by Mark Yarwood
I shrug again and look round the room.
‘So many things like this happen, because people don’t go to the police,’ the detective says. ‘Things get worse and worse. It happens to the young and the old. Someone always gets hurt. Either the blackmailer or the person getting blackmailed end up doing something they’ll regret. You see it on the news or read about it in the papers everyday, where a body is fished out of a river or found dumped in a woods, just because somebody was trying to get something that didn’t belong to them. But that’s the human condition, I suppose. We always want something we can’t have. Always chasing a dream. When we get what we want, we realise it just wasn’t worth the sacrifice and we turn and run after something else.’
‘Yeah, that’s life,’ I say and try to smile.
‘If only people could be happy with what they’ve got,’ he says and rubs his eyes. ‘All these people who borrow more and more money, buying stuff on credit cards just because they think having stuff will make them feel better. Next thing they know, men in suits are taking away their lovely stuff.’
‘You know about all the money I owe,’ I say and look at my hands.
He squints a little. ‘I was referring to Maggie Parks. She’s lived an expensive life for quite a while. God knows how much she’s spent in the last year or so. Imagine the bills. And her career isn’t so hot anymore. She needs publicity. What’s better than having your own stalker? Some lonely guy with a grudge to bear and a knife in his hand wandering on to your property. I’ve seen it so many times on TV, all these news reports in America about stars and their stalkers, how they won’t leave them alone. I ask myself how many of them have paid to be stalked? There’s plenty of sad and lonely and desperate people out there. All you need to do is promise to pay them from your end. It’s all about publicity.’
I look up into the policeman’s eyes and see his head nod a little, his eyes widen. He smiles slightly as he says, ‘But what if that stalker turned up dead? Maybe he kills himself, who knows. What then? You wouldn’t have to pay him.’
I tell the detective that I have no idea what he’s talking about and look about the room.
Jump from a speeding boat they said, you’ll be okay. Who are they kidding? Thing is, I can’t help imagining Billy, my new best friend and father figure, and Kevin, my rival for Janet’s affections, and Maggie Parks, evil witch and party animal, all sitting round plotting. Right from the start, I can see it all. Kevin writing the letters when Maggie told him too, forcing me into poverty, making me look mad from the start. When it’s over, when me and the boat are floating in the sea, gutted, just pieces of charcoal, they’ll be stories about me threatening the company, stalking Maggie and fucking for the sake of art. With the right spin, I’ll be just another one of history’s crazies. I’ll be God knows how many hits on a website.
‘Let’s go,’ the policeman says and stands up.
‘Where?’ I ask and get up.
‘I’m taking you home, unless you have anything to add?’ He looks at me intently, absorbing me.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing at all. I want to go home.’
Chapter Nineteen
Kevin did nothing but smile. It was as if he was high or something, injected with a high dose of a drug called ‘not giving a shit anymore’. But Kevin was clean, and that’s what made me want to smash him in the face with the hammer I was holding. I raised it and tried to look like Jack Nicholson did in The Shining, but Kevin just keeps on grinning. This was the new Kevin, the pure of mind Kevin, and I wanted him to beg for his life.
Months ago I used this hammer to bang in nails and to hang nice pictures on my walls, to make my home look lived in. Now I wanted to destroy everything with it. I wanted to crack open the world, like I wanted to crack open Kevin’s head. I loved him like a brother. This is all about passion. Passion leads to murder, you read about it all the time. Someone’s found dead, and chances are a loved one did it. A husband kills a wife, a parent murders a child, a friend smashes in the skull of a friend.
My mind was out of control, imagining a massive plot constructed to make me the patsy. I wasn’t playing Lee Harvey Oswald for anybody, so when Kevin got home, I knocked him to the floor and tied him up. When he was laying there, a broken vase lying round him, pieces of it still in his long hair that’s still got paint in it, he was smiling that smile. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he’d just had sex. I’d say he was in love and whoever they were, they were indulging him. They had opened themselves up like a box of chocolates and let him take his pick.
‘Hello Kevin,’ I say and tap the hammer on my open palm. He’s sat on a wooden chair facing me, smiling, showing his slightly crooked teeth.
I ask Kevin if he’s got anything to say before the torture starts. He looks into my eyes and asks, ‘Mate, how have you been?’
I raise the hammer far above my head, teeth gritted together, but he doesn’t flinch. This Kevin, this free from human neurosis Kevin, just tilts his head to look up at me, smiling like he’s about to have his photo taken. I look him over, seeing the bits of hair that are folding over his ears. There’s a large Italian barber somewhere finally enjoying his retirement. I let the hammer fall to my side and grab a piece of dried black paint from above his ear. A mother wiping snot from her kid’s nose just before she drowns him in the bath.
‘What the fuck is going on Kevin?’ I ask and really let him see the anger in my eyes. ‘Why do you keep sending letters to the company? Why did you frame me?’ I let him see the hammer.
‘Mate, that was the old me.’ Kevin smiles thinly and raises his eyebrows a little. You can almost see the spot where God reached out and touched his head, but really it’s the wrinkled hand of an old woman.
‘Well, the old you fucked up my life,’ I tell him. ‘And Kevin, I don’t think you did it alone. Maggie told you to do that didn’t she? You were all in it, weren’t you?’
‘Maggie wants the best for everyone,’ he says and closes his eyes.
‘Maggie wants the best for Maggie, Kevin,’ I tell him and step closer. ‘She’s in debt and she needs money. But more than money, she wants everyone to know her name again. She’s crazy.’
Kevin stares up at me and looks a little sad, maybe disappointed. ‘Mate, you just can’t see it. She’s made everything right. What she’s doing is what’s right for everybody. She cured me.’
I smile. ‘No, it was the water, remember? I told you that the water would cure you and it did. You owe me. I’m your friend, and I helped you.’
Kevin looks at the hammer in my hand and smiles thinly. ‘Mate, friends don’t bash each other’s heads in, do they?’
Looking at the hammer and then the paint behind his ears, I begin to laugh. Cracking up with laughter, spit slipping from my lips, I pull down Kevin’s trousers and point to the brown mud splatter of paint that’s welded his pubic hair together. I tell him that friends don’t screw their best friend’s girlfriend either.
These signs, remains of sexual desire, in Janet’s book would just be dried paint on an artist’s pallet.
Kevin looks down at the mess of dry paint in his lap, twisting his head a little, tilting it as if he’s looking at a Picasso hanging on the wall of the Tate. He looks up and smiles, a real slit in his face that’s beginning to split open his cheeks. ‘That was art, Mate. That wasn’t sex.’
I look down at the mess in his lap even though it fills my throat with bile to do it. I step forward, making sure he sees the hammer that I’m lifting up. ‘How old is that paint?’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Don’t know, could be days, might be months.’
I shake my head, lifting up the hammer above his head, trying to see if that smart arse smile will fade from his stupid face. ‘Try again, idiot. You have three seconds to tell me, or I swear I’ll smash your brains round this room.’
He shrugs. One, I count, and lift the hammer higher, feeling my shoulder glow with the tension. Two, and I’m showing him my gritted teeth. Thr…
/> ‘Mate, okay, it’s from last night.’ Kevin looks a little sad for a moment even though he tries to keep his smile on his face.
Last night. Kevin tells me he had sex last night, while I was out being marched towards Maggie’s house, fearing I was about to be executed gangland style. All that time, he was screwing the woman I had only just recently realised I loved. This cannot be true, I tell myself, feeling my arm begin to wobble, the hot grip I have on the handle of the hammer travelling up my arm to my pit. I lower the tool and shake my head.
Prove it. Prove you had sex last night, I tell him.
Kevin nods towards his jacket. In his jacket, Kevin tells me, is the only proof I’ll need.
I look at the crumpled suede jacket lying strewn on the armchair. Imagine Kevin coming in and throwing it across the chair, not caring if it stays there for days or months. That’s so the new Kevin.
I pick it up and begin searching through the pockets. In one pocket, I find a plastic container, the type that you buy sandwiches in from supermarkets. Inside is half a ham sandwich, which has long since gone mouldy. I throw it at Kevin and it bounces of his chest and sprays across the floor. In the next pocket, I find a tubular shaped object wrapped in cellophane. I close my eyes and feel my stomach sink to my shoes. I feel like going out and finding those two men who kidnapped me last night and pleading with them to finish the job, to put a bullet in the back of my head. My last piece of rock, the one on my pillow left by Janet, had nothing to say. Knowing Janet that means it’s over. This piece of rock, the one in Kevin’s pocket says: The sex was great. I love you.
I hold the rock out to Kevin and he eyes it, and then looks up to me and smiles. This is from her, I ask? She gave you this after you two had sex?
I cannot tell a lie, he says. He tells me that they had sex and she gave him that particular piece rock. She had been saving it for him.
‘What else?’ I ask and press the hammer to his face, forcing his head back. ‘What has she got planned?’
‘To be rich and famous,’ Kevin says, the claw end of the hammer making a red cloud on his cheek. ‘She said she didn’t want to end up underneath a motorway.’
I take away the hammer quickly and all I can do, as my world cracks up and falls into a deep black sea inside of me, is watch the red cloud on Kevin’s face slowly fade.
I look at Kevin, seeing something I knew had been there all the time, but only just recognising it, like a cancer patient seeing the tumour just cut out of him, the thing that had been killing him slowly.
‘You love her? She loves you?’ I ask and look at the carpet, now splattered with a rotten sandwich.
He nods. He smiles.
I untie him and tell him to get out of the house and never come back. If I see him again, I say, or her, I’ll kill them both. I tell him I mean it as he just looks at me, still smiling.
Kevin walks out of the house and I stand there and look at the hammer, wishing I had what it takes to smash his skull in.
Chapter Twenty
In the morning, I realise I cannot live in a world where Janet’s making money for having sex and calling it art. I know many magazine publishers have been doing it for years, but this is different. This was supposed to be love, not the emulsion outline of a penis on a piece of card.
I no longer want to be a drawing on a cave wall.
I order a taxi and tell the driver to take me to all the galleries and halls on the list I’ve made. I sit in the back of the taxi, scribbling more, remembering some of the addresses that the paintings went to. I’ll show her for what she is. I’ll tell them that it’s not art, but just a sick joke. In a couple of months, they’ll be thousands of cars passing over her masterpieces every day.
In the first gallery there is only one picture left. I stand in the middle of a thin light blue room that seems to stretch so far back, it’s walls lined with the slap dash work of imbeciles. There, halfway down the wall, with a single light shining upon it, sits one of our finest pieces. Looking up at it, I think I can make out a tip of a penis. It could be anyone’s. I wonder if it might be Kevin’s.
A tall, pointy nosed man strides to my side and starts giving me the history of an artist that doesn’t really exist. He tells me that it was painted by a woman, a lonely woman, with so much to say on life and with a pure sexual nature. I begin to laugh and wipe a hand down my face. He asks me if I’m feeling okay, but I just tell him that it’s all rubbish. This isn’t art, I say, this is just two, or maybe more, people shagging while covered in emulsion.
Emotion? he asks. No, emulsion, I tell him and point dramatically to the piece.
Two people have sex on top of a piece of card while someone else throws paint on them. This is what I keep telling him, as he rubs his chin, stepping back a little, tilting his head to one side, taking in the painting in all it’s pornographic glory.
‘I see it more as a statement about…’
‘THIS IS NOT ART!’ I shout to the rest of the gallery, and, when the few people round me ignore my pleading, I storm out.
The taxi driver parks outside the next gallery. Inside it’s the same story, just a different set of lighting. A thin woman dressed like a fashion conscious secretary hands me a glass of champagne and begins telling me about a lonely woman.
There is no woman, I tell her, only sex mad lunatics with too much spare time and lots of tins of paint.
Yes, she seems to agree, but it’s still art. I hand back the champagne, and then snatch back the glass and throw it at the paintings on the wall and run towards the taxi.
I sit for the rest of the day nodding my head, drifting off into a sleep, while the taxi takes me across the city. Each hall or gallery that’s selling our fake art, pretty much reports the same thing. It may not be conventional art, but it’s selling well.
I’m too tired to start tracking down the rich suits and dresses that watched us screw and then chucked signed cheques at us. I arrive back home and find the phone ringing. When I pick up, Janet is already talking to me, telling me that she knows that I’ve been visiting all the galleries and what I’ve been saying. We don’t need any more publicity, she says, but it was a good effort, well done. With all the money coming in, she tells me, I’ll never work again.
I hang up the phone.
I look at my scribbled list, a new enthusiasm for destruction surging through my veins. I see the address of a television presenter that lives along the coast with his fat blonde wife. He took away two of our porno artworks to hang in his home.
Another trip in a taxi and I’m walking up his tarmac drive, seeing the warm lights of their living room. I press the doorbell and then I’m facing a pretty young woman with long dark hair. She half looks at me while punching the keypad of her electronic organiser.
‘Yes?’ she asks, abruptly.
‘I need to speak to Mr….’ I look at the list. ‘Mr. Fielding.’
She types something into her organiser and sighs with irritation. ‘They’re too busy to sign autographs. How did you get this address?’
‘It’s about the art they bought a while ago,’ I say, looking over her shoulder into a long plush hallway that melts into a massive round kitchen.
She looks up sharply, her nose creasing. ‘They’re not fakes are they?’
‘We don’t know at this point,’ I say.
Her hand reaches out and grips me, pulling me inside. With her hand pushing my back, she takes me into a huge lounge with dark red walls and a tall ceiling. As she Marches me to the far end, she starts calling out the man and wife’s names. I see the two figures, as they sit sipping wine, begin to turn to us and stand up. Above their heads, and above a large fireplace with no fire in it, sits one of our two paintings. I turn and look at the far right wall and see another one.
The presenter’s plump wife is the first to approach us, her face flushed from alcohol and her hands pulling down her crème skirt. ‘What’s wrong, Laura? Who’s this?’
‘Apparently, the paintings could be fake!’
Laura says, pointing towards the fireplace.
‘Fake?’ Mr. Fielding spins his head round to stare at his two paintings. ‘Who said that? Who are you?’
‘I…’ I begin, wondering how to tell this couple the whole sordid story.
‘Wait, I know you,’ Mr. Fielding says, looking over my face and then back to the paintings. ‘You’re the artist’s model. You’re her inspiration.’
‘You’re in most of her paintings,’ his wife says and starts stepping backwards, pointing at the painting on the far right wall. ‘That’s your arse in that picture.’
Fielding marches halfway down to the painting over the fireplace and shouts at us from there. ‘That’s your penis!’
‘There is that chance,’ I have to admit.
‘Come and have a look!’ Fielding makes all of us stand looking at the Muppet pink outline of my little soldier. How proud he looks- my soldier- not Fielding. The television presenter taps the painting and smiles. He tells me that he cannot believe that I’m standing before him in his home. They should hang me on the wall, they joke, but I wish they would tie a noose round my neck and hang me from the chandelier.
‘Who knew an old film star like her had such an artistic streak,’ Fielding says and smiles, looking from me to the painting.
‘What?’ I splutter.
‘The artist,’ he says. ‘She used to be a film star, back in the sixties.’
I shake my head. That’s not right, they’ve got confused somewhere along the way.
Yes, he says, he’s sure. He points to the small signature in the corner. I see a name and lean closer, my eyes focusing in on the words written in bright red paint. Maggie Parks, I read and my head starts spinning.
‘Fancy you not knowing the artist who painted you,’ the wife says and laughs heartedly.