Man with a Seagull on His Head

by Harriet Paige

  Lucy continued:

  “He paints these amazing pictures of a woman standing on a beach. Always the same woman standing on the same beach, and yet no one has ever known who she is. But now I do. She’s a woman called Jennifer Mulholland. And I was told she lived here at number ten Prittlewell Square. I thought I’d found her … I thought she was you.”

  Was this Amanda’s doing? This doesn’t happen to everyone, Jennifer. But was she ready for something to happen? Why should Amanda Parsons be the one to decide it should happen now? She felt a certain contrariness rise up within her. But when she spoke again she wished she could be free of it, of her inane words, of her very flesh and bones.

  “Well, I hope you find her, dear. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help, it all sounds … yes, fascinating I’m sure. Goodbye now.”

  And then she closed the door. She froze there for a moment, absorbing its closedness, staring at her hand on the latch, a strange reptilian thing. Then her eyes fell upon the clock on the wall to her left and she must have caught it in transition between one second and the next, for the hand seemed to hang there, paralysed, far longer than it ought, as if giving her a chance to think again. She felt the muscles of her hand clasp around the handle, and then the door was open again. And Lucy Clarkson was still standing there facing her, as if that little interruption in their conversation had never happened.

  Ten

  Grace lay on the small white sofa at the foot of her bed. She had on an indigo silk robe, something vaguely Japanese she’d once imagined herself wearing about the house in the evening. Its coolness caressed her flesh, the fabric trickling in a low v between her small breasts and on down over the top of her right knee, which poked out through the slit. She stretched out her leg, catlike, luxuriating in the spring light pushing softly through the closed orange curtains, and in the fact of lying here at this hour, which was ten in the morning, when children were at school and other people were in offices or buses or taxis.

  Ray faced her at the far end of the room, standing on a drift of white dustsheets. He had an easel and a canvas and a small fold-up table by his side arranged with plump tubes of oil paint—no food, this time, she just wanted him to try it. He wore a white smock, one of George’s, and looked in every way an artist—or an angel, the way it ballooned out, too big, beneath his sweet, triangular face.

  Only an hour ago she’d dropped Mira off at school for the start of the second half of the spring term. They’d walked down through the park and across the front of Buckingham Palace, where they waved good morning to the Queen and carried on down into Belgravia, to the small school for girls where they had concerns about Mira’s solitude and her artwork, which showed signs of disturbance. George’s impression of Miss Partridge had been the last great hilarity before he fell into his hole.

  Grace loved the park in the spring. One morning when you were least expecting it you’d walk down to the lake and—bang, it hit you, those big bursts of colour when all you’d got used to seeing for months were dreary shades of brown and green and grey. You had to be feeling up to it, it was true. Those bright, pert trumpets on their turgid stalks seemed to demand some sort of response. But this year, for once, she’d felt herself stride out to meet them, ready and able.

  Once she’d dropped Mira off she walked slowly back through St. James’s Park, taking time to taste the crystalline coolness in the air and to watch the trees try and catch the leaves in the very act of forming. She crossed the bridge over the lake, paused out of pure habit to gaze up towards the Admiralty, and then cut across the dew-damp grass onto The Mall. By the time she arrived home she was thoroughly ready to be painted.

  She stretched a little again, internally, trying not to move, for at last he had begun. She could feel his eyes on her skin, the very tickle of his brush on her toes as he started work on the extremities. She knew very well the way he painted, the way he started at one corner and worked in. No blocking, no sketching; it was all there from the very beginning, every intricacy complete before he shifted on to a new, clean section of the canvas. She felt her toes keenly, as if they were only now waking up for the very first time: a gradual thaw, a quickening, creeping upwards into her flesh.

  She sat for just an hour. It was enough. Her toes had an itch for adventure, and as she dressed, her mind was on a call she’d had yesterday. Giles, a friend of George’s, had rung with a lead, a woman by the name of Ruby living on an estate in Hackney whose “memory boxes” he thought would be perfect for the collection. It was George who usually followed these things up, made the initial visit. Sometimes she accompanied him, often she didn’t. There was still something about poverty that intimidated her. But her feet had been painted by Ray Eccles today and felt like they could go anywhere. And more than that: she felt herself swelling with some capacity for beauty. George always said that each acquisition to the collection should be a little love story, and she felt, now more than ever, the potential for one to begin.

  Feeling adventurous, she went by bus, picking one up on Piccadilly. It was empty enough for her to have the front seat of the top deck all to herself, and she sat there as the bus heaved and swayed over the cars and people below as though it were an elephant she rode. They travelled up through Piccadilly Circus, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road. How gloriously seedy the West End seemed from the damp and smoke-infused upper deck, especially at this hour—midday—when the lights of theatres and advertisements flickered dimly against the weak English sun, and the streets were home to a dazed mix of tourists, tramps, and foreign students eating fast food on the move. They went up through Holborn into Islington and down into Hackney, where Georgian terraces not too dissimilar from the ones lining the streets of Pimlico had boarded-up windows, cracked and blackened brickwork, and weeds sprouting from the gutters. She got off at Dalston Junction, just as Ruby had instructed her over the phone that morning, and turned right down the Kingsland Road.

  This was a different country to the one in which she’d boarded the bus: everything coated with a film of dust; a ripe smell of bananas and fried food; shops selling hair and fingernails. She felt momentarily feeble, her body still reeling a little from the movement of the bus. She stood still, steadied herself, then dug her hands deep into the pockets of her long black coat and took off again with long, sure strides until touched once more by the calm and leonine confidence that had got her this far.

  She left the Kingsland Road and went over a railway bridge, then she saw the estate she was heading for: huge concrete monoliths towering up into the blank sky like great lumps of regret. When she was among them she saw that they had names: Patience, Dignity, Gladness, Hope. “I live in Hope,” Ruby had said.

  Grace smiled to herself and followed the sign that pointed her towards Hope, a block located in the centre of the estate, surrounded by cracked paving and patchy grass. Outside, two girls sat tight together on a bench, both with prams and cigarettes and bare legs blotchy from the cold. As she drew closer she felt tender towards them, with their babies and their cold knees.

  “Yeah, what you starin’ at?” one of them shouted out as Grace approached, and she scurried into the building.

  She had been in places like this before, in stairwells that stank of urine and lifts carved with telephone numbers offering her a fuck, but it was no use pretending she felt comfortable in them. How often would she have to ride up and down before she called one of these numbers and said “Okay then, show me a good time”?

  Ruby lived on the eleventh floor. Her front door was royal blue and so glossy it could still be wet, or at least sticky, from a new coat of paint. The sallow light that slunk through the dusty window of the stairwell caught the ghosts of past carvings beneath the surface. Fat Tramp.

  Grace pressed her finger to the greasy bell and heard it rattle away inside. It was some time before it was answered—by a woman as wide as the doorway, in a skirt that hung round her middle like a curtain round a
cubicle in a cheap clothing store. Oh dear. Grace had trouble with fatness. She found it hard to forgive, somehow. It showed such a terrible lack of self-control.

  “You must be Ruby,” she said.

  “Are you the one what’s come to buy my boxes?”

  “Well—” Grace laughed. So presumptuous! “I’d love to see them … if you’d let me?”

  The woman turned her back and started down the hallway, disappearing into the far room to the left. How dismal, thought Grace, to be able to stand here in the open doorway and to see in one short glance the entire layout of the apartment, the end of it just a few metres in front of her at the dead end of the little passage, and four narrow doors opening uniformly off it all that was offered by way of diversion. She stepped forward and closed the door behind her, following Ruby into the second room on the left, a small cube of a living room upon which the ceiling bore down in vicious Artex spikes tipped with resinous deposits of nicotine, like stalactites starting to form.

  Grace drifted unthinkingly towards the window and the view. She’d always harboured the suspicion that tower blocks like this, much taller than her own, would be the most wonderful places to live: high and free above the city. But now she’d found her way into one and was looking from the window, mired on the outside with a lunar-like sediment, she concluded that one could be too high, there could be too much sky, that from up here the city seemed just a low and dreary sprawl.

  “What a wonderful view!” she said.

  “Man two floors up threw ’imself out last week,” said Ruby, from behind her.

  “Oh, how dreadful!” Grace felt suddenly faint—for the first time in her life she actually felt as if she might faint. She backed away from the window and slunk into a chair as calmly as she could manage. The thought of fainting had always rather thrilled her, but to do it for the first time here would be terrible: to wake up with Ruby bearing down on her… breathing on her… I must try and love this woman, she thought, remembering why she was here.

  Her head began to clear and she looked with studied brightness around the room. There was barely a thing in it. She and Ruby sat opposite each other on the only two chairs—armchairs that looked overweight themselves, with great rolls of peachy fat. Clearly they’d started life as an identical pair but the one Ruby sat in was showing the strain of being preferred, the velvety fabric worn bare over the arms and headrest, the buckled frame visible beneath the frayed hem of Ruby’s skirt. Between them was a small oval coffee table, and that completed the furniture. There were no pictures on the walls, no curtains; just one bare, lit bulb hanging from the ceiling. But round the edges of the room, following the line of the skirting and barely noticeable at first, was a neat line of tiny, whitish boxes. “Is that them?” Grace asked, nodding towards the floor.

  “Memory boxes,” said Ruby.

  “Can I have a look?”

  Ruby pointed, quite specifically, to a section of skirting to the right of the doorframe. “Over there,” she said, and Grace rose slowly from her chair, making her way cautiously towards the door.

  “Here?” said Grace, pointing down in front of her feet.

  “Fine,” said Ruby.

  Grace crouched, and then bent her head further towards the floor, for the boxes seemed somehow out of focus, blurred. She couldn’t work out what it was, and then she saw: each was covered with a thick layer of wax. Beneath were faces, photographs—couples, family groupings, small children holding hands—cut out and stuck together in a kind of collage. Their eyes strained up towards her, and hers strained down towards them as though they were staring at each other across the veil of time, trying to make each other out. In the small spaces between the pictures, she could see indistinct lines of printed typeface, showing that Ruby had made the boxes from newspaper. The words, again, seemed out of focus, as though they would gather and sharpen into meaning if she could only find the right distance to read them from. But always they remained just the other side of clarity.

  She peered closer, on all fours now, and touched one. It sprung slightly under her finger; they were light, these boxes, borne aloft by the deep pile of the carpet. Her nose caught dampness in the fibres, and she could see little drops of wax now, everywhere, clinging to the synthetic twists like early morning dew. Dirt and ash was caught up in them too—and life, she felt certain, must be going on in there, tiny births and deaths. She picked up a box and placed it on her palm. It fitted neatly into her hand. The underneath was the only side not coated with wax, just the thin, bare newspaper, and she could feel the small and separate weights of the things inside.

  She stood up and walked back over to Ruby, lowering her palm to offer her the box. Ruby picked it up between forefinger and thumb and held it up, looking up at the underside. “Fifth September, ’85,” she said, reading off what was written there. “This one’s fine. I wait a year, see, before I open ’em up. That way I’ve forgotten what I put inside and it’s a nice surprise. I was gonna open one this morning but I waited for you, see.”

  Ruby put the box down in the middle of the table, spreading her knees wide and leaning forward into the gap they created. There was an eagerness in the gesture, like sleeves being rolled up, and something warm, too, in the fact of having been waited for. Grace knelt down at the end of the table, a little excited, feeling for the first time that she wanted to be close to this woman. There was a slight agitation too in the stagnant air, as if the strange little box was a pebble that had plopped into the room and caused ripples to spread out towards the walls.

  Ruby lifted off the lid, a flat thing, about a centimetre thick with wax. “Hello my treasures,” she whispered, and then lifted her head towards Grace, her greasy hair falling down over her eyes. She smiled. Then she looked back down into the box and, very slowly, one by one, pulled out the contents, holding each thing up to the weak light with the same care and admiration with which Christopher Earnest had held the silk tie to catch the glint of the chandelier. A cigarette butt; a silver ring-pull; a dry, brown leaf; a crumpled till receipt; a one-penny piece; and a discarded baby’s pacifier. This last thing she held up longer than the others, the plastic handle pinched between her fingertips, the rubber teat pointing to the ceiling. “They come from the angels, these,” she said, twisting it slowly one way and then the other. It was a horrid thing, the pallid pink plastic scuffed around the edges, the rubber as thick and yellow as dead skin. But as Grace looked at it she started to see there was something peculiarly puzzling about it, something intimate and alien. She glanced then at Ruby’s face, held in profile. Her gaze was concentrated upwards, her mouth slightly open, and Grace suddenly saw quite startlingly that she’d once been a child, that this huge, lumpish, lank-haired creature had once been a dear little girl.

  Ruby lowered the pacifier back into the box along with the rest of the things and put the lid back on carefully. She sat up and looked at Grace.

  “I love it,” said Grace quietly, looking up at her.

  “They ain’t cheap, mind,” said Ruby. “I won’t sell for less than two hundred pound a box.”

  Grace returned in a taxi, and beside her on the back seat sat an old shoebox Ruby had given her filled with five of her memory boxes. She felt them beside her like something small and alive, a hamster perhaps. She smiled—a hamster!—pleased with the analogy, for it so perfectly described the small thrill of new responsibility and companionship that had come with her purchase, the sort of pleasure that accompanies the taking home of a new pet rather than, say, a new baby which was too … too much, somehow, to be pleasurable.

  Of course what lay beside her was much better than a silly hamster. It was Art. And the wonderful thing was that she had made it so. She thought of her cheque for one thousand pounds lying on the small, chipped coffee table. How marvellously it had transformed in her mind the room she had left behind, which existed now, as she trundled up towards Angel, as a place of heartbreaking beauty. She
pictured Ruby—gloriously fat—seated stately in her collapsing armchair, the walls of the empty room pressing yellowly upon her, the man two floors up sailing past the window like a dying bird, and the name of the block—“Hope”—throbbing somewhere in the sky above, a faded neon sign.

  She was already thinking of an exhibition, in the Serpentine perhaps: all of Ruby’s memory boxes arranged open on the floor in neat rows, the precise, uniform spaces between them bristling and fizzing with an inexplicable energy.

  At home she went straight in to George, curled in his bed like a crab under a rock.

  “I bought something,” she announced, sitting down on the edge of the bed with the shoebox on her lap. George’s gaze bored blank into her thigh. “Dear George,” she said, and bent to kiss him, prompt and efficient, on the side of his head. Surely he could at least try to feel better.

  She removed herself and the shoebox from the bed and knelt on the floor, her face close and level with his. “I’ve been to the dreariest block of flats you can imagine!” she whispered with determined eagerness. “You should be proud of me, it was beautifully grim.” She reached into the shoebox beside her and, with both hands, lifted out one of the memory boxes, placing it on the bed right in front of him to force his eyes into activity: to focus or close. “They’re made by a woman called Ruby. I loved her. I completely fell in love with her!” She watched his eyes reel from the proximity and she laughed, shifting the box a little further away. His eyes narrowed, striving to see the clusters of faded faces beneath the opacity of the wax. Slowly, he reached a pale finger out from under the duvet to touch it. His brow tensed a little, gathering strength, and Grace watched optimistically for the first signs of recovery, which often showed here as a straining for movement in the skull. He prodded at the box and it was just enough to topple it off the edge of the bed onto the floor, spilling its contents, like a tiny rubbish bin, across the carpet.

  So much for the upward tilt. Grace did not try again. Instead she found fewer and fewer reasons to enter the dark little room at the back of the apartment. Something new was happening outside it and for once she felt behind it, effective and capable. In the mornings, after dropping Mira off at school, she sat for Ray, a most delicious start to the day. Stretched out on the white sofa, naked beneath her indigo robe, she felt the movement of his attention as it shifted slowly up her body like a rising tide, the tingle creeping from her toes, up behind her knees, between her thighs. She felt herself being filled in, fashioned anew, a second, truer skin knitting itself around her like a healing wound. By the end of the hour her body ached with its own fullness, as if she might burst open were he to touch her.