by Mark Yarwood
This is where it all changed. My own vanity, myself -love, stabbed me in the back.
I’m kneeling on the men’s room floor, gripping my burning face, watching blisters appear in a perfect beard shape. Water only made it worse. Now I was curled up like a baby, hugging my knees up to my chest, praying for the burning to end, when some suit comes in and sees my postulating skin and backs away, saying he’ll get help. This was where I ended and my beard began.
My doctor told me that the beard area had now become infected and, even though the antibiotics would help for a while, eventually they would stop working. He was right. The only thing that might help, he told me- and I’m sure he had a slight smile on his face- is growing a beard. So I did, and it grew and covered my face with wiry thick coarse hair, like ivy growing up the side of an old house. Of course, doctor ‘My Child Died’ loved this.
Then he touched my leg, his face looking almost sympathetic, as he told me what I should do. He told me to go on holiday, get away from the stresses and strains of life in the city. Go to the Seaside, rent a cottage, he told me.
He looked at me for a moment carefully, then said, ‘I shouldn’t be saying this…but there’s a little fishing village in Cornwall you should visit.’
And he told me about a patient that had a similar infection, who had happened to visit the same fishing village. A few days later, my doctor told me, the patient was free of infection.
They put all kinds of chemicals in the water when they treat it, my doctor told me. Who knows what effect it has on skin, he says. What harm could come from it, he says and smiles.
Just when I’m about to leave, the doctor calls me back and tells me to sit down. With a slight smile on his lips, he tells me the bad news. He tells me about the patient with the infection, about how the infection came back and got worse when they returned to London.
‘It’s the water, or the pollution, or something,’ the doctor tells me, and I’m sure he’s holding back some laughter. You either stay there or prepare to be ugly for the rest of your days in London, he says.
Jump to a couple of months later, and I’m living in the magical Cornish village, my picturesque prison, staring at a bathtub full of its medicinal waters.
And there’s Kevin behind me, hopping over the cracks in the lino.
‘Mate, the water doesn’t look very magical to me,’ he says.
‘It’s not actually magical. There’s no such thing. It’s chemicals. Something they put in the water.’
‘Mate, I need to talk to you,’ Kevin says. ‘That’s why I came down to visit.’
I need you to do something for me, I tell Kevin. I turn and clench his shoulders, just because I know he hates, no, detests being touched.
‘Anything,’ he says, ‘as long as it doesn’t involve dirt.’
I need you to dunk me. Really push me under and hold me under, I say.
My father was religious; he was the kind of Christian that wanted everyone else to burn in hell. But then there was my mother- my saviour, or sinner, as my father called her. Her beauty was his downfall. Whatever she asked, whenever she demanded something, he would have to give in.
My mother, God bless her. She made me, but she might have destroyed me too.
When my father wanted to have me baptised, she refused, perhaps just to see him burn inside. With blazing eyes, he’d scream at my mother, something like, ‘He’s a beautiful child! Do you know what happens to beautiful people? They become sinners. Sex comes easily and they cannot stop themselves from sinning. God will punish them! He’ll take away that beauty! He must be baptised and saved from hell.’
Kevin grabs my shoulders and bends me over.
‘Mate, I think you have to be a vicar or something to perform a baptism.’
A baptism, that’s what I need. Maybe my mother cursed me, sent me to a living hell. Perhaps my infected face is my punishment.
Without warning, Kevin slams my face into the water, narrowly missing smashing my head into the side of the bath. Bubbles escape my mouth. My eyes bulge. This is freedom.
Then I’m up, my ribs bending outwards, my breath coming hard. Before I can take another breath, Kevin jerks me back beneath the surface.
I wish my father could see this. I wish my mother was here so she could weep.
Kevin dunks me ten times. He has to dunk me ten times. If he doesn’t, his sister might have a brain embolism.
‘Why are you here, Kevin?’ I ask, pulling away from him before he drowns me.
‘Mate, they fired me.’
‘What for?’ I ask and can almost see the story in my head.
‘One of the secretaries said I touched her!’ His face contorts and he shudders. How can you be touched inappropriately by a man who hates to touch anything? Unless he’s wearing latex gloves of course.
Then, as he stands in my bathroom, washing his hands ten times and rubbing them red raw, I can see that look in his eyes. Kevin’s mind doesn’t work like yours or mine. He doesn’t go from A to B, he doesn’t have a logical part of his cranium. With Kevin, he has to navigate a maze crammed with unhealthy thoughts before he can arrive at any kind of conclusion. He stares at me, saying nothing. But I know, right there in the warmest part of his brain, is the memory of me laughing at him.
‘Okay, Kevin, you can stay,’ I say and dry my hair. ‘As long as you want.’
The smile creases Kevin’s thin face. ‘Do you really think the water will cure you?’
‘I hope so. I really hope so.’
You can’t blame Kevin. You can’t blame a man at the mercy of his compulsions.
Even so, when Kevin came to stay, that’s when all the bad things started to happen.
Chapter Three
When you move to a new place, it’s hard to make friends. It’s even more difficult when there is a wall of fur between you and them. You cannot ever really trust a person if you can’t ever see all their face.
Kevin told me about the arts and crafts group. He saw a scribbled advert in a window of the newsagents and decided to go along.
Arts and crafts for beginners class is held in a corrugated iron shack that used to shelter boats from the winter that sits a few feet from the harbour’s edge. Next to it is the shed where the lifeboat will shoot from when it’s needed.
In the corner of the building, still hang thick worn ropes that smell of the sea. Dried crusty seaweed strands hang over the large wooden doors on the front of the shack, where someone has put childish drawings on the walls to cover rust coloured stains. Instead of the hulls of boats sent in for repair, now there are small desks, probably thrown out from the local school, all placed in neat little rows. On top of one desk is written, in black ink, Jody sucks cocks.
Kevin came along to the arts and crafts group for one day. He said he was bored and wanted to create something.
On the first day, he stood at his desk, trying not to touch it. He said he couldn’t help imagine the thousands of dirty school children’s fingers. In his head he saw fingers up noses. Kids go to the toilet and never wash their hands, he said.
Kevin said they brought out trays with lumps of wet clay on them and told them to shape something. Use your imagination, the woman in charge of the class told them. Kevin looked at his lump of clay, his hands inches from it, hesitating.
The only good thing about the class, Kevin told me when he came home with his hands still clean, was the girl with the coloured hair. Janet.
Janet, the girl who teaches the group. He told me she was beautiful.
The next time the class gets together, I’m there, standing by a desk, my hands feeling the carved letters scratched into the surface. Steven bums cats, it says in one corner of the desk, with a carefully drawn illustration of Steven bumming a cat. Steven has a smile on his face. The cat does not.
Janet stands in front of the class smiling. She plays with a straggle of blue hair as she looks at our faces. I look round to at my fellow classmates and see a man with bright ginger hair and pink face. H
e’s called Cyrus. Cyrus is the talent of the class. He brings in his own pieces of art for Janet and the rest of us to see. This week he has Cello-taped bake bean cans on top of each other. They look as if they are ready to collapse.
Janet looks at it and says she likes it. She gives us all a piece of seaside rock with a message through it. I pick up mine and expect to see something like: Welcome to the seaside on it. But it says: I want to bite your right nipple.
I look up and Janet is staring at me. She looks away and tells the class she wants them to paint exactly what’s on their minds at that moment. She gives us some sugar paper and poster paints. She says we can only paint using our lips.
Kevin would have never got this far.
Kevin told me that it was love at first sight.
My picture is a swirling mess of paint with hair in it. My piece of art is the Turin shroud. Just as meaningless. Just as fake.
I don’t know anything about art. I know advertising. I know sales. I know that when you arrive on someone’s doorstep and they open the door, you have to smile. A smile means there is no threat. It’s all about SEX: Smile, Enthusiasm and eXcitement. When trying to sell something to someone who really doesn’t want your product, you have to keeping nodding and keep smiling. What you really are doing, is selling yourself. The product sells itself.
Nobody wants to buy a product with a beard.
What am I painting? What is on my mind? What’s on my mind, is what’s on my face.
Janet walks round the room watching everybody paint extracts of their own fucked up minds. She stands by Cyrus as he dabs his nose into black paint and keeps bobbing his head like a nodding dog. She smiles at him and strokes his flaming hair.
She walks past a very tiny girl called Lisa who smashes her face into her desk with intensity. Janet passes me and I can smell clothes that have been sitting in a washing machine for far too long. I can smell underwear that’s been worn for a month.
Kevin said it was love at first sight. How would he ever get past her clothes?
Janet picks a hair out of my painting. I don’t see her throw it away.
She takes her place at the front of the class and tells everybody that they’ve done something wonderful. She’s not talking about their pictures, she says. They are shit, she says and looks over our faces. I nearly laugh.
Janet ducks under some shelves on the right of the shack and pulls out a large piece of white card. She lays it on the floor and looks at us again, her brown eyes taking us in slowly. She stands still, gripping the bottom of her salmon coloured shirt and suddenly, and in one clean movement, pulls it over her head. Not staring at her white, but tightly packed body, wasn’t an option. I see the silver belly button ring and savour the rest of her flat stomach until my eyes rise over her ribs and up over her red bra. The bra falls to the floor and her breasts stay exactly in the same place. I look at the angry lines under her breasts and let out a breath.
She slips off her jeans and begins covering her body in paint of all different colours, pouring the bottles as she holds them over her head.
This is art, she tells us.
My eyes swell as she massages the paint into her body and lies down on the card. She flops about for a few seconds like a suffocating fish, pressing her body onto the card.
She wants us to grab card and do the same.
Cyrus nearly knocks over his desk as he scrambles towards the shelves, trying to pull his trousers off as he runs. Little Lisa looks round the room for justification as she unbuttons her blouse.
Naked and covered in paint, standing over their white boards, they all look at me.
Janet looks at me.
Cyrus raises his flaming eyebrows.
This is true art, she says. This is making art, true art, the only way people can. She tells us about the drawings in caves from thousands and thousands of years ago. Hand prints on walls. Babies grabbing their own shit and throwing it about, she says, is real art.
Cyrus’ slightly orange body is flapping about in the middle of the room. Lisa’s bobbly pink backside is bouncing up at me, purple paint squelching through her thighs.
I look down so I don’t have to watch. On my desk is the stick of rock that Janet gave me. It reads: I want to bite your right nipple.
I pull off my jumper and trousers as everybody claps. The paint is cold and I shiver.
Janet watches me, her multi-coloured breasts hanging before me.
I’m a stranded dolphin. No, I’m the first man to stick his finger up his arse and draw on the wall of his cave. This sort of art stinks.
Janet walks round us as we die like fish, paint like maniacs.
The product should sell itself. You’ll always be selling yourself. You can sell anything with a smile and a nod.
Monkeys can make art, Janet tells us as she walks round the room. Covered in paint, you’re no longer naked. You’re wearing art, Janet says. You are art.
When it’s done, when all the art making is over, I feel like we should all lie back and smoke a cigarette.
Janet takes our boards and mounts them along the wall, writing our names on each one. She comments on the pieces, saying that even though we were just moving around, our souls were making art. There is nothing accidental, she says.
Janet steps up to mine and pulls a pubic hair off the canvas. I don’t see her throw it away.
Love at first sight, Kevin called it.
Everybody gets dressed and leaves. I go to walk out and Janet quickly moves in front of me, barring my exit.
‘That wasn’t art,’ I say. ‘There wasn’t anything artistic about that.’
‘How would you know?’ Janet peels some paint from my beard.
‘What makes you such an expert?’
‘I have an art shop. I know good art.’
Owning an art shop doesn’t make you an artist, I say. She tells me that she makes her own art, her own works and she sells them. People buy good art, she says. I tell her people will buy anything, it’s the way you sell it.
‘You’re a salesman,’ she says, her eyes trying to flay my skin.
‘I used to be.’
She walks round me. ‘I like your beard.’
‘I don’t.’
She comes back to face me and looks at me carefully, one eye closed. ‘That’s because you’re hiding behind it. You want to be beautiful. You think your beard makes you ugly.’
‘It does.’
It’s a part of you, she says. It grows out of you, therefore it’s beautiful.
‘Will you be coming back?’ Janet asks. ‘I’d like to paint you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Okay, fine, she says, but she wants me to have something. She thinks I deserve it. She hands me another stick of rock, which is purple with pink stripes. It reads: I want to feel your beard on my breasts.
I thank her, walk out of the shack and start running.
Chapter Four
My soon to be ex- solicitor gives me the bad news as he sits at my kitchen table in his red and yellow Hawaiian shirt.
Solicitors, like prostitutes, will do anything for money. There’s not much difference between them, except solicitors aren’t usually that alluring, but then again, neither are prostitutes. If you haven’t got any money, you’ll have great trouble getting either of them to do anything for you. They both smell an empty wallet and they stop being nice. The attractiveness of a prostitute can be found in her willingness to do anything for money without complaint, despite how disgusting the request. You have to spend weeks, even months trying to persuade a wife or girlfriend to have anal sex.
This is how I ended up making art for money with Janet, because my company and Tom had got together and decided to stiff me. I think they would call this a corporate gang bang.
I came from London with hope, glad to be away from the smoke, knowing that Tom’s cream and my company were sponsoring my new life. It didn’t matter that people in the city looked at me as if I was a tramp, I was moving on, findin
g a new life.
No beard. My face would be back. There would be money in the bank.
My face, my blistered and infected beard area, was my fault, as it turned out. This is what my soon to be fired solicitor tells me, as he flicks through the pictures on his digital camera. He shows me a shot of him and his wife standing by some statue. He’s only here because he happens to be on holiday. And so he can slap a bill on me. One final insult.
I should have known the company wouldn’t stick with the deal, ganging up against me in some boardroom weeks after I had left, deciding to do the dirty instead. Turns out Tom decided he had given me a suitable amount of warning; he now remembers telling me in no circumstances am I to use the miracle cream, it may have serious side effects. Just like that, his memory comes back.
Every bit of money I had saved up went into this new home, this luxury cottage on the edge of this picturesque fishing village. Thanks to a few celebrity cooks opening up flash restaurants near by, this area has the highest rise in housing prices in the country.
It wasn’t quite a luxury home when I first bought it, but after I had a large bath tub and new power shower, new curtains, sofas, carpets and beds installed, it became a dream with four walls and a new roof that retains the character of the surrounding buildings.
My soon to be redundant solicitor might as well be slapping me in the face.
‘How much money do you have left?’ the Hawaiian shirt asks me, a slight whimsical look on his lips. He has a lobster red strip cross his forehead and nose.
‘Not a lot,’ I say.
‘Then you’ll no longer be able to afford my services,’ he says. ‘It’s just as well, what with the way you’ve been acting towards the company.’
I look up, confused. ‘The way I’ve been acting?’
‘The letters.’ My ex –solicitor flicks through some more of his holiday snaps, occasionally showing me a few.
After I tell him that I have no idea what he’s talking about, he gives me the same look my mother used to give me when I’d break something and deny all knowledge of the incident.