Crudo

by Olivia Laing

  *

  It was a party. 9 September 2017, 22:30, the fringes of the map. Things under discussion: super-Tuscans, wine nights, life in the City in the ’80s and ’90s, weddings. It wasn’t Kathy’s crowd. There was intrusive background music, she was wearing fishnet tights, Patti Smith was singing ‘Because the Night’, unlikely. Kathy couldn’t eat but said yes to every drink, which was why at 9 the next morning she had a port hangover and could barely open her eyes. Her husband complained that he had a very dry mouth and then pulled some damp blue threads from his mouth and looked surprised. Who knew what had happened to them while they were asleep, ajar, defenceless? They were in a hotel room of such monumental ugliness it seemed an achievement in its own right. The bathroom glittered, the mirrors were made from moulded plastic, like a cheap child’s toy of Versailles. There was a bar beneath them called the Log Cabin, outside which young men shouted until far into the night. At 5, a barking dog woke the entire hotel. What were they doing here? Just drifting, accepting their fate, not saying no, saying yes.

  The other main topic of conversation was nuclear war. Why doesn’t America just say to Kim-Ing, Kim-uh-ing, that he’s a big boy now, well done, that’s obviously what he wants. What I don’t understand is why they don’t just nuke him into oblivion. They don’t know where the missiles are Kathy said in a woman’s voice, which was inaudible in this and many other circumstances. I didn’t recognise you, a man she had known for decades said. I’m wearing make up, Kathy replied.

  What was good was the hills, the deep, densely wooded valleys, with flat shallow streams and grazing assorted cows and sheep. What was good was the clear air, brushed now and then with rain, the fast-moving green. They kept stopping at churches, they pulled in when they saw antique shops and sifted through boxes of grimy Spode and foxed hardbacks from the century before last. The past hung heavy, they breathed it in, it was good to experience the density of time. Everything was blown or shot or on the wing, the last martins skimmering above slate roofs, the oaks so dogged by their shadows they looked like chess pieces, rook to king.

  Home, several motorways later, Kathy picked up a book and read a few pages at the beginning and then turned to the end. There was a run-on list of deaths, among them they found I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me. The tide of cruelty in the world was drawing in, it was impossible to ignore. The waters were rising in Miami, Tampa, Naples. You could not possibly stay at home, but the police had announced that if you had an outstanding warrant, you would be arrested at the shelter. People seemed to warm to this kind of cruelty, they thought it was tough, they liked it. Kathy foresaw a future run by strongmen, she saw the poorer nations of the world obliterated by climate change, she saw the liberal democracy in which she had grown up revealed as fragile beyond measure, a brief experiment in the bloody history of man. No surprises there, she always thought it was a veneer, dependent on cheap food, plastic, oil, flights. She was not flabbergasted but she was scared. She was finding it hard to sleep, she had perpetual headaches, she knew she shouldn’t read the paper, but she snuck looks from the minute she woke up. What’s Putin doing, what’s happening in China, in North Korea, in the US? How’s the car-crash of Brexit proceeding, how are they getting along with changing all the country’s laws in secret, how much do we hate foreigners today, who’s winning? Kathy was finally comfortable, Kathy was practically as secure as anyone can be, and still she was riven by despair. In the House of Commons, MPs barracked Caroline Lucas for asking apropos Irma when we were going to get to grips with climate change. They actually shouted Shame. This is how it is then, walking backwards into disaster, braying all the way.

  Kathy had always mapped her dreams. She mapped the houses of the dead, she’d been doing it for years. She got out her notebook, wrote Its walls were painted with manure, I was the only human here. She wrote about rooms that were flooded with shit, she wrote about ruined houses, she wrote about children buried underground. Swamps, alleys, dead roads, dead leaves, spit and shit. Oil fires in the distance, a bank off the Tottenham Court Road that wouldn’t give her money without a passport, but she couldn’t find her passport. She dreamt that she died in Mexico, she dreamt that she had no health insurance. She dreamt that there were many rotting bodies under the water, she dreamt the density of the smell. She woke choking, a pain in her belly. The doctor said to her we need a stool sample, she gave her a plastic bag. Phones featured. In the dream of her death she was like a child, she called herself Janey. She would like to be bottle-fed, she is a bottom, she is a baby, she is on the edge of a void, speaking neither into nor out of it. There is nothing here but rain. She spends a whole day looking at coats. She wants to find a kind of language where she won’t be so easily modulated by expectation. In the dream she passes through rooms without doors, the stairs lead into the ocean, Mark is here, she has to call but the shop has changed its number. The sense of effort, but no target. In the dream of her death she is very drugged. She spends a day in bed. It’s wasted time but what time isn’t.

  Every morning she waits on the beach to see what the tide has brought in. The return of torture in Turkey’s crackdown, the ongoing repatriation of UK law, facilitated by Dennis Skinner, a disappointment. The lynching of an eight-year-old mixed-race boy in New Hampshire. According to the victim’s grandmother Lorrie Slattery, he was playing with a group of children and teens when they began to taunt him with racist epithets and throw sticks and rocks at him. One of them climbed on a picnic table and they tied a rope taken from a tyre swing around his throat and kicked him off the table. He swung back and forth three times before he was able to free himself. None of the teens came to his aid. A photograph accompanied the story, purple welts on a small neck. Meanwhile Kathy was sitting at the table, two empty bowls of muesli in front of her, a vase of dahlias, nearly dead, a bracelet, assorted magazines, bowls of fruit, light bulbs and books. Outside, the ragged autumn garden, overblown flowers, long, comfortable shadows. A passing train. Each day she sensed something creeping nearer. If it was happening to someone, it being unspeakable violence, how could she be happy: the real question of existence. The knowledge was a splinter in her own corporeality. Would this be a moment she looked back on later, damaged in an alley or locked in a cell? Something was approaching. Kathy could not settle. She knew. She knew.

  Maybe it was better to sit down on a sofa, with a small new dog. The new dog that Kathy had access to was a Labrador, eight weeks old, russet-coloured, therefore Rufus. She went round to have tea with him, then again a few days later. On both occasions he spent a full minute cowering in the kitchen, avoiding eye-contact, before resuming his puppyish duties. He was chubby and had giant paws, like slippers he kept tripping over. He was too small to climb a step, he was just the right size for riding around in someone’s arms, he looked smug and delicious, lounging by a Missoni blanket, a pedigree, calmly submitting to his Bruce Weber shoot.

  There’d been a storm the night before, Kathy had woken in the dark to the sound of tearing. She kept pacing about, she couldn’t settle, she’d switched pillows five times. The next day her jaw ached, as if she’d been biting down for hours. The house reeked of paint, it was low-grade toxic just to sit in the kitchen. Furniture kept disappearing, the garden was vanishing under foliage, damp, green, rust-spotted, unplanned. She had decided to sell her flat, a supposed investment, again. She had decided to buy a new one, again. She wanted a dog, long-legged, long-nosed, she wanted a new coat, a new figure, a new lease of life. Feet that were going somewhere, the good sleep of the weary.

  Kathy was repulsed by her own indolence, she had a perpetual sore throat, Kathy never stopped agitating towards the future. She wanted someone else’s life, ideally an architect called Ben Pentreath, whose rented rectory in Dorset she coveted unbearably. She spent several hours gazing at pictures of his dahlia borders, beech tree, cow parsley, churchyard, Georgian hall table, olive candles, Ravilious prints, old china, peach, hot pink and yellow
and red striped tulips, and felt lust curdling in her chest. Things, she liked them more and more. Old things, haphazardly arranged, like apples fallen from a tree, that casual, that lordly. She wanted box balls and an orchard, maybe a lake, she wanted oaks and cold stone. Maybe possessions were like beauty, they made you impermeable. Kathy loathed permeability, she wanted to be gilded, I mean everyone did. The thing about wrenching her heart open was that suddenly loss was everywhere, in the window boxes of geraniums on Kingston Street, in the conkers that had blown gleaming into a skip. Fuck September, with its mournful air. Kathy wanted to bed down by a fire and not leave the house till March but she was flying back to America in ten days. Conveyancing, boarding pass, papers to grade, hotel reservations in Virginia and DC. Some little well was empty, it was weird. Kathy had definitely been this tired, maybe not this scared.

  PAPERS & PAINTS

  Good, a new day. She woke several times in the night, boiling hot, and threw the covers aside. The sheet was burning, light seeping in through orange then blue chinks at 2 and 4. In the true morning she surfaced a little, resting between dreams and the radio, bobbing like a lobster pot. Missiles, Korea, Japan. Later that day there was a bomb on a tube train. Photos of the bomb circulated online, a bucket full of wires in a Lidl bag, still burning. She had been writing a will when she saw it, she was future-proofing herself. Walking along the pavement it occurred to her that people who had children probably felt considerably more afraid and she was abruptly abashed at her own selfishness. She never liked people who bred making claims on the future, as if they had made a heftier investment, but actually they had. Her investment was tulip bulbs, a few books and now her husband, his dear wrinkled cheek. I know I must stay alive until Wednesday at 12, he said as he left the house. This was when the will would be signed. Yes, she said, but in ten decades’ time.

  Earlier that week, 14 September 2017, she had been on a jury for a queer art show. She saw multiple Grindr portraits in pencil, pen and pastel, she saw multiple gas masks, multiple butt cheeks and assholes. Is it really so transgressive, is it not getting tired, a little bit samey. Kathy liked a drawing of a boy foreshortened and naked like Holbein’s Christ, and a photo staging the death of a drag queen called Tracey Ermine, floating in the sea off Kent, her ruby slippers protruding from calm blue water. Kathy liked saying YES and NO, she liked drinking coffee and scrolling through jpegs. Later, she walked through Notting Hill in the dark, the enormous polished houses. A boy in a suit, screaming into his phone, lay down on the platform at Ladbroke Grove yelling I AM JUST SO TIRED. She was with her husband. On the train, a man asked them in broken English if he needed to change at Edgware Road. No they said, then later yes. They got off together. He had a nice worried face and a large bag, he was from Hamburg, not so far away her husband said. But all the distances had grown in the last year. The feeling of foreignness blew around the carriage. She liked the man, she smiled at him as they left. You make divisions between people, countries, races, and out of the gaps the warheads emerge. It was that simple, she was watching it happen with her own eyes.

  Later that night, upstairs, she wrote in an email to her solicitor I would like to be cremated. She typed the words then went downstairs and burst into tears. I don’t want to be cremated she said to her husband, nearly wailing. I don’t want to be dead. They were setting all the doors to shut neatly behind them, it was expensive to think this closely about your own demise.

  Meanwhile, the door was also closing on a variety of human enterprises, replaced by automated alternatives. Everyone was very angry about a thing called Bodega, which replaced the need to go out into the street and through the door of an actual bodega, there to purchase Tampax, Blue Moon, Häagen-Dazs, pretzels, Advil or whatever else you needed to survive the day, with some sort of automated internet-enabled kiosk that contained all the essentials and didn’t require you to walk, speak or dig through your pockets for quarters. Then there was a hoo-ha over facial-recognition software, which was actually two stories, one about the new iPhone, whatever thought Kathy, and one about an academic study that wanted to find out if you could tell people were gay based on their faces. You only have one face, Kathy’s friend Tom kept saying. You have infinite passwords, ten digits, one face. The face is not a sensible key for a phone, never mind what regimes might do with their homos.

  In this atmosphere it was becoming increasingly hard to feel real. Kathy felt daily more like a helium balloon, untethered, barely attached. About to give a talk, she’d found herself breathless and numb down one side. She’d had to go into the street to do some breathing in a doorway. She wasn’t nervous, she was just not real. It was like that all the time, she just noticed it more when she was with other people, the movements of her speaking face. She cut her hair again with almost blunt scissors, why. You look dreadful, her husband said, you look like Henry V, and she felt dunked in shame. The scissors thing, it was kind of self-harming, yes, but it was also just wanting to make something happen, to get control over at least one aspect of tangible reality. She could have dug the garden but she was too lazy, nursing an on again off again flu that manifested mostly as midday exhaustion and extreme temperatures between midnight and one. They were both having bad dreams, they were both headachey and queasy, they ate a lot of orange cake and then experienced mild regret.

  The hair needed fixing. Fixing it required going to a place with mirrors and Kathy was incapable of looking at herself in a mirror while being looked at by another person, this was probably the root of the self-cutting issue, but also another manifestation of the unreality business. She didn’t want to go back to America, that was the thing. In her mind America had become death, a crossing she did not want to make. What if the entire country or just the East Coast was annihilated in a missile strike. How would she get home. In their dreams lost luggage, trains making unsigned stops. I dreamt I was being tortured her husband said, and wouldn’t say more.

  18 September 2017. At 3 she went to Chantal’s studio, Northern line to Angel, walked along the canal in the rain, the water very green, reflecting willow leaves and tower blocks indiscriminately. Her feet sounded good under the bridge, her strides ringing. Chantal was wearing a blue mohair cardigan covered in paint, her hair up in a scrappy twist. The studio was full of work, two enormous canvases in the corner of Chantal in her pants with her daughter, apple-green ground like Degas, her eyes very bloodshot. On the floor there were dozens of cut-out commuters, a whole population. They both liked the man at the end best, in sandals and kurta, stylish and sharp, stepping out into bright air. Apple green was everywhere, in little chinks under people’s eyes. It made everything look eerie and modern, like electricity or the internet was somehow infiltrating the air, the breathing ground, the actual backdrop to their lives. Kathy loved the cut-out people, roughly drawn, curled into ovals, their body parts contained in space. He knew, Chantal said of Vincent van Gogh. It was all right. They were talking about new work, what happens when no one likes it, what sort of conclusion you should or shouldn’t draw. Chantal pulled out books, a series of tiny paintings of water towers, she described paintings of men in pants and paintings of men pissing, she brought in Guston’s shoe paintings and Paula Modersohn-Becker. Together they looked at a Renoir of Julie Manet as a child, her face as it smiled opening sideways, actually very like the cat in her arms. They talked about Vermeer’s use of under-painting, how he let the light leak through, they talked about a single yellow sleeve. As they talked they ate very quickly cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery. I was greedy as a child they both agreed. Kathy was scooping up pink icing with her finger and shoving it in her mouth. Later that day Mary-Kay said when I was a child my mother called me a snake. A sneak Andy said. No no, I was never a sneak. A snake.

  After the studio Kathy walked right across town, nearly to the Barbican then right through Clerkenwell and down St John Street to Farringdon Road. She walked up Rosebery Avenue and Gray’s Inn Road and overshot and had to come back by Mecklenburgh Square. Her husban
d was waiting on the corner of Rugby Street in his mac and hat. A man came up to me and asked me where I bought my jacket, he said. He was very proud. She made him go into the Folk shop, she tried on a coat, a jacket and a sweater, the coat was the best, it was superior and serious, also cosy. They had time to kill, they ate chicken wings and drank wine and discussed plagiarism, whether it really mattered or not, Kathy thought no. I mean words, they’re like paint, they’re like Degas’s apple-green ground. You take what you find, it’s all material, I mean what is art if it’s not plagiarising the world?

  The talk was at 7, everyone was there. There was a lot of news moving around the room. Charlie and Rich were getting married, that was great. Mitzi was wearing the most beautiful coat, Colman’s mustard, fastened with a lovely old leather belt. They saw Claire and Steph, also a girl with a pinched Jane Eyre face and very tightly drawn-back hair who Kathy recognised from photographs. She was listening to the talk, drinking cheap wine, but she was also thinking about the pictures in Chantal’s room. Dealers don’t like babies, a hulking white back like the flank of a whale.

  *

  The theme of the week was art, not on purpose, it had just panned out that way. The Basquiat show was at the Barbican. Rich appeared while she was queueing to buy water. Was it a good show? It was nondescript, it felt all the time like something better, more open might be going on in another room. Could this be it, these low ceilings. The paintings looked congested, sort of immaterial. What she really liked was a series of photographs by Warhol, something human going on there, public affection at the very least. Basquiat nuzzling an old dog, Basquiat swinging from a lamppost, Basquiat’s face concealed beneath a Venetian mask made maybe from tinfoil, maybe from gold leaf. They spent a while trying to identify people in a set of Polaroids with a couple of strangers, both women. Debbie Harry, Klaus Nomi, Madonna, Grace Jones, for sure that’s Keith Haring. Rich got Anjelica Huston, she looked very lean and imperious. Madonna was a baby in a lavender wig. I used to live in New York in 1981, the woman next to them said. She had a bob and bulky black clothes, the sort of air that made you think she might be famous, though later Kathy looked her up and found very little. It wasn’t dreamy enough, that was the thing. Though hypnotic to watch the camera panning along beneath the old West Side Highway, Basquiat spraying lines about cotton on a hoarding by the sugar factory. Kathy collected words, armadillo, Avenue A, war, Wall Street, she collected body parts, she liked the bits in isolation but not the faces topping torsos.