Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  No, I say, we just screwed while covered in emulsion.

  ‘It was her idea though, yeah?’ he asks.

  No, yes, I don’t know anymore, I say. What is going on? Why is Janet signing Maggie Parks’ name on our paintings? I make my excuses and run off from the house, back through town, heading for my home. When I burst inside, I hear the sound of someone blowing at a hot drink. Kevin is sitting at my kitchen table, his hands wrapped round a mug, smiling as always. If I hadn’t run all the way, if my heart wasn’t ready to pop, and if I didn’t have that iron taste in my mouth, I might attack. I sit opposite him at the table. I wait.

  ‘Mate, you seem out of breath. Have you been running?’ Kevin asks.

  ‘Why is Maggie’s name on all the paintings?’ I ask.

  ‘Because it was all her idea.’ He shrugs. ‘She’s the genius.’

  ‘Why is Janet letting her do it?’ I ask and lean forward.

  Kevin gives me his biggest grin. ‘Because that’s what family do for each other.’

  I look at him, expecting him to laugh. ‘What? What the fuck are you on about?’

  ‘Maggie is Janet’s mother.’ Kevin sips his hot drink of something, leaning towards me a bit, expectantly, like a person waiting to hear a coin splash at the bottom of a well.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. Janet’s mother was ill, and now she’s disappeared. Maggie’s been a film star for years.’

  ‘Mate, who said Janet’s mother wasn’t a star?’ Kevin smiles. ‘She moved to this town to get away from it all. She’s had a lot of plastic surgery in that time. No one here knew who she was. She brought her young daughter and set up a life for herself. She learnt all about arts and crafts and set up the shop. She even taught Janet how to make sticks of rock. Then she got ill. But she got better again and now she’s been trying to find a way to be rich and famous again. This is it. And no one is going to get in her way.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I locked myself in my room no sooner had Kevin stopped speaking, and listened at the door for the sound of him leaving my cottage.

  What scares me more now, more than knowing the truth about the crazy life of Maggie, who’s had one man killed already that I know of, and knowing her fucked up porn loving daughter is involved, is that I was right. My paranoia, something that usually was content to stay in the shadows, had got up and shook me by the collar. In my bathroom, after I’m brave enough to open the door, I splash water in my face. I look up into the mirror and flinch. My heart jumps.

  It takes me a few minutes to calm down, to breath deeply and realise that the bearded man looking back at me is me. Unknowingly, somehow, I had slipped back into that zone where not shaving is as natural as taking a slash every morning. I chuckle to myself, realising the joke of it all. My love affair with Janet, that must have lasted a couple of week, can’t have been about love at all and was more about self -neglect. Keep a man occupied with her body, and his own will melt away, like before birth; a small insignificant human being feeding off a woman. Does he know he’s alive? No, but he knows what he needs, what he hungers for.

  If I could find or make a stick of rock for Janet, it would read: I’m Not Your Baby.

  Tomorrow I’ll expose them all, including Kevin, who, if I’m correct, and I hope I’m not, has been making art with Maggie.

  Again my heart races. In the lounge, I swear someone’s sitting on my sofa, and then there’s a rise of scent in the air. My hairs flicker up my neck as I reach for the light switch.

  Maggie smiles like a young girl given her first staring role in a movie. ‘Sorry sweetie, I love doing dramatic things like this.’

  I tell her that I’ve noticed that.

  ‘My daughter thought that you were probably helping us by running round the galleries and saying we were fakes, but I don’t agree.’ She smiles brightly and I look at her newly inflated lips and the mauve lipstick that bleeds into her creased mouth.

  Maggie pats her hand on the armchair by the sofa and gives me a slow wink. ‘I suppose you object to my name being on the paintings. I don’t blame you really. All that hard work, all that exertion and what happens? An old woman gets to steal your limelight. Think about it though, I let you have my daughter and that doesn’t come cheap.’

  I move slowly to the chair and sit on the arm, not taking my eyes off her overly made up face. As she speaks, her entire face shows little emotion, paralysed from whatever poison she’s had injected into her face muscles.

  ‘Don’t worry though, once you’ve finished your part in all this, you’ll be famous. Everybody will remember who you are. They’ll have our names in their mouths, or typed into their search engines. My films will be shown over and over again. All the Hollywood films will be pushed aside for a year at least. In that time, we’ll be richer than anyone has ever been. I’m not just talking about money of course, darling. Of course not. We’ll be rich knowing that we made a difference.’

  I shake my head and rest it in my hands.

  Maggie’s fingers pull away from mine and she looks up at me with raised eyebrows. ‘I know Billy has run you through the whole boat drill. It will be easy.’

  I can’t do it, I say. I won’t do it.

  ‘Yes you will,’ Maggie says and nods. ‘Remember the letters to the company that you sent? Well, Billy has a young friend of his working there now, doing manual work round the place. With one word from us and he’ll set fire to the place. And it won’t look like an accident either, my dear. They’ll be a letter left at the scene or posted to the police. Your confession, with your fingerprints on.’

  What she’s saying will be the truth. They haven’t sat back and let this happen, they’ve planned it all down to the last detail.

  ‘Just do what Billy taught you and you won’t go wrong,’ Maggie says and pats my knee. She gives me a quick squeeze too, and God, I travel back through time and realise that that little squeeze would have meant so much to some young bastard in the sixties. One touch, one unspoken promise of affection from that monochrome face. It’s the way she looked her best.

  ‘And don’t worry about the police,’ she adds, crossing her legs. ‘The detective who’s been hanging round a lot, asking questions about my daughter, wanting to know where her sick mother is…well, he’s been taken care of.’

  I ask if she’s had Billy kill him.

  She laughs throatily. ‘No, we just proved to him that I’m Janet’s mother. I told him I had been sick for some time, but I went to a clinic and got better. Yes, Maggie Parks and Mrs. Coleman are one in the same. He understood the need for privacy once in a while. I also told them how you’ve been stalking me for some time, threatening my life.’

  They’ll arrest me shortly after, I say.

  Maggie shakes her head.

  ‘They will and they’ll make me talk.’

  ‘No, they won’t.’ She sits up a little. ‘Everything will be okay.’

  Maggie leans forward and I can smell her tobacco and coffee breath as she whispers to me, like a mother to an upset child. Just do what we told you, Maggie says softly, just take the boat and drive it into my home and everything will be alright. The assassination attempt against her life will make her famous again, Maggie says. The paintings will sell for even more money. Her films, she says, and squeezes my leg again, will become the mostly shown movies ever. She’ll be a shining star once more.

  She leans back a little and smiles. ‘Just remember to leave the boat before it hits the cliff. They’ll presume you died in the crash and won’t bother searching for your body for the first few days. By then you’ll be far away.’

  I stroke my beard, knowing I’m a prisoner, stuck in this town. ‘You’ve forgotten one thing.’

  Maggie strokes my hair as she gets up and starts towards the door. She turns and looks at me, questioningly. ‘And what’s that, darling?’

  ‘For this to work, for this tragedy to really have a really big effect on the value of the paintings and your fame in general, you’ll have to die.�
�� I raise my eyebrows.

  Maggie’s face stays calm as she lights another cigarette before opening the front door. She bellows out some smoke. ‘You’re half right. But yes, someone will have to die.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I run from my house looking for Janet, but I can’t find her in her home or the shop. I walk round the town with images of someone, maybe me, dying that night. Then I stand and face the harbour and the iron shack that sits there creaking in the early morning breeze.

  I pull open the large wooden door and smell the seaweed of a thousand different fishing trips, and remnants of some of the flapping dead bodies the fishermen brought back. At the back of the room, under a single large light, Janet and a group of young people I don’t recognise, make art. When I say make art, I mean they are groping each other, panting heavily as their bodies slide over each other, paint squelching between their flesh.

  Lisa stands watching them all, a towel wrapped around her body, and a camera in her chubby hands. Occasionally she shuts her open mouth and lifts the camera to her face and takes a few shots. She nods to herself and says to the group, ‘This is great. This is wonderful.’

  They move round, get up and change positions, while another white board is slipped onto the floor.

  I move closer and watch them screw all over again and then suddenly I’m laughing at them all. I’m holding my side, giggling like a stupid child, feeling piss trying to seep from my dick. I pant and stand upright, and see that some of them are watching me, still humping each other. These rainbow bodies, with their paint smeared desire, they don’t even feel ashamed with me standing there. To them this is now so natural. The world is their canvas.

  Janet grabs me from behind, her paint covered hands making two hand prints on my chest. ‘Come to make some art with me?’

  Lisa nods and waves to me, saying, ‘Come on, take your clothes off.’

  I would have a few weeks ago, perhaps a few days ago, but now with Maggie’s name signed on our art, I want to kick all these colourful bodies until they bleed from their stupid mouths.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Janet says and turns me round, then kisses my mouth.

  ‘You’re the one who left,’ I tell her. ‘Where did you go?’

  Janet tells me that this sort of art doesn’t just make itself. We may have art in our souls, our spirits, but without our flesh, nothing gets done. We can change the world with our bodies, she says.

  I turn and watch Cyrus, all covered in orange and red and blue paint, pick up cans of emulsion and pour them over Lisa and the skinny man who’s now writhing between her legs.

  ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, this is what it’s all about,’ Lisa says and grabs the guy’s skinny arse, trying to pull him further into her.

  I find some clothes on the floor and throw them at Janet, telling her to get dressed. She does so, as she looks at me all confused. I pull her from the shack and down the harbour until we find Shelley’s café still open, serving fry- ups to the local drunks. I pull her to a table and order two coffees.

  Silently, I sit there trying to think of what to say, huddled over my coffee. All I can see in my mind is the early works of Picasso I once saw in the Guggenheim, when he painted like a normal man. When did he decide that painting crap would make him more money?

  Jenny comes over and asks when we are making art together again, all three of us. I turn and tell her to fuck off with all the venom I have. She raises her eyebrows and storms off.

  Janet reaches out and touches my beard. ‘It’s so great that you’ve grown it back. Hemingway had a beard. Lots of great men had beards.’

  ‘Hemingway shot himself,’ I tell her.

  ‘Only because he couldn’t get it up anymore,’ she says and winks.

  This is all crazy, all this art and the sex, I tell her, grabbing for her hand. It’s all out of control.

  She shakes her head and pats my hand. ‘We’ve made so much money already. As long as that lot keep at it we’ll make millions.’

  ‘For who?’ I ask and squeeze her hand.

  ‘Us.’ She looks across at the drunks.

  ‘Why is Maggie’s name on our art work?’ I ask and sip my coffee, watching her face.

  She doesn’t look into my eyes, just asks, ‘Is it?’

  I pull her face round to me. I know she’s her mother, I tell her. I tell her that I know the whole plan and that she’s been taking me and everyone for fools, just so she can resurrect her old hag of a mother’s career. Why? Why has she been lying to me about this?

  She didn’t think I would get involved if I knew it was mostly for her mother. She was right, she says and sips her coffee, this time looking me in the eyes. She goes on to tell me about the old movie star who gave birth to a baby when she was getting on a bit, while she still could. After the rape, Maggie never really wanted a man to touch her, but she asked a trusted friend to help out when she thought the time was right.

  Billy. I say the name aloud and nod my head. Billy is her father and will do anything for his daughter and her mother. Now it all makes a lot more sense.

  I turn and see Jenny eyeing me from behind the counter, her lips twitching with anger, until she sees me and tries to smile politely. A while back she would have given me her body willingly for the sake of art, all the girls would have, and even some of the guys. They call it performance art, I call it prostitution, the oldest trade in the world. Some caveman sees a cavewoman he likes the look of and gives her some of the food he’s killed. In return, she lies on her back and he bangs away at her. Later, he’ll probably draw it on the wall of his cave. Prostitution and art hand in hand. Nothing changes, I suppose.

  ‘So, this is about family?’ I ask.

  She shrugs and, for a moment, her paint -matted hair bobs on her shoulders. ‘What else is there? Family is all I have.’

  ‘The Mafia would say the same thing.’ I stare at her, and then I get this warmth travelling up my insides, combined with a hollow ache that builds into a slow panic. ‘What about us? What about what happened between us?’

  ‘It was fun.’ She smiles a smile that’s supposed to remind me of her body. Thing is, every time I’ve had sex with her we have been covered in paint. Chemicals have come between us. It’s like that religious group who wear sheets when copulating, with only holes cut out for the genitals to poke through.

  That’s all? I ask her.

  She shrugs again. It’s up to me, she says. Can I go along with what they are doing? Can I drive the boat into her mother’s house and then let her mother take all the glory? Will I disappear with her when it’s all over?

  Then I realise my hand is rubbing my beard, feeling the wiry bush around my jaw. I’m trapped by this, and by my own vanity. I tell her about what’s under the beard and all that happened in London, looking out the window, not making eye contact with her. I don’t know why, but a tear clambers out of my eye socket and streaks down my face.

  Her hand finds my beard, tenderly touching it and she smiles into my eyes. ‘I love your beard. It doesn’t matter about whether you’ve got a beard or not. I love you. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Maggie is up to something,’ I say, grasping her hand. ‘For all this to work, to be the perfect tragedy and to make your mother more famous than ever, she would have to die. But she won’t allow that. So, she’ll do the next best thing.’

  She screws up her face, taking her hand from mind. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘A sacrifice,’ I say. ‘Someone has to die to make it news worthy. Maybe it’s me. Maybe she doesn’t expect me to make it off the boat or…’

  Janet raises her eyebrows. ‘You think she plans on killing me?’

  I take a deep breath and nod. This is my entire fault. If I hadn’t been so vain, hadn’t put that cream on my face, been obsessed with my own good looks, then they wouldn’t have had the perfect set up. And poor fucked up Kevin, where does he come into all this? In love with a woman nearly three times his age who he thinks cured him. He’s gone mad.r />
  He replaced me in Maggie’s bed, but he was willing and that makes him sick. I tell Janet about Kevin, saying how he’s doing everything for her mother, even seeing to her special needs. She nods like it should be obvious to me.

  ‘They seem happy together. What difference does it make to you?’ Janet sits back a little and plays with her hair that’s now well and truly welded together by paint. It’s like she’s got lots of sticks of rock hanging from her head and they all read: I’m as crazy as my crazy mother.

  The point is, I tell her, someone is going to die. Maggie admitted as much and it could be her daughter. It would make sense.

  Janet just looks at me the way people do when you’ve hit on the truth and they don’t know how to tell you the rest, the festering mess under the lies they’ve been telling you and themselves. In that moment, I know that I don’t care about what her and her mother have been cooking up together. I don’t even care that Kevin has been in with them from the beginning, getting his hands dirty, but not getting them dirty, if you know what I mean. This is that terrible moment when the blurry image you have been carrying around of someone in your head comes into focus. Every little detail is suddenly sharp and it’s like you’ve never seen that picture before. You never noticed the way the sun caught their face, or even the various different coloured specks in their eyes. All that you hated about that image melts away. If I could give Janet a stick of rock, it would read: You’re all I want.

  ‘Please don’t die,’ I say to Janet and hear the pathetic pleading in my voice.

  ‘This is the way it has to be,’ she says. She smiles and it’s a smile that makes me shut off everything around me, even the fumes of alcohol coming from the other customers and even pretty Jenny who gives me another coffee.

  Drink your coffee, Janet says and reaches out a hand and squeezes mine. I lift the cup to my mouth and drink, focusing on the picture of Janet I now have in front of me. I’m desperately trying to remember this moment, the way the early morning sky with its electric blue tinge is making her face hazy. I switch off the sound of cutlery being scrapped along plates and the continuous laughter echoing round the walls, and listen to the sound of her almost silent breath. Why didn’t I listen and watch her more while she slept? I ask myself and drink another sip of coffee. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. Then I ask myself why I’m sinking, where the floor is going. The tabletop slams into my face and sleep envelopes me.