Everyone commented on the resemblance between my mother and myself. There’s no doubt whose son you are, Aunt Luce always exclaimed emphatically, when she had not seen me for several weeks. And we were strikingly alike: short, straight, blonde hair, like a couple of Nordic heroes, pale freckled skins which burned easily, and the same grey-blue eyes. I looked into her face and saw the reassuring mirror of my own. All the hair on her body and on mine was ash-blonde, almost white. Our hands were slightly square. But by the time I was sixteen I could enclose her hand in my own. I was already as tall as she was. Our hands were the same shape, the same wide nails, the same fair skin, the same frank grip. She had painter’s hands, stained, strong hands, working hands. I loved watching her cleaning her brushes. They were expensive and she took good care of them. But these were the only things she ever cleaned carefully. From time to time I saw her scraping the thick chunk of glass she used for a palette and leaving huge, caked slabs of colour. My hands were smooth and untouched. I had the hands of a rich, spoilt woman. She had a man’s hands. Neither of us ever wore any jewellery, any rings.
I never had any pets. I never asked for rabbits or hamsters. Pets teach children the lessons of love and loss. I didn’t need them. She was enough. The smell of her body, a sharp, florid, tacky perfume and the eternal whiff of linseed oil, dominated the house. Until I was fourteen, fifteen, sometimes even well after that, she came to my room every night, to kiss me goodnight. I saw the shadow of her hair, the curving line of her smile, still marking her cheek, felt the cold prod of her nose as she bent to kiss me. She kissed me on the forehead, the cheek, the mouth, she ran her lips gently down the curve of my neck. I felt our likeness in the dark. She tasted of paint. Her breasts brushed heavy against my chest. Sometimes she lay down beside me and held me in her arms until I was asleep. Once when I awoke in the morning she was still there, shivering, fully dressed, her eyes gummed together with exhaustion, fighting me for possession of the duvet. We squabbled crossly as if we were both children.
We were often mistaken for brother and sister. A man in the car park asked us whether our parents had paid. In giggling conspiracy we disclaimed all knowledge as to where our parents had gone. Then she went shopping. I sat in the car and we saved 80p for two hours. I found our likeness reassuring, a promise that she would give me the recognition and love which I feared would not always, as of right, be mine.
I inherited her concentration and discipline; we could both occupy ourselves peacefully for hours without speaking. But I did not have her gift for laughter and I minded the mess she made. I tidied up after her. I did all the washing-up she left. I scrubbed the sink with Vim. I scoured the kitchen floor. Without me the kitchen would probably have become a health hazard filled with rotting food and crawling beasts. Sometimes, despite all my efforts, this happened anyway. When I did clean up she always kissed me, thanked me, but never changed her ways. Her room was a cavern of old clothes, abandoned washing, painting materials, scraps of cloth purloined from Aunt Luce for a collage experiment which didn’t work, and several huge buckets of coloured sand. She never made the bed. She once told Aunt Luce, who was amused rather than disapproving, that she only changed the sheets when she stuck to them. I changed mine once a week. I did all the washing. I loathed hanging out her clothes. I did this even if it was frosty, just to air them. I was afraid of her underwear, which I stuffed into the machine, one load once a month, and avoided examining too closely. I even disliked touching her wet jeans and shirts, smart ones for work, shabby ones for painting. In those days I was prim, prurient, afraid of her zest for grime. She seemed to love matter, textures, odours, liquids, slime, in quite physical and visceral ways. I was a little afraid of all those things.
* * *
In every way, the child of a gifted artist labours under a terrible disadvantage. You live under the shadow of a tidemark on the wall, an unobtainable level of excellence, which remains there, accusing, just out of reach. Everything you produce is derivative, worked in another’s colours. I never escaped the sensation that she was the original and I was the copy: second-hand, second-rate. I haunted her studio in order to be close to her. The room smelt of turpentine, linseed oil, glue, varnish and fixative. She had several huge chests, immovable, paint-spattered, which had been constructed to hold architectural drawings. These chests took up the entire wall backing onto the living room. They loomed out into the space. The handles of the drawers were often sticky with gum or wet paint mixed with sand. I was unable to open the drawers, which were too heavy for me when I was small. And when I was strong enough to peer into them I discovered that there was one which she kept locked.
She had a huge easel, but didn’t always use it; sometimes she just stuck paper up on the wall with masking tape and painted on that. Sometimes she leaned huge canvases against the structure and negotiated paint at knee-level. There was nothing mysterious about her methods. She spent a long time preparing her canvas in the traditional manner, with layers of rabbit’s foot glue, transparent substances, the texture of egg white. Then her ground wash, faint, light, pale, then her underpaint. Here she varied her colours. She never drew directly onto the canvas at all. She worked her designs in curtains of paint, each one falling over the canvas, layer after layer, deepening, changing. She soaked her brushes in plastic Vittel bottles with the tops chopped off. But these weren’t her only tools. The kitchen was next door to her studio. She used the kitchen knives, the fish slice, the pastry brushes, the rolling pin, sheets of tin, her bare hands and forearms, the tips of her fingers and her clenched fists. Once she unpicked her jeans and used the frayed bottoms to create a repeated, fan-shaped pattern. She worked with appalling, inflexible intensity, always on more than one canvas at once, the radio blaring on the window sill. She never worked in silence. She worked every day. Even when she came home, tired out from teaching. I admired her readiness to make herself filthy, but was alarmed by the fact that whatever she cooked tasted of acrylic, glue or turps. The paintings probably tasted of elderly food. I was never quite at ease with her carelessness. I could not resist eliminating the trails she left behind her.
Her style was described by sexist critics as masculine. Or at least, she said they were sexist. She worked on a grand scale; huge abstracts, dense, knotted surfaces, worked and reworked, the paint thick and edible. When I was small she sometimes allowed me to play with the paint on one corner of the canvas. Sometimes she integrated my ideas. I longed to become her apprentice, gazing up at the huge geometric masses, their shifting volumes and uncompromising, monolithic intensity. Whenever she sold a picture she took me out to dinner. Not to a local wine bar, tandoori or McDonald’s, but to an expensive restaurant in the city, with real white tablecloths and napkins, where the waiters spoke French and she ordered snails, sizzling in individual craters, like smoking bombs, the kind of restaurant where there was never any background music and everyone spent a long time gazing at huge ledgers with the wine list handwritten inside. No ordinary cheque card was ever sufficient to cover the bill and she paid with her American Express. Once there was a knife fight just outside. I remember the wail of police sirens and the manager losing his temper.
‘Shall we go and look?’ I demanded.
‘Nonsense. If somebody’s dead we can read all about it tomorrow. Look at your salmon. It’s much more important to eat well than to watch fights.’
Reluctantly, I attacked the fish.
‘Listen,’ she said, addressing my lust for the sensational directly, ‘I’d go on eating – no matter what. Even if History was passing in the street.’
I immediately envisaged History as a giant chariot, covered in garlands, with a mob trailing behind.
* * *
She taught part-time at the local art college. This was not a particularly distinguished institution, her colleagues were much given to espousing passing fads. One year everyone had to work with bricks and cardboard boxes. But a year later the apotheosis of modernity was sculptures in concrete. A group of Easte
r Island look-alikes on the same scale as the originals won the end-of-year award. They proved impossible to transport and became a permanent fixture outside the sculpture studio. Then they went out of fashion, and like much civic art, became an awesome and indestructible warning against temporary enthusiasms. They attracted graffiti, red rubber noses and giant penises during the festive season.
My mother was in charge of the painting studio. She was convinced by the ideology of art in the community, and even organized a live paint-in, which anyone could attend. The deeply courageous, a happy few among the public, actually took part. Much against the better judgement of her immediate boss, she set up several huge wall-painting projects along the motorway and in the shopping centre with her students. One of them caused a public scandal. It was a giant frieze of dancing, copulating couples, all uncannily alike. The design was censored for overt eroticism, rather than androgyny, quite unsuitable for a car-park wall overlooking the main entrance at Safeway, and had to be withdrawn. She reworked the plan, excising the frolicking nudes and including portraits of the local drug pushers in their silver Mitsubishis. The car park was one of their night haunts. There was a public phone box, which they used in the early days when they began to frequent the suburb. Later on, when they all had their own mobile phones, they still parked by the phone box, talking into their receivers. Thus the fresco became a surreal public icon, a tribute to the men selling death beneath their own warning images. Neither the public arts committee on the Tory council nor the dealers ever noticed. But her students knew. They were converts to her ideology. Her students loved her. She had a talent for subversion.
* * *
Aunt Luce told her, in my hearing, that if she was serious about being heterosexual, then she ought to find herself a man.
She had two affairs which I could remember, or knew about for certain. One man was a younger colleague at the college called Jo, who was there on a one-year teaching assistantship. He was tall, with spiky hair cut close, and rows of vicious-looking earrings rising up the side of his reddening lobes. He was her immediate junior colleague. She was supposed to be showing him the ropes. When she promoted him, very shortly after his arrival, to the official position of lover there was a muted frisson of scandal in the staff common room. He took to staying over on Friday and Saturday nights. I liked the new lover, who was cheerful, offhand and made the Weetabix lorry off the back of the packet to amuse me. Then Jo came home with a DIY kite in a box and we stitched it up so that it floated like a dragon over the bracken and horseshit on the common, with the three of us rushing after it, far below, tugging the invisible floating wire and shrieking. As a sexual presence Jo was good-natured, irresponsible. He walked about the house stark naked, to my astonished delight, referred to his penis as his ‘donger’ and played two of her reggae records, Black Uhuru and The Harder They Come, until they wore out. He helped me with my homework, and promised to take me to a punk concert, where the band pissed on the stage and then into the audience, but never did. I was bitterly disappointed.
Liberty liked him and Aunt Luce didn’t. He was never allowed to share the studio. He moved on to another college at the end of the year and rang once to say that he loathed it and that he missed us. Then we never heard from him again. She seemed a little sad for a week or so after his departure. There was more muttering in the staff common room. The scandal blew over, although, like all scandals, it was never quite forgotten.
The other lover was a more sinister affair. I can only just remember him. I must have been about four years old. Aunt Luce was never even allowed to know of his existence. He was never named, never mentioned. Sometimes I wondered if he had ever been there. He was an older man with a large car and a butterfly tattoo on his forearm. I caught sight of the tattoo on the first morning that the man was still there when I woke up. The man is shaving, with the bathroom door ajar. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs; a long, thin, converted corner of a much larger room. The moulded leaves of the cornice circle three sides of the walls, nuzzling the ceiling and nurturing cobwebs, then vanish suddenly into the blank, undecorated fourth wall. I stand, gazing at the light wavering across the walls, splintering against the cornice, guttering on the water in the bath. This is a very early memory. His mouth gapes as he draws the razor carefully across his upper lip. His forearms are dense with black hair and there, in the midst of the foliage, as if struggling free, is a butterfly, a dark blue butterfly with a touch of darkening red, thick lines, larger than life, shimmering in the watery light. This is what I remember, the man’s gaping mouth and the fluttering, extraordinary tattoo.
But I know, I have always known, that neither of these men is my father.
* * *
When you live, always, in the same house, with the same suburban landscape cradling your memories, one year becomes another. It is hard to remember whether it was that year, the same year I bought my first bicycle, the year the willow tree blew down and the men came to cut it up with chainsaws, and it was rotten inside, crumbling, yellow dust, and how extraordinary that it hadn’t blown down before. I measured out my life not in years, but in events. That was the year of the art teacher lover and the dragon kite. That was the year she bought a new car, with a handout from Aunt Luce, second-hand, but new really. When I was five the neighbour’s daughter asked me to lick that suggestive pink slit between her legs. And further back, that was the year of the man with the butterfly tattoo, the year my mother sold three of the giant blood-red monoliths and I drank a whole half-glass of champagne. I remember that year.
That was how I remembered things.
There were some things to which I could attach a precise date, a date like a luminous marker, an orange buoy on a grey sea. Some dates I planned in advance. I made a pact with myself. I would ask her when I was twelve. I would ask her on her birthday. She was born on August 1st. We were always on holiday for her birthday. And because we were never at home, but in exceptional circumstances, it was easier to make exceptional demands. And to the mysterious Oedipal question – who was my father? – when I had no birthmarks, no memories, no purple swaddling to identify my origins, the reply was bound to be exceptional. But she responded by breaking all the classical rules. She laughed. She shouted with laughter. She hugged me. She unsteadied my dignity while I wobbled in red shorts: pompous, egotistical, righteous, white-faced, demanding my rights, the right to know, the right to identity, the birthright, my inheritance.
But she laughed and laughed, her straight gold hair, her breasts, laughing, shaking.
Then she declared that she had often wondered if I was ever going to ask directly and had considered proposing the Archangel Gabriel. No, my father was quite real. She giggled a little more. I felt utterly ridiculous.
‘He was much older than I was, very sexy, rich and married. I never met his wife. But I noticed his wedding ring.’
‘Do I resemble my father?’
‘No, mercifully, not at all. You look like me.’
‘Have I ever met my father?’
‘No, not to my knowledge. You never have.’
‘Do you still see him?’
‘No. Never.’
This was an astute question because it brought my father into the present and she looked at me, surprised, no longer laughing.
‘Were you very, very young at the time?’
‘Yes, fifteen. Three years older than you are now.’
‘Did you really truly love him? As much as you do Aunt Luce?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘Did he ask you to marry him?’
‘How could he, twit? He was already married. And I was under age.’
And here she closed the conversation by sidling off to the kitchen, that stranger’s kitchen in the beach house, where we could never find the cutlery, the salad servers, the bottle opener, the plug for the TV aerial, the pump for the lilo. And I didn’t ask again.
But she made it up to me. We spent all the days and all the nights together at the beac
h house. By day we scoured the beaches, whatever the weather, searching for unusual stones, skulls, driftwood, shells, bones picked clean by the sea. We took huge collections home in boxes and the smell of the sea dawdled in her studio for weeks. By night we slept together in the huge sagging bed, curled around one another like sunburned clams.
I had her full attention. I needed no one else.
* * *
She was careless with her own money. She was generous with my pocket money. If she saw something she liked or wanted, she bought it: a food processor, a new CD system, a Kelim rug, in a sale, but it was still £700 and she paid in cash, an old smuggler’s trunk with a broken iron lock, which she repaired herself and used to store her rolls of canvas, a naturalist’s cabinet in which she amassed objects for still life studies, flints, bird’s bones, crystals, a thirteen-speed mountain bike I had coveted, a pair of Indian cushions with tiny mirrors, thick, stitched threads and tassels at each corner. She never hesitated. She spent money as if she was a rich woman.
But she never bothered with the everyday things. The light in the hall was never mended. Every new bulb fused at once. She never rang the electrician. The white shed in the garden had rotted, leaving the croquet hoops and mallets rusting and exposed. She didn’t bring them inside. The neighbours said it was a shame, to have such nice things and to allow them to deteriorate. The hedges were never clipped and grew to fabulous heights. The neighbours complained. They were deprived of light. She climbed up a stepladder, cut back the hedge and shaped the top. I heard her singing as she did it. When the neighbours came home they were faced with a large prick and balls and two suggestive green breasts, carved in privet all along the top of the hedge. The penis blew over in October and she lopped it off. She never employed a gardener. But she never did the garden. The windows needed repainting. The sills on the south side were crumbling with damp rot. In every room one of the sash cords hung frayed like an unsuccessful hangman’s rope. She didn’t bother. She didn’t care. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it. Although sometimes she said that she couldn’t. If it was a lean time Aunt Luce would have paid. She couldn’t be bothered to ring up the builder, the plumber, the electrician. Yet the one thing she always had mended at once was the telephone.
The Deadly Space Between Page 2