And Janet had called the police who would send cars to the places where roads crossed the canal and only if that yielded nothing launch the helicopter – while she herself went along the towpath on her bike which might take fucking ages because, say Ash and Albert had left at 3.15, i.e. 5 hours ago, and bikes and boats went at roughly the same speed, it would take her 5 hours or more to catch him, assuming he stopped for the night; and if he didn’t then she never would.
While he, Philip, did nothing. While he, Philip, waited here to hear. Because, please take note, he was not the uncle or fairy godfather or St George or a friend he was just the doctor who must not get over-involved, must not get even more over-involved even in this crisis, no especially in this crisis, when in any case there was nothing useful he could do. Janet and Albert’s friendship network were alerted and searching, and the police were, and Janet herself was in hot pursuit. He really must get rid of the feeling that he was involved, that he was responsible even. Because it was his duty to maintain professional detachment, and what was more it was in Albert and Janet’s best interests for him to do that, because, without it, his judgment would not be unbiased, without it he would not be able to trust his judgment, no one would.
Sympathy and understanding were OK; sympathy and understanding were necessary. But there was a line between them and getting involved.
What is that line exactly, can you show me that line? – a mild voice asked in his head politely.
Fuck off it’s completely fucking obvious and this is it right here a great big thick white line right here with a no entry sign and danger of falling off a cliff.
Philip’s mind went blurry and his balance swooned and he tipped and his shoulder went into the soft seat cushion. His cheek was on the slippery leatherette. What can I . . . ? What can I . . . ? – his mind was whimpering.
You can, Dr Newell told himself, try to rest because you have not had enough sleep. You should, Dr Newell told himself, drink water because there is too much alcohol in your bloodstream for you to function effectively.
As he stood and edged, once more, along the shiny soft frontage of the sofa cushions, Sue and Caro were stepping out of the lift and moving towards Charlotte’s pale blue front door. Caro pressed the bell and they stood in the over-bright light of the brick-lined hallway. Then Sue made a fist and flailed her arm and rapped and rapped. After a while Sue slipped her right hand into her right front pocket, and then her left hand into her left front pocket, and then her right hand into her right back pocket, and then her left hand into her left back pocket where she found the key which she conveyed into her other hand which pushed it into the lock and turned it.
‘I’ll leave you here,’ said Caro as the door swung open. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Huge thanks,’ said Sue, turning, reaching out to grasp Caro’s shoulder for a moment, then turning back and going into the shadowy apartment.
‘Charlotte?’ – she called, pointlessly.
So what? So maybe she had got better and gone out to get some supper, or maybe she had gone to the chemist.
Food.
As Sue moved waveringly through the grainy light towards the kitchen end of Charlotte’s living space, Philip, having gulped two half-pints of water and brought a third back with him and placed it on the pine coffee table, and having slumped once more into the shiny sofa, clicked on the remote.
‘But if I did find him, what good would that do?’ – someone was saying plaintively, a sad bloke in a pub. ‘He’ll have his own life now . . .’
Jesus Christ. Philip pressed channel + . That must have been East Enders.
‘You put them’ – it was some old bloke in a greenhouse – ‘around the stems.’ There were tall growing plants and the presenter was taking handfuls of big heart-shaped green leaves and stuffing them in around the bottoms of the stalks. ‘As they decay all the goodness goes out of them and goes down into the soil . . .’
Jesus Christ. Philip pressed sleep.
He checked his phone again: of course nothing.
He must . . .
He swung his legs round and up and slithered a bit so that he was lying on the slippery sofa with the back of his head on one of its arms and his Achilles tendons resting tenderly on the edge of the other.
He closed his eyes.
He breathed in long and noisily through his nose.
Out whisperingly through his nose.
Janet on her bike, legs pumping, the gravel of the towpath crunching, the river curving silverily ahead of her, darkness under the trees and spreading out along the fields. Darkness lapping at the path.
Albert standing atop the barge, his arms lifted high, the pale light of the draining sky sparkling in his eyes.
Albert swirling in black water, tumbling in a weir, no in the gush of water at the bottom of a deep lock, his cold flesh white, his dead flesh white. His eyes white. Thin, fish-bone limbs.
Philip was ballasted with unhappiness, it was as though the lower perimeter of his body were dissolving with unhappiness, as though he were gluily disappearing into the sofa with unhappiness.
He must think of something else.
He must pull his thoughts back and think of something else.
Sue was there for him to think of.
Because tomorrow was Sue’s big day – Christ, now it was a different panic sticking in his throat, how had he forgotten? – but in fact there was nothing he had forgotten, it was tomorrow, all he had to remember was to remember to be out there on the patio at nine with the laptop and webcam. Unreel the extension wire, bought specially, out from the kitchen socket to the patio table, plug in the laptop, plug in the camera, point the camera at the bed of wild flowers and grasses which had indeed grown as he had hoped, first peppering the ground with points of green, then opening minuscule leaves and shooting out minuscule strands; then stretching up and unfurling and stretching some more and budding until eventually one bud split, then another, then another, so that now there was a thicket of swaying but resilient shoots and leaves, and a scattering of flowers: poppy and clover and cornflower and buttercup and some others but he could not remember the names. The crucial thing was to keep the laptop safe from rain since the forecast was for more of this monsoon-like weather, hot but showery. There was the patio umbrella but since he was not absolutely sure it was completely waterproof maybe the thing to do was to put something else over the laptop as well, for instance was there a plastic box in the kitchen cupboard? – or else perhaps a pan.
Yes it would be fine, it would be fine, he would be able to accomplish this thing for Sue and actually it was lovely – a smiley feeling rose from his tummy, somehow, into his cheeks – to be able to be part of her show, to be one of the few vulnerable, actually live contributions, because he could wholly understand how important it was to her that some at least of the streams should be live, i.e. at risk of going wrong, given that so many of them had turned out disappointingly to have to be pre-recorded. As indeed on the following days this stream from their back patio was going to be shown as recorded video because obviously he couldn’t spend every day out here with an umbrella and even if they were able to set the laptop up somewhere securely safe and dry he bloody needed it for work.
There was paleness in the patio beyond the window at the kitchen end. The usual saffron gleam came through the milky panes of the front door and stretched a little through the open inner door towards where Philip lay. Otherwise the room was gloomy: the human being and the furniture were hazy lumps of black.
The phone still buzzeth not.
Should he text Sue? No. She would – he thought – be concentrated, not wanting to be distracted even for a second, even by him, fine-tuning, issuing intructions here and there, sorting the last things out; although really, as it happened, at that particular moment she was in fact snuggling on Charlotte’s sofa, feeling the scratchy fabric against her bare thighs through the sheet. Much better now. Just basically a blood-sugar low which a bit of ryvita and cottage cheese had t
otally sorted out. A jolt of happiness went through her because: tomorrow was the day! The whole amazing gamble had completely come off, and Omar could go fuck himself and the whole stifling Savile-Row-suited art world could completely go fuck themselves because she had pulled it off, she and Charlotte had pulled it off, this magic show that basically took bits of the world, bits of people’s lives, bits of the amazing interesting art that was in the world and people’s lives, and jigsawed them together into something that was basically just very hard-hitting and unusual.
Hooray! Hip-hip-hooray! She was a crowd of gleeful people chanting, that was it, she was Tahrir Square! – even though to look at from the outside she was just a slight young woman lying foetally on a sofa in the gloom.
Elton Barfitt. The twin plastinated figures appeared in her mind mouthing words she could not hear. The twin plastinated figures sitting on their twin thrones were sucked backwards and up into the endlessly huge and yet incomprehensibly also totally flat space inside her mind, and up and up, higher and higher and further and further until they were just a midge in the top right-hand corner of infinity.
Because it had worked. Once tomorrow had happened it would have worked. Because after that there was nothing Omar could do: he could hardly go public saying ‘Ahem, actually this show does have an Artist, or rather pair of Artists, or rather a composite two-and-yet-one Artist, after all.’ And anyway obviously he couldn’t because it wasn’t true.
Because she and Charlotte had lied, because she and Charlotte had constructed a whole elaborate electronic network of deceit.
Which had enabled them to mislead their boss and basically misuse public funds.
So what they needed was somebody, or rather what she should do afterwards was become expert in computer hacking so she could go into their system and basically delete the whole email paperchase like Murdoch had had done at News International.
No, absolutely not! No! No!
Because Omar had approved the show and the funds were for the show and the show was what it was whatever name attached to it.
Which was the whole point so – No!– nothing needed to be deleted and actually it would be better if it all came out.
Because let’s imagine – Sue said to herself one final time – the worst-case scenario. Omar goes nuclear. Charlotte and I are not only denounced and sacked but actually taken to court. Well, what then? What would that trial be about? It would be about the value of authorship in art, the tyranny of authorship in art, the bizarre endurance of the author for what were obviously brazenly commercial reasons despite everything we know about textuality and the multiplicity of the self and the postmodern condition. It would be a trial of ideas! It would be a place where she could stand up and speak out what she believed! It would be like Sensation in New York, no it would be like something better than that, it would be like the Whistler trial from the nineteenth century, a pot of paint in the public’s face vs. the knowledge of a lifetime. I.e a webcam image in the public’s face vs. the way things really are! Well, maybe not quite those words but certainly versus something. So that the trial would become part of the artwork too, part of her campaign. Because for Chrissake freedom fighters went to court, eco-activists went to court the whole time, like for instance Ash she was sure he must have a string of minor convictions so why didn’t artists too, or only rarely? OK maybe taggers did but who else in this fundamentally cosy white middle-and-upper-class subsidised world?
Eh? Eh?
So she would. Her toes were stretching taut and her thighs were squeezing tight and her heart was drumming with happiness.
Though actually what she needed to do now, what she really needed to do now, was try to relax, to calm, to relax, to soften, to stretch, to soften, to float, to find a way to sleep.
Because tomorrow was really going to be a lovely day.
Because it was all ready it was all done! – Only Hsin-Yu’s and Stuart’s and Philip’s cameras to hook up tomorrow and that was as it should be, that was part of the aleatory character of the piece.
And it was lovely that Philip was going to be involved because he was so lovely.
It was lovely that Philip had said he wanted to be involved, had just stepped up like that to solve a problem; and she had said: ‘You don’t have to’; and he had said: ‘But I want to’. Because otherwise they might have felt so pulled apart but as it was there was this little connection between them in the middle of the work that was just their little secret. So that, although he would not be there, he would be there.
Because his court thing had gone OK earlier, phew, because she had felt bad, so bad, at not being able to be there for him, but she had had to dedicate herself to the show, he understood that, and now everything was going to be alright.
And then next month they could have a holiday, they could just pick somewhere at random, last minute, and then they would be in a sandy cove with milky, bubbly, sparkly waves lapping at it, or in a sun-dappled Italian olive grove, or actually, why not, just in a little white cottage somewhere in Cornwall or Scotland or Wales, just the two of them, quietly, not connected to anything, or actually rather where they could pretend they were not connected to anything, with nothing to do, but could just be, looking up at the tranquil sky.
The lower slope of a mountain rose behind Sue where she lay; and a flock of sheep-like clouds migrated overhead; and she was just dipping into sleep as Philip, 53.5 miles away, was thinking calmingly to himself that tomorrow evening Sue would be back, and they would sleep entangled in the same warm bed, or maybe not entangled exactly but certainly side by side; and they would wake in the morning together, and doze together, and if they opened the windows nothing would come in and try to get at them except warmth, and they would just lie there with the light and the warmth surrounding them, and nothing else. So that, thinking of dozing in bed with Sue, he dozed on the sofa alone, just at the moment when Sue, 53.5 miles away, was sinking from stage III into stage IV sleep, or would have done were it not that, at that very moment, Charlotte turned the key in the lock, and stepped in, and switched on the light, and said:
‘Oh shit’ and switched it off again.
But Sue was stirring and opened an eye and panicked as she saw a figure advancing towards her in the darkness but then realised it must only be Charlotte and said:
‘Hello?’
‘Sorry sorry I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Oh yeh,’ said Charlotte. And then: ‘Much better, thanks.’ And then: ‘I went out for some fresh air.’
‘Switch on the light,’ said Sue, as Charlotte, in the dark, opened a cupboard for a glass.
Sue manoeuvred herself against the sofa-back and made a zed-bed of her knees beneath the sheet as Charlotte, having switched on the lamp that hung low over the kitchen table, moved round and settled into the sofa beside her. Charlotte laid her head back so that her mouth was open and her eyes stared up. Then she lifted her head forward to its usual angle and turned to Sue and reached out to lay a hand on her knee and said:
‘It has been really great. I just wanted to say: it has been really great working with you on this. I have really valued it.’ She gripped the knee. She shook it.
‘No,’ said Sue. ‘I mean: thank you. But we’ve done it together. Actually it feels to me like you did most of it.’
‘The organising maybe – but you were the inspiration, you were the one who had the . . . gumption. I don’t want to be sentimental but I did want to say it has been a liberation for me, working with you. I forgot myself. It made me feel like, Oh God, but anyway: it made me feel like I was starting again, but starting again the way I should have done in the first place, as, well, the real me.’
‘Good,’ said Sue: ‘Long may it last.’
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, maybe a little bit grimly, now looking straight ahead down at the floor.
‘Hey,’ said Sue, putting a hand on top of Charlotte’s hand. ‘It’s done. It’s gonna happen.’ Her cheeks squee
zed up into a grin.
‘Yup,’ said Charlotte, maybe a little bit flatly, turning and looking for Sue’s eyes. ‘Yes it is.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there this afternoon.’
‘Oh, there wasn’t anything left to do. And anyway: you couldn’t help being ill.’
‘No,’ said Charlotte in an exhalation as she stood up. ‘I couldn’t.’ And then: ‘Big day tomorrow!’ She leaned over, braced an arm against the top of the back of the sofa, and touched her lips against Sue’s forehead.
Then she walked off towards her bedroom. ‘Night,’ she said, as she switched off the light.
‘Night night.’
As Sue returned to her shadowy mountain, Philip was dozing murmuringly; and, as Sue rolled down the shadowy mountain, Philip was seeing Janet’s ghostly face howling; and, as Sue sank into a sea of enveloping, breathable blackness, Philip was seeing Sue’s luminous face staring at him solemnly; and, as Sue was in the strange state of dreamless sleep, Philip felt that the solemnly was changing to lovingly, and, as Sue was still in the strange state of dreamless sleep, Philip was shocked awake, grip at his throat, gasping for breath, heart bucking because his phone was buzzing and warbling and when he reached for it the screen said Janet and when he dragged down for Accept and put the phone to his ear her voice said:
‘He’s not here. He’s not here. He’s not . . .’
‘Janet.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘You’re at the boat?’
‘I’m at the boat and Albert’s not here.’
‘Have you searched it?’
‘I’ve searched it. And he’s not here.’
Philip saw Janet under the moonlight pushing her way past Ash onto the boat, shouldering her way past Ash down into the cabin, pulling open cupboards, drawers, yanking the mattress off the bed, mattresses off the beds, screaming: where is he?! where is he?! what have you done with him, Ash?! What have you done?!
Or in fact maybe finishing her search and squatting down or kneeling down, letting her mind drain to empty before then after a minute, after thirty seconds, re-gathering her forces, summoning the strength to carry on through a darkness that had now got darker.
The World Was All Before Them Page 24