by Paul Tomkins
A Novel
For the missing.
Acknowledgements
With special thanks to Mark Lynch, Kate Ware and
Palomi Kotecha.
Further thanks to Neil Wheelhouse, Neil Burke, Mark
Allan, Jules Jackson, Carol Anderson, Chris Hadley,
Damien Parsonage, Chris Rowland, Claire Clifton,
Mairead Mooney, Eve White, Matthew Young, Daniel
Rhodes, everyone at Cornerstones, Roberto Rodriguez,
Araminta Hall, plus the fine folk at Matador.
Finally, an extra big thanks to my family, and anyone
I’ve so thoughtlessly forgotten.
Website: www.paultomkins.com
Email: [email protected]
Copyright ©2015 Paul Tomkins
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A part from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Part Two
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
“There is love of course.
And there’s life, its enemy.”
Jean Anouilh
“The job of the artist is always
to deepen the mystery.”
Francis Bacon
ONE
The sea surges across the shingle with the clack of a billion ricocheting billiard balls as she – this woman who transfixes me – floats past. I linger, looking through the crowd that throngs the promenade of Brighton beach; admiring her grace, her style, her natural beauty. I feel my pulse throb in my throat – its jugular thrum – and in my gullet sense my half-swallowed heart.
She turns, heads my way. I breathe deep as she passes, inhaling her scent: a mix of lotion, perfume, peppermint and seaside sweat. It stirs chemicals deep within my brain, strikes a primordial chord. She leans on the balustrade; I move to stand behind her, to one side, and pretend to look at a leaflet pulled from my pocket, acting the bemused tourist. Gulls – large, fierce – circle and call overhead. She turns. I take her in with forensic observation: arching eyebrows, naturally full lips, faintly olive skin, broad brown eyes that open wide between sweeping lashes. Stray hairs, escaped from pigtails, blow about her face, and she swats them away like flies. Graceful, but not ornamental.
Ninety-three: the year, the temperature. More than two decades have now passed, yet in my mind it is still the present day. I close my eyes, and it’s happening. I hear strains of music through the fuzzy earphones of her Walkman. I recognise the dark, brooding tune, but cannot place it.
I want to touch her – this total stranger. The urge is incredible. I am moments away from an arrestable offence. But I am not a threat to her safety; just a man who, for a split-second, has the wilfulness of a two-year-old child who doesn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer. Why can’t I have her?
Just because. Just because.
The sea breeze blows a bead of sweat from her shoulder onto my face – a millimetre from my bottom lip, so I trail my tongue to taste the salt: a speck of saline heaven. Perhaps it is sea spray? No – it is her: her taste. I’ve not yet spoken to her, but I’ve already tasted her.
Checking her reflection in a compact, she doesn’t engage the mirror for longer than is necessary; looking for a blemish, rather than admiring herself. She flicks something from her cheek, snaps down the lid. Done. It is at this point that I hear a cry, a strange guttural sob, and mistake it for the call of a seagull. I turn to see a boy standing alone, his cheeks ruddy beneath a blond bowl haircut. Bolt upright, almost statuesque, he wails with hands outstretched at the end of straight, quivering arms. I’m guessing he is six or seven years old, although I’ve never been good at determining children’s ages. Passing tourists ignore his distress, unwilling to investigate a sadness that must have a simple remedy – kids cry, and sooner or later the parents intervene. Or maybe they are the other kind of passer-by, those who simply don’t care. But the young woman is different. She sees that he is alone, and I can tell from her quickly altered expression that she senses a larger sorrow, an all-cutting pain; desolation, abandonment, the things that make us howl. With purpose she moves in, a saintly presence on the shingle. She hunkers down to meet him eye-to-eye; the denim of her jeans drawn taut across her buttocks, small ankle socks revealed as the turn-ups rise upon her shins.
I see her ask him a question. Her head tilts, an ear offered to the boy, but his reply is blurted out – too eager to have his words heard, too upset to do so with controlled breaths. Unable to speak clearly, he vomits staccato syllables. Again, a calming gesture. Again, reassurance. She wipes a tear from his eye, takes his hand. For a moment I think of offering assistance, but worry that I’ll ruin her rescue mission, which she handles with an assuredness beyond her years.
She stands, leads the boy in the direction of the Palace Pier. I am about to move to keep up with the unfolding drama when a frantic mother appears on the scene, and clasps her son with suffocating force. In that second the panic recedes.
This is all it takes to confirm love at first sight. But what is that? Nothing more than lust, coupled with an overactive imagination? I can tell many things from the way this girl moves, the expressiveness of her mouth (I have already seen it turn up at the corners with miraculous geometry, as if elevated by abnormally-developed cheek muscles), the alertness darting from her eyes. It gives me a sense of her inner soul – or what I perceive to be her inner soul. In truth, everything I know about her, beyond the physical, and one single act of heart-warming kindness, is my imagination filling in the blanks. It is easy to experience such heady feelings for someone when instilling in them y
our every wished-for characteristic. She is merely a blank canvas.
The time: I need to be somewhere. And so I have to let her go –– open my hands to set free the butterfly flapping against my palms, tickling my skin. But an indelible mark has been made on this, a day that will irrevocably change my life. Everything will forever lead back to this morning, when I took a walk along a seafront that would never let me leave.
TWO
I peeled a slither of Sellotape from the back of my hand; feeling it as keenly as flaying a layer of skin. I held the crinkled strip up to the light, staring at the arrangement of fine black hairs trapped like gnats on flypaper, and the mottled dust marks containing my DNA. I’d planned to repair a precious item, damaged five hours earlier in a violent marital struggle. Instead, I embalmed myself in transparent sticky tape.
Setting down the roll in temporary defeat, I returned my gaze to the mess of a lifeless face laid out on the bloodstained carpet. I studied the familiar features, slashed in rabid anger, scarred and disfigured, ripped and torn. Supine on the bedroom floor, pigtailed hair draped across her shoulders, she remained slumped where she fell in the early hours of the morning; one unmoving eye staring inquisitively back, asking What did I do to deserve such unremitting brutality? but unable to receive any kind of reply.
Uncomfortably cross-legged, I swore beneath my breath. The painting laid out in front of me – a portrait of a young woman, by an artist only at the fringes of fame – seemed determined to remain beyond repair. Having already spent ten minutes trying to stick it back together – stick her back together – I experienced only abiding failure. Utterly unable to avoid getting in a tangle with the Sellotape, I flicked and flicked as it clung to my fingers, and then, when I pulled it free, watched it curl worm-like up against itself. If I managed to prise a piece apart and straighten it out I found all tack lost. Eight or nine consecutive times I’d wasted a strip, and now the end of the roll had vanished; the scrape of a thumbnail unable to locate it as I twirled and twirled. Adrenaline burned my veins, my hands shaking. I’d only managed to stick together two pieces of matching canvas. A restorer would be appalled.
The portrait, of course, lay beyond repair. Painted only a decade earlier by Jacob Dyer, its worth – little more than a couple of thousand pounds in prime condition – vanished with this sudden and devastating alteration, reducing its price to less than that of its frame. But the elimination of its monetary value was not the issue.
A painting, worth so much more than a mere work of art.
* * *
The early hours of that morning came back via muddled memories, taking shape like slow-developing Polaroids. Every thirty seconds another shocking tableau gained resolution, pouring out from the mist.
Sprawled on the mattress, tangled in bedclothes, I heard the sound of vomiting drifting through the half-open en-suite bathroom door; repetitive jerks followed by rasping attempts to clear the throat and unblock the nose. I turned out of a knot of sheets, sat up. Evidence of violence surrounded me. Constellations of blood spattered the cream-white linen, culminating in a large circular pool on my wife’s pillow. Clothes and ornaments lay tossed as if by frenzied vandals: drawers turned out, wardrobe doors hanging crooked on their hinges, and the apposite omen of a smashed mirror, in pieces on the dresser.
I could see my wife through the door to the bathroom; her back arched with the feline curve of a cat retching up the mother of all furballs. I felt unsure whether she vomited as a physical or an emotional response, or both – doubling-up on her as she lay floored, as she lay doubled-up. Slouched across the bathroom rug, arms embracing an open toilet bowl, it was over – so definitely over – but I wondered at what point she would feel strong enough to do anything about it. She forced bile from her nostrils. Slug-trails ran from nose to chin. Dried and darkened lines of blood covered her forehead and weaved a path down her nose and cheeks, bifurcating like forks of lightning. If she survived to get up, she was gone.
The true extent of Laura’s recovery remained hard to gauge. But within two hours of waking she felt sufficiently revived to pack a few essentials into a bag and drive to her parents’ house. She left without more than the briefest exchange of words. She confirmed she was leaving, and I accepted her decision. We understood it to be over; nothing before had ever been as clear-cut. I did not waste breath begging that she change her mind. I knew I would miss her, but she was doing the right thing. The only thing.
I sat beside the bedroom window and watched her depart, unconsciously performing my regular nervous habit of running the tip of a finger across the pronounced scar on the back of my right hand – a wound dating back a decade, to 1993, just over a year before we first met – feeling the bumps of damaged skin as she climbed into her car and drove away.
THREE
Rinsing hands stained scarlet, Jacob Dyer smiles. Some things refuse to be purged. His fingers squirm around a slab of pearl-white soap that turns a very faint pink, but no more. The palms still red. He grabs the towel hanging over the edge of the Belfast sink, squeezes it hard. Sanguine particles transfer to the white cotton fibres, but not enough to constitute cleanliness.
He crosses the room and enters his body into the composition of a window, almost self-consciously so.
“Everything you do is so purposeful,” Black says, leaning naked against the wall.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Well, just look at you – standing there like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a living work of art, framed within the window.” She crosses to the angular Marcel Breuer chair on which her clothes lie. “So considered. Most people would just slump against the window frame when looking out. With you, it’s almost as though the looking out is secondary, an afterthought.”
Jacob scans the Brighton streets below, choosing not to reply. He locates his glass of red wine, walks to the middle of the room. With his free hand he fiddles with a video camera on a tripod, arranged to film the session, but despite several prods, fails to halt the recording. The tape spools on, capturing him walking away from the lens.
Black gathers her clothes from the seat of the chair. She separates each garment from the mound they form with one hand, carefully reconstructing the pile in the arched cradle of her other arm. She returns her gaze to Jacob. “It’s starting to sink in. It feels so final.”
“You’re leaving the country. That’s fairly final.”
He returns to the window, looking first at the sun’s reflection on the sea before glancing down at the street below.
“Who are you expecting?” she asks. “Don’t tell me I’m being replaced before I’ve even gone?”
“No, no. An old college friend. Haven’t seen him in years. It was just a possibility, nothing confirmed. He said either today or tomorrow.” He angles his head to see further along the street. “Incredibly nice guy, considering the breaks life has dealt him. I’d be far more bitter.”
“You’re bitter enough as it is,” she says, laughing.
Still in a state of undress, Black stands with her big cushion of clothing. Clasping the disparate fabrics tight to her breast, she buries her chin in cotton and nylon and wool and lace, and with the constricted movement of her mouth noticeable in her enunciation, enquires, “Is my still being here a problem? Did you want me gone?”
“No, not at all. Anyway, if he was going to come today he’d have been here by now. I’ve never known him to be even a minute late in his life. He’s a bit anal like that. I think it’s safe to say it’ll be tomorrow, if at all.”
Black places the neatened pile of clothes back on the chair, short of one item: her knickers, thrown at Jacob hours earlier after a sarcastic remark. She begins to search the studio, crawling beneath a long low table, every inch covered in coloured tubs and cans of various sizes. She pulls away from the wall, one by one, the many blank or half-finished canvasses tipped like partially-fallen dominoes, to no avail; scuttles about the studio, dodging tubes of paint strewn ac
ross the floor; sifts under loose sheets of cartridge paper littered about the room, paying no attention to the pencil and charcoal sketches of herself depicted thereon. No sign of the garment by the broken easel, bent-up in the corner like a beaten heavyweight boxer. She wanders into the kitchen, widening her search. Whilst there she switches on the kettle, and drops a herbal teabag into a mug.
* * *
Still naked, Black wanders back into the studio, muttering “I don’t believe this,” half under her breath. Her gaze remains cast at the floor, until Jacob attracts her attention.
He turns to the door, holds out a hand in my direction.
Running uncharacteristically late, I have finally arrived. What I find remarkable is this: here she is again – the girl from the beach. Not only is she here, but she is completely naked.
“Black, I’d like you to meet Patrick.”
She turns to the door, to where I am standing. And staring. I know it’s rude, but I simply cannot avert my eyes; the particular nerve stems carrying the command severed by shock.
Black is similarly frozen. There is a momentary delay before she moves to cover her pubis with one hand and places the other forearm across her chest. However, in that brief suspension I have already taken a dozen mental snapshots. It is only when she moves to conceal her modesty that I realise it would in fact be polite to look away, and so begin to intensely study my shoes, scuffing them against the doormat; appearing to discover something profoundly existential in the word Welcome.
Despite moving behind an oriental screen to dress, she remains, in my mind’s eye, at the exact spot I first saw her: some kind of apparition, caught in the mix of shafts from the four skylights – God positioning the sun until it becomes a follow-spot for the star on centre stage – so that when she finally turns to look at me an other-worldliness transforms the scene, and I am entitled to be dumbstruck.