The chair came to a jarring halt and she realised she still had her hands in the shape of guns and dropped them like stones to her side.
She didn’t know whether she was going to die of heart failure or a hernia and she wasn’t actually sure she blurted out, ‘I thought you’d gone,’ but he was shaking his head and saying, ‘Nope,’ so she must have done.
There was no explanation from him about why, earlier, he had given her the impression that he’d left. Not even any pretence that he’d forgotten something and had to come back.
She wasn’t sure what expression she had on her face – wild panic probably – but the one on his said, Well, look at that huge slice of free spirit peeking through there. And hey, if you wanna play games, I’m up for it.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ he said.
‘Uh … yes. Just seeing how it moved, you know.’ She got up unsteadily and gave the chair a pat. ‘Yes, quite good. Handles really well.’ All she needed was a pair of driving gloves to look a bigger prat.
The set of Tate’s mouth suggested he wanted to lie on the floor and laugh out loud but was going to keep her guessing about how much he had seen and heard. She felt the flush of heat over her face that she knew meant her cheeks would be pink. Gun fighting, whirling round and round and mocking the way he spoke. Pretty damning. What had she said about getting under her skin?
He came over and patted the chair just as she had done and she took a surreptitious step away. She knew it hadn’t gone unnoticed.
‘Yeah, she does move like a dream,’ he said. ‘Not surprising really. Older models, well, more to them then these flashy new ones.’ His hand was indicating her office chair but his eyes were on her and there was enough seriousness in them to make her unsure about the true meaning of his words. She thought back to wanting to kiss his face. Had he sensed that too?
And then he was turning away. ‘I’m really going this time,’ he said and that was it. No other smart comments; just a ‘Night, Gracie,’ when he headed out of the office again.
‘It’s Grace,’ she said after checking he really had gone this time. ‘Grace. One syllable. Easy. Like Tate.’ She thought about that and studied the chair. ‘No. Not so easy. It’s still only Monday. One day of him and I’m starting to lose it.’
That made her sit down in the chair again, but this time there was no spinning, or laughing or mock gun fights. She stayed absolutely still and tried to get the logical, ordered side of her brain to put in an appearance and to stop thinking about those green eyes and that silver ring, which she knew were already breaking through her defences.
CHAPTER 16
‘So, are those part of your tour, dear boy?’ Gilbert asked the following afternoon, indicating the graffiti along the side of the warehouse, and Grace tucked her hands further into the pockets of her coat and looked at her feet so that Tate wouldn’t see her smile.
‘Funny, funny,’ Tate said, punching Gilbert softly on the arm before reaching out and pressing a bell – one of about eight on the wall next to the heavy iron door. Someone had written Artists are puffs on it and Alistair, clutching his briefcase, tutted and said, ‘Philistines. No wonder they can’t spell.’
There was the sound of something grating against the other side of the door before it was pulled back. The woman standing there did not have the asymmetrical fringe Gilbert swore all modern female artists had, but it was cut very high, making her look as if she were permanently surprised. She wore pale grey, draped clothing with a paint-smeared baggy shirt over the top.
‘Tate,’ she said, opening her arms wide to receive him.
Introductions were made and the woman led them up an industrial-looking metal staircase to her studio.
‘Shawna does these amazing collages,’ Tate said, ‘real deconstructions of the alienating nature of post-boom, post-bust urban culture.’
‘Oh goody,’ Gilbert groaned, but Grace noticed he was doing it quietly so that Tate wouldn’t hear.
They were in a huge space with metal beams and exposed London brick and leaning against some of the walls were large canvases of varying shades of grey. From the doorway they seemed as if they were just splodges of colour, but up close you could see that each canvas was covered with tiny bits of paper, each with its own grey image on it – here a vandalised sign, there a broken window or a single glove stuck on a railing.
‘If there were handcuffs and some rope, she could call it 50 Shades of Grey,’ Grace whispered to Gilbert and he gave her a look as if he had no idea what she was talking about.
She made an effort to pay attention to Tate as he said, ‘See, some of the images are found, some are photographs and some Shawna draws herself. Brought together like this, they have a more profound effect than if you viewed them alone. But, hey, let Shawna take you through the artistic impetus behind her work.’
‘We’re usually blind to the decay in our society.’ Shawna’s seriousness was the kind that made you want to giggle despite your better instincts. ‘We see it so often – the boarded-up shops, the litter … Here I’m trying to make the decay the absolute focus, not something you can ignore. To raise it to an art form in itself.’
They all nodded as if they agreed, except for Alistair who was simply repeating, ‘Marvellous, marvellous,’ at every opportunity. He had done the same in the other studio they’d visited earlier, the one where Gnat (multiple piercings, skinny arms, indeterminate sex) rolled an assortment of prosthetic limbs through paint and then applied them to canvases. Gnat said that explaining what creative impulses lay behind this was ‘an outdated, hierarchical, join-the-dots way of viewing art.’ Tate had simply clapped and encouraged Gnat to expand on that approach. So Gnat had said the canvases spoke for themselves. Or, did they have to speak at all? Did art really have to have meaning? And anyway, how could he give them his take on the meaning when they were all individuals forming their own subjective conclusions? A dramatic pause. What was meaning anyway?
Grace had been unable to look at Gilbert during this lecture for fear that they would set each other off. There was an almost irresistible impulse to ask Gnat whether the price tags on his work had any meaning either.
Shawna continued to talk them through her canvases, Tate every now and again interjecting to point out something they might like to consider, such as what effect the different greys had and why this particular canvas they were looking at now, with objects rather than images, was probably producing a different emotion. Grace contemplated the discarded burger boxes, the lace from a trainer, the bits of plastic with worn lettering and the shards of glass, all painted zinc grey, and didn’t quite know what emotion she was meant to feel towards any of it.
She had started off feeling jittery, expecting all kinds of memories to begin whirling around in her brain with each sniff of paint, each view of a canvas, but what she was seeing was so different from Bill’s work, nothing seemed to be happening. Except she felt uneasy every time Tate caught her eye, remembering the chair incident. He made no attempt to bring it up, which spooked her even more. God, he was good at this unsettling thing.
His enthusiasm for all this … this stuff was unsettling her too. It was not the tinny falseness of Alistair’s enthusiasm, but the sparkly, bright kind that lit up your eyes and had you bounding around. She supposed it was the same enthusiasm that had him retrieving tat from skips.
He knew his subject too; she’d studied enough modules on conceptual and figurative art, absurdism and all the other isms to know that.
Grace focused again on Shawna, who was now showing them how she selected her images. They trooped along to a corner of the studio that reeked of chemicals. They stood and listened, they learned about techniques for distorting and colouring photo images, and they peered at a half-completed work. After a few more pleasantries, more gushing from Alistair, they were off, heading up another flight of stairs.
‘I really have to show you these next guys,’ Tate said, shepherding them along. ‘They will blow your mind.’
&n
bsp; ‘I hope they do blow my mind,’ Gilbert whispered to Grace, ‘because after that last place, I’m primed to cut my wrists.’
This time it was a man who opened the door, no older than Grace with jet-black hair that came to a point in the middle of his forehead and echoed the shape of his goatee beard. He was dressed in a black boiler suit. A black boiler suit that was pristine and had sharp creases in the legs as if it had been ironed very precisely.
‘Tate, my man,’ he said, and again Tate was received into wide-flung arms. It was beginning to grate on her how popular he seemed to be. She reasoned that it was because he was going to bring potential business to the studios. She thought back to Bill. Always a bit of an edge to people’s worship of him, as if they were scared he would take a chunk out of them verbally if he was bored. Or drunk. Or just ‘being Bill’. You can’t be a real artist and have friends. That was a Billism. Everyone is a drain on your creativity in the end. That was another.
Now Tate and the guy in the black boiler suit were bumping their fists together and laughing and Grace was curling her lip at that until she got right inside the studio and did have her mind blown slightly off track. It was filled with sculptures, and when she looked closely they were made of paper, great chunks of it. It was as if someone had taken the biggest phone books in existence and cut and shaped them as easily as blocks of cheese. There were nudes made from pages of porn magazines; fat bankers made from paper money; a nun made from a bible. Against one wall, another guy was leaning over a stack of old books with the covers removed and was cutting into them with an electric knife. He turned it off and lifted up his safety goggles when he saw them. He was as scruffy as the first man was neat, and his face, except where his goggles had been, was splattered with paper dust.
‘Yo,’ he said.
‘Mi-keeee,’ Tate replied. There was another series of those strange hand bumping and grasping rituals in which Tate excelled, before Grace, Gilbert and Alistair found themselves listening to Mike tell them how the whole artistic process was about taking things from one state to another, reversing the process that had begun by taking a solid tree and making it into fragile paper.
‘It’s a kind of rebirth,’ he said, picking bits of paper dust from under his nails. ‘We’re allowing the corporality of the tree to have a second chance – it’s a metaphor for the human condition really.’
‘I liked those sculptures,’ Grace whispered to Gilbert when they were leaving.
‘Yes. But are they art?’
‘There’s more skill in them than the collages and the—’
‘Do not mention Gnat and those limbs, I will be having nightmares as it is.’
Grace laughed which made Tate turn and, walking backwards, shout, ‘You having fun there? Still awake, Gracie?’
‘She’s loving it, dear boy. We both are,’ Gilbert shouted back, which saved Grace the bother of having to make something up. Tate gave her a look she didn’t quite catch and turned back around and carried on talking to Alistair. Tate was leading the way at a gallop and Grace watched him talking, hands describing what he was saying, making points with his fingers.
‘Tate’s pretty impressive, isn’t he?’ Gilbert said, and Grace wondered if that was his reason for coming on this tour when he obviously had no intention of viewing anything he saw without his sixteenth-century blinkers on.
She watched Tate again. She had been wondering what he would turn up wearing today – western garb, complete with chaps and a Stetson just to embarrass her? In fact, he was wearing a suit, tweed, with a matching waistcoat, and he’d teamed it with a collarless shirt and a scarf so that he might have been an extra from a Dickens’ crowd scene, except he was also wearing a grey wool beanie, his blond hair just poking out from underneath it. It made his eyes look even greener.
He still had the biker boots on, and Grace wondered if they were his only footwear.
They arrived at the gallery and Gilbert groaned. ‘I hate this place – saw it on the television when it first opened. It’s what happens when limitless money meets limited taste.’
‘Shh,’ Grace said as they walked past the staff in their regulation black – black trousers, black T-shirts, black looks.
Tate led them through a run of high-ceilinged, white-walled, echoing rooms. They went past stoats preserved in plastic, pairs of crutches tied up with barbed wire, a piano made entirely from mouldering bread. There were canvases with just one word on them, canvases with nothing on them, canvases that had been ripped apart. As they went, Tate talked about what the artists were perhaps trying to express, how they fitted into current art movements and trends. They stood in the dark and watched a video of men getting on and off a fishing boat over and over again and another video of a woman peeling an onion and the onion crying. They stood next to a huge computer screen while an artist in Hamburg transmitted a thick red line and other artists around the world incorporated it into their own work on smart phones and tablets.
In a room displaying only a very small piece of curved metal with a black-and-white picture of an eye on it, Gilbert stood in front of the explanation on the wall and shook his head.
‘Something up, Gilb?’ Tate asked.
Gilbert gave the sculpture a jaded look. ‘I just have a theory that a work of art should speak to you without needing a screed of explanation. I tend to think, dear boy, the longer the explanation, the poorer the piece of art.’
Tate screwed up his face. ‘We-ell … depends what you think art is.’ He put his arm round Gilbert’s shoulders. ‘Anyway, Gilb, your Titians: don’t you explain them, set them in context? It all helps enrich the experience.’
‘Yes, but it’s an add-on with the Great Artists.’ Only a person with impaired hearing would have missed Gilbert’s dig at the less great. ‘I mean, even if I said nothing to my clients, they could still see the skill involved and know what the painter was getting at. But what on earth is this saying to me? “I am a piece of metal with an eye on it”?’
‘Or is it saying, “I am an eye with a piece of metal under me”?’ Tate shot back before peeling away from Gilbert, laughing. ‘Just keep an open mind, eh, Gilb? Being frustrated, angry, irritated – they’re all valid responses to any piece of art. It’s even allowed to make you laugh.’
Grace wished Tate had been grudging or snarky. There was too much generosity in the way he listened to other people’s views.
‘I think it’s marvellous,’ Alistair cut in. ‘Stark, concise … the inanimate, plus an inanimate image of the animate. Marvellous.’ He nodded earnestly and took himself and his briefcase off to look at a fish made of shoes. Tate followed him, but Gilbert and Grace hung back.
‘Talking of things that frustrate, anger and irritate, and rarely make me laugh,’ Gilbert said, ‘does Alistair keep having to prove how much he is “up with” the modern art world?’
‘I think the expression is “down with”.’
Gilbert flapped a hand. ‘Is it too much to hope that there’s a coffee shop? I mean Tate’s doing a wonderful job, but really, there’s only so much of this I can take.’
‘Go on,’ Grace said, ‘I’ll cover for you.’
She watched Gilbert cut back through the room, giving the piece of metal and the eye a wide berth as if it might somehow infect his artistic sensibilities if he got too close. He turned and waved before he left the room, every bit a naughty schoolboy playing truant from a school trip. She wandered slowly after Tate and Alistair, but they seemed rooted in front of the fish sculpture, Tate’s hands swooping up and back to describe something and Alistair responding with a volley of nods. At one point Tate stretched up his arms and put the palms of his hands together as if describing some kind of bridge and Grace stood watching him before realising that her attention had gone from his hands to his backside. She turned away and headed into another room. Safer to go off-piste as Gilbert had done.
She stopped in front of a poster advertising a Bollywood film, upon which the artist had stuck thousands and thousand
s of pieces of rice painted in jewelled colours. She was surprised at how much she liked it.
She stopped in front of another poster and then another. Yes, these were lovely; perhaps they didn’t call out to her like a Monet or a Van Gogh, but there was something in them that touched her. She read the dense blurb about the artist and drifted through to another room, not really caring now if Alistair and Tate had noticed she was missing. She sat on a bench and did some people-watching – noting the ones who just skimmed through each room, and the ones who stood and stared. The ones who, like her, seemed glad of a sit-down. Some students were taking photos and others were sitting, cross-legged, sketching a long canvas dotted with splashes of colour. Nobody seemed to be giving tours, except for Tate. She wondered if Alistair had dislocated his neck yet from all that nodding. She wondered if Tate had lowered his arms.
In front of her was a sculpture of a huge white clam on a stark black plinth and the more Grace studied it, the more it reminded her of her father the night before when she had tried to get him to open up about her mother.
The conversation had not started well, mainly as Grace had come home to find more areas of her flat experiencing their own personal crime wave. Her father was in the kitchen ‘working on a spate of post office raids in Surrey’; every surface was covered in paper and books. There were files open on the floor too and the phone was on the table. She knew if she touched it, the thing would be red hot. Her father had a number of pals who were also interested in crime, two of them being ex-policemen, and they were often on the phone to each other swapping theories and snippets of information. That they called themselves the Newham Gang showed that at least they had a sense of humour about their obsession.
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