by Paul Tomkins
I fell asleep on the sofa after It’s A Knockout, waking to the test card hours later. I went up and grabbed some bedding, along with the increasingly careworn Monty from my room, and returned to the sofa. I left the TV on, but turned down the volume to mute the drone. The little girl and her clown kept me company throughout the night.
It would be a long weekend in the house with my father’s body.
Looking back, my father’s funeral proved a rather pathetic affair. Given that I hadn’t been allowed to attend my mother’s cremation – just the wake – it would be my first. I therefore had nothing with which to compare it. Only years later, with the aid of hindsight, did I realise that more than a handful of people should be present for the laying to rest of a man of his age. After all, he wasn’t some pensioner who’d outlived all his friends; he simply hadn’t accrued any. An only child, he lacked the siblings to boost the tally with their own partners and children, while his own parents were both long-since deceased. Kitty, two neighbours and a couple of council colleagues paid their respects. That was it. Five adults and one child.
My father had not drawn up a will, nor discussed any plans for where he wished to be buried. As such, he ended up in the graveyard of the 12th century church in the village nearest to where Kitty lived. After the service we filed slowly and silently back to her cottage, and that was it: both parents in the ground.
* * *
The cries of scruffy children rose to the third floor window beside which, in a shabby armchair, I habitually sat. Only a couple of months into life with a foster family, it felt like an eternity, interred in that block of flats. Eventually Kitty took me in, but not until I’d endured a spell as an outcast in a brutal housing estate.
I listened to the step-divers play, launching themselves as far as possible, before one of their number marked in chalk the length of the jump. Beyond the step-divers a dozen-or-so boys kicked and chased a sagging sack of plastic — a football, once — swarming over the concrete wasteland, from one end to the other, where pushbikes with buckled wheels, crumpled sweaters and bent-up traffic cones substituted as goalposts. Each kid fought for the right to be next to lay leather to its embarrassed shape as they spilled across a boundless pitch. No touchlines, no bylines. Casually they circled the burnt-out Cortina chassis as if it were just another opponent. They strayed to beneath my window, in amongst the step-divers, with straggle-haired waif assuming possession of the ball from straggle-haired waif, skinny girl landing between them on white chalk line.
I looked on from above, omniscient but excluded.
Perhaps those five-and-a-half months, alone and cooped up, intensified my love for the cottage; by the time I arrived there, I had come to appreciate just how oppressive life could be. I had never lived in splendour with either of my parents, but each home proved comfortable enough, and, even though I never really thought about it, relatively spacious. Then came the stint at Tyrer Court. Although a nice enough couple, Mary and Alan did not welcome me into the lap of luxury. He worked as a long-distance lorry driver, which took him away a lot, and her time was spent as a housewife. They’d fostered before, but only ever girls, and I’m not quite sure Mary knew how to relate to me. To be honest, I don’t remember an awful lot about them; what sticks in my mind is confinement and boredom. My future at that point remained uncertain; Kitty had been approached about my adoption, but she had only very recently undergone the first of two hip replacement surgeries. She had yet to indicate whether or not she’d ever be physically capable of taking me in, although perhaps her psychology also held her back.
I had no friends with whom to enjoy the summer holidays. One boy from school looked a potential candidate, but he went away for the entire duration. I’d tried to fit in with the kids of the estate, but lacked the sportiness and sufficient roughand-tumble. The widely-known fact that I lived in a bedroom with pink walls adorned with flying unicorns did not help with this early form of street credibility. The gentle girls welcomed me to play, but while I appreciated the offer, I only saw that as adding to my problems with the boys. Other girls – those who hung out with the tough lads – would push me, spit at me, safe as part of a gang. Perhaps I could have toughed it out, but my resistance waned, and isolation, while tormenting, just about trumped bullying and abuse. Thankfully Kitty eventually rescued me from this purgatory.
My stay at the cottage remained blissfully free of complication, until the arrival of Genevieve Frazer.
SEVENTEEN
Did Black have a precursor? Indeed she did. I first met Genevieve when I was eleven and she thirteen, and then again a year later. At the time girls remained an irritant, an alien life-form to be distrusted and fought with. Plain and slightly plump, and although not exactly a tomboy, she had a willingness to at least sometimes join in with my games. This of course endeared her to me, and we got on well, despite our different interests. The first girl to ever feel like a proper friend, I was grateful to have someone to hang around with, irrespective of her gender. I sensed that she cared for me; at that stage she seemed genuinely concerned with my well-being.
Genevieve’s mother, Alice, knew Kitty from their schooldays. Originally from Sussex, Alice now lived in Derbyshire, and had taken to sending her daughter to the cottage for the summer. A widow, Alice worked irregular hours, and childcare had long been an issue. The south coast, and the cottage, struck her as the ideal retreat for her daughter in the holidays. However, at fifteen Genevieve felt old enough to stay at home in an empty house on the evenings and nights her mother worked, exerting her authority in several heated arguments in order to do so. Genevieve betrayed that trust by running away to London with her boyfriend, only returning after six weeks in the capital, as the relationship ended in violence. A year later there arose the chance of seaside work in Sussex while she contemplated a return to school for A-Levels – something she had the intelligence to do, if she applied herself. Her fractious relationship with her mother had once again reached breaking point, so time apart was considered wise by all concerned. Genevieve was granted some of the autonomy she craved, within the relatively secure setting of Kitty’s cottage.
But something happened that summer in 1981, when I was fourteen and she sixteen. In the two years since I’d last seen her she had transformed into something new. She now hung on the verge of womanhood. Hitherto uninterested in the contents of a girl’s blouse, something about the development of breasts on Genevieve’s once shapeless body struck me as a kind of alchemy: flesh turned into miraculous curves whose form represented a type of perfection. From the widespread fascination with them that surrounded me, I knew that they would one day appeal on levels I didn’t yet understand; I knew how I was supposed to feel about them. But when I did – when the penny dropped – it just hit me so quickly: moving from an abstract concept to a stern reality in one moment as she stepped from the car, her contours clearly visible within a tight red t-shirt. The shock – so exaggerated due to their existence on someone with whom I didn’t associate them – floored me. Desire arrived that day: an androgynous girl, with tomboyish ways, reborn in alluring adult form; as changed as butterfly from caterpillar. Where I’d never been anything other than superficially attracted to either girls or women, Genevieve, who occupied a glorious middle ground, captivated me.
She seemed different in so many ways. As well as the development of those curves, her face had altered shape. She’d lost some puppy fat, but more than that: the angles had refined. Make-up – a new addition – only accentuated the metamorphosis, and I reacted to the redness of her lips, contrasting with her powdered pale skin, with a similar gut-level yearning to that evoked from her new-found shapeliness. Had her mouth grown and her teeth straightened? Had her cheekbones swollen, accentuating her eyes? And the hair: deeply dark, with startling bright red streaks.
Her clothes that summer were mostly black or white, with the occasional addition of a red garment –– neck or head scarf, belt, shoes, t-shirt –– that would pulse against the monochro
me materials. She looked like a pop star: part New Romantic, part Goth, part glamorous siren; still an alien life-form, but now one I wanted to intimately know.
Two years earlier she had been a devotee of the Grease soundtrack, with its overriding sense of innocence and poppiness. Her new taste in music, which I’d hear from my room over the coming months, was jarring: The Cure, Bauhaus, Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Killing Joke and the like, with their bleak and foreboding tones. Duran Duran, in the top five with Girls on Film (which also happened to be on her playlist), proved about as left-field as I got. What I heard from beyond her door summed up the new Genevieve: strong, independent, brooding, with moments of beauty undercut by an undercurrent of darkness, and a certain detachment.
That first day, as she stepped from the car, my nerveless insouciance disappeared; rendering me awkward in an instant. Her openness vanished, replaced with a closed-off coolness; the new outer casing not merely cosmetic, but, it seemed, an impenetrable veneer. That first day I did not know whether I felt love, lust or loathing.
EIGHTEEN
Almost midnight. The stillness of the day has given way to movement in the air. The wind grows and dies in erratic bursts. Zephyrs swirl around our bones, darting like invisible starlings, as, below, the resonance of waves amplifies and the pier trembles and shakes. Woodwork creaks and bows, ironwork rattles and chimes, and a bird flaps its wings in frantic flight. In the darkness these sounds add fleeting menace to what has been one of the strangest days of my life.
Black pulls from her pocket a small lump of brown resin wrapped tightly in cling-film. “I take it you haven’t smoked this either?”
“Pot? No, not really my bag,” I say.
“So you won’t be wanting any now?”
“Well…”
All of a sudden, it seems like the most natural and essential thing in the world. Even if she is going on only the shortest of trips, I want to travel with her. I want something to bring us closer, onto a shared level, and this could be it. But like a departing ship, I have to get on now or never if I am to experience the same ride. “Go on, then,” I say, hoping to fix onto her wavelength.
She smiles to herself, nodding as she stares down at the kit stretched across her lap; a gesture that implies she isn’t sure I’m cut out for even the lightest of narcotics. She constructs the joint with the care and precision – and steadiness of hand – of an expert model maker. She begins by heating the clump of brown resin, picking off tiny scabs as they soften and placing them in a line along the length of an open Rizla paper.
“You didn’t tell me about your family?” I say.
“No, I didn’t. I guess my childhood wasn’t ideal either. I don’t have a father — at least not one that I know of. I was illegitimate, as they say. Mum was pressurised to give me up, but she kept me. It was a struggle, though.”
“I bet.”
She looks up from her work. “We clashed a lot, in my teens. But I’m grateful now, looking back. I didn’t appreciate the sacrifices she was making.”
“You don’t, at that age.”
I watch as she trails her tongue along the side of a cigarette, from butt to tip – the tiniest hint of saliva deposited – before peeling back the damp white strip to reveal a cylinder of tightly compacted tobacco. “True,” she finally says, studiously laying the tobacco over the cigarette paper, evenly spreading its tangled fibres as she pulls apart the weave.
“You’ve done that before,” I note, as she licks the adhesive strip and seals the joint. With the excess paper at the fat end twirled into a tight tip, she takes the thin end between her lips and strikes down on the lighter. The tiny burst of gas is audible, and the surfeit of paper briefly burns bright white-orange. It flares again upon her first drag, and she exhales like someone expelling her last breath. She smiles broadly and passes me the baton.
I manage to inhale without coughing, although just a single intake of smoke is enough to set my vision gently spinning. Within seconds I feel light of head and body, but it’s not an unpleasant kind of giddiness. Black takes longer, more intensive drags, to my quick, tentative tokes.
“What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” she asks, staring me hard in the eyes; a gaze of interrogation.
“I don’t have any secrets.”
She snorts. “Everyone has a secret.”
“Maybe my secret is that I don’t have a secret,” I note, smugly.
“Or that you do, and you bury it in a secret about not having a secret,” she says, passing the joint.
“Maybe… Although if that was my secret, it’s no longer a secret. And then that would mean I have no secrets.”
We both pause, then laugh. The joint has burnt down to a hot remnant of roach, which she discards with a casual flick.
“So what’s yours?” I ask.
“My secret?”
“Yeah. Seeing as you brought it up.”
“You’ve seen me naked,” she says. “That’s a kind of secret. I don’t share that with many people.”
“Although Jacob was lucky enough,” I note.
“He paid me,” she says.
“So that’s the secret to seeing a woman naked?”
“You seemed to manage it for free.”
I take a swig of beer, to wash away the taste of smoke. “How did that come about? Working with Jacob?”
“I was down on the seafront, near the boat sheds, looking at some stall selling quirky jewellery. He came up and introduced himself, and asked if I’d be interested in modelling for him.”
“Didn’t that seem a bit sleazy?” I try to imagine doing the same thing. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get away with it.
“I knew who he was. I’d been to a small exhibition of his work, and his art just got to me. I felt honoured. Really honoured.”
“So you don’t normally do that kind of thing?”
“Undressing for strangers for money? No, not normally.”
“So, any proper secrets?” I ask, with a gentle nudge of the elbow.
“Aside from being half-crazy?” she says, with no clear hint of irony.
“We’re all half-crazy. Half-crazy all the time, or totally crazy half the time. Come on, you can do better than that.”
“Says he who has no secrets.”
“Says she who asked the question in the first place.”
“Okay,” she says, “I’ll tell you, if you promise you won’t share it?”
“That’s the golden rule of secrets. They go no further.”
“In theory.”
“With me, in practice, too.”
“Okay, in that case I’ll tell you,” she says, settling herself with a deep breath. “I recently helped to, um… steal a body.”
She clearly expects me to be shocked. I’m not. “Would it happen to be a bearded old man?”
“How did you know?”
“I met him, in a manner of speaking. Or what’s left of him. In Jacob’s freezer.”
“Oh my god,” she says, shaking her head. “He promised he wouldn’t tell anyone until he was ready to exhibit.”
“Promises, eh? Actually, it was my fault. I was nosing around. I stumbled across him, in all his frozen glory. And in fairness, Jacob never mentioned your name in connection with it.”
“I’ll get someone into big trouble if this comes to light.”
“I don’t plan to tell anyone. That said, is there much of a trade in bodysnatching these days?”
“They’re worth a lot of money, for medical purposes. Not quite worth their weight in gold, but not far off. Although this one had already been worked on, with his organs removed.”
“At least you didn’t get involved in grave digging. I mean… you didn’t, did you?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Just teasing. Sorry.”
“Look,” she says, fiddling with her lighter. “I’m not proud of it. But art has to be about taking risks.”
“Did Jacob tell you what he’s going to do with it
?”
“Some kind of elaborate sculpture. On a big scale, although to be honest he was a little vague. I knew someone at medical school and helped set up the… well, theft I suppose. I regret getting involved... and yet at the same time I don’t. It could end up being meaningful. But that’s not the end of it.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve told him that if anything happens to me he can have mine, too.”
“Your what?”
“My body. My head.”
I am stunned into silence. I understand the words, but on some level it just won’t compute.
“Your head?” I eventually say, my voice an octave higher. “If you die?”
“Yes. Why not? I’d rather that than just rot in a box, or burn away. What’s the point of that?”
“I don’t know what to say. I mean, you’re serious, aren’t you?”
“About art? Yes, I am. Deadly serious – no pun intended.”
“Well, it’s your life, I suppose. Even when it’s at an end.”
“Indeed it is,” she says, and then she laughs, out of the blue. “But life’s great, isn’t it? So precious, so fragile. If you don’t appreciate it, why even bother continuing to exist?”
“My heart just keeps beating on my behalf.”
“But you have fun, right? You experiment? You live?”
“I do, but you make life sound so much more vital. It can be like that, but it can also be filling time, in between those things. Waiting.”
“Wait too long and it’s gone.”
We both fall quiet, and I wonder if all this time I’ve been living, or simply waiting.
“So…” Black says, smiling as she breaks the silence. “How would you feel about posing for me?”
“Posing?”
“Yes. Here. Now.”
“You’re kidding?”