Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  If I could make a stick of rock, I’d make one for Janet that read: I don’t know if I love you, but I know for sure that I hate your guts.

  Thing is, you really can’t fit that many words on a stick of rock. Everything has to be short and sweet. I hate you or I love you, is the best you can hope for. You just have to decide which.

  ‘You really shouldn’t be Jealous,’ Janet says, taking off her T-shirt. About a dozen handprints of various colours cover her chest. Covered in her art, Janet will never feel ashamed. With enough money, Janet says you can buy back your dignity.

  ‘I don’t have any feelings for Kevin,’ Janet tells me, and a sponge in my stomach is squeezed dry.

  ‘You don’t love him?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t love anyone,’ she says and pulls a piece of dried paint from her right nipple.

  ‘Not even your mother?’ I ask and look into her eyes.

  ‘Not even her.’ Janet soaps herself down, standing over my kitchen sink.

  I ask her if she killed her mother to get the shop and the flat above it. Where is she buried, I ask? Janet keeps on washing her breasts, leaving a splash of orange paint under her left armpit. I tell her that she had better go to the police and tell them the truth, explain to them what really happened, or all the art and the money she’s made will be for nothing. Does she really want to go to prison, I ask?

  ‘You think I’m doing this to get rich?’ Janet asks me, actually looking disappointed.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing all this,’ I say.

  ‘To live forever. To be immortal.’ Janet puts her top back on and ties her hair back. ‘Kevin understands what this is all about. He understands what I’m doing. Why I’m doing it. Soon the whole world will know who we are. We are all held back by something in our lives. Maybe it’s our parents and the limitations they’ve put on us or maybe it’s just ourselves.’

  I tell Janet that she should be sitting in a big chair stroking a white cat, but she just shakes her head.

  ‘Kevin was held back by his obsessions and now he’s free,’ she says. ‘He’s free to crawl around in the dirt if he wants. That’s what makes people happy. His parents made him what he was or so he told me. Now he’s born again. You didn’t realise it, but your beard set you free from a life that was making you into a monster in a suit. You were held back by your own good looks, imprisoned by your vanity. Now look at you.’

  ‘Was it your mother who was holding you back?’ I ask, sounding like a therapist.

  ‘No,’ Janet says, and I’m sure I spot a tear in her eye. ‘My mother set me free.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kevin comes home sometime in the afternoon sporting his black eye and paint-speckled hair as if they are the art world’s version of the Victoria Cross. While I’m searching through my bathroom for razor blades, Kevin is making a bowl of cereal, which I know he won’t eat all of just to make a point. There are now several half eaten plates of food round the kitchen and lounge. Bags of crisps with a few crumbs at the bottom. This is Kevin’s way of sticking his fingers up at me.

  While spooning globs of milky cereal into his smiling mouth, Kevin slips a large cream coloured invite across the kitchen table towards me.

  Somehow, my electric razor has gone missing. There’s nothing to shave with. I ask Kevin if he’s seen my electric razor and he shakes his head and taps his fingers along the invite.

  I pick it up and read the words that say: You are invited to attend the first exhibition of the Janet Coleman Sex as Art collection. Tonight from 7:30 pm at Margaret Parks’ house.

  Looking at Kevin, I can see the clarity of his mind. I can see that if he didn’t have a mouth full of milk and corn based breakfast food, then he’d probably be humming or whistling. Thing is, before his performance with Janet on Friday night, Kevin had never had sex before. Janet has completely liberated him, given him a new birth mother. Her. Janet is now his mother. This is the best thing that could have happened to him, but he no longer needs father or his big brother, his best friend or whatever I’m supposed to be. The way it goes, you have to kill your father to get to sleep with your mother. Things have really got messed up.

  Art should be therapy, not a feature length special of Trisha.

  I ask Kevin what his role in all this business is.

  ‘Mate, I’m just trying to help Janet with her art project,’ he says, between mouthfuls of sodden lumps of corn. ‘We all could be very rich soon. Mate, I owe Janet a lot. She’s helped me.’

  I shake my head and sit next to Kevin, taking the spoon from his hand. ‘No, Kevin, you don’t owe her anything. You’re cured now, but it’s all down to you, no one else.’

  Kevin picks up the spoon. ‘It’s Maggie and Janet that cured me, and the water. I drank loads of water like you said and Maggie helped me with the food thing and Janet with the dirt…we’ll now I’m trying to help them both.’

  ‘You’re only doing this because you love Janet. You’re still obsessed by her,’ I say and grip his shoulder.

  Kevin smiles the brightest smile I’ve ever seen and it’s almost too shiny, like looking at a bright light bulb after you’ve spent hours in the dark. He pats my hand like you might pat a child’s head, as he says, ‘Mate, you don’t get any of it. This has gone beyond love. This isn’t about sex either. The fact that you got jealous and attacked me shows that you don’t get it at all. I’m free of all that.’

  Kevin, with his smiley face, just like one of those acid house yellow badges with the big grin on it, telling me that I don’t get it. A big smile that had a whole army of doped up, dancing crazy people behind it, blowing whistles in the middle of the night and standing in fields or warehouses, paying homage to their chemical God.

  Soon everyone will know us, he says.

  Our bodies, or the paint-splattered outline of our bodies, will hang on everybody’s walls.

  They’ll take down Van Gogh’s sunflowers and put up a Coleman, he tells me with a droplet of milk hanging off his chin.

  Now Kevin has clarity, has resolved his childhood issues, whole members of his family could be dying somewhere in bizarre ways. Picture his cousin Alice getting hit by a speeding car. Her blood across the tarmac. Violent Death Red. But Kevin no longer cares, is no longer chained to his unfounded fears.

  After grabbing the invite, I jump in the shower and rub soap into my bristly beard. I go down along the harbour to the small chemist to buy razor blades, but the thin young man behind the counter tells me that someone came in that morning and bought the lot. Do they have any electric shavers, I ask? No, they have been sold too.

  I try and avoid Kevin by sitting in a pub somewhere out of the village, and then in Shelley’s, hugging a cup of coffee. When I go back it’s getting darker, and the harbour melts into the sea and I get that fear that I’m going to step off the dock into the murky waves. Kevin stands in the shadows by the door and doesn’t say anything, just watches me watching him until a car pulls up and paints us both in orange light. There we are, two orange men, like the Jelly Babies no one wants to eat, just staring at each other. A flicker crosses Kevin’s face, like a glitch in a computer screen, as if a virus has been detected.

  Billy Wallis steers his Jaguar motorcar up the hill, with us in the back, his car lights crawling up the rock face, lighting up the next drop into the swirl of black ink and white spit below. The moon stays with us, Kevin and I, as we bounce along with the car, watching the back of Billy’s thick head. I count the wrinkles on the back of his neck several times, trying to avoid Kevin’s eyes even though they are on my shoulder, almost nudging me to look at him. Occasionally an amber light from somewhere sweeps through the car and I feel my face light up and bulge, while my eyes blink.

  ‘I wonder who they are looking for,’ Billy says, his head turning to his left as a flat level of trees appear beside us. I see nothing but a few trees that blend into the creepiness of a woods, then two torch beams bouncing around. I tell Billy to stop, but he keeps on driving. I gr
ab his shoulder and he puts his foot hard on the brake.

  ‘It’s too dark to find anything out there,’ Billy says, ‘they won’t find what they’re looking for.’

  ‘This is what they do,’ Billy says, watching the beams of torches bounce from the woods to our car. I cut the glare out with my hand and then notice the slim figure moving towards us, growing outwards, getting more bulky as he closes in on the car.

  The policeman that interviewed Janet and I, the one who raided Janet’s home, stands before us, leaning against the door of the car, looking at each of our faces. ‘This is the worst bit of our job.’

  I ask what the worst bit is, and the policeman lifts up his torch and shines it right in my face, jerking it a little in his hand. When the light goes away, I barely see the smile on his face through the little pink fairies dancing in front of my eyes.

  ‘Looking for something, anything that might tell you what actually happened.’ The detective looks back over to the woods where a brighter beam of light has appeared between the trees. The thin silhouettes of branches stretch out to us and fade along the tarmac before they reach the car. In the trees, the glowing policemen brush sticks through the undergrowth, all in a jagged little line.

  ‘This really should wait until morning, but time is a priority here.’ The policeman loosens his tie. ‘We want the evidence as fresh as possible.’

  ‘Burying someone in a woods and hoping they will go away, is a stupid thing to do,’ Billy says.

  We all turn and look at him, waiting for him to continue, but his mouth stays firmly shut.

  ‘Are you going up to Margaret Parks’ place for her party?’ the policeman asks and looks at me.

  ‘I am,’ Billy Wallis says suddenly, starting the engine again. ‘I’m dropping my friends off on the way. Young men like these have wilder parties to go to.’

  The policeman nods and moves away from our car as Billy drives further along the road. I watch the policeman turn and march back into the woods, the torch beams crossing each other and cutting him in half.

  In Maggie’s house, a team of caterers hurriedly prepare food for her guests, while Pete Hallow, the vulgar mouthed celebrity chef, shouts at them. This is what they have to put up with every day, getting the timing right on every dish, carefully laying out the meals so that their self- important boss won’t shout at them. He flicks a cherry tomato at a young girl’s head, but she doesn’t look up from her chopping board.

  I’m supposed to be crazy angry with Maggie, enough to kill and here I am in her house, picking up a plate and shovelling minute pieces of food into my mouth.

  ‘No one really cares about her. Most of them probably don’t know who she is, but they pretend to,’ Billy says and pulls me through to her massive stretch of living room. Our shoes squeak and hammer against the polished wood floor, our eyes floating across the large canvases hung on the walls. There are no frames, just the pure unadulterated sex art we have performed hung on the white walls. I look at the pictures and try and remember what part is me, what part is some other poor idiot with a hard on for Janet.

  ‘This is not my sort of thing,’ Billy says and looks around the room, eyeing a few celebrities from local TV. I recognise a young man in the corner, with spiky brown hair and hawk like nose, as a weatherman. Next to him, in a rose pink suit and fluffy long blonde hair, is an anchorwoman from the same channel.

  ‘That girl knows what she’s doing,’ Billy says and steps closer to the wall, tilting his thick neck back and taking out a pair of glasses. The bifocals somehow wipe away the scars on his face, let them melt into the perfect image of a father or tough looking uncle.

  I look where he is looking, at a large canvas on the wall, and see someone’s backside and maybe a tip of a penis, all in blue and yellow. I look closer and see a wiry looking hair, my particular shade.

  Then I see the small labels on a few of the paintings, red rectangles with something written on them in white. I move closer and read the word: Sold on about fifteen of our masterpieces of fornication. How much money Janet has scraped together so far, nobody but her knows.

  I see Janet walk into the room, her hair now dyed black and her clothes matching. Is this so the paintings stand out more? I ask jokingly. Are you in mourning, I ask? Perhaps for her dead mother?

  ‘The important thing is that we don’t end up under a few inches of concrete,’ Janet says and watches the celebrities sip champagne and dip their hands into the trays of tiny hors d’oeuvres offered to them.

  ‘Is that where your mother is, Janet?’ I ask.

  Janet smiles at me as she says, ‘I used to hate her. I used to wish she was dead.’

  Most children go through some sort of feeling of hate towards their mothers sometime, I tell her. But most of them don’t kill their mothers either. Most of them, I tell her and watch her face.

  ‘They’re searching the woods,’ I say to Janet, hoping to get some kind of emotional response. ‘They think they’re going to find her out there. Someone must have tipped them off.’

  Janet strokes my face and winks. ‘It’ll keep them busy for a while. It’ll give us enough time anyway.’

  ‘You told them you buried your mother in the woods?’ I march after Janet as she leaves the lounge and heads for the kitchen. ‘That’s pretty sick, even for you.’

  ‘My mother gave me a lot in my life.’ Janet pours two glasses of champagne and hands one to me. ‘She taught me how to make rock. She told me the truth was important. You should say what you mean, always.’

  ‘You’ve lied to me from the beginning,’ I say and drink my champagne in one shot.

  She shakes her head. ‘No, I just haven’t told you the whole story.’

  Then Janet tells me she has something for me and pulls out a stick of rock and hands it to me. It’s almost all the colours of the rainbow. I slowly turn the end towards my face, making the moment last, wondering what she might have written through it. Words that I’ll never eat. It reads: Janet Coleman loves you.

  While I stand there, frozen to the spot, a few young men and women carry paintings from the lounge and disappear out the front door. Car engines roar and headlights flicker through the bay windows. The sound of crushed gravel crawling up to my ears.

  ‘The only problem with art,’ Janet says, ‘is that for the artist’s work to really sell, they have to be dead.’

  I point to the young helpers carrying some of the larger paintings to the expensive cars parked outside. ‘I don’t think you’ll have a problem there.’

  ‘This is just the beginning,’ she says, and holds my hand. She squeezes my fingers and looks into my eyes. ‘For the bigger money to come in and for fame to really happen, the artist must die in tragic circumstances.’

  Tonight, Margaret Parks’ house is breathing deeply, the weight of the rich crowd making the floor creak. For a while, I fear the house will suddenly fall into the sea, while I feel warmth from Janet’s hand as she keeps gripping tightly to me.

  Kevin talks and smiles with people who would have avoided his gaze not so long ago. I wonder how he was actually cured. Did the water coarse through his body, taking away his disease the same way it killed my infection?

  We stand in the living room and watch the paintings disappear from the walls, while Billy Wallis supervises the young people he has dragged from the dole queue. I watch him drop money in their hands along with a signed photograph of Maggie Parks. The looks on the faces of the young helpers say it all, as well as the pile of screwed up snap shots of an old lady that lie on the driveway. Janet and I scoop them up as we leave, hand in hand, heading for her place.

  After a while, I find myself moved in, leaving Kevin in my house alone, or with whomever he might be spending time with now. We lie in bed for what seems days, only getting up to eat, and sometimes not even that. I note down in my mind each colour of paint I find tucked around her body. This walking paint sample looks at me and I see something in her eyes that isn’t about art.

  A few days la
ter, I hear a deep and official sounding voice at the door, a question stapled to every sentence marching from his mouth. I hear Janet laugh, almost too casually.

  ‘We found some clothing in the woods,’ the policeman says. ‘There was blood on the clothing. Using your mother’s medical records, we’ve managed to match the blood to her.’

  ‘She was always cutting herself accidentally,’ Janet says. ‘I used to think maybe it wasn’t an accident and maybe it was a cry for help.’

  ‘What would her clothes be doing in the woods?’ the copper asks.

  ‘Hanging out with the Teddy Bears?’ Janet replies.

  ‘We now have enough evidence to come to the conclusion that some harm has come to your mother,’ the policeman says and coughs.

  ‘But no body?’ Janet asks, a little impatiently.

  I listen to the policeman trying to sound desperately like an all powerful figure of authority, but his words crumple against the impact of Janet’s careless paint covered body.

  It goes on like this for some time, the police dragging her down to the city and making her sweat in a room, watching her in a tiny cell, hoping she’ll crack and confess. The splatters of emulsion between her bum cheeks are the only things to crack while she lies back and sleeps. Between interrogation sessions with the police, Janet and I are two horny dogs again. And sometimes I’m watching Janet humping some other human canvas.

  It may be not such a good idea, but I start phoning the company in a hope to make them understand that I’m not some crazy stalker. I’m not going to try and poison their water supply or set fire to the building or anything like that. I get through to some secretarial type called Caroline, who puts me on hold. There I am, this supposedly crazy ex-employee, waiting in line to talk to some voice that I hope will tell me everything’s okay. I hang up and decide to phone Maggie Parks just to breath heavy down the line, or shout some obscenity and hang up. Somehow, like she’s psychic or sitting on the phone, she answers straight away. There I am, having weird phone calls with this old movie star, her telling me about what it was like back then. Sometimes, I don’t even listen, and, like in a sitcom, I leave the phone for minutes at a time, then return and carry on listening.