How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Yes. It is a pleasure, putting on a coat, midday, mid-week, and walking to the cairn at the summit of the old corpse road. It’s a joy, being in his workable home, with its mismatched, notched crockery and under-door draughts, the brisk accessible kettle and the sagey deodorant of Lydia lingering if she’s just passed through the room. But he’s earned the bastard lot! He’s earned it with dedication, long hours, lost weekends, rejections, ridicule, out-of-voguery, and taking an enormous bloody punt and being nifty with a brush and sticking at it. Dues have been paid. He’s risked a risky profession, and it’s paid off. And for that he is proud, and for that he doesn’t mind Rob Robertson’s playful rebuke. It’s not like he hasn’t worked a million shitty jobs before the only one he ever wanted eventually became his. Barkeep, road sweeper, sausage packer, cleaner, fly and lure seller, bastard rent collector, toyboy. Not like he hasn’t been skint as a rag-and-bone man. Not like he isn’t intimately acquainted with the fag end of the country’s social order-the weak broth, the pneumoconiosis, the booze, the glory-hole of working class solidarity.

  But. He’s not complaining. Not today anyway. Not with this gilding, long summer light, and the promise of severe, photogenic shadows in the ravine. Sitting behind a sloppy armada of cows is not much to have to contend with really. He is a patient man. He is accustomed. He’s groovy.

  Fed up with itself, the car stalls. He turns the engine over a couple of times until it fires. A dirty tubercular cough splutters from the exhaust pipe. Rob Robertson looks back over his shoulder and the wall-top rooks swivel their beaky faces to admonish the disgraceful noise. Haughty buggers–they’d have his eyes out too given half a chance! On the moor, foxgloves are rising from the charred ruins of the bushes that have been burnt back, and the whin smells sweet. Cuckoo-pint is growing along the slopes of the vallum. He wonders if the nettles are too tough now to make a pudding–he’s had a recipe stuffed in a drawer in the studio for years that he’d like to try. So many things still to do, eh Peter. ‘There’s no such thing as ennui, except for the lobotomised,’ he tells Susan and Danny when they complain about being bored. He’s never bored. Although these cows are beginning to test his chipper reserves.

  Lydia’s red VW is trundling back over the road in the distance. At a fair old lick is how his wife drives. Round the corner by the farmyard she comes, over the cattle-grid with a loud metal thrum, over that bump where the concrete kinks–the car pitches sharply up, and quickly nods down. ‘Oooh, the suspension! Careful, love!’ There’s the whingeing of brakes, and then she’s lost from sight on the other side of the black-and-white herd.

  Lydia accompanies him on trips out sometimes, now the kids are self-sufficient and mostly elsewhere. Together they travel light, carrying small rucksacks of equipment instead of papooses. If he’s walking up a fell, she’ll sometimes join him, or she’ll cut down to the nearest waterway in search of rarities, taking her camera with her. Other days he leaves her to her own machinations at home, carried out under the cover of chores, behind the tent of bright cottons on the washing line or in amongst the jams. ‘I think I’ll mooch about at home today’, she’ll say, her grey eyes already mulching paper in a bucket or stripping varnish from a salvaged bureau as they look up at him. ‘Right-o, cheerio, love, good luck with the japanning,’ he’ll say, planting a big clumsy kiss on her face that misses her lips and squashes her nose.

  When he gets back she’ll have developed a roll of photographs in the pantry; they’ll be dripping chemicals on to the floor, drumming the wax-paper lids of jars. The vegetable patch will be dark with freshly turned sods, carrots left clarty in the sink for him to scrub. She’ll have added denim patchwork pieces to his holey dungarees, or expanded the quilt hanging in the little upstairs room that used to be Susan’s, and is Susan’s again until she moves, along with prosaically blacking the hearth and splitting kindling. He never knows where she finds the time for everything.

  He suspects, no, let’s be honest, he knows, that it’s not him Susan gets her organising skills from–her tidiness and productivity–and her natural instinct for dark rooms. He and Danny can’t stand that whole thing–the claustrophobia, the shrewy optics, the tortuous pong. But the Caldicutt women seem immune. Already their daughter is attracting attention with her work, has walked straight into the best art school in the country, has received a decent amateur prize with which she has bought a classy camera. Clever lass. She is what her brother calls the brains of the operation. Why is it then he worries most about her? Why doesn’t he stress so much about Danny, who is, like his old man, a drop-out, who has been in gentle trouble with the law for possession and distribution of the herb, who is as flaky as chocolate and has decided to steward the summer music festivals and live like a pauper for the rest of the year? She’s the one on the fast track, off to Goldsmiths any day now. She’s the one with ambition, the gumption, the get-up-and-go. Why then does he worry about the pull of her strings?

  Movement. Suddenly the road up ahead is visible. The cows have docked in the corrugated shed. There’s Lydia in her scarlet bug, revving it up, spinning grit. He puts the car into sticky forward gear and pulls away with a squeal. The doomsday hares, having returned to the road like the plague, scarper again. His wife, sitting with plenty of air between her spine and the seat, holds her hand up and zips by him. ‘How was yoga?’ he calls.

  Five o’clock at the Gelt ravine. He parks on the verge above, skirts round the edge of the crags and sets his caddy down on a shelf of rock. This time of year the darkness in the crevices has the consistency of creosote as shadows spool into the valley below. The face of the gorge is like a gothic portrait, like the Sargent painting of Stevenson. It makes him think about Donald, with his long hair worn over his face to cover the scars from the accident on the roof with the bitumen. He’s often wondered how it must have felt, to have his skin scalded off like that. Terrible. Medieval. Poor old Donald. It took years for him to start going out in public again, and then he insisted on using his brown locks to mask the damage. Even longer for him to start doing readings again. The burn has healed well over the years; when he tucks his hair behind his ear, Peter can see the slow, yellow recovery. But the damage is vast. Donald doesn’t drive, not because he’s a woolly poet, but because his right eye is missing, and he has no depth perception.

  Maybe he’ll phone him later to see if he and Caron want a pint in the Jerry. It’ll be a nice night to sit out and get mildly loaded and shoot the breeze. Maybe Lydia and the kids will come too and they can all roll home and have a nightcap. He’ll open a new bottle of elderflower. Yeah, he could fancy a pint or two after this. The charcoal’s feeling nice in his hand, fast and loose, and it’s leaving true lines. The wind along the crag ripples the page, and he reaches for a clip from the caddy to hold it down.

  Sing once again with me, our strange duet.

  Phantom of the bloody Opera. The funny thing is, Donald’s never written about any of it, and this has always surprised Peter. You would expect a writer to draw from such an experience. You’d expect there to be some kind of formal quarrel with what happened, a step into the hazelled ground. At the readings, Peter watches the audience, wonders what they think about that avalanched cheek and inflexible glass orb; whether they have any idea what his scalp looks like under his hair. They never ask. They applaud the ones about snooker and sex. He signs their copies.

  Such stark light. He’s caught it on the page–in the slashed fissures and pockmarks, in the crags. Yes. It is a strange profession, the seduction of stone, the attempt to relocate a mountain on to canvas. ‘It’s all geology, Petie,’ is what his old man would probably say. ‘It might not be dollying coal up on conveyors, but the principle’s the same.’ His levelling, lucid father. With the cough that would seem to last for ever, but would cut the man down in a year, halfway through his fifth decade. God bless the black-lunged, shafted miners.

  Now the light is tilting. Maybe there’s a better angle to be had. He pockets the charcoal stick and slips the sket
chpad inside his shirt, snug against his belly. He leaves the caddy tucked into the alcove of the shelf. Down in the crevice might be best, looking up at the giant. He begins to climb down, dropping over the outcrops, his boot tips slotting into the ledges. It’s a nice feeling in his muscles–the hold, the stretch–though he can feel the morning’s run in his legs. But he could probably make this descent blindfolded, he’s done it so many times. Down, down, twenty feet, thirty. Not too taxing a climb. Not really as sheer as it looks. Soon the grade becomes flatter, opening out into a tumbled skirt of scree and big shingle. He jumps from rock to rock in the bottom of the gorge.

  Manoeuvres like this would make Lydia twitchy if she found out about them. ‘You’re not a young buck any more, darling,’ she’d say. ‘What if you lost your balance? What if you slipped and fell and broke your back?’ But heights have never bothered him; if they had, he wouldn’t have managed to fashion the extreme landscapes he has. Clambering about on the summits and ridges feels like second nature–you can’t explain this to someone for whom it’s just plain hairy. He doesn’t have the phobic urge to topple over into the rushing chasm. He doesn’t get the fear. And if he slipped and fell and broke his back, well, it’d be a damn sight preferable to being rear-ended by cancer, or making that long, map-less walk into dementia. In fact, it’s how he’d like to go, given the choice. Not something your cautious wife wants to hear of course. It’s better to let her see a safely finished painting rather than reveal exactly where he made the studies from; which heavenly, inaccessible pinnacle; which granite eyrie.

  He retrieves the pad from his smock, now a little damp at the edges with perspiration. A few more quick sketches, then that’ll be him. A good day’s work. The sun sinks on the horizon, crowning the upper striation of the gorge with fierce light.

  He removes the clip, flicks back through images. Perfect. Enough. Time to head home now for a nice tea and then a few pints. He stows the pad inside his shirt, makes his way back over the scree. There’s nothing like it, this demob pleasure that comes after accomplishing a task. The giddy satisfaction, feelings of affection for the world. Probably just as good as moving the cows, eh, Mr Robertson. Yeah. They can think he’s nutty. They can think he’s a slacker. This is what it boils down to: knowing you’ve done something useful. Feeling elated and useful, feeling spritely and sure-footed. Feeling the ground beneath you is just.

  Then again, the ground beneath him right now feels quite the opposite. It feels infirm; it feels loose. There is a strange sensation, of movement, of motion. The big, lichen-backed stone under his left foot is shifting, rotating. He can hear it grinding rubble as it rolls, tipping him sideways. Given that no one is around to attend to his reaction, it feels absurdly unnecessary when he hears himself say, ‘Woah.’ Time seems bizarrely roomy while this stone-back rodeo is in progress. There is time enough to register a few thoughts. The idea of an earthquake. The striking of flint in the gorge. Lydia, that day she held her finger to her lips and pointed to a stag by the river with bloody velvets. ‘Do you see it, Peter?’ He tries to jump, but the rock has already moved too far. His boot slips. He feels a grazing sting, hears a crack.

  It takes an additional epic second for his mind to process the results.

  His left leg has been fed into a slim channel between two boulders. The roller has come to a halt above his ankle, no, against his ankle. He has been cast awkwardly to the side and is half kneeling. There is the painful realisation that the accident is bad, then just pain–not ordinary pain, but something vivid and coruscating, as first his shocked silence, then his nauseous whimper, then his primal bellowing attests to. And though an instinctual physiological directive is telling him to get out of the trench, to extract himself pronto from the bite of the rock jaws, he cannot. Because after another deranged few moments of slapping the leg, and yanking it, and trying to lever the raw shin this way and that, excruciatingly, ball-witheringly, it is apparent these are objets d’occlusion, it is apparent that he is, well and truly, trapped. Peter, Peter, Peter.

  The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni

  The strongest perfume of all the flowers on the market stall is that of the lilies. The scent has something lush and unsteadying about it. Uncle Marcello prides himself on the successful hot-housing of such flora. He has strains that are very difficult to raise in the soil here. Annette must be careful when handling the lilies–their pollen is worn tremulously and the smallest knock or brush could dislodge it and stain her clothing or the clothing of customers. The strokes of orange and yellow are impossible to remove. When they are in season the lilies have a curious effect. They breathe their scent over everything, their long dusted tongues panting the aroma. The perfume is insistent, a soprano pitch, which lifts above the rest of the bouquets. It tingles the bridge of Annette’s nose when she leans close, making her hands and neck feel soft, like the time Uncle Marcello gave her a tumbler of nocino to sip.

  Those who buy lilies behave in a way that suggests dreaminess. They sigh. They sing and hum under their breath. They make unwitting noises, as if enjoying a delicious plate of food. They flirt. All around them are the notes of a peculiar kind of love. Perhaps, if flowers are blessings of God as her mother suggests, the lily serves a different function to the virtuous rose. White lilies are for annunciation and grace, such as the angel offered to the Madonna. But the stargazers and the tigers are vivid and exotic, their shapes and colours voluptuous, and their fragrances intoxicating.

  Her mother does not keep lilies in Castrabecco, as she keeps cuttings of other flowers. She finds them extravagant and inappropriate. She says they are too expensive to waste. The white ones are for church, and the others are suitable only for the bordello. Her mother has opinions about the inappropriateness of many things. She has opinions about Annette’s unruly hair braids, about the scandalous price of renting their stall, and the money-raking of the cooperatives, the council and the government. She has things to say about the attire of President Saragat, and the political mistresses. Her firmest opinions are always about what is moral and what is not. And yet she does not often leave the house. She does not investigate for herself the corruptions of Italy, but prefers to read about them at the kitchen table.

  Maurizio brings her newspapers and fashion magazines, which she tuts over. Annette will often asks her mother to read to her, but she prefers not to read things out loud, only to comment on the terrible state of things, on the infidelities, the actresses and lipsticks, and the hundreds and thousands of refrigerators leaving the country versus the lack of refrigeration in their own house. ‘We are perfectly cool,’ Uncle Marcello says. ‘The flowers do not suffer, why should we? Wouldn’t you rather have a television, Rosaria?’

  Uncle Marcello spends approximately three-quarters of his life at the greenhouses and the growing plots, according to Tommaso, who has recently begun to calculate fractions in his schoolbook. Sometimes Uncle Marcello sleeps in the gardens, on a low wooden pallet between trellises, and other times he sleeps at Castrabecco. He arrives at mealtimes with dirty fingernails, which Annette’s mother does not like, and shares his ideas for new strains of flowers he hopes to create. Frequently he arrives with sample sketches of crosspollinations to show them, and Annette wishes she could see the drawings, the lavish hypothetical hybrids that Uncle Marcello will attempt to engineer with medical depressors and cookery utensils; the colours of the bells and the petals he will try to reverse. ‘Can you imagine what would happen,’ he asks, ‘if the fuchsia was released from its red and purple collar? How beautiful it would be if it were the colour of an English primrose. So light. A little angel or a fairy.’

  He owns many books on the subject, and he also owns a scientific microscope, which he keeps in the small brick office of the greenhouses, which Maurizio is not allowed to use, because he is bullish, but Annette may adjust if Uncle Marcello is present to assist. While Mauri shovels clods of earth and prepares troughs, Annette and her uncle sometimes examine the secret infinitesimal beauty of pla
nts, their heads close together over the device, Uncle Marcello’s hair resting crisply against Annette’s cheek. She cannot see exactly what is clipped to the stage under the objective lenses. The details are too small and precise, and the iris diaphragm arranges the light too intensely for her pupils. But her uncle will describe the specimen, putting his eye to the ocular piece and his warm calloused hand over hers on the coarse focus. His long middle finger gently revolves the fine focus. On the glass plate, he tells her, are delicate filaments and farina, pollens like star clusters and intimate tissues, blushing pigments and freckled crevices. These are descriptions which sound to Annette like the alien creatures in the space films Mauri watches, like those moist, tendrilled, protuberant things, programmed to find humans, breed with them and build new colonies, according to Hollywood.

  When they have finished, Uncle Marcello cleans the aperture, the lenses, and the stage, with a special cloth kept in the microscope case. Then the device is lifted away and stowed below the desk.