The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

by Sophie Hannah

  I said all of this to Saul, not in the least embarrassed. I had known nothing about art for most of my life, but my sudden passion for it had given me confidence. I knew I was right because I felt it; I didn’t care about critics or experts, and whether they’d agree with me.

  Gradually, I built up a collection. I branched out from paintings to sculptures. I relaxed my rule a bit and allowed myself to buy work that I didn’t love quite as much as Something Wicked and Tree of Life. In an art collection, I decided, one didn’t necessarily need or want to respond to every piece with the same intensity. Besides, I discovered, some pictures grew on you. I told Saul about my change of policy, explaining that, as well as soulmates, a person needs friends and acquaintances. He agreed. ‘Have you got any friends, Ruth?’ he asked me, looking concerned. In general he avoided asking me personal questions; I could hardly begrudge him this one.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ I said, eyes fixed on the art magazine I was reading.

  ‘Yes, but… apart from me. Have you got anyone else that you… see?’

  ‘I see you,’ I replied determinedly, starting to feel uneasy. ‘Why? You’re not planning on ditching me, are you? Closing the gallery and running off somewhere without telling me?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ said Saul. ‘With any luck, I’ll be around for a long time.’ It struck me that this was an odd way for him to put it. I looked up to catch his expression, but his face gave nothing away. I’d been working for him for two years by that point. Was he worried about what would happen to me after he died? Surely not. I didn’t know exactly how old he was, but he was certainly on the right side of seventy. I didn’t like to think about Saul dying, so I changed the subject back to art. It was the only thing I was interested in talking about, and Saul seemed happy to indulge me.

  As it turned out, I was the one who deserted him, though it was the last thing I wanted to do; he was the only companion I had and I’d grown to love him.

  On 18 June 2007-several dates are etched for ever on my brain, and this is one of them-I was sitting behind the counter, reading an art book called Still Life with a Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert, when a woman walked into the gallery. I recognised her, having seen her once or twice before, but didn’t know her name. She belonged to the category of Saul’s regulars that he and I called ‘the Rudies’-the people who, if they found me in the gallery, would ignore me and walk straight through to the back to find Saul.

  I tried to smile, as I always did when a Rudie walked in, but got no response. The woman, dressed in a tasselled gypsy skirt and white trainers, and with a mass of curly silver-threaded black hair, was carrying a picture under her arm. I saw only the back of it as she strode past me without saying hello.

  I shook my head at her rudeness and turned back to my book. A few seconds later she was back, the painting still under her arm. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got a picture I want him to frame-today, ideally.’

  ‘Isn’t he there?’

  ‘Not unless he’s invisible.’

  ‘Um… I don’t know. He must have nipped out.’

  ‘Did you see him go out?’ she asked impatiently.

  ‘No, but-’

  ‘How long’s he likely to be?’

  ‘Not long.’ I smiled. ‘He’s probably popped out the back and across to the post office. Can I help you at all?’

  She looked down at me as if I were a piece of rubbish, contaminating her space. ‘You haven’t so far,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait five minutes. If Saul’s not back by then I’ll have to leave. I’m not wasting my whole day hanging round here-I’ve got work to do.’ She leaned the canvas board she’d been carrying against my desk and started to circle the gallery, looking at the pictures Saul and I had hung a few days earlier. ‘Lame,’ she said loudly about the first one she came to. Then she marched quickly past the others, offering a one-word comment on each of them: ‘Dismal. Lame. Pretentious. Vacuous. Hideous. I see nothing’s changed around here.’

  The picture she’d brought in was tall, and she’d propped it up against the part of the desk I was sitting behind-perhaps deliberately to annoy me by obscuring my view of the room. On the back of the board someone had scrawled, in capital letters, the word ‘ABBERTON’. I wondered if it was her surname.

  Her outright condemnation of every painting she saw made me curious to see the one she wanted Saul to frame. Whether she’d painted it or someone else had, she clearly deemed it worth spending money on. No one frames art they don’t value. I stood up and walked round the desk to look at the picture. She must have sensed me move because she whirled round, the bottom of her tasselled skirt whooshing out in a circle. It had a hole in it, I noticed. Her face was a mask of suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. Did she imagine I was glued to my chair? Why shouldn’t I move freely around the gallery, as she was? I worked there, after all.

  When I looked at the painting, I had the same feeling I’d had when I first saw Something Wicked, except stronger. It was like instant hypnosis, a magnetic attraction. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The background-painted in dark greens, browns, purples and greys so that you could only just make it out, so that it looked as if it was in the shadows-was a residential street with houses all along it, a loop at one end, the shape of which had been massively exaggerated; it looked almost like a noose, with the rest of the road being the rope. The street was a cul-de-sac: Megson Crescent, though I didn’t know that at the time.

  The rude woman must have noticed my reaction because she said, ‘You don’t need to tell me it’s good. I know it’s good.’

  I was too startled by the picture’s power to say anything. At its centre, standing in the scene, was the outline of a person. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman. Apart from its shape, there was nothing human about the figure; inside the thin black line that separated it from the rest of the picture was a mass of what looked like hard feathers, scraps of material-gauze, perhaps-some white, some with colour painted on. A churned-up angel: that’s what it made me think of. It should have been grotesque, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. ‘Did you do it?’ I asked.

  She told me she did.

  ‘It’s amazing.’

  Flattery usually worked, even with the rudest of the Rudies, but it didn’t on her. Every few seconds she frowned at the door, as if willing Saul to walk through it. I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ruth Bussey,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, even though I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘We haven’t,’ she agreed.

  ‘Is your name Abberton? I noticed-’

  ‘No. Abberton is the person in the picture.’ She didn’t tell me her name. When I kept looking at her, she raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Do you want to make something of it?’

  I turned back to the painting. ‘Is it…?’

  ‘No. It’s not for sale.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was horribly disappointed, and couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly challenge her-it was her painting, after all-but I knew I had to have it, had to be able to take it home with me.

  ‘I’m going,’ said the woman. ‘Tell Saul he needs a new business plan, one that knows the difference between being open and being closed.’ I was about to ask her name when she moved to pick up the canvas board, and I realised she was going to take it away.

  I nearly cried out. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Even if it’s not for sale, can you… could you tell me something about it? What made you paint it? Who’s Abberton?’

  She let out a long sigh. ‘He’s nobody, all right? Absolutely nobody at all.’

  He. So Abberton was a man. ‘Do you ever make prints from your originals?’ I asked ‘Sometimes artists…’

  ‘Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘You cannot buy this picture, Ruth Bussey.’ Her skin looked like paper that someone had screwed up, then flattened out to find all the creases still there. I didn’t like the way she’d said my name, particularly since she hadn’t told me hers. ‘Get over i
t. Buy another picture.’

  I thought she’d given me a glimmer of hope. ‘Have you got others I could look at, ones that are for sale?’

  Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from me,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work-it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist…

  She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.

  She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s someone else’s picture!’

  ‘It’s someone else’s appalling picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’

  She’d done it deliberately. I read her words, the ones she planned to leave for Saul to find. Most of them were obscenities. If he didn’t take one look at that note and decide never to frame anything for this awful woman again, there was something wrong with him. I looked at the bottom of the scrap of paper for a signature, but there wasn’t one-I’d interrupted her before she’d had a chance to sign her letter.

  I decided I didn’t want to buy Abberton after all. It would have spoiled it for me, knowing the person who had painted it thought nothing of vandalising another artist’s work.

  I felt more upset than I could justify to myself. The picture I loved, even though I’d only seen it for the first time five minutes ago, had been ruined for me. More than that: it was as if art had been ruined, the thing that had started to cure the ache in my soul. Now it felt tainted. ‘Why do you want to destroy other people’s work?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. ‘Can’t you bear the idea of anyone having talent apart from you?’

  I turned round and walked back to the gallery area, shaking. A few seconds later my hair was yanked back, as if my ponytail had caught on something. I cried out in pain. It was her. She spun me round and pushed me against a wall, knocking me into a picture. It crashed to the floor and the glass broke, falling in pieces around my feet. She’s going to wreck the gallery, I thought-all our paintings, and it would be my fault. It’s always my fault. What would I tell Saul?

  One of her hands was flat against my chest, the other behind her back. That was when I started to get frightened. What was she holding? She’d been in Saul’s workshop, where there were knives. Saws. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing. I just… I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me. Let me go!’ A storm began to rage in my mind. The same words again, the ones I’d said over and over to Her when she yanked the tape off my mouth: don’t hurt me, please, let me go. I was no longer aware of the woman with the grey-black hair, or the gallery. The present dissolved into the past; there could never be anything but Him and Her; that one attack would last for ever, in one guise or another.

  The wild-haired woman’s hand emerged from behind her back. I saw a canister: paint. Red. My body felt formless, as if it was breaking up. She held her weapon close to my face and sprayed. I screamed. It went in my mouth and eyes, and when I closed them, she carried on spraying. I felt a heavy wetness all over my face and neck, stinging, hardening. I tried to move, but I couldn’t.

  ‘What on earth…?’ Saul’s voice.

  I heard a splash, then something rolling, a metallic sound. I tried to open my eyes, saw thin red ropes in front of them where my lashes had been glued together. Her hand released me. I mumbled, ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Saul and the woman were shouting over one another, saying things I didn’t want to hear. I had to get to the door. I had to get out of there. I didn’t pick up my handbag or my jacket. I was free to move, so I ran.

  I didn’t stop running until I got home. I didn’t have my keys with me-they were in my bag-so I sat on the grass outside Blantyre Lodge in the rain, shaking, for what felt like hours. I could have sat in the porch but I wanted to get soaked, to wash everything away. At some point Saul appeared. He’d brought my things. He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I put my hands over my ears, hysterical, my face still covered in red paint that made my skin feel tight, like a mask. The downpour hadn’t shifted it. The paint that framers use to spray mouldings is thick, greasy; it doesn’t wash off easily. People hurrying out of the park, on their way to shelter from the sudden bad weather, stared at me, then turned away quickly. One little boy pointed and laughed, before his mother stopped him. I didn’t care. No one could get me here-the crazy artist couldn’t, Him and Her couldn’t. Not in the middle of a public park.

  Eventually Saul went away. I haven’t spoken to him since, though for weeks after that awful day he left me regular phone messages. He said he understood that I didn’t want to go back to the gallery, and why I didn’t want to speak to him or talk about what had happened, but he needed to phone me from time to time, he explained, even if I never answered. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t forgotten about me, that he still cared.

  The last message he left, early last August, was different. I heard that his voice had changed; he didn’t sound sad any more-he sounded determined. He gave me Aidan’s name and address, told me Aidan needed someone to work for him. ‘My loss will be his gain,’ he said. ‘And yours, I hope. Please, Ruth. Do this for my sake as well as yours. I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past-I’m not a fool, I know something must have. Maybe I should have asked… Anyway. I won’t let you ruin the rest of your life. Go and see Aidan. He’ll look after you.’

  I remember I laughed at this, sitting in the dark in my house, smoking yet another cigarette. Look after me, with so many people intent on doing me harm? Him and Her, the crazy artist with the silver-black hair whose name I didn’t know, with her can of red paint… Everyone knew I wasn’t worth looking after, because I was too pathetic and helpless to look after myself. Aidan Seed, I was certain, would be no exception.

  6

  3/3/08

  Simon was on the phone to Sam Kombothekra when he saw Aidan Seed’s car turn the corner from Demesne Avenue on to the Rawndesley Road. Seed was driving it, and he seemed to be alone. ‘Gotta go,’ Simon said curtly, tossing his mobile on to the passenger seat. He hadn’t been sure if Seed would make his trip on foot or in the dusty black Volvo estate that had been parked at a forty-five degree angle to the side of the workshop.

  ‘You’re not planning to wait, are you?’ Charlie had said. ‘He’s going nowhere. He lied to get rid of us.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she’d corrected him. ‘I’ve got to get back to my enthralling questionnaire. Give me a ring if something happens.’

  Simon was pleased Seed had opted to drive wherever he was going. It was easier to follow a person in a car. Behind the wheel, encased in his own private space, Seed would be less likely to look at anything but the road ahead.

  As he followed the Volvo along the Rawndesley Road, Simon thought about the lies he’d told Kombothekra, and felt something he didn’t often feel: proud of himself. His story had been a medley of all the things the sergeant wanted to hear: two hundred and seventy-six addresses divided into handy regional groups, a travel schedule, a brand new road atlas courtesy of the Snowman. Not a word of it true. Simon had thrown Proust’s t
enner in the bin-perhaps his job along with it, but at the moment he didn’t care.

  Seed drove at fifty miles an hour along the High Street, where the limit was thirty. It wasn’t long before Simon was having to do eighty on the dual carriageway to keep up with him. Why was he in such a hurry? Was his trip-news of which had evidently come as a surprise to Ruth Bussey-connected to Simon and Charlie having dropped in unexpectedly? Wherever he was going, it wasn’t Megson Crescent; that was in the opposite direction. Rawndesley, perhaps.

  In the absence of Proust, and the need to defend his gut feelings, Simon was scornful of what the voice in his head was telling him. Where did it come from, this conviction that if he didn’t act quickly something terrible would happen? The sense that Seed, Bussey and Mary Trelease were teetering on the edge of something horrendous, something only he could stop? Arrogant wanker, Charlie would have called him.

  At the Ruffers Well roundabout, Seed didn’t go straight over and on towards Rawndesley as Simon had expected him to. He took a right. Simon allowed a car to get in between them, then followed. Could Seed be heading for the A1? North or south? North, he guessed.

  South, it turned out. So much for gut feelings. As he followed Seed past exit after exit, it started to seem more and more likely to him that Seed was on his way to London. ‘Shit,’ Simon muttered under his breath. He was a good driver in every other town, city, village-in every other part of the country-apart from the capital. London was different; other drivers played by strange rules, if any. Simon had been involved in two car crashes since he’d passed his test at the age of seventeen; both had been in central London. Both times he’d been in pursuit of a suspect and both times he’d pranged his car and lost them. Something about London made him lose his cool. Not today, he told himself. He wouldn’t lose Aidan Seed.