Yet to enter the room with Turner’s late paintings, he would say, was extraordinary, and made it all worthwhile, it was like entering a room of light, pure sunlight pouring forth from the walls, that was when the voltage surged, when the museum became a cathedral.
In fact, early on in our friendship we had agreed, during one of our very first conversations, that we much preferred the old to the new. It was far better to watch over art that had withstood the test of time—why devote hours of your life guarding something that might be gathering dust or mould in a warehouse fifty years from now?
‘If the foreign couple hadn’t noticed Crooke in his chair I would’ve probably been the one to discover him,’ I reflected, ‘when I’d moved on to Room 23.’
‘We’re thin lines of defence,’ Daniel replied, tapping on his glass with two fingers.
‘That we are,’ I said, half relishing the thought.
Over the decades the museum lore gathered, mainly things overheard rather than witnessed first-hand. Among these were the widely circulated stories that had become public domain, such as the heavily lipsticked woman who kissed a white painting in order to cheer it up, and the guard at the Louvre who went around carving Xs into paintings with his own set of keys. And of course Rembrandt’s Night Watch, attacked no less than three times in the past century. We came to hear about all sorts of museum pathologies, mostly involving people suffering from an identity crisis, paintings mistaken for mirrors as individuals caught sight of a troubling reflection.
At work we had been taught to be good judges of character, programmed to pick up on the slightest stirrings of unrest, to read faces and gauge their intentions. After so many years at the job, I had become finely skilled in the interpretation of a clenched fist, a skittish glance, the roaming gaze of someone unharnessed. I would try to detect whether there was something in immediate need of release, on the verge of eruption, a dangerous failure to distinguish one’s personal life from that of a painting.
Daniel knew many more stories than I did, and additional ones from overseas, such as the irritable old ladies at the Hermitage who despite seeming languid and inert were in possession of sharp eyes and tongues, the mentally impaired guards at one of Munich’s painting collections, and the custodians at Pompeii who flicked ash from their cigarettes into the ruins.
After he’d brought up some of these details yet again that evening, reminding me of the great yet for the most part untapped range of variables in our profession, I returned the conversation to poor Leighton Crooke, whose fading pulse I could still feel between my fingers, but as I spoke I could see Daniel’s attention beginning to drift.
The girl at the bar was calling out—with a rather pronounced lisp that didn’t match her looks—to a man who was walking away without collecting his change. But for a few degrees her face was nearly turned in our direction. Daniel made himself taller in his chair, straining to enter her line of vision.
Most of the time, like me, he did not care to draw notice to himself and was similarly content to carry out life at low volume. There was an abundance of loud people in the world, we agreed, and someone had to compensate, bring the dial down halfway. We preferred to stand back, cross our arms, and observe. The world was full of people rushing around trying to change things or make themselves seen. So it fell to the rest of us to withdraw from the foreground, just like those distant bluish landscapes in old paintings, so discreet you only notice them later. I liked to imagine our kind as thinkers in training, a flow of indefinite blue that deepens over time.
Ships in bottles steered by one tiny captain, Daniel liked to say. He too enjoyed the invisibility, of having gazes wash over him with indifference. But there at the pub that night he was desperate to have his presence acknowledged.
His first glimpse of her had been a profile, as she’d held a goblet to the tap of Leffe and waited for it to fill, and he’d stood at the bar transfixed, longing to see up close the face within the bob, the kind of cut-glass bob that in silent films framed a whole catalogue of faces. A new employee, he assumed, or the publican’s daughter home from somewhere. He had never seen her before.
‘She kind of looks like you but with a wonky eye,’ he’d later said, and I remember being half flattered, half aghast, at the thought of looking like anyone or anyone looking like me, yet was intrigued by the wandering eye Daniel mentioned, wired up to its own puppeteer. From where I was sitting I could see there was indeed a resemblance, and when he returned, emboldened, to the bar for another round, he commented on her jagged black fringe, like that of a cabaret singer whose hair had been trimmed in the dark.
‘Kind of like yours,’ he’d added, with which again I had to agree, though I had my flatmate Jane to thank for that; she was the one in charge of trimming my fringe and also did it in the dark, in the darkness of self-absorption.
Daniel and I each had our collections, private and public, and beyond their horizons all we required was one solid friend. Neither of us had anyone else of significance in our lives, though every now and then he would fall prey to an obsession, for the most part unrequited, and I would have a brief encounter, usually with someone I dimly knew from my past, that didn’t threaten the peace.
After meeting, ours had quickly settled into a friendship with thankfully little ambiguity, and though I was drawn to his face and found myself studying it from different angles, even having faintly erotic dreams about him once or twice a year, I could never imagine getting close.
At thirty-three my romantic past was far from populated—a modest list of names with few pangs attached, perhaps one or two vague regrets but certainly no one for whom I longed to rewind time. As for Daniel, he’d been married in his early twenties to a Japanese nurse, and the only lasting result of those three years, he said, was a twenty-eight-line poem, ‘False Door to the Tomb’. He still occasionally dreamt of finding someone but over time had started to feel like the last remaining individual of a species, he said, a highly evolved bird with a highly evolved cry, his song unheard since he never shared it with anyone, and he’d even started to wonder whether perhaps the right female for him had become extinct, preceding him by days, decades or centuries; anything was possible, a tragic error in chronology or biodiversity.
The hours passed. I fetched the next round, and the next, Daniel having decided to continue his contemplation from afar. The girl was pretty, I conceded, with wide set eyes that focused on different corners of the pub, and she had an aura of the past that tends to cast a spell over nostalgic types.
Dispensing with our plans for an early night, we ordered a snack from the blackboard and settled further into the clamour of that Tuesday evening, Daniel’s attention looping in and out, and my own returning frequently to events in the Gallery that day.
A bell sounded through the pub. Last orders.
‘Go on,’ I urged him, ‘she’s just a girl with a jagged fringe and a wayward eye.’
But Daniel remained seated and when we got up to leave he shot one unreturned glance in her direction and followed me out; he knew as well as I, if not better, the danger of closing the distance even a fraction.
At night I prefer to take the bus home though it often means transferring. To descend into the brightness of the Tube cancels out the day’s end too brusquely, while buses do the opposite by carrying you through the pensive streets. I found a seat towards the back and settled in by the window, preparing myself for a quiet journey.
A masculine woman smelling strongly of roast coffee came to sit beside me. I tried to relax, the smell was quite pleasant, but the driver turned out to be extremely erratic, stepping on the accelerator at odd moments, lurching forwards along with the traffic, bolting the moment a clear strip opened up, each jerk knocking me against the passenger by my side, who didn’t react. As we zoomed past bags of rubbish awaiting dawn collection, yesterday’s debris ready to be carted off to make room for tomorrow’s, I thought about Leighton Crooke and how quickly he’d been removed from his chair at the G
allery. I’d sometimes watched him in the canteen, the museum juncture that best offered a glimpse into the lives of colleagues, not the most exciting glimpse but one nonetheless. Some individuals brought their own lunch, prepared by a spouse or themselves, the distinction apparent in the detail, others purchased hot food at the counter. Leighton Crooke always bought his food there at the counter, never anything from home as far as I could tell, and occasionally our trays would end up face to face. The widower was given to mood swings; sometimes he would talk about everything from rising bus fares to the proliferation of shopping bags in his kitchen cabinet, at others he would clunk himself down with a sullen expression and not extend more than a nod in my direction.
Like some of our more frequent visitors, a handful of individuals who’d come in regularly to look at people, not paintings, I sensed that Crooke found an escape from solitude in our museum, drawn to the airy space and soothed by its ebb and flow.
Roland too loved the ebb and flow, or so he claimed, Roland the former speed freak in search of stillness. He was proud of his new set of teeth, years of savings turned to enamel, and after speaking he’d clench his jaw to make sure nothing had come loose. His real teeth had gone years ago, first to grinding and then to rot, but now he was calm, as if the accelerator had been removed from his system. Once Daniel left the Gallery he quickly became my favourite colleague, and certainly the most handsome, with a face that looked more painted than real. As he stood between rooms, tall and creaky like an old wooden puppet, I’d scarcely notice he was in uniform.
The 38 bus deposited me steps away from where Essex Road joins Cross Street, the stop and short route home so familiar I could trace them in my sleep, though I’d be loath to miss my nightly dose of Get Stuffed, the taxidermy shop on the corner. It was always closed—visitors by appointment only—yet through the rhombus-shaped grille, which broke up the already bizarre view into kaleidoscopic fragments, I would peer in to see a pricked ear, a snout, a stripe or a raised paw, and the lifeless tails, now little more than stopped markers of time.
Whenever I looked in my gaze would land on something disquieting, whether the two mounted zebra heads or the dangling bat with outstretched wings or the mother kangaroo with the motionless baby in her pouch. At night the shop would remain lit up, the only concession the owner made between his animals and the outside world. That evening I cast a sidelong glance as I walked past, then stopped and did a double take. For a few seconds I was certain I saw Leighton Crooke’s figure there at the back, stuffed and inert and sitting upright, but when I looked again I realised it was only the imprint left by the owner, a man with raccoon-ringed eyes whom I’d often see in the morning hunched over his desk at the far end, an uninviting silhouette surrounded by his menagerie.
I ran into my flatmate as soon as I walked through the door. She had either just arrived or been waiting impatiently for my return.
‘Have you been at the moths again?’ she asked, her lips and teeth stained red with wine. Jane worked as a scout and publicist at Hunchback Records, a small independent label; her evenings were filled with gigs and record release parties and she was rarely home before one. That night she was back early.
I removed my coat and shook my hair out from under my hat.
‘One of the strips in the living room’s missing.’
‘I may have borrowed it.’
‘You’re meant to replace them.’
‘I was going to, this weekend.’
‘Well, in the meantime who knows how many moths will get at my clothes.’
‘Jane, it’s November.’
‘You know every season is moth season here.’
She was right. We had them all year round.
‘I’ll buy you a couple of new ones tomorrow.’
‘Have you taken any others?’
‘No, I only needed one for now.’
Jane’s bedroom was divided in half by two clothes racks from which her shirts and dresses hung colour-coordinated, black items at one end slowly conceding to colour, and in the middle of each rack was an adhesive white strip on which constellations of little brown moths had met their fate. At least once a day she would check these strips, counting to see whether there were any additions, moths angled skywards, tiny papery aeroplanes grounded at takeoff, their antennae raised, bodies glued flat. She had also laid out strips in the living room and kitchen; for my own reasons, I would check on them too.
I promised I would replace it the following day.
Satisfied with my answer, she turned towards her room, but before leaving asked whether I’d like to accompany her to Camden the following Sunday to buy a corset. Despite having made a point, for years, of not returning to Camden, I said yes. I’d tell her about my semi-eventful day another time.
I crossed our small living room and closed the window Jane had left open, shutting out the traffic sounds. Our flat lay on the noisy Essex Road, directly above the Sea Dragon aquarium, whose Chinese owner, purveyor of cold water, marine and tropical fish, would spend his days in the entrance of his shop with his arms crossed. As far as I could tell this was his only activity, to gaze longingly across the street at the successful fishmonger Steve Hatt, purveyor of dead and for the most part monochrome fish with splashes of pink and silver, his merchandise infinitely more in demand than the living harlequin kind. We never went to either place; the closer you live to a shop, the less likely you are to enter.
In my room I headed straight to the shelf on the wall, to the right of my bed, and stopped. From one collection to the other, that was the way, and only very occasionally did I feel like prying open a space between the two in that nebulous area called real life.
There they lay, my eighteen miniature landscapes, in their current semi-random order, their slopes and plateaus rammed into smaller dimensions, their geological memory handed to them all at once. I picked up an eggshell and tilted it towards the light, admiring the autumn landscape that would never meet winter, fiery leaves the size of rice grains forever fastened to mini branches, the painted gold sky unsilenced by any solstice or atmospheric disturbance. This autumn eggshell was the first I’d crafted, before making spring, and, months later, winter and summer, always indifferent to the real season at hand.
I’d then fashioned a mountain, coated with real soil and faded grass, its peak a powdery white, a moth glued halfway up its steep face in perpetual ascent. And then warmer scenarios. A volcano with its upper and lower mantle, marbled crust and chamber of magma. A desertscape that lay somewhere outside time, its pinkish sand in permanent undulation.
Two seascapes: choppy waves of crystallised sugar, boats with slanted masts and torn sails of gauze. For the dark clouds pressing down on the horizon I’d rubbed cigarette ash on to tufts of cotton and flecked the borders with ink, then suspended them with nearly invisible threads. Skies hooked up to backboards, seas tethered to a tiny plank.
All was possible, and nothing.
After a year or two of open landscapes on boards I turned my attention towards interiors. The first was a grotto in an eggshell, with a jagged tooth from my parents’ old cat glued to the centre. Then, a cave with miniature wax stalactites and stalagmites inhabited by tiny liquorice bats. A pale blue eggshell with a small door gave on to an interior night sky, the stars dots of silver metallic marker on a background of Indian ink. A low Dutch horizon, with toothpick windmills, hinted at human presence and endeavour minus the actual humans to complicate matters.
No human figures. Only moths. The idea originated when I moved to Essex Road. First, from a sign in the window of Get Stuffed assuring customers that animals weren’t ever sacrificed in the name of taxidermy and that many of the specimens such as foxes had come from roadkill—and then when I saw Jane and her moth strips. Yes, cruel, but at least I put the cruelty to use. So I added these stilled lives to my still lifes, and I liked the results. Let them die for something.
With my pair of little nail scissors I would cut round the outline of their bodies, the fata
l strip serving as a ready mount. At first I’d tried to detach them but their wings would crumble between my fingers. Once I’d cut one out I would then paste it on to a desert, mountain, a ship at sea.
Over the months the moth would slowly, very gradually, decompose, coating everything in a fine brown sparkly powder, and then the time would come to check on the strips again, the pheromones having continued to issue their wicked siren call. I don’t know what would happen were I to stop living with Jane, whether I would go out and buy them myself; it was simply part of the ecosystem within the flat.
The landscapes came naturally to me. From the start, it was as if a mysterious hand had taken hold of mine and directed it. Without the help of a manual I’d known where to cut an eggshell, in which direction to make the incision, how to gently detach a quarter or a half. First I’d make a hole at the top, tip the egg over and empty its final contents with a syringe. Once it was clean and dry I’d cut and fortify, with glued paper or varnish. At first I used the sharpest knife in the kitchen but after some research went out and bought myself an oblique burin, its steel blade slicing happily along the calibration lines I’d marked on the shell. I would carve through the centre halfway horizontally, then halfway vertically, and remove one of the upper quarters so that the bottom half remained, ready to welcome its features.
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