear on . . .’

  ‘You’re a disgrace, Hector. I will destroy you,’ said Monger, chin up in the air, ‘I will fucking annihilate you, you sad, impotent specimen. You are no more capable of pulling that trigger than—’

  And that’s about the moment when I pulled the trigger and watched his head turn into a special effect. His hat span across the room like a posh Frisbee and his hair flew up into a ridiculous quiff. My painting behind him was splattered with . . . Oh, need I go on? I’m sure you can imagine.

  An hour crept by. I think it was an hour. I hardly recognized it. Bearing no resemblance to any of the numerous other hours of my acquaintance, I hardly recognized a single second of it. I believe that I slept, though it was barely sleep, and come to that it was barely me.

  Upon waking I rummaged through his duffel bag and found a trove of ammunition. Through a process of trial and error – learning how to load and reload – I shot up the entire flat. The mirror got it, the bed got it, my painting got it, and, just for good measure, Monger got it as well, over and over, over and over. In the end I threw down the gun and beat my head against the keys of the piano until even music was destroyed. Before I passed out I caught sight of my painting, rent by ladders, bullets and the shrapnel of Monger’s skull. A self-portrait at last.

  Now I’m perspiring at such an alarming rate, I’m beginning to steam. And once again I am thrown into a flap that I will be discovered before I have the opportunity to fully explain why it is that I’m here in Lenny’s hole in the floor of the Tate. But no matter, the moment is almost upon us, and no matter what, I sincerely believe that they will warm to my cause once my point is finally made. After all, the room above is filling up and fairly rings with the trill of lyric banality and the clash of crystal. I must say that I never imagined my life ending this way. But then I never imagined all those other lives ending in the way that they did. But what does that really tell us about anything, other than that my imagination is not up to scratch? I always thought that death would unpick me slowly, meticulously, over a long period of time; first subjecting me to one ailment, just to put me in the mood, and then, as the years shuffled by, it would gleefully augment my suffering, little by little, with each succeeding malady spread on top of the other, much like a glaze, until, at last, there existed a dense impasto of crippling afflictions that would finally suffocate the subject, rendering it muddy, lifeless and without form. And that was the best that I could have hoped for. You see, I suppose I always found it near impossible to really delight in the rich tints and manifold textures of life, since they always seemed to me to be casually flattened by the lacklustre tones of the final account.

  And so here I am, at last, scaling the walls of my dead friend’s deep and admired hole, naked and sweating, fumbling
for finger holds with one hand whilst clutching a loaded gun in the other. Who would ever have thought that it could come to this? My bare feet are quarrelling with their bleeding toes and I sear one side of my scrotum on the rage of a lamp. Just as I am about to poke my head above the trench my brain is assailed with the dizzy clamour of the mob of critics. I’m not sure if that is the correct collective noun when one is speaking of a gathering of critics – what else should it be? An ostentation, as in peacocks? Or a murder, as in crows? Perhaps a pride, an envy, a gluttony, or even a sloth. I believe that it is Brian Sewell who first comes to the aid of the baffled Miss Cookham, assisting with the translation of the offending French slogan daubed upon the wall, in what seems commonly agreed to be blood.

  ‘Why it’s perfectly straightforward, Becky,’ declares Sewell, with sixty-three plums pushed into his mouth: ‘“L’acte Surréaliste le plus simple est de marcher dans une rue peuplée avec un revolver chargé, et de tirer au hasard.” It’s Breton at his most asinine. It means, the simplest – or one might say the ultimate – act of Surrealism is to walk into a crowded street with a loaded revolver, and open fire at random. That’s what it says, but then Breton was a charlatan of the highest order. An utter quack.’ He’s sounding unnervingly like Monger. ‘I mean, quite honestly, I fail to see what point Snook is making here. I find it not only tiresome, but extremely jejune, and, I might add, cretinous to boot. I mean, for goodness’ sake, André Breton, this was a man who—’

  And that, at last is it, I believe. That is my cue. That is when I make my move. A fleshy, unfathomable behemoth scrambling up and out of the dirt with a gun in its fist, eyes like cheap cufflinks. The first shot was understandably wide of the mark, ricocheting off the ambulant pram and shattering the back window of Lenny’s blood-filled limousine, thus flooding the gallery floor with ninety gallons of bubbling pigs’ blood. Although, in truth, it never was real pigs’ blood, as Lenny had always claimed, but only a sort of synthetic blood, a sticky, sweet and rather too pink substance, much used in the movies, which went by the charming name of Kensington Gore. But then, you see, that is hardly the issue. Indeed that was only the start of it. For with the next shot, or twelve, the gathered pack of now howling traducers were brought to their knees and invited to savour some real pigs’ blood – some authentic Kensington Gore.

  19

  WANDSWORTH PRISON, LONDON

  I understand that it is customary, on occasions such as these, for the perpetrator of the atrocity to have the good grace to turn the gun upon himself. Apparently, in ninety-nine per cent of cases, the befuddled culprit is so discomfited by the severity of their gesture that they seek solace in the kiss of the very same bullet. Alas, in the event, it seems that I was found lacking with regards to this requirement. In the event, I’m afraid, the compulsion to play by the rules, and do the decent thing, evaded me. To be honest, I never even considered it.

  I’d love to be able to tell you that I won, but I didn’t – I lost. I lost spectacularly; in fact I came in last. Still, not bad, to be last – which was in fact fifth – when I wasn’t even nominated. Archie March won, even though most of his idle gimmicks were ravaged in the fallout. You might think it a little indelicate that they should have even considered the question of winners and losers after such an abomination. But, at the end of the day, art is business, and that business is primarily show business, and the first principle of show business is that the show must go on. So the show went on. Archie March showed up on the night in a black tux with a black beret and a black sable armband and dedicated the accolade to the dead and the prize money to the families of the dead. As you might imagine there were a number of outspoken opportunists and diehard Breton enthusiasts, posturing in the pages of the broadsheets, saying that I should have won, but, as you might imagine, they were roasted and vilified as nihilistic ghouls, cut from the same cloth as the handful of diabolic reprobates who hailed 9/11 as a masterpiece of postmodern deconstructionist installation. The red-tops indulged themselves in an orgy of punning with headlines which ranged from the obvious and asinine ‘Art Attack!’, ‘Artbreaker!’ and ‘Artless Swine!’ to the more sophisticated ‘A Turner For The Worst’, ‘A Brush With Death’ and, gloriously, my personal favourite, ‘I Don’t Know Much About Mass Murder, But I Know What I Like!’

  Newsnight cobbled together a nice little special on me and helicoptered in Damien and Tracey, who, on the whole, felt that I had taken things a little bit too far, and that the well-mined and ubiquitous motif of death had finally reached its zenith. Jake and Dinos put in an appearance on Question Time, stating that the ultimate role of art was to illuminate the eternal dilemma of mortality without actually ramming it down the spectator’s throat. They found my statement to lean too weightily, too indecently, on the literal, and would have found it more compelling if I had merely implied the notion of indiscriminate slaughter rather than actually slaughtered people indiscriminately. In a self-aggrandizing coda to their condescension, they took the opportunity to speculate that my barbarism represented an all-consuming final curtain to the theatre of the YBAs, and that they should henceforth be referred to as MABAs: Middle-Aged British Artists.

  My ceiling is twenty feet lower than my old ceiling and there is no piano. But there is no grey so grey that the trained and cultured eye cannot throw out a good length of rope and heave up a thick tough fudge of blue. And often, therefore, these walls are far, far bluer than all those bleached and hoary skies of recent memory. Even the mice are a kind of lavender. Even the spiders.

  I have finally stopped painting big heads. In fact, I have finally stopped painting altogether. Oh yes. You see, for the first two months they allowed me a few lousy brushes and a meagre selection of acrylics, but consequent to a psychiatric evaluation of my output it was decided that I shouldn’t even be in the same room as a pencil, which is a shame, because I was right all along. Because death, you see, was the answer. I’ll say it again: Death was the answer.

  When my life was starved of death it was not really what you would call a life. Since my life sought justification through representation, it was imperative that this representation should be consummate by way of being omniscient. As long as the ultimate desolation remained in the shadows then all my attempts to capture and illuminate the profound were damned to the shallows. Consequently, when my life was beset by, not one, but multiple bereavements, then the process blossomed in the glow of a glad and orgasmic ignition. What I’m trying to say is that one cannot interpret the curves and drops of existence until one has skidded a little on the ice and gravel of annihilation. Is that clear? Good. Then let us proceed.

  Bianca comes to see me every fortnight, as a friend, free of charge; though our conversations are much the same as our conversations of old that used to retail at about a pound a minute, two syllables per second, or thereabouts. Of course my issues, if that’s what we must call them, are a little more complex; and whereas we used to look forward to a day when we might terminate the treatment, we now have a tacit understanding that any kind of conclusion lies far in the distance. (And that the word terminate has, of late, taken on a very different meaning.) She’s the one friend that I have left, since the remainder of my friends, who aren’t actually dead, now see fit to shun my company (which isn’t very difficult for them, obviously, since my company is rather easy to shun these days, and looks set to continue being the case for the next thirty years or so).

  As to why I did what I did, Bianca is still working on it. I sometimes wonder if she regrets ever having met me. And then, other times, I believe she spends her evenings lining up her lucky stars and slipping them all a tenner. After all, I’m Hector Kipling. And what self-respecting Kleinian psychoanalyst could ask for anything more? She started off by grilling me as to whether or not, if at any point, I might have heard some sort of voice, or voices, in my head. Imperative voices, she called them. I said no, and she took my hand in hers and told me that it was nothing to be ashamed of, and that I would, in fact, be in
very good company should I concede this to be the case. She told me that Pythagoras had had them, Socrates had had them, St Augustine, Galileo and Hildegard of Bingen, whoever he was. I asked her if she meant Hildegard of Ogden and she scolded me for being flippant, and scorned my tendency to resort to infantile comedy in the face of mature tragedy. I asked her if there was such a thing as immature tragedy and she poked me in the middle of my third eye and said, ‘There you go again!’

  Apparently Galileo heard the voice of his dead daughter, whereas Socrates was often advised as to the best way round to his mate’s house. We talked about Van Gogh, Rothko and Munch, and Bianca posited that my breakdown might very well date back to that day at Tate Modern with Lenny when I broke down and wept before the Munch painting. We talked about Breton and Manson, about Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark Chapman, and then about Jake and Dinos Chapman. Then I began to sneeze a lot and had to lie flat on my back and chant something in Tagalog or Urdu, I’m not sure which. We talked about God and which one, and what sort, and what we think he or she, them or it might be up to these days. I assured her that I’d made a few half-cocked attempts at praying in the prison chapel, begging Jesus and his dad to deliver me from evil, to forgive me my trespasses, and please not to make any rash decisions concerning the fate of my mortal soul, that kind of thing. Bianca disregarded such talk and told me not to dwell upon grim themes of retribution: tridents, fire and the eternal gnashing of teeth, and how the Church of England’s official line is, of late, that hell is just black nothing as opposed to the white wonderful something of heaven. Even the Vatican has recently seen fit to knock all that purgatory palaver on the head. She discouraged my visits to the chapel, opining that all organized religions are merely the fossils of enlightenment, and that any prolonged contemplation of the violent renderings of Christ’s wounds could well set us back a few sessions. She went on to talk about Buddha, a short fat bald bloke, much like myself. Sedentary, contemplative and celibate, much like myself. The next week she brought in a small orange book and quoted from it at length: ‘Whatever joy there is in this world / All comes from desiring others to be happy / Whatever suffering there is in this world / All comes from desiring myself to be happy.’