The Colour of Love

by Preethi Nair

  I thought about it on the way to Gina’s house. If he was being serious I just didn’t have the strength to pretend any more. He would have to take me as I was.

  Gina was back at the flat, about to leave for work.

  ‘Did you sort out the stuff in your head?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then Tastudi Mangetti called,’ I replied.

  ‘What did he want? Did he apologise for not turning up?’

  ‘He wants Foruki to enter the Turner Prize.’

  She spat out the cornflakes she was eating. ‘Bloody hell! No! What? And what did you say?’

  ‘I said I’d call him back.’

  ‘Why the bloody hell did you say that?’

  ‘Because I don’t think I can lie any more. It was never meant to go this far. People get hurt. What if someone finds out Michael helped me? I can’t do that to him.’

  ‘No one is going to find out – if it ever comes out, Michael can deny it. Nina, you can’t let this go. It’s the bloody Turner. You’ve got to keep going and then when it’s all over you can come clean. Think about it … Foruki going in for the Turner.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘What’s there to be sure about? Just go for it. Play them at their own game. Most of them are just full of crap anyway. When I went to the opening of Hutton’s new exhibition you know what he did? He made a sculpture with cigarette butts and a few empty cartons and some idiot bought it for two thousand pounds. What kind of madness is that? Your paintings are original, Nina, it’s the artist who’s a fake. I’ve got to go to work now but please tell me that you’ll think about it.’

  ‘It’s all I’ve been doing.’

  ‘So think about it some more.’

  It was like Ki making me take centre stage. At first I thought she didn’t understand, I didn’t want to be humiliated any further, but she just wanted to make me stronger.

  After Gina left I called my mum and dad.

  ‘Have you changed your mind?’

  ‘No, Dad, but …’

  ‘The fooler.’ He hung up.

  I then left one last message for Michael.

  ‘Michael, Mangetti wants Foruki to go in for the Turner. I don’t know what to do. What if someone finds out that you knew all along. Will you call me? Can we talk?’

  An hour later Michael’s secretary called back saying he would have no reservations with Mr Foruki entering the Turner Prize and wished him the very best with his career. That was it, nothing more.

  I went to see Mrs Onoro.

  ‘Oh Mrs Onoro,’ I said hugging her, ‘I don’t know where to start. I’ve left my fiancé, my family won’t speak to me and my friend Michael has gone.’

  ‘I make you tea and you tell me properly.’

  She made us some tea and I told her everything and then I asked her if she had ever pretended.

  ‘I pretended for long time I happy when I not – at least you no have to pretend. You be yourself. Lots of people they not self because they pretend they happy when they not.’

  ‘What about truth?’

  ‘Hikito say you find own truth. Nobody tell you what right or what wrong. You find your own way, you do what you think is right.’

  I asked if I could speak to her son, thinking that at that moment what was right was to finish what I had started and to see it through to the end with conviction.

  ‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘You want marry him?’

  ‘No, no. Maybe he can help me with a job I’m doing?’

  ‘Rooney supply fruit and veg everywhere. No job too small. You wait, he come home soon.’

  We talked about her childhood in Japan, how she came to England, what she wished for Rooney, and together we waited for him. Two hours later he came home. In that time I had managed to convince myself that asking him to stand in as Foruki made perfect sense.

  ‘What’s for …?’ He stopped when he saw me, he probably thought I was stalking his mother so I could get to him.

  ‘Rooney, Nina wait for you.’

  He looked at me suspiciously and said something in Japanese to his mother.

  ‘No, she want big order for vegetables,’ Mrs Onoro replied in English.

  ‘It’s not exactly vegetables I wanted to ask you about.’

  Mrs Onoro showed no sign of leaving us alone so I could talk to him privately about being Foruki.

  ‘Mrs Onoro, could I have some more tea please?’ I asked, thinking she’d go off and make a fresh pot.

  ‘I pour for you.’ She poured the cold tea into my cup, sat comfortably back in her chair and waited for me to begin.

  ‘Well, well the thing is I’m a painter, well, I was a lawyer before that and I sort of fell into painting. When I finished a piece, I dedicated it to my best friend Ki who died. It was because of her I started to paint again.’

  Mrs Onoro nodded vehemently.

  ‘These paintings were spotted by a very influential man and he confused the inscription with the name of a Japanese painter.’

  ‘I no understand,’ she said.

  ‘Well, he thought that “FOR U KI” was a Japanese man and because he was so important I didn’t tell him that it was me.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ Mrs Onoro gasped. ‘You lie?’

  ‘Yes, and now he wants to enter the exhibition he thinks Foruki has done for an important prize so he wants to meet him. I don’t know any Japanese men except you, Rooney.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t want to get involved,’ he said quickly. If he needed confirmation that I was a lunatic, this was it.

  ‘I’ll pay you. Ten per cent of whatever I get from the exhibition. Say if I make thirty thousand pounds that’s …’

  ‘Three thousand, Rooney, he do it,’ Mrs Onoro said.

  ‘You don’t even have to say anything. Just talk in Japanese and a friend of mine will translate or I’ll pretend to. You can think about it and tell me later if you want to do it.’

  ‘So I don’t have to paint? Just turn up, talk in Japanese and you’re gonna pay me for doing that?’

  ‘I’ll pay you if he goes for it and the paintings sell. If they don’t I’ll pay you three hundred pounds. Either way, you don’t really have to do anything.’

  He took a moment to think about it and then he agreed.

  ‘It so clever. Rooney he sell good,’ Mrs Onoro added.

  I called up Mangetti to tell him that we could meet him the following week. He wanted to meet at Brown’s but I mentioned that Foruki would prefer it if we could meet somewhere more private. Mangetti suggested meeting at his friend’s offices in Cork Street. That left five days for Rooney to be primed.

  Gina arrived home late. I couldn’t find a Japanese restaurant near where she lived so I bought us a Chinese takeaway and had it ready for her when she arrived home.

  ‘Tell me you’ve been thinking about it?’ she asked. ‘It would be good to see one of us break the mould.’

  ‘How much Japanese do you speak, Gina?’

  ‘Enough to get me by? Why?’

  ‘Me and you have got a lot of work to do if Rooney is going to stand any kind of chance with Mangetti.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ve been thinking all evening about this and I don’t know how exactly this is going to work, but maybe you could act as Foruki’s translator so Rooney doesn’t have to talk about art. The only way I could convince him was by telling him he didn’t have to do a thing.’

  ‘Let’s get Foruki’s profile right first, his background and his concepts, and then we’ll deal with how we present it all to Mangetti.’

  Gina and I sat up for most of the night, eating Chinese food and expanding on the profile I had given Foruki.

  Foruki was a pseudonym for Ronald David Onoro. He was born in London in 1973 to a Japanese mother and a British father. His mother, Lydia Onoro, was a descendant of a Japanese Emperor who came from a very wealthy family and she was a painter. Gina suggested making her good fri
ends with Yoko Ono but I said it was a bad idea in case Yoko was tracked down for a quote on their friendship.

  ‘You think it will go as far as that?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but when we are doing this we have to try and think of every eventuality.’

  Foruki’s father was Kenneth David, an archaeologist who had been sent on a project to Tokyo. Lydia and Kenneth met by chance on a bus, there was an immediate connection between them and they began talking (Lydia could speak some English). Just four weeks after their initial meeting, they married. I told Gina that it was a bit far-fetched that they married a month after meeting on a bus but she assured me that was what had happened to her parents.

  The Onoro family were completely against the marriage and they asked Lydia to leave. So after Lydia married Kenneth they moved to London. A year later, Rooney was born. At this stage I wanted Kenneth to die so Lydia would be left penniless and alone with no alternative but to go back to Japan, but Gina suggested it was better if they were abandoned so there would be a whole range of emotions that Foruki could work with. I used my dad’s example of what he envisaged happening to my Uncle Amit’s daughter and Roy; and so their marriage disintegrated rapidly after the birth of their son, primarily due to cultural differences, and Kenneth met someone else. When Rooney was only two, Kenneth left them both. Penniless and with nowhere to turn, Lydia returned to Japan, thinking that her parents would soften on seeing their grandson. But when she arrived in her home town they refused to see her because she had brought disgrace on the family.

  With no money, Lydia began selling fruit and vegetables and took her son to work on the streets with her. At night at home she would paint to escape her reality and if Rooney was awake he would enter her world of colour. There had to be this link to a fruit and veg stall just in case someone photographed him and came forward saying they’d seen Foruki down the market. We would do everything to keep him away from the press but there were no guarantees that they wouldn’t track him down. If this ever happened, I could say that Foruki could do things that appeared completely eccentric like selling fruit and veg, but this was because before he started each painting he needed to re-create the joy found in the formative years of his youth. It was absolute nonsense, but as my dad put it, ‘Gives them the rambles, they likes it.’

  We spent a long time debating whether to kill off Lydia but essentially she had to go. Gina said the colours Foruki painted with were so bold and daring, almost as if they had been let loose from a place of tremendous angst. Therefore, Foruki had to have lots of pain in his life and be unable to express his grief except on the canvas.

  Lydia died when Foruki was fifteen and he was left to fend for himself. After working the whole day doing odd jobs he would transmute his feelings onto the canvas. Feelings of despair, loneliness and sadness all poured out and were given colour and life. They were hopeful pictures, he wanted to see something else other than the starkness of his reality.

  His life changed dramatically after an encounter with a wealthy Japanese widow who was taken by him and his paintings. She introduced him to an influential circle, moved him into her home and paid him money just to paint for her. After years of being with her she betrayed him and left him for another artist. A period of substance abuse followed, a period where Foruki questioned his self worth, anything he could snort was up his nose. That was until he found himself in the gutter and decided that the only way was up.

  Foruki had several opportunities to exhibit abroad but chose not to, that was until I came along and found his work in some back-street gallery. I asked him to come to London because all that exuded from the canvas was energy and potential.

  ‘What were you doing in Japan?’ Gina asked.

  ‘I had been feeling disillusioned at work for a long time and always had a fascination with Japanese art and so I made a preliminary trip where I happened to stumble across him.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Gina interjected.

  It was hard to convince him because Foruki wasn’t an artist who could be enticed by fame or money and there was a nonchalance to his character. He was eventually persuaded on the premise that he could explore his feelings towards one part of his heritage that he had previously denied: his Britishness. Gina suggested that maybe he came to London because he fancied me but this suggestion also had to go; it was better if his feelings towards me were ambiguous, he had to concentrate on his art.

  ‘We’ve got a few problems,’ Gina pointed out.

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘You said this Rooney bloke is Japanese; he’s not half-English. Isn’t that going to show?’

  I thought for a moment. The Japanese thing; it only showed in his eyes as his skin was quite pale. ‘We’ll have him wearing sunglasses. They help him see light in a different way, he only takes them off when he’s painting so the light appears even brighter and this is reflected in his work.’

  ‘You’re bloody mad, Nina.’

  We had Foruki’s profile and back-story down to every minuscule detail, even what kind of aftershave he would wear. The next few days I spent going to the library and taking out books on personal development. Raj had talked a lot about Neuro Linguistic Programming and the art of empathy but I hadn’t really listened. He had called me twice in an attempt to persuade me to go back to him and both times I took the calls, trying my very best to explain to him my reasons for doing what I did. The last time his mother caught him in mid-conversation with me and I could hear her shouting at him to hang up ‘on that cheating housie’, which is what he did. There hadn’t been any more calls since. In contrast, Jean Michel left several messages asking me not to go through with the wedding, that I was making a big mistake. I had already made the biggest mistake by not being honest with both Raj and Michael. There was still no news from Michael and I knew that at some stage soon I would have to give up hoping.

  In two days I devoured books on NLP and learned about empathy and how you could appear to be on the same wavelength as someone. The way the books were written did not make it sound manipulative, which it patently was.

  ‘This bit talks about the importance of body language. He’s got to mimic Tastudi’s gestures but so subtly that Tastudi doesn’t notice a thing. This guy also talks a lot about eye contact but that’s going to be difficult with the shades, but maybe if you’re translating you should do the eye-contact thing with him,’ I said, holding the book up. ‘And also speaking in the same tone.’

  ‘What time did you say we were going round there?’ Gina asked.

  ‘Around eight.’

  I wanted to go and see Mum and Dad who didn’t live too far from Mrs Onoro but it was too soon, I couldn’t face the door being slammed shut in my face. And anyway, Gina was coming with me to Mrs Onoro’s house to try and ascertain the extent of the work that needed to be done on Rooney.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Mrs Onoro ushered us in.

  Gina greeted her in Japanese and Mrs Onoro was mesmerised.

  ‘Oh you pretty girl,’ she said to Gina. ‘And you speak Japanese.’

  ‘Mrs Onoro, this is my friend Gina.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you at last, Mrs Onoro. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘And polite girl. You married?’

  ‘No,’ Gina replied.

  ‘That’s very good. You don’t marry until you find right boy. You engaged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rooney, Nina and her friend come to see you. Come down, put good shirt on.’ She led us into the sitting room. ‘I make you tea. Where you learn to speak Japanese?’

  ‘In Japan,’ Gina replied. ‘I used to teach English there.’

  ‘Rooney put best shirt on,’ Mrs Onoro shouted up again as she went to make the tea.

  Rooney came down in a black tracksuit. We only had four days left to transform him into a charismatic artist. ‘This is my friend Gina,’ I said introducing them.

  When he went over to her to shake her hand I sensed that there was some raw material that
we could work with; his eyes seemed to sparkle, his shoulders were pulled back so he appeared taller and confident.

  ‘Tea here,’ Mrs Onoro came in with her tray.

  ‘Gina’s going to do the translation and maybe find some clothes that are more appropriate.’

  ‘I’m just kitting Foruki out, you know, the kinda clothes he would wear. So it would be good to know your sizes,’ she added. ‘And shoes, do you have any classy shoes? They are important,’ Gina continued.

  ‘Go bring down shoes,’ his mother instructed.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  Mrs Onoro sat back in her chair as if he had said something deeply offensive.

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll take a look later,’ Gina replied.

  I told him what we were planning to have him dressed in and how we were going to work on him. He objected. Mrs Onoro looked at him as if he had wounded her.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he replied.

  Gina then read out Foruki’s history.

  ‘Kenneth bad man,’ Mrs Onoro shouted, fully recovered. ‘Good he dead. Why Foruki mother she have to die? She no good? How she die?’

  ‘She was killed in a car crash, killed instantly so she didn’t feel a thing. His mother was really nice, the best mother, but it was her time to go.’

  ‘So sad,’ Mrs Onoro replied.

  ‘Anyway, that’s his story. You have to imagine that I am Tastudi Mangetti and I’m going to ask you some questions. Say the first thing that comes into your head in Japanese and try to copy some of my gestures.’

  ‘No bloody way,’ he shouted.

  ‘Just work with us, Rooney. See how it goes and if it’s not working, leave it, but at least give it a go,’ Gina said.

  He seemed to respond to Gina better so I let her continue.

  ‘Tell me what you want me to do again?’ he asked.

  ‘Answer Nina’s questions by saying the first thing that comes to your head in Japanese, but when you answer try and copy her a bit. What she’s doing with her hands or her head. The tone she’s using. So if Nina talks softly, you answer softly. If she pauses when she’s asking you a question, you pause in giving her an answer.’