The Horse's Arse

by Laura Gascoigne

  The Drawings Gallery contained a single image, the first acquisition in pAf’s permanent collection of works on paper, bought with a grant from the Contemporary Art Association. The trustees had chosen to inaugurate the collection with one of Mervyn Burke’s ephemeral series of Signature Works, executed in a range of impermanent media including the artist’s semen, snot and blood – DNA markers that would fade with time, leaving the artist’s signature as the only visible trace of their passing. The medium of this Signature Work was relatively safe and uncontroversial – the only bodily fluid it contained was possibly saliva mixed with the coffee that had left a ring stain on the slightly crinkled paper. It was signed and numbered 23.

  Funny, thought Daniel, he could have sworn that was the number of the Burke Signature Work Crispin had chosen to illustrate his piece on East Goes West. He was unlikely to have misremembered. Twenty-three was his lucky number.

  Before he could make his exit the lift doors opened and pAf’s newly appointed director, Marjorie Rimmington, emerged blinking into the light with a group of eminent Picktonians in tow.

  She made straight for the Burke.

  “This is the gallery’s first acquisition,” she announced proudly. “We were lucky to get it for a special price from a friend of the artist who received it as a gift. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, and great collections from little coffee beans…” Her pause for laughter met with an awkward silence. “Pickton is playing its part in redefining drawing. Our ambition is no less than to become the go-to gallery for post-modern works on paper in the North-East.”

  As Daniel slipped out through the glad-ragged gathering of Pickton’s finest, he wondered whether the city’s 6,500 unemployed wouldn’t rather spend their free afternoons observing changes in the traffic lights than redefining drawing. But he knew better than to write that in his article.

  Chapter XIV

  Duval should have seen it coming. First the new bathroom with the Brazilian blue marble vanity top. Then the new kitchen with the stainless steel cabinets. Then the conservatory with a cupola, which leaked.

  The demands had been escalating, and now Valerie had asked for a divorce. She’d get the house, of course, and without that he was finished. Bad enough to be a dealer without a gallery, but a dealer of no fixed abode? Forget it.

  In the last of the evening light, the tarp on the cupola cast a subaqueous gloom over the conservatory. Duval smiled bitterly. He had entered his Blue Period. How had it come to this without him noticing? Incrementally, as it always does, bit by bit.

  Looking back over his life, it was blindingly obvious that at every juncture he had taken a wrong turn. If he’d opted for the academic career that quite clearly awaited him he’d be safely ensconced by now in some professorial pigeonhole, a respected authority, dusty but distinguished, on a regular salary with a university pension. Instead of which where was he, the precociously brilliant student who had passed out top of his year at the Courtauld for a thesis on Expressionism and the Primitive that went straight into publication (Cherwell & Cam 1980) and landed him a job as the youngest ever head of department at RDV?

  Out of work, out of marital favour, out on his ear. What had happened to all that youthful promise? Evaporated, frittered away, wasted.

  He got up and emptied the bucket under the cupola into the wilting begonia, before shifting the begonia under the leak and removing the bucket.

  Whatever had made him think he could go into business, an innocent like him? He completely lacked the killer instinct needed for survival in the art world, a flatfish in an aquarium full of sharks. And now he had sunk to mixing with bottom-feeders like Martin. He had chosen a career to which he was psychologically totally unsuited: he had no interest in money and he loved art.

  If he contested the divorce, he might be able to delay proceedings. If the case didn’t come to court for a few months and he held out until the October sale at RDV, he could give Valerie the money to buy her own house. For the time being he was just about OK sleeping on the chesterfield in his study, letting himself in the back through the alley door. As long as he had the run of the basement, he wouldn’t need to put his pictures into store.

  The last Derain to sell at Westerby’s New York had raised £12m. That would give Valerie enough to buy a small palace and clad it inside and out with marble and steel. The alimony he could sort out later. By then Phelan would have delivered the Modigliani and perhaps the Marquet, and it would be a matter of waiting for the odour to fade. Varnishing helped, but it would take six months.

  Nigel had been pressuring him for the Derain in June, but he’d resisted. He half regretted returning that Degas pastel to Martin. It would have been a risk, but it was ready money.

  Like Martin, he was losing patience with watching paint dry.

  Chapter XV

  The brittle click of plastic on plastic came from the editor-in-chief’s office as the freshly applied nail extensions of Fay Lacey-Piggott – FLP to her troops – made contact with her computer keyboard. Like any dactylographer from the pre-electric era, Fay struck her keys with determination; it was the one clue to her age she could not correct. The eyelids, chin and teeth had all had attention. The figure, naturally scrawny, was still youthful, although the gym-toned upper arms were a tad too muscular.

  In happier days Fay had spent her mornings on the phone and her afternoons lunching, but no longer. Since the editor and deputy editor had been let go she had had to step into the breach, writing, editing and even subbing copy.

  This morning she was rewriting Bernice’s piece on the launch of Orlovsky’s new space in a Moscow multi-storey car park. So far, not a single name of a Russian oligarch had been spelt right and some were so wrong they were beyond recognition by Google. If it wasn’t for Bernice’s contacts, she’d be next for the chop.

  To be honest, it would have been simpler and more cost-effective to write Bernice’s stuff from scratch oneself, if one had time to go to all the parties. But the parties themselves were getting boring. Did anyone actually care any more what Jason Faith said to Mervyn Burke at what private view or what white ensemble Celeste Buhler wore to what gallery opening? The party was almost over for the Cool British Artists. It was time for Bernice to update her address book, but first she needed to learn how to spell.

  Through Fay’s glass door the open-plan office looked busy enough, with well-dressed young women flitting to and fro. One commodity in superabundant supply in a recession was interns, but a magazine cannot live by interns alone. Someone’s got to turn out usable copy. Last week the Venezuelans had cancelled the inaugural Caracas Bienal, and this morning two of the participating galleries had pulled their advertising. Add in the interview with the Bienal’s director that would have to be spiked and that was two pages that needed filling before the magazine went to press tomorrow.

  Too late to cut pages from this issue, but if the advertising didn’t pick up next month they’d drop four pages of editorial, possibly eight. Hopefully readers wouldn’t notice, with the extra padding of the Middle East supplement – assuming the advertising came in for that. But it would. There was no recession in the Gulf and the Arabs were desperate to establish themselves as major art world movers and shakers – or should that be sheikers? Fay wondered if that was too cheesy to use in a heading… Supplements were an advertising lifeline. The ad manager was already asking where next.

  Through her door Fay could see Daniel hard at work, eyes glued to his screen. In her present predicament she was glad of the young man’s help; he was cheap and efficient and he turned in readable copy, as long as he could be kept out of trouble. She’d get him to expand that report he was writing on pAf to a full page. Do an interview with Godfrey Wise and get a few quotes from the gallery director, the architect, the restaurant chef even – wasn’t it a branch of Bercy’s or something, the only one north of the M25? Crispin would whinge but he couldn’t have his by-line on every feature. Crispin was becoming an old stick. And the gallery might be persuade
d to take an ad, at a special introductory discount if they were too impoverished to afford the rates.

  Watching the look of concentration on his handsome young face, Fay felt almost maternal towards Daniel. As she crossed the office to talk to him about the pAf feature she noticed him quickly clicking a webpage shut, but not before she’d caught a glimpse of Indian miniatures.

  “A bit traditional for us, no?”

  “I was thinking,” said Daniel, blushing, “that with the record prices achieved at Westerby’s Indian art auction this month it might be interesting to do something on artists of Asian origin working in Britain. Who’ll be the next Daneesh Shakoor?”

  An Indian supplement dropped into Fay’s mind like a paper on a mat. This young man was turning out to be quite an asset. He had the instincts of a successful journalist.

  Chapter XVI

  Martin sighed as he adjusted his boxers and studied the squirt of jism on the virgin sheet of Fabriano Artistico hot-pressed watercolour paper. He was dimly aware of his dad’s Degas nude looking down reprovingly from the chest of drawers, as if piqued that he wasn’t fantasising about her.

  “You’re a bit old for me, love,” he said and turned her respectfully to the wall.

  It looked a bit of a mess, if he was honest. You had to hand it to Merv, his semen drawings looked drawn whereas his own effort looked, well, for want of a better way of putting it, come. There was more art to this game than he’d given him credit for.

  At the risk of wasting expensive paper he tore off the soiled sheet, laid it on the bedside table and, with the tip of a nail file, scraped off a dollop of semen and carefully applied it, with a circular wrist action, to a fresh piece of paper.

  It didn’t look like Merv’s work – he was more of a brush than a palette knife man – but it looked all right if he held the pad up sideways to catch the light. The effect was perhaps a little too subtle, but given time he assumed it would darken. It would gain definition when dry. Anyway, the signature was what mattered.

  That was going to be the hard bit. He’d replied to Merv with a formal letter signed Martin Phelan in the hope that it might elicit a reciprocal response. Instead what had arrived in the post this morning was a letter from Burke’s solicitors Dyer & Cummings signed ‘Geoffrey Dyer, Senior Partner’. So no joy there. But Merv’s handwriting would be a doddle to copy and the pillocks at pAf would never notice. They were that desperate, they’d clutch at straws.

  If they didn’t go for the one, he’d offer them a twofer.

  In the meantime, what? He’d been round to his dad’s to sniff the Derain and even to his cauterised nose it still stank of turps. His father had said that varnish would seal in the smell but it was too soon to apply it. The old man had always been a stickler for traditional methods, refusing to use modern driers in the paint. At this rate they’d be lucky if the pictures were ready by next June, let alone this October. The waiting game was driving him nuts. Why hadn’t the Post-Impressionists invented acrylics? And that doofus Duval was still refusing to auction the Degas pastel. Him and Dad were as bad as each other.

  He turned the Degas nude back to face him. She was on the blowsy side, but a beauty. And she was burning a hole in his bedroom wall when she might have been burning a hole in his pocket.

  Chapter XVII

  Daniel made it from Finsbury Park to Walthamstow in 10 minutes flat. He raced up the Seven Sisters Road, breezed down Broad Lane, flew over the reservoirs and sped down the Blackhorse Road past St James Street Station. On a sunny Saturday, the pavements around the station were clogged with crowds of shoppers overflowing from the High Street, home of the longest street market in Europe.

  Multiethnic Britain. Lithuanian garage, Polski Sklep, Turkish-Cypriot restaurant, dodgy Romanian-run dive named Jack’s. Two pubs, both closed, one in the process of being converted into a health club but still empty, with its freshly painted windows gathering grime.

  Yasmin lived in an upstairs flat in Ilfracombe Road, a street of Victorian two-up two-downs ending in a park. Most of the houses, originally built for workers’ families, had been divided into starter flats for singletons. In Chelsea they would have changed hands for a couple of million; here they went for upwards of £150,000. Some were bijou, with plants in tubs outside. Others had been casualties of the buy-to-let bubble, bought by speculators too skint to spend money on them and let to squabbling families of Polish builders, the ones in work who could afford the rent. The ones who couldn’t dossed in the garage lock-ups that lined the dirt track between the back gardens and the railway embankment.

  No. 137 was at the bottom on the right, she’d said, just a couple of houses before the park. Halfway down the street Daniel got off his bike. It was hot, the start of a promised barbecue summer and he didn’t want to arrive in a muck sweat. Plus his heart was pounding, making him breathless. He wiped his face on his T-shirt, rolled down his right trouser leg and pushed his bike up the street unnecessarily slowly, savouring the pleasure of anticipation.

  There were two bells for 137 and no intercom. He rang the top bell and heard the sound of feet running downstairs. Expecting a face to appear in the frosted glass, he jumped when the door suddenly opened apparently unaided.

  “Mum’s on the phone,” said the slip of a boy in the Arsenal shirt standing on the doormat.

  Daniel liked the look of Sami. He followed him up.

  He found Yasmin curled up on the futon by the living room window, feet tucked underneath her with the sun behind. In jeans and a T-shirt, she could have been Sami’s sister.

  “Gotta go,” she said into the phone, “I’ve got a meeting. Yes, I know it’s Saturday, it’s not that kind of meeting. Tell you later. Love you,” she hung up.

  “My mum,” she rolled her eyes at Daniel, “thinks I work too hard.”

  She got off the sofa and padded over on bare feet. Her toenails were crimson, her eyes as green as he remembered.

  “Cup of tea?”

  “Please,” he gulped.

  “Good of you to come all the way to my ‘studio’,” she called from the kitchen over the rattle of mugs and the roar of water filling a kettle. “As you can see I’m not really set up for entertaining ‘clients’.”

  A lot of what Yasmin said seemed to be in inverted commas. He hoped that applied to the world ‘clients’.

  “Sugar?”

  “Two please.”

  “Sami, Mum needs the living room for a while if you don’t mind taking the computer into the bedroom.”

  She handed Daniel a mug stamped with a crown and the logo HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

  “He’s a computer whiz,” she smiled at Sami. “I’ve bred a geek. Lucky I went into the police, I’ll have the right connections to save him from extradition when he’s arrested for hacking into the Pentagon.”

  “He doesn’t look like a geek,” said Daniel, eyeing the Arsenal shirt.

  “Which team do you support?” asked Sami.

  Daniel couldn’t think of a team, so he said: “Chelsea.”

  Sami gave him a pitying look and went into his bedroom.

  “So, tell me about ‘Sheddism’,” asked Yasmin over her shoulder as she reached behind the futon and pulled out a large black portfolio.

  Daniel explained, and she didn’t laugh.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Walthamstow is a hive of ‘Sheddists’. You should see the allotments round the back of the park.”

  She unzipped the portfolio, laid it out flat on the futon and knelt in front of it, flipping quickly through the plastic sleeves in search of the Nativity. Daniel wished she’d slow down so he could look at the pictures flashing past, as bright and enticing as wrapped sweets on a conveyor belt. He wished the whole morning would slow down indefinitely.

  She stopped at the Nativity and pulled it out of its sleeve.

  He felt immediate relief – the picture was perfect. Often paintings that looked fine online were rubbish in reality: the colours garish, the handling amateuris
h. But Yasmin’s colours were jewel-like and her touch was assured. From close-up, the Virgin was a brilliant self-portrait. The mop of unruly hair was tucked under a veil but the face was instantly recognisable from the arches of eyebrows, like physiognomic quote marks. And the shed was masterfully rendered, wood knots and all.

  “This is really good.”

  He hoped he didn’t sound surprised.

  “Can I look at the others?”

  He knelt down and flipped through slowly, pausing at each image.

  “You’re really looking at the pictures!” she said in surprise, looking over his shoulder.

  “I’m an art historian. That’s what we do.”

  “Well, these are history as far as the art world’s concerned,” she said with a half-smile.

  “Are you still painting?”

  “No…” she indicated the size of the room, and Sami next door.

  “I know they’re ‘miniatures’ but where and when would I do it? I’ll take it up again when I’m retired… It may surprise you, but I enjoy my job. I like police work. What’s the point of painting pictures nobody buys? It’s not a nice feeling to know you’re wasting your time. I like to feel I’m making a difference.”

  “But people would buy these.”

  “Possibly, for insulting sums of money. To be honest, I’ve had offers but I’d rather keep them. It may sound retentive but they’re part of me.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen. He heard the fridge opening and closing.

  “I’m making me and Sami a bite to eat. Would you like some?”

  Chapter XVIII

  From the dress code, it might have been a funeral: everyone in the gallery was wearing black. The only way you could tell the caterers from the guests was by their aprons and trays.