The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

At this stage it may be normal to undress, with one’s eyes, the subject of the infatuation. But I have already seen her naked. Visually there is nothing left for the imagination; a form of perfection. So instead I move onto the next stage, and imagine physical contact. From across the room I feel the cambers of her flesh, the jutting peaks of bone softened by skin, the twists of hair uncoiled from their pigtails. My mind wills eager hands up and down her body, lingering at points of interest. My palms are warm, clammy, wet with sweat against her skin. I read goosebumps like Braille; stroke faint downy hair, momentarily pricked-up; with my fingertip encircle the birthmark on her thigh; stroke the tiny tubercles that populate her areolae. Only to an insane mind are these imperfections.

  Normal people just don’t enter your life in this way.

  * * *

  Jacob lives and works on the top floor of an old Victorian school, converted at the start of the decade into domestic dwellings. I have not seen him much since our college days, and this is my first visit to his current home. He shows me around with no obvious pride, acting more out of a sense of duty. Nothing, aside from his art, and getting drunk in the company of young men, appears to mean much to him. “Art, arse and alcohol,” he has told me on many occasions, usually when intoxicated.

  It’s an impressive place. The ceiling has been removed, and the internal walls replaced with steel columns, resulting in a capacious loft apartment. An upper level – housing the living quarters – exists as a mezzanine, access to which is via a wrought-iron spiral staircase. So profuse is the sunlight permeating the broad windows that it’s like being outside. I have entered a square lighthouse, with stunning views of the English Channel; only, an inverted lighthouse, illuminating the within, not the without. A single wall is constructed entirely of brick; great sheets of glass pan around the other three sides of the apartment. The effect is completed by mid-afternoon rays crashing down through expansive glass panels built into the high-arching roof. Such perfect light for his colours, he tells me, glass of wine in one hand, smouldering hand-rolled cigarette in the other. He then points out the array of daylight bulbs, rigged for night-time work. “For when the mood takes me,” he adds through a puff of smoke.

  Finally we come to a stop. “It’s good to see you, Paddy,” he says, fully aware that I hate the shortened version of my name. “What brings you back down here? You never explained.”

  “Do I need a reason?”

  “Well, you’re so rarely in Brighton these days,” he says. “Unless you just never tell me?”

  “No, you’re right – I keep away. This time I had no choice. I needed to check something out for work.”

  “On a weekend?”

  “It’s a retail outlet.”

  Jacob doesn’t even know what my job is these days, and doesn’t think to enquire. “Have you been home?” he asks, prodding my arm in an accusatory manner, as if he already knows the answer.

  “No.”

  “How long has it been? Is your aunt still alive?”

  “Yeah, she is. Ten years. It’s been ten years this summer. I still phone her – Kitty. Well, occasionally. But the cottage – I just can’t bring myself to go back. It’s too… well, I just prefer to move forward. You know how it is.”

  “Certainly do. Even so, you should go see her. But hey, that’s up to you. It’s your life. I have enough trouble making sense of my own.” By this stage he has his back to me, walking away. “Cigars,” he says, as he makes his way into the kitchen, adding, “Make yourself at home” once out of sight.

  The studio, which dominates this level, smells, depending on where you stand, of oil paint, turpentine, damp rags, wet paper, leather and cigarette smoke. It is also a total mess. Chaos reigns; how a receding tsunami might scatter objects across a room. The floor at the centre of the studio is decked with newspaper, on top of which is lain clear plastic sheeting. This, in turn, is covered with Pollockesque trails and spatters of paint. Sable brushes – thick with desiccated clumps of yellow and orange and red – flower from glass jars on windowsills. Newspapers – yellowing by degrees from bottom to top – are stacked in one corner, reaching up to the height of the mezzanine. Jacob returns, cigar in hand, wine glass refilled, now sporting a battered pair of Ray-Bans, which he chooses to don whenever he’s not painting. “I rarely read them, just have them delivered for the pictures,” he says, seeing me taking in the collection of tabloids and broadsheets. “Although, occasionally a story will give me an idea.” Beside these, a proliferation of items most people would label as junk, but for which he sees some kind of purpose, even if he is yet to decide precisely what that might be. For him, garbage is the start of a process, not the end.

  Below the windows of three walls are smears and swabs and swatches of oil paint, haphazardly daubed in an effort to test the colour; no surface too precious – the studio a living, breathing part of the process, an active participant in the work. Maybe this is art: an installation piece. The random nature of the marks could be transferred to a gallery with the brick and mortar intact.

  I suggest this to my host. He stares blankly back.

  In its entirety, the far wall is fly-posted to an inch-thick density with scraps of paper: vertical strata that an archaeologist could painstakingly strip away, expecting to discover centuries of activity, only to find that nothing had been adhered prior to 1991. It is a crazed, disparate montage of images: photographs, posters, leaflets, magazine and newspaper clippings, film stills, sketches, doodles, even 3D objects attached to masonry with six-inch nails, including a plaster of Paris mask Jacob cast from his own face, speared to the wall through its left eye socket.

  Jacob and I are friends quite by accident – assigned adjacent rooms in the same student lodgings in the autumn of 1985 – and sometimes I’m very conscious of our different backgrounds and outlooks on life, even though we both spent our formative years in Brighton. While we studied the same art class, our temperaments could not be more contrasting. I am calculating, methodical, rational; he is spontaneous, off-the-cuff, radical. Although I am three inches over six-foot, and he just 5’ 8”, I feel somehow diminished beside him – as if my size is excessive, pointless. For some reason he took me under his wing at college, and in a way, perhaps I balance him out. As outlandish as he can at times be, he abhors bullshit. He knows I will tell it to him straight, even if he doesn’t agree with what I’m saying.

  Due to a dishevelled appearance – his unkempt hair is a knotted mess – Jacob looks much older than he actually is. He could pass for 45, and yet at 28 he’s only a couple of years older than me. He has a beard that grows in clumps, a random proliferation of hair that only joins together at certain points of his face, and is at its thickest density beneath a sharp aquiline nose. Almost certainly an alcoholic – he refers to himself as a wino – he has recently taken to dabbling in various drugs, to further stoke his muse.

  There can be little doubt he enjoys the contradictions to his personality, and wilfully embellishes them. If a stuffy art critic approaches him at a show then his response is to act ignorant, play the fool. If a viewer doesn’t understand his art, he seeks to further confuse them. Undeniably homosexual, he claims the more ambiguous title of bisexual, even though I’ve never known him to show the slightest interest in women, beyond sometimes painting them. He hates giving people what they want, being the person they expect. He makes those in his company work hard, keeps them on their toes. Mostly appreciated by those who know him well, he is generally disliked on first impression, and often well beyond.

  “When will they make bottles big enough to last beyond a handful of glasses?” he spits contemptuously, before shuffling off to locate and open another Beaujolais. His capacity for alcohol never ceases to amaze me, but it all seems to be part of a pure artistic temperament I just don’t possess; what marks him out as a true artist, while I remain a mere technician.

  Now alone, my eye is attracted to a cluster of photographs on the wall capturing extreme movement: G-force distorting a young
pilot’s face into an old man’s gurn; a boxer taking a blow on the cheek – jaw-bending, nose-squashing, eye-popping, vein-bursting. War photography: bullets entering and exiting crania, faces exploding, amputees screaming, severed limbs curled on the ground like sleeping animals; a punctured dam of skin, blood flooding in pools. Beside these a selection of diagrams and illustrations relating to various diseases of the mouth. Further along, graphic photographs of operations and autopsies.

  Black calls to me from the kitchen. “Would you like a cup of herbal tea? They’re a special blend Jacob has imported from China.”

  I find herbal tea insipid. “Sure, that’d be lovely.”

  I lift one of the many sketches of Black scattered all over the floor: a drawing so rough it hasn’t evolved to contain hair or fully formed features; just the coarse charcoal marks where each eye is positioned within the oval of her face, the tip of her nose and a stroke indicating the mouth. Beauty, reduced to a few lines within an ellipse. I could make a thousand – a million – marks on the page and not get anywhere as close to capturing her essence, but this is why I need time and effort to achieve a likeness, and he is the visionary.

  I make my way back to the far end of the studio, to the collection of beaten-up leather car seats mounted onto wooden bases, and slump into one with its back to the collage. The disembodied engine of a Triumph motorbike – perspex sheet atop – has been reinvented as a coffee table. I take in my surroundings, awaiting Black to approach and hand me my drink: the moment we finally share the same small personal space.

  Dressed in the clothes she had been wearing on the beach, Black brings through a tray of Constant Comment teas, the bloated bags left to float like dead sea mammals. She hands me mine, then sits down. I crave eye contact and yet as soon as it arrives I involuntarily look away. What am I scared of? I have grown increasingly confident around women with age and experience, but my attraction to her is such that I am fifteen again. I sip gingerly. The tea tastes of watery orange and sweet spices. Jacob briefly re-enters the studio, heading to the video camera, this time successfully switching it off. He leaves his tea – he still has a glass of wine in his hand – before wandering away to get changed. Black and I are left alone, and I am lost for words.

  “Black?” I eventually ask. She looks at me, failing to realise that this one word is in itself a question, not simply an attempt to gain her attention. “An unusual name,” I add.

  “It’s my surname. People began to call me it at sixth form college and it stuck from there.”

  “Like your eyes,” I say. She smiles, half-heartedly, and I am not sure she understands what I am getting at. Has it come out as “I like your eyes”? I want to clarify that it was a comparison – that her eyes are fiercely black. But I don’t push it.

  “Um... that’s a nice pendant,” I note, looking at the silver locket which hangs around her neck, before realising that my gaze is dipping dangerously close to her cleavage. I avert my eyes, guiltily. She thanks me for the compliment, but the topic leads nowhere. Then, inspiration. “That was a nice thing you did earlier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the beach. With that young boy.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Yes. I was on the beach too, nearby. I was very impressed. By the way you handled it.”

  “I hate seeing children suffer. It makes my insides quiver.”

  “Me too... I was going to help, but, well, you seemed to have it all under control.”

  She remains friendly, but slightly distracted. Fleeting eye contact comes and goes in waves. Just when I think I have lost her attention, and that she is off in another world of thought, she switches focus and our eyes meet with a sharp collision. I feel less unnerved when she is facing away; when she looks at me I feel the grip on what I am saying loosening, the thread of my thoughts starting to unravel.

  It is only once Jacob returns, and acts as a conduit, that I relax a little. He provides the safety net, and I am buoyed by his ability to haul me into conversations, such as when he aims a few “Patrick likes such-and-such, don’t you?” at me.

  We sit discussing art. Black, it transpires, has just graduated from a degree course in photography. Some of the pictures on the wall behind us – a selection of medical students dissecting a cadaver – are hers. Finally I feel I have an ‘in’, a strong point of connection, a chance to tell her that I am also an artist.

  “Anyway,” she says, rising to her feet, “I’d best be going”, before I have the opportunity to explain. My heart sinks. On her way to the door she grabs her canvas bag and yellow Walkman from the hat stand. “See you tonight,” she shouts cheerily to Jacob. “Nice meeting you, Patrick,” she adds.

  “And you!” I reply, with a little too much enthusiasm.

  “Tonight?” I ask Jacob, once the front door is closed.

  “A little get-together. On the West Pier. Just a few of us.”

  “The West Pier? It’s a wreck. It’s not open to the public.”

  “Then we won’t have any plebs ruining our fun. The invite stretches to you, of course.”

  I feel like a monarchist invited to the royal wedding.

  FOUR

  I’d never seen my wife like this, in almost a decade together. I didn’t even recognise her: features distorted by rage, eyes distended with hatred and no little confusion. Her usual benign appearance – thin lips, narrow nose, small blue eyes, all of which framed and accentuated by a sharp mousy blonde bob – pinched inwards in rancour. Intoxicated – we’d both been drinking heavily – she looked like someone who wanted me dead.

  At the heart of the altercation lay the painting of Black, which had hung in the spare bedroom for four or five years. Only in the previous few weeks had I found myself studying it again. Until then it had stopped telling me anything new; showing only the swabs of colour and the tracks of brush strokes. I had begun to view it as a series of textures, like a mountain range, with the many peaks and troughs of oil heaped in layers over one another; due to overfamiliarity, I saw only the medium, not the message. Then, suddenly, it spoke to me afresh. It found some new vivacity, alive once more. As a result, Black moved to the front of my mind. Nerves deadened and dulled by time were newly exposed, sliced open at the quick.

  To my wife the woman in oils represented something altogether larger; Laura had it in her head that I was having an affair, even though the only person to cheat during our marriage was her. Maybe she anticipated revenge. Or perhaps, aware of her own lapse, she could not truly believe in someone else’s fidelity. To be fair, she strayed during a period of separation, and her guilt was far greater than my anger. I fully forgave that momentary indiscretion, but her suspicion proved far more insidious. Something – and to this day I don’t know what – tipped her over the edge. Full of confusion, she expelled vitriol in my direction.

  “You bastard!” she screamed, pacing from our bedroom out onto the landing, throwing whatever she came across at whatever surface presented itself. I had to chase to look at her, face to face, before she turned away again, and launched the next object to hand. I ducked, and the mirror at the top of the stairs smashed as a clock impacted plumb centre.

  “You cheating shit,” she said, with the crazed glint in her eyes of someone whose mind was clearly well beyond making proper sense of anything. “You, you––” She circled the spare bedroom like a stir-crazy hamster mesmerised by the routine of her wheel “––bastard.”

  She didn’t seem to hear a word I said. I went to take her upper arm, without aggression, to hold her still, but she wrenched it away with an exaggerated tug, leaving me cast in the role of brute. “Don’t you touch me,” she snarled, before picking up a vase and hurling it in my direction as I backed away. It sailed past my face, shattering against the far wall.

  She stood facing Jacob’s portrait of Black.

  “Is it her?” she asked.

  I hesitated, confused.

  “It is! Oh good God, Patrick. You’ve flaunted it. All th
ese years. You vile piece of shit.”

  “I’ve got no idea what you’re on about,” I said, furiously shaking my head.

  Laura moved closer to the canvas. We had disagreed over the painting before, and, after defending my right for it to maintain pride of place in the living room, I eventually allowed her to move it to a less prominent position in the house. But now, to my wife, its significance seemed clear. This was not, as I told her, a random portrait from a flea market; it was evidence of my infidelity. Nothing I said could shake her from this conclusion.

  Buzzing with a rage that seemed to stem from some electrical source – plugged into 20,000 volts – she took her door key and struck a deep blow between Black’s eyes and, having pierced the canvas, dragged it down through her nose to the base of her chin; so visceral I expected an arc of blood to spout across the room. Before I could move – rooted to the spot, catatonic in disbelief – a second stab, this time at Black’s shoulder blade, with the incision running at a forty-five degree angle, slicing through the opposite breast until flaps of material draped down, revealing the creamy blank reverse. She drew back the key again, her hand hovering over the painting, poised for a third incision. I had to act.

  I grabbed her shoulders, span her round. No sooner had I released my grip than she flew at me; a rapidly uncoiling spring, expanding with exponential force. I sidestepped her wild lunge, but she glanced off my shoulder, into the painting. She would have head-butted Black’s nose had her two-dimensional face not hung apart, exposing the backboard of the frame. Laura’s body sprang back, strangely loose and pliant, uncontrolled arms flopping up then down and outwards in slow motion, head lolling back and to the side; her movements a mix of heavy rag doll and unbelted crash test dummy.

  She came to a rest at my feet, flat on her back; a gash, about an inch in length, opening up on her forehead. This time the blood did gush, thick and red.

  Guilt seized me, squeezing tight. Even though I was fairly certain none of this was my fault, I could perhaps have handled it better; not let things escalate to such an extreme. But I was also fairly inebriated, lost in a half-fog where nothing quite made sense. I lifted the dead-weight of her body back to our bed, and, in a rather pathetic token gesture, placed a plaster on the wound. And then, with her breathing steady and sure, I left her to sleep off the excesses and mania of a night to forget, but which, barring those vague moments of blackout, would remain forever in our minds.