The Art School Dance

by Maria Blanca Alonso

  ‘Read on,’ Griff smiled.

  McCready read on and the words leapt out from the page at him: ‘‘Look it up! If you have any difficulty in comprehending this brief then translate into English whatever modification of the language you are familiar with. Finally, you might bear in mind a dictum of Thomas Aquinas: That which makes two pieces of flint two pieces and not one is not the fact that they are both flint, for in this respect they do not differ. Good luck. B.Goode, Sen. Lec., F. Art.’’

  McCready gave a short gasp of puzzlement, crumpled up the paper and tossed it over his shoulder.

  ‘What is rechauffe?’ Griff asks. ‘What does it mean?’

  They sat down to consider the roots of the word, which they thought might possibly be French, and as they were pondering over it Ceri marched into the studio, quiet and purposeful, carrying a roll of newsprint under his arm. This he unfurled and taped to the wall behind a selected balloon; then he turned and left, still quiet, still purposeful. On his second entrance, a minute later, he was carrying a bucket of very liquid paint.

  ‘What’re you doing, Ceri?’ asked McCready.

  ‘Sorting out the fucker and his project,’ Ceri answered gravely, and put the bucket down with all the reverence deserving a chalice. He rolled up his sleeves, picked up the bucket again, and in one quick movement hurled the contents at the balloon. The balloon bounced beneath the glossy torrent and the paper received most of the paint, showing what might or might not have been the silhouette of a balloon. The paper was taken down from the wall and laid flat to dry.

  ‘Is that it, then?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Ceri, hands on hips and chest heaving, looking down at the soaked paper.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Barney, regarding the mess into which he had almost stepped.

  ‘It’s Ceri’s response to your project,’ McCready told him.

  Ceri nodded. ‘An accurate and precise interpretation of the situation.’

  ‘Too creative,’ Barney told him, walking away and leaving a trail of sticky footprints across the floor.

  ‘Pretty mindless, though,’ thought Griff.

  *

  ‘I’ve got the buggers in knots upstairs. They’ve got cameras and callipers and rulers and bits of string in play, there’s only Ceri using any paint and all he’s doing is flinging it about the place. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going.’

  Barney was effusive as he told the others in the senior common room. Most of the staff, like the students, were confused by his project, Teacher was too dulled by drink to care, and only Walter showed outright disapproval in his dark, black-eyed glare.

  ‘This is your balloon project?’ said Bobby.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Barney, his grin aimed at Walter, extracting every ounce of pain that he could. ‘It’s put a stop to their bloody painting, hasn’t it, Walter? Knocked the bloody nudes on the head for good.’

  ‘It’s only a fad,’ Walter believed, trying to sound unconcerned. ‘They’ll soon grow out of it, like they grew out of playing conkers or wanting to be train drivers.’

  ‘But that’s where you’re wrong, Walter. This is the beginning of the end for you and your kind. You’re going to be exiled to the ladies’ evening class for good now.’

  Walter’s nose was still swollen, his eyes bruised, he had been too humbled by Barney’s single blow to respond to these fresh taunts. He hunched his shoulders and sulked.

  ‘What are they actually going to do with these balloons?’ Bobby asked hesitantly, not wanting to seem too ignorant.

  ‘Anything they can, apart from paint them.’

  Walter got to his feet. ‘You’re so bloody childish,’ he said to Barney. ‘Sticking balloons up all over the place is so infantile.’

  ‘So infantile that you can’t even understand what it’s all about,’ Barney smiled. ‘It’s just too childish for you to appreciate, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s childish to keep waging battle like this. We’re supposed to be educating the students, not fighting for their favours.’

  ‘And educate them I will, Walter, just as soon as I’ve got them out of your clutches. Why don’t you just leave me to it, find yourself another flat-chested girl from the foundation course and hide away upstairs with her?’

  Bobby giggled and Walter blushed. Years ago he had convinced himself that his interest was aesthetic, as innocent as the Reverend Dodgson’s preoccupation with Alice, but Barney’s mentioning the penchant and Bobby’s tittering at it made him feel guilty. He was unsure whether to make light of it, to laugh along with the joke and say yes, he would go upstairs and fondle a seventeen year old virgin, or categorically deny that anything licentious was ever in his mind when he confronted his models.

  ‘Can’t think what to say, can you?’ Barney knew.

  ‘Sod off,’ Walter replied, shuffling across the room to pour himself a cup of coffee from the percolator.

  ‘Poor Walter,’ said Bobby.

  ‘Just what is it about him that grabs everyone’s sympathy?’ Barney wanted to know. ‘Julia’s just the same, always sorry for him.’

  ‘He’s so inoffensive, that’s the thing. Certainly too inoffensive to deserve your insults. I don’t know how you can treat him the way you do.’

  ‘It’s easy. He may seem inoffensive to you but he’s buggering up the mind of those students upstairs. Someone has to stop him.’

  ‘And you’ve taken that role upon yourself, have you? Righter of wrongs, champion of the good? Christ, Barney, you almost make it sound like a crusade.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, and looks at the Principal dozing in the chair beside him. ‘Nobody else cares enough to intervene. Teacher certainly won’t do anything, the idle bugger.’

  Teacher stirred, but said nothing.

  ‘Say that louder,’ Bobby challenged Barney, and smiled when he declined to. ‘No, you won’t, will you? Teacher would beat the crap out of you if you started on him the way you do with Walter.’

  ‘Well, he is a big bastard, ‘ Barney conceded. ‘Thumping him would be like thumping an outside toilet.’

  Bobby shook the Principal roughly, told him that Barney is calling him a shithouse.

  There was a low grumble, which might have been an acknowledgement or a rebuke.

  ‘The driving force behind our art school,’ Barney said, but still not loud enough to cause offence.

  Walter returned with his coffee, sat quietly brooding, and silence settled on the room again, like an overweight bird come to roost. Barney smiled to himself, satisfied with the confusion his project was causing. Bobby split a matchstick and begins to use it as a toothpick, digging away at her teeth. Barney gave a deep yawn, his mouth opening wide, blamed his tiredness on his daughter who now seemed to disturb the peace of every night.

  ‘Ah, so the joys of fatherhood are wearing thin already?’ Bobby guessed.

  ‘Not at all. It’s just that it’s a rather more tiring business than I imagined it would be.’

  Bobby refused to accept this. ‘No, it’s more than tiredness, Barney. You can’t fool me. It’s the way that life has become stale and domesticity stifling, that’s what’s got you weary. I’ll tell you what you need to do.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What every creative married man needs to do once a bambino comes along. You need to get yourself a mistress.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No I’m not. A mistress would bring some novelty back into your life and help you love your family again.’

  ‘I do love my family,’ Barney maintained, but was forced to add, ‘it’s just that the baby makes things difficult at times, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s your abstract considerations tying your brain in knots, that’s what it is,’ said Walter. ‘You need to pick up a paintbrush again, Barney, and find some peace of mind.’

  ‘Pick up a piece on the side, more like,’ Bobby continued to argue. ‘Untwist his testicles, that’s what he needs. It’s his balls that are in a knot, Walte
r, not his mind.’

  Barney offered neither a grumble nor a frown, nor wasted any breath on telling them to keep their advice to themselves; he was sane and he was sensible, reason was in control, he knew that his only problem with family life was in finding the peace he needed to work.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said to Bobby, and without really considering his words it was more an aside to himself, ‘I thought you’d be too busy with your own love life to find time to bother with me and mine.’

  ‘Bother with you?’ she laughed, and threw back her head. ‘Jesus, Barney, you didn’t perhaps think I was offering myself to you? I might have mentioned you taking a mistress but I certainly wasn’t auditioning for the part!’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Barney tried to correct himself, and felt his cheeks redden as he laughed with her, saying, ‘No, I was just meaning, well-’ For once words failed him, her continued amusement annoyed him and he snapped, ‘Bloody hell, Bobby, I wouldn’t touch you with a disinfected dipstick!’

  ‘Liar,’ Bobby smirked, leaning forward provocatively. ‘You were just itching in your pants at the thought of bedding me.’

  ‘Ha!’ he snorted. ‘Bedding you would be like bedding- like bedding Barbara Streisand!’

  ‘And you’re saying that prospect doesn’t turn you on?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. She certainly doesn’t.’

  Walter shook his head, said, ‘The poor man’s been away from painting too long, he’s completely lost his aesthetic sense.’

  ‘Aesthetic, nothing. Her nose is too big,’ Barney protested, only realising just how pathetic his protest sounded when he had blurted it out.

  ‘Listen to the man!’ Bobby cried, now laughing so loudly that other people in the room were turning around. ‘He must be the only man left on the planet who worries about the state of the mantelpiece when he’s poking the fire! Talk about fussy!’

  The conversation was getting out of hand for Barney, too heated for him to give any consideration to what he was saying; he could handle a discussion on Descartes, or a lecture on logical positivism, but the talk with Bobby was deteriorating and his responses were just gushing forth without thought or effect.

  ‘Well, this isn’t getting any work done,’ he said, after taking a deep breath to stem the previous flow of inanities.

  ‘Why don’t you take me for a drink and see if you can’t soften me up?’ Bobby called after him as he marched away. ‘You never know your luck! I might be persuaded to let you fuck me!’

  *

  Though everyone else was confused, and Ceri was still flinging paint about the place in abstractly expressive bursts, McCready seemed to be making no effort at all to respond to Barney’s project. The balloons in the painting studio become puckered as the days passed, like freshly washed fingertips pegged out to dry, and they hung limply, nothing more than sad sacks of stake air. When the deadline came for the completion of the project Barney was waiting for McCready.

  ‘So, McCready, are you going to make your apologies?’

  ‘Apologies, Barney? For what?’

  ‘I don’t see any response to the project I set,’ said the tutor, looking around the walls where the few desultory attempts at a solution had been displayed.

  ‘That doesn’t mean to say I didn’t respond,’ McCready said, with a clever smile.

  ‘Okay then, let’s hear about it,’ Barney demanded, inviting McCready to sit and explain.

  ‘The clue was in Thomas Aquinas,’ McCready began. ‘I delved a little more deeply into the man’s work and came up with his conclusion that for change to occur there must be a cause.’

  ‘Reasonable enough,’ agreed Barney.

  ‘So, imagine if we worked back from effects to causes… we could either work back indefinitely, or eventually reach some ultimate original cause, like a God for example. The first of these options, the idea of infinite causes, has to be ruled out, because with this there could be no beginning to the series. If there’s no beginning, there’s no succession. If there’s no first cause there can be no second, no third, and so on.’

  ‘So?’ said Barney, interested, for this was the sort of response to the project that he had had in mind.

  ‘So we have to accept the second option, the idea of an original God-like cause.’

  Barney waited for McCready to continue.

  McCready didn’t, though; he sat back with his arms folded, smiling smugly.

  ‘Then what’s the answer to our problem?’ Barney finally asked.

  ‘God knows!’ McCready laughed, rising from his stool and starting to walk away.

  ‘Hey! Where do you think you're going?’ Barney asked.

  ‘To the canteen. It’s time for lunch.’

  ‘Then it’s going to be a working lunch. You don’t think you’re going to get off as easily as that, do you?’

  McCready should have known, he should have realised that it would not be so simple.

  As they went down to the canteen Barney launched into one of his meteoric philosophical journeys, spinning around the arguments suggested by McCready’s excuse.

  ‘What it boils down to, McCready, is that while there can be certainty about questions of scientific knowledge, whatever criteria are involved, questions of religious knowledge are beyond such straightforward considerations.’

  I was in the canteen as they entered, at a table with Rose and Griff, and I saw McCready’s gesture of helplessness as Barney led the way to a vacant table, hoped that all would be well… for both our sakes.

  Rose and Griff were not at all optimistic.

  ‘McCready’s got that expression on his face,’ Griff observed. ‘Smugness about to turn to tantrum.’

  ‘And Barney’s wearing one of his face-cracking smiles,’ Rose recognised. ‘The same smile he wore after he busted Walter’s nose.’

  ‘It doesn’t augur well, does it?’ said Griff, and laid a consoling hand on mine, in a confusion of genuine sympathy and grotesque delight.

  ‘Doesn’t augur well at all,’ Rose agreed, peeling her veil back further from her eyes and squinting hard, as if she needed to witness every subtle change of expression, every twitch of anger and pain in McCready’s face.

  Barney talked as he ate, at McCready rather than to him, arguing that the methods applied to ordinary knowledge could not be used when assessing the merits of religious knowledge. Religious knowledge was of two kinds, he explained, one revealed and the other natural. The first contended that religious knowledge was the product of insight -revelation, as the word suggested- while the second held that there were particular events or facts which offered a foundation for religious knowledge. It was the second of these which was the more convincing, starting as it did with the order and pattern which was seen in the natural world. The effects which could be discovered in nature, the numerous intricate relationships which existed, were so similar to the effects of human planning that it could be easily assumed that the causes which produced these effects were also similar. In the case of human planning the impetus was thought, wisdom, intelligence, so the argument led to the belief that there was also a similar intelligence behind the construction of the natural world. Obviously this underlying intelligence would be deemed to be greater than that of humankind, since the order behind the natural world was far more complex than that behind the human world.

  Those of us eavesdropping on the argument nodded our heads in agreement; it was left to McCready, the pervert that he was, to search for flaws.

  ‘As long as he doesn’t argue back,’ Griff said to me. ‘He’ll be alright if only he can nod and listen and agree with everything Barney says. That’s the way to frustrate the bastard.’

  McCready, of course, could not simply sit and listen. It was as if he deliberately wanted to be upset.

  ‘But with the human world we see both cause and effect,’ he pointed out. ‘With the natural world we see only effects. And are the natural effects similar enough to human effects to convince us that they both have similar cause
s?’

  Barney smiles as he set aside his knife and fork. ‘Very good, McCready, you’re starting to think again,’ he congratulated him.

  Griff warned me to prepare myself. ‘Get ready, we’re reaching crisis point. Prepare for lift off.’

  ‘But what about it?’ McCready asked, as Barney pushed away his plate and rose from his seat. ‘You’re surely not going to bugger off now, are you?’

  ‘My job is only to prompt questions, McCready. You should know that by now. I’m not here to give any answers.’

  McCready swore at him, kicked his chair away and gave chase as the tutor left the canteen.

  ‘Oh, McCready! Please!’ I begged, then cursed him for the idiot that he was. ‘You bloody fool, McCready! Come back! Don’t let him upset you!’

  Chapter Seven

  If Walter had announced a still-life project, pure and simple, then it’s doubtful that Rose would have shown any interest whatsoever, but the grand Gallic reference to ‘nature-morte’ had her with her ears pricked and eager to join in, sweeping up from the gloom of the sculpture department to the painting studio like a fury out of hell.

  Walter proposed his subject quietly, almost secretively, remembering how Barney had reacted to the last one, whispered his intentions privately to each student, together with the advice that whatever subjects were chosen should be unobtrusive enough to be easily hidden whenever Barney might make an appearance in the studio.