How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Yes, yes, they say, and they turn to personal matters. What then of the Madonna and her tradition? The holy mother of us all, with a dead child in her arms? What of your wife?

  They expect confession. They sense the frailty of old age. What might I say in the end that they do not already know? That no one believed the race manifesto. That Colonel Segre shot himself with his service pistol. That Dina sang ‘Giovinezza’ and gave away her wedding ring. That she donated once to the Zionist cause, and was born in the Jewish ghetto. That she had no baptismal certificate but was a patriot, loving Italy as I loved Italy. That I returned one day to find her missing, and neither the popular rejection nor the fifty kilograms of gold could save her. That our trains used to travel slowly north, and at the junctions they altered their courses.

  In Il Libro dell’Arte, Cennini teaches us how to paint wounds, using unalloyed vermilion as the base, and lac resin applied sparingly, so the blood continues to shine. To look inside those red windows at the Uffizi today is to witness five-hundred-year-old pain as if it were a harm committed today. In these preparatory passages there is also a section on how to paint a dead man. I have often wondered if the condition of death is perhaps less grave to the human anatomy than physical injuries. For in death there is release from suffering. Sadly, the master craftsman is unable to instruct us in the healing of wounds.

  The Fool on the Hill

  Here it comes again. The fire in his calf muscle, the hot instrument being pushed up his femur, through the sinew, up into his scrotum, up into his abdomen. The searing makes him clench and unclench his fists, clutch the boulders and lean away from the vice of stone as if away from the pain itself. He grinds his teeth, counts through it. One, two. Threefourfive. Six. Seven. Breathe. Breathe, Peter. Come on, get the air down. Eight, nine. Breathe, you fucker. Pant as if in childbirth, lion-inhale like Lydia does in yoga. It’ll pass. It’ll pass as it did before, a minute ago.

  Already it’s going, see, already those burning lances are being withdrawn slowly down the leg, retracted back into the ankle. The pain is going, and with it the internal wildness, the violent mania, the desire to demonically vomit. OK, then. Good. Good. Calm. Better. Now he can think again. Now he can focus.

  How long has he been here, pinned like this? Maybe forty-five minutes now? An hour? It’s hard to say. It feels like longer, though the lurid intensity hasn’t waned. Maybe less time then–twenty minutes? The light has gone from the top of the ravine wall and the floor of the gulley is in shadow. The blue of the sky has graduated from navy at its highest point to palest blue on the horizon. If he twists round to face the flatter side of the cutting–not too far round or the leg will start up again–he can see one or two stars, just the faintest glimmer. One is moving-a comet, or a plane perhaps-and beyond it, acres of freedom.

  It’s difficult to get comfortable. The stuck leg has thrown him into an awkward angle. The foot’s not quite down on the ground, at least he doesn’t think it’s touching, but he doesn’t want to try moving it again: it’s too fragile. The other leg is having to compensate, bent up on the boulder or set down in the trench behind the other, though neither position is helpful. At best he can only lean against the rocks, taking his weight on to one buttock. He can’t sit properly or alter the bend of the trapped knee. And he can’t get a clear view of the point of imprisonment; he can’t really assess the damage. The withers of the boulders are in the way, the light is fading quickly and it’s too dark down there.

  Not that he really wants to see the injury–the thought of it is enough to make him feel queasy, and make his mind start running crazy. Is it a break? Crush injury or open fracture? Oh Christ, is it a partial fucking amputation? Is the foot dangling loose on just a thread or two of skin, like an uncooked sausage, the tendon severed and recoiling up the back of his leg? Oh fuck! Is he going to lose it and be a cripple? He’ll have to get a prosthetic for the stump. He’ll have to use a wheelchair. No more running. No more climbing, or even bloody walking properly. How many operations? He hates hospitals. All that suffering and hopelessness. His mum in her incontinent dementia. His dad coughing up black chunks into a kidney dish, rotting inside like an old log.

  Knock it off, Peter! Don’t think like that. Don’t rush to the worst conclusion. Be sensible. It’ll be a broken bone, clean and simple. Well, maybe not clean, but mendable. It’ll be ten weeks in plaster with a pair of nifty crutches and a bolted joint, and a very good excuse to drink shinny by the fire all day. Soon he’ll be telling war stories in the pub, and showing off a magnificent, grinning scar. He’ll be embellishing the tale for Susan and Danny–how he hopped all the way round the gorge to the car (a good mile), how it was very lucky the car only had one forward gear so he didn’t have to keep using the clutch, destiny some might say, blah blah. Now. He’s got to think. He should try shouting again. ‘Helllooooo? Heeellllllllooooo?’ His voice booms and echoes in the ravine. Someone will hear that, they’re bound to. This isn’t the Langdales or the Scottish Highlands. It’s not Snow-bloody-donia. He isn’t miles from civilisation, even though the population round here is sparse. Kids out roaming about. A man walking his dog before bed. A farmer on a quad bike. Someone will hear.

  The wind lilts softly between the walls. It is cool down in the dark cleft of the gorge. A lapwing calls from its nest on the moorland beyond. Peter concentrates, collects himself. He turns his upper body clockwise and puts his palms against the boulder that originally moved, the smaller of the two collaborators. He braces the free leg on the ground and bends. The sketchpad under his shirt sticks into his ribs, so he retrieves it, places it to the side, and sets himself up again. He heaves. He gives it everything he’s got. The veins on his forehead begin to bulge. Then, half a roar, the involuntary product of his vocal cords. Come on. Move. Roll. Roll it over, Sisyphus.

  But it’s useless. The rock will not shift. He can’t get a good enough position to throw his full weight into the move. He relaxes, breathes out, looks down at the grey, lumpen back. It’s big. Must weigh two hundred pounds at least? OK. OK then. Lateral thinking, inverse physics. He will have to try pulling.

  He looks at his palms, anaemic from the pressure of pushing, and flaps blood back into his hands. He turns his body anticlockwise, redistributes his free leg, and slips his fingers into the depressions of the rock. He gathers his energy. But then, oh hell, it’s starting up again–that gory pain. He straightens, stays still, swallows a mouthful of bile. His ankle is on fire. Some fucker is scraping a knife up the bone, beginning to drive it higher into the kneecap. Please, he whispers, please, no. No! It’s much worse this time. Like gunpowder lit in a wound. Like electricity passing through a bullet hole. Oh God. Please make it stop. It is appalling. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Why is he apologising?

  He feels suddenly a desperate urge to piss. He scrambles a hand to his fly but it meets with thick, impenetrable material. No way in, he’s in his overalls. He will have to unclip the fastening on his shoulders, and quickly. The clasps jam. He tugs them open, shrugs the denim down around his hips. He grasps his cock, and aims away over the litter of stones. Thank God. Better. The leg begins to fade. It feels like he’s pissing out the pain. The stream of warm urine splatters on the top of the rocks. He hoses them down. Fuck you, you bastards.

  Pulling won’t work either. Even though it feels like the power in his arms and back is greater, still he can’t throw himself into it. The thing won’t budge. Each time he has tried the pain has returned, more and more inflamed. He will have to get comfortable, keep yelling, and hope someone comes. Darkness is flushing into the sky, like ink into water. What time is it? Time for everyone to be inside. The chances of discovery are slim really. A more susceptible mind might panic now. A weaker disposition might turn hysterical. He will have to centre himself, be Zen. He will have to meditate, or attempt to–he’s never actually tried before–and let his purified mind manage the situation. Lydia has described this state to him, and he has paid attention, sort of. A releasing of anxiety, a w
hitening, she says, then answers and forbearance arrive. How hard can it be?

  So. Empty, empty, empty. What can he think about?

  Such a bloody shame! The day started so well, what with the run, and the pretty light, and the feeling of contentment, and the kids both being home. And a good day’s work too, which is not always the case. He’s not always so ethical. Even removed from the conventional systems, he knows he must turn his hand to something useful, but too often does not. Often he is lazy. Often he procrastinates, distracts himself, and fiddles on, while a voice in his head tells him he is wasteful, he is wretched. Then he becomes desultory. He becomes blacker than obsidian–consumed by guilt and worthlessness. ‘Men should set to, as soon as they’ve digested their food’ was one of his father’s old adages. And ‘A good plumb line is the working mind’, whatever that one meant.

  But there are days in the studio when he drinks nothing but homebrew and smokes too much pinch and can’t hold down a conversation about anything with his wife, and he is, well, the foulest git. She’s thrown him out before, and thrown a heel of bread into the lane after him, slamming the door like she wants the house to come down around her. It takes a lot, but lovely placid Lydia can be riled. Her inner banshee can be summoned. And then she is quite simply terrifying, and must be left alone to re-metamorphose. So he’ll spend the night on the fells. It isn’t purely punishment for the domestic malady. Lydia knows what will jolt him out of a filthy mood. She knows the tonic properties of spry grass under his backside and hedgerow foraging, the peating back over of campfires at sun-up. She knows him.

  After the off-the-Richter-scale booming of the front door, he’ll rove about, huffing and coughing like a disgruntled ram, then he will light out into the hills. He’ll walk for hours, tossing away the bread in fury, and picking it up again. He’ll aim to get some height, altitudinally if not morally, then he’ll select a divot between granite slabs and chuck himself down.

  Once settled, his mental torments are indulged fully. He will ruminate, tracking back through the years, revisiting other women, bad events, and disappointments, old arguments, while the sky passes grey-white overhead, and buzzards drift upwards on the aerial thermals. He will lament his lost talent, his pathetic life, and his unbearable lot. He will wonder why he should go on living. He will know, balls to bone, that a more miserable bastard than he there never was.

  And then he’ll remember that he likes looking up. It reminds him of Lydia, when they first met, on her back in the fields of Lanercost Priory, facing an enormous teal dusk and the endlessness of space with such amity. She was clicking the number of bats departing the ruins with a thumb-counter. How lovely she was, with her halo of brown hair on the ground. How inspiring was her calmness.

  Peter was aggravated that day. He was explosively angry, possibly only a few ventricle pumps away from premature coronary. A public arts meeting in the North-East he’d attended had dissolved into ridiculous back-tracking, funding had been pulled, his preliminary work for the project rendered useless. Doomed from the start, of course–art to fix a fucked-up town. A civic car-park mural–what a joke. He was offered his petrol money back, though he’d stormed out before recouping it. The commission was his first British endeavour after leaving America, and on top of all the other recent galactic failures it was simply too much.

  The arterial route home was heaving with traffic, so he’d got off on to the old military road and gone into Roman ruin country. By Birdoswald his car was juddering, and at Banks the shredded tyre had started to slap the ground like a bested wrestler. When he got out to inspect it, he’d found the wheel rim stripped. He’d hoofed the car door, and begun to march ahead, furiously, hoping to hitch somewhere down the line, or catch the last train at Brampton, then stop over in Carlisle with a friend. But, given the supreme arsery of the day, he suspected he’d have to walk all the way.

  It always surprised him whenever he saw the priory’s gothic frame, ruined and grizzled at one end, robust and functioning at the other, like a living thing that refused to die, even though its back end was already decomposing. The apple trees in the old quarter-garden were laden with big crisp globes–their branches were bowed over with fruit–and unholy fury had given him an appetite. There were a couple of cars parked outside by the massive stud door, the chance of a ride maybe, so he’d decided to investigate.

  She was in a group of six voluntary bat watchers stationed around the monastery. She was lying not far away from the river and the heavy Cumbrian evening was balanced on the tip of her nose. Her brow was rippled, her eyes rolled up to the heavens. ‘Lie down,’ she’d suggested, and he’d dropped down next to her. ‘Two hundred and nineteen, or eighteen,’ she said. ‘They’re quick. Don’t confuse them with swifts. Here.’ She passed him the counter and let her elbow rest on his arm. Above–an incalculable, endless space, under which he’d felt microbial and strangely calm. He could smell the wild rhubarb down by the river, its red-and-green leaves tart and starchy, and the river itself. Click. ‘Two-twenty.’

  Lydia. His marrow. His marra.

  Is she starting to worry now, he wonders? Is this later than he usually gets home? Usual. But there is no usual. Unusual is usual where Peter Caldicutt is concerned. If he stays out all night, it isn’t a novelty; it doesn’t signify crisis or calamity, infidelity or abduction. He could be walking Helvellyn by moonlight with the Patterdale walking group. He could be sleeping it off on Donald’s couch, or hunting rabbits on the estate. She will simply expect to see him the next day, smoked and sooty from his bonfire, crow’s-feet stark white from squinting into the flames. She will expect to have to trim his beard where he has singed it by blowing too close to the embers, and they will laugh about the terrible smell–that awful tannic fume–which will remind them of the lacquered bouffants of the girls in school going up when they leant too close to the Bunsen flames. Remember those days?

  Suddenly he can’t help thinking about the abattoirs. He worked there for a few months, ten years ago, when the outbreak happened. He never got used to watching the creatures react to the smell of their own kind being burned. The bulging of panicked eyes in the fleecy trailers. The plaintive bleating. The sudden mayhem that ensued, legs and horns breaking as the poor creatures tried to jump through the gaps in the trailer bars. He can’t help thinking about it now, here, with his leg held fast, and the incendiary pain licking up the muscle again.

  When the light turns negative he can still see, but only in a loose, nocturnal way. The air around thickens. He is certain no one will hear him now when he shouts. ‘Heelloooo. Down heeeere. I’m huuurt,’ his voice booming in the stadium of the ravine. All the dogs are walked. Children are watching telly in bed, or sleeping. Someone might be out for a late-night romp in their car, but with the heavy breathing and the clambering between seats it is doubtful they will be paying attention to what’s outside in the dark. He will have to work himself free somehow, or be patient, stay put until dawn, and hope he is found. The madman’s curse, sleeping out under the stars-that’s what they used to say about the navvies-and though he has always loved it, he does not tonight. Tonight everything is wrong. The scree is silent, but within the silence the ground crackles and chimes, skitters and ticks. In the ravine, the wind is hawing between the channels of boulders, and there is the eerie percussion of little stones rolling over in supplication, like stag beetles under the moon. And he does not like this lonely quarry sonata at all.

  No, she will not worry yet. His absence is not alarming, and is never held against him. Those nights he stays out, if Lydia is gone the next morning about her business or to the Mill café with a friend, there’s always a new loaf of bread set out on the table for the prodigal husband.

  The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni

  The church of San Lorenzo smells of cherry wood and juniper smoke. In the cool solemnity is the ancient mortuary perfume of old women and the dripping baptismal tears of little babies. As Annette approaches the altar she feels the evil gaze upon her,
compelling her face to tilt upwards, instead of down into the position of sacramental humility. The priest clears his throat. He administers the body of Christ, which tastes of bulrushes. The host dissolves on her tongue, cobwebs between her teeth, vanishing as if it were never there. She prays for her mother, for Uncle Marcello and her brothers, including Vincenzo, who has emigrated to South America, and Andrea in Turin.

  Father Mencaroni speaks of the fasting of Saint Catherine. How she took slow joy in the peeling of the orange, how she rubbed one segment of its flesh against her gums and teeth. How this simple ritual was enough for her. God’s devotion sustained her, he says, not mortal appetites. Mauri shuffles in the pew and sighs. He unwraps chewing gum inside his pocket and Annette hears the wet popping of his jaw as he begins to work it. He reaches over and tickles Annette’s arm, then pinches it. ‘Quick, Tarantella, dance, dance!’ he whispers. Tommaso is kicking his shoes together and giggling. Somebody in the pew behind shushes them.