by Oscar Turner
It was true to say, however, that her knowledge of art and its historic leap to commodity status was limited. But that was irrelevant: she would somehow pull it off.
But first things first: cigarettes, alcohol, food, electricity and gas were needed urgently.
She had made many connections in the past and assumed that securing an undemanding, well-paid position using her looks and personality would be a routine exercise.
But, she soon realised, those connections were only valid by association with her now bitter former partners. Word had quickly spread about her conduct and she was on an invisible blacklist.
Her sights lowered, she eventually found a job as a pay clerk with an engineering company subtly entitled 'Hogarth Heavy Engineering,' in Shoreham, a short bus trip away. She hated it, but, believing it to be temporary, chose to see the whole experience as character-building. It would be a journey with a destination. She hoped.
In the early days when Polly first started work, they would both get up around seven, shower, usually together, have breakfast, chat, cuddle and generally bathe in their blissful ignorance. Polly would then kiss Seymour at around 8.15, saunter out of the door and down to the bus stop.
Seymour would then work furiously all day, fired by the inspiration of his perfect life. It was a dream partnership for about 6 months. Then Seymour painted himself into a creative cul-de-sac. He began to find himself standing in front of a blank canvas after Polly had left for work and - nothing would happen. There was nothing in his canvas arena to argue about, nothing to insult, no revelations to celebrate. He had dried up. Polly knew it too. She kept an eye on his output discreetly, but not wishing to pressurise him, said nothing.
It was then that Seymour discovered the joys of daytime television. Increasingly, he even didn't bother to stand in front of the blank canvas, hoping to become repossessed by the talent that now lay snoring in his spirit. These days, he would climb out of bed, slump into the old leather armchair, and zap the TV on with the sticky remote control, usually to be found in the bowels of the armchair. He didn't even enjoy TV, although he had developed an intimate relationship with Tommy and Val, the antiseptic couple who hosted a smug morning chat show set in a simulated lounge. Well, his relationship was with Val, really. Seymour found her strangely attractive in a teenager's Aunt sort of way - and in need of a damn good rogering, a task, Seymour decided, Tommy was probably incapable of.
However, he would never watch the TV after three o'clock. It took two and a half hours for the set to cool down to room temperature, just in time for Polly's return.
These days he didn't even get out of bed until Polly was well gone. There seemed little point. He got in her way and irritated her. Pseudo-sleep was the only option.
Occasionally he would have a spontaneous burst of inspiration, and when he did, he could complete a painting a day. But as time passed, these bursts became less frequent. He'd produced enough work to fill at least two small galleries since he'd been with Polly, and probably a warehouse full pre-Polly, most of which had been destroyed or lost. However, his ability to persuade a gallery to show his work was non-existent. Seymour knew what it took to get his work exhibited, and artistic talent had little to do with it.
Being untaught, he had never become involved in the institutional framework of the art world. An aspiring professional artist was expected to clamber on this framework with white-knuckled hands, withstanding the pain of the boot of the rising star above, dodging the swinging tongues of the bitch critics below. Not only was the Art World out-of- bounds to him; it was also a mystery. Conveniently. Seymour had no intention of getting involved. Art was something he hid behind.
The last thing he wanted was to be found.
The fact that Polly had her own plans for his future was of no concern to him: she would fail. As far as he knew, she understood even less about the art world than he did, despite the fact that she had witnessed its intricacies via the former art dealer lover she refused to discuss for some reason. She bought every art magazine she could find, went to every exhibition she could, ensured her name was included on gallery mailing lists, and spoke with some expertise on the subject. Or at least in a language that was convincing enough to make Seymour's eyes cross. She had become obsessed with her mission to find a way to promote Seymour, as he was obsessed with his survival as a freeloader. Of course it was flattering to see Polly putting so much enthusiasm into her mission, but then it was Seymour's work that had sparked their love in the first place. He never told her of his cynicism, for her naiveté amused him, her hard-earned money fed him, got him drunk, stoned, and housed. Her fabulous body satisfied his sexual desires and her sharp mind kept him on his toes. It was all perfect.
Seymour heard the bus pull away from the stop outside and blew a sigh of relief. He was safe for the rest of the day to wallow.
CHAPTER FIVE
Reality.
Polly despised the bus and everybody in it. It was an ancient, ex-military single-decker belonging to Hogarth's, badly repainted and sign-written to tell the world that the people on this bus were doomed to a life of endless misery. She would often catch its reflection in shop windows and see her bowed head, suitably distorted and badly lit, slightly moving with every jolt and, written on the side of the bus, 'Hogarth Heavy Engineering' as an apt subtitle.
The bus stank of cheap after-shave, cheap perfume, rank armpits, cigarettes and burnt oil. It reminded her of death, the sweet smell of rotting flesh she had smelt only once when she had to visit a mortuary as part of the initiation for her two week career as a student nurse back in 1970. That smell still burned her nostrils whenever she thought about it.
Each day, everybody sat in exactly the same seat on that damn bus, including Polly. Most of the men sat in groups yelling at each other about the telly the night before. ‘What about when he caught her? Yeah yeah and then that fucking other bloke, his wife, gaw I wouldn't mind ...yeah, not 'alf.’ Male gang camaraderie at its best. It amused her whenever, for some reason or other, the men were separated, like the days when a hard of hearing blind man would use his free ride to Supasave. He would sit in one of the blokes' seats, leaving one of the gang to sit away from his support group, sometimes next to Polly. It had happened recently. Just the day before, one of the separated men had drawn a comparison between Polly and an airhead with pert tits on page three of The Sun, but when he sat next to her, close enough to her to arrange to ‘run one through her’ as was his desire apparently – then, he was such a good little boy.
The gang of girls on the bus from the factory disgusted her more, constantly teasing and enticing the men to delve deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of human behaviour. Scraping the fingernails that scraped the barrel of depravity.
Polly was the only member of the office staff to ride in the bus. The rest either had cars, found their own way, or were dropped off by their loyal husbands: any way of avoiding this nightmare on wheels.
It was at times like this she resented Seymour's ineptitude, a quality that at one time she had found cute. Seymour had forgotten to learn to drive; she could, but they could barely run themselves on her wages at the moment, let alone a car.
There was an option to this bus, however. The number thirty two went to the bus station and then, if all went well, she could catch the number three to a stop near Supasave. But that involved leaving home fifteen minutes earlier and cost three quid a day. That bus only stank of pensioner pee and beer vomit, which was, to Polly, a bargain for three quid. The only down side was that if she screwed up in any way, she'd miss the number three and would have to get the number nine which made her twenty wonderful minutes late for work.
As infuriating as it was to Mr. Arnold, the office manager, it was an option she took whenever she could. But today it was not to be. It was Thursday, the day before pay-day. She'd woken early after arguing with Seymour until the early hours, hadn't showered and didn't have a penny to her name.
Polly, as usual, did her best to blo
ck out the bus using the meditation she'd learnt long ago. Those were the days when everything around her always smelt of incense. Those pre-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life days. The pre- how-do-I-look days. Certainly pre-Seymour Capital days. She remembered snippets she had learnt from an emaciated hippy who was a Guru but was now back being a plumber in Manchester. She had met him in the Sixties on an Ashram in Spain. Visualisation, reinterpretation of experience, positive thinking, all simply achieved by deep breathing and focused attention. But deep-breathing the nauseous cocktail of smells in the bus just didn't quite have the same effect.
She was tired, hungry and angry and had nothing to look forward to beyond the excitement of being paid and catching the thirty two bus home that night.
At times like this she wished she knew no different from her mindless existence. That was a prerequisite for tolerating tedium. But she did know differently. She had nibbled the apple, liked it and shaken the tree until the roots had loosened. She had eaten men like fun food, spat them out and survived fairly unscathed. The brief and disastrous relationship with Kevin had been the final straw in her life as a dependent. The worm had turned. Then she had met Seymour Capital and here she was, sat with a bunch of toilet-trained gorillas on a bus to hell. Life played strange tricks.
Polly stared dead ahead, her eyes doing their best to avoid the irritating neck of Mr. Dawson, the stock control supervisor, who always sat alone in front of her. She hated his Christian neck. It was always perfectly shaved, tapering from his starched collar to the military style haircut emphasising his huge FA cup ears. He stank of Brylcreem, polo mints and shoe polish and he was always reading some badly printed Christian paperback. She enjoyed hating Dawson.
As her thoughts battled to focus over the puerile banter in the bus, she was able to replay vague snippets from the previous night's row with Seymour. Everything that she had said made sense - to her anyway. Now that Seymour had accumulated a healthy stock of work, it was obvious to her that she should start working as his agent and Seymour take on the role of supporting them both. That had always been her plan and now was the time to implement it.
Seymour had pointed out over and over again he was almost unemployable. He had no trade, no education and although he didn't actually admit it, no inclination. He had tried every desperate angle: the disruption that work would cause to his art, the danger of losing a limb in some hideous machinery, or sustaining a repetitive strain injury through being a part of the hideous machine. Polly, of course, always had an answer. Manual work would give him a chance to get a different perspective on his art.
Seymour didn't seem to appreciate the relationship between the decline of his productivity and the collapse of Polly's enthusiasm to support them. But then, Seymour rarely noticed anything in his life unless it actually punched him in the face, which it often had done. Polly had pointed out to him that he shouldn't worry about drying up: it happened to everyone.
‘You need food for your soul, Seymour. Go out there, just for a while, until I get things happening.’
‘Where?’ he'd said.
Polly's train of thought faded away when the bus jolted as each of its wheels mounted the two speed bumps at the main entrance of Hogarth's. Its aged body twisted and groaned as it inched through the wrought-iron gates, which remained open around the clock. Every employee had to pass through these gates. Polly often wondered why they were there at all, given that they never closed.
A rat-faced security guard was always on duty at shift changeover time, and he peered in through the windows of the bus as it passed. The rest of the time he sat in his cubicle reading war comics, picking up hints on tactical manoeuvres in war zones and other useful information for a security guard. Polly wondered what on earth the security guard was guarding. Perhaps against anybody sneaking in to do a day’s work?
Polly watched as everybody in the bus clambered to their feet well before the bus stopped and jostled their way out, the moment it did. They just couldn't wait to get stuck into their day’s work. The exception was, of course, Mr. Dawson, who always waited until last and allowed Polly to go before him, probably in the hope that he might grab a glimpse of her tits as she stepped out of the bus.
Seymour was still in bed, his thoughts chaotically rolling around in his head, doing his best to avoid the inevitable conclusion. Get a job. The very suggestion made him shake. It wasn't work itself that concerned him so much: when he was on a roll he'd been known to keep going for hours, even days without a break. But that was different. That was his work. But being a cog in some meaningless machine that droned on and on, with all those other cogs beside and above him, never below him, endlessly spinning? Lunch boxes, tea breaks, pin-up girls, overalls, clocking on, clocking off, canteens, dirty jokes, stinking toilet cubicles, bus-stop queues with people who looked like they were waiting to be shot. He'd experienced it all first- hand on a careers information school trip once.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ whispered Seymour, desperately burying his head under the pillow.
'Hang on, hang on, don't get hysterical. There is a solution, Seymour. You've just got to think it through. One step at a time. OK?' Seymour's head slowly emerged from the pillow and nodded to the voice inside.
'Right. Now think about it! How about if you split right now, before this thing gets really messy?'
'Yeah, right,' thought Seymour, considering the notion.
'What have you got to lose? Nothing! Remember what Bob Dylan said? “When you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose.”
‘Well, look how well he's done for himself! Right. Now where can you go? Friend's house, maybe?’
‘Um, friends, friends. Now, let me think. Tracy maybe? No, last he'd heard she'd been evicted from the bus station and it was now a club called The Buzz station. OK, go overseas for a while, yeah, have a break from all this. Oh, that's right, no money. See? Fucking money again!’
Seymour slammed his hands down on the bed, sending another waft of Polly from under the sheets. Turning onto his side he curled his body into the foetal position, his eyes clamped shut. Bizarre squirming ideas popped into his head, ranging from suicide to becoming a milkman. Quite by accident he slipped into a deep sleep, waking occasionally throughout the morning, but not for long. Being awake only made things complicated.
Polly always delayed going into the administration building for as long as possible and sat on a park bench overlooking the meticulously maintained front lawn which had been laid to honour the memory of the company's founder, Henry Hogarth. The lawn was about half the size of a tennis court. A flower bed around its perimeter glowed with sickly colours which nature must have been corrupted to produce. In the centre was a huge soot-stained stone monument with a bust of the stern-looking old man on top, surrounded by a cast-iron fence. There was some kind of script engraved in its base, which was hard to read due to the years of grime accumulated from the heavy traffic and billowing toxic fumes from the Hogarth chimneys. Polly had tried to make out the inscription a couple of weeks before by peering through the bars of the fence, but had been stopped by the panicked shrill of the security guard's whistle. It was, she discovered, strictly forbidden to go anywhere near the monument for anybody except the gardener and senior management. ‘Why on earth can’t I have a look at it?’ Polly had asked. The security guard told her that somebody had written certain insulting words on the monument during a strike three or four years before. ‘What did it say?’ Polly had asked.
‘Well, let's just say it sort of crudely described a lady's toilet parts,’ whispered the guard from behind his hand, pointing out a particularly clean spot on the otherwise filthy stone.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Polly, pointing vaguely at her groin. ‘What, you mean, you know, down there?’
‘That's right,’ said the guard.
‘And was he?’ asked Polly.
‘What?’ said the guard.
‘Well. You know, a vagina,’ said Polly. ‘Looks more like a prick to me.’
; Company loyalty was considered to be vital at Hogarth's and Polly hoped her file would now be stamped 'traitor' and therefore put her first in line for the constantly feared but generously compensated redundancies.
Polly watched the rest of the staff dutifully file in through the main door of the office, a filthy Germanic-style monster of a building designed, she thought, by a man with a little dick and big ideas.
Their walking pace was always eager, similar to that of a pursued ostrich, and their facial expressions like those of a bad shoplifter. They were always early but never, ever as early as the office manager Mr. Arnold. She had never seen him arrive, or leave come to that.
As the minute hand of the huge clock on the front of the building flicked onto five to nine, Seymour popped into her head. She smiled. Lucky bastard would probably still be in bed, and despite her still smouldering fury with him, the hell that surrounded her at that moment softened her feelings. She'd said some pretty heavy things to him lately and for a second she regretted them. Still, she had to be tough and stand her ground with this thing. The row wasn't over some pathetic domestic thing like not washing up or other vital things. No, this was serious stuff. They'd made a deal and now it was time for him to take over the task of breadwinner and that was final.
Getting up from the bench she ambled over to the main doors. Those damn doors. They were dampened self-closing doors that would, if you weren't careful, beat you back out again, throw you to the floor and pin you down in a full nelson. What she hated most about this place was the fact that for the privilege of entering this god damned hell-hole, she had to fight these fucking doors.