Ménage

by Ewan Morrison

  Two hundred people fell silent.

  — I don’t see any signs around saying don’t touch, Saul shouted back, flicking back his hair. — Really, if you’re going to put objets d’art on display you should at least make sure they’re securely fastened.

  Pierce grew increasingly irate. Dot headed towards him through the crowds. Saul was smirking, waving the bottle. — So we’re in the Victoria and Albert, are we now?

  Dot tried to quieten them both, taking Saul’s arm, all apologies to him and the strangers around.

  — Get the fuck out of the art, Pierce shouted, as Saul wandered over to the next artwork, the realist diorama, and started picking at the fake authentic fifties wallpaper, pulling off a strip, smiling to himself.

  — So this is art, is it? he pronounced sarcastically, loud enough for everyone to hear. Dot tried to pull him away but he shook her off violently. There were mutterings beside me of ‘drunk’ and ‘loser.’ Women in designer grunge turned away. Searle headed for the door. I was frozen to the spot.

  — I must apologise to you all, Saul declared. — I was bored and simply wanted to watch TV, but then it fell over. I’m sure this is a wonderful radical work of art, and that we’re all having a lovely time being truly ‘out there’, I was just deconstructing, it all seems to come to pieces quite easily. You’re more than welcome to join me. Take a piece of art home.

  And he tore off yet another strip of wallpaper. That was it. Pierce stepped inside the diorama and tried to remove Saul by force. Saul dropped the bottle. As he bent to pick it up, Pierce grabbed his arm and he staggered back against the fake wall. It fell to the ground with a bang, blowing dust into faces. Dot started shouting sorry, sorry, in the ruins, as Pierce struggled to try to lift the wall back in place, but he started sliding in the broken glass of Dot’s smashed screen, cutting his hands. The warehouse was rapidly emptying. The almost naked woman in the bin bag marched over to Saul, Dot and Pierce.

  — No, he’s right, she shouted — this is all decadence, think of the starving in Bosnia!

  Saul broke into hysterical laughter and the woman by his side was paralysed with confusion.

  — Fuck Bosnia, he yelled. — Fuck Ethiopia! Bomb the lot of them! She clinked away from him, joining the throngs of the leaving. Pierce grabbed Dot’s arm, shouting, pointing a bloody finger at Saul.

  — Is this cunt a friend of yours?

  Dot stood there silent and Pierce headed for the door. She ran after him, and slid in the glass, tearing her jeans and skin, apologising, trying to explain. Someone had started taking flash photographs. My final glimpse was of Saul, throwing beer bottles to the floor, one after another as if listening to notes they made, singing along to some song in his head. Probably Wagner – Dah dahdey dah dah, dah dahdey dah dah.

  I could not sleep through her screams at his locked door. Through the gap in my door frame I glimpsed her, on her knees, weeping: — Please, please, open up, I’m sorry for whatever I did . . . I don’t know what I did wrong . . . just please, open your door.

  All she had left now was her degree show and it was such a cop-out and made her sick, sick, please, please, she repeated. I couldn’t bear it any more, got up and tried to take her from that place but she shrugged me away, her face weeping mascara, her fingers bloody, a smudge of it too on her cheek.

  — Take your fucking hands off me! . . . You did nothing, you stood there and watched like a fucking . . . you did nothing . . .

  I walked away. The whimpering resumed as again and again she pleaded I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, please, please. I glimpsed her curled on his doorstep like an obedient dog. Back in my room, I heard the William Shatner album start up. His excruciating rendition of ‘My Way.’ Shatner was a failure. Saul was a failure, now she was. We all were as shit as Shatner. Saul once again had it all, his way.

  I wanted to run but could not for fear of seeing her face in the hall. She ran past my door, slammed hers, then the noises were of things being thrown, crashing and smashing. I covered my head in my stinking pillow, knowing that she was right in her judgement of me. Once again, I did nothing.

  All that long night her howling kept me awake as I tossed and turned and tried to find a way to save her. I would borrow money from her and we would leave together, that was the compromised plan. When I finally found sleep light was coming up.

  Awake, I found the flat silent. I waited outside her door, listening for a noise inside. Then knocked. No reply. I opened the door and witnessed the aftermath. Her stereo was smashed and thirty or so records lay in pieces on the floor, littered among the thousand torn pages of his books.

  In the toilet I found another, lying face down. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, as if one of them had left it there for me to find. Many pages were earmarked. Quotations underlined in pen. As I leafed through I learned that the many aphorisms and epigrams Saul had spouted over the years were not his own. Valéry, Barthes Niezsche, Wilde, La Rochefoucauld, Cocteau, Chesterton.

  ‘The future is a thing of the past.’

  ‘Stop all this talk of equality. We only want to be equal with our superiors!’

  The charlatan had sat there for hours each day memorising aphorisms to make himself sound intelligent. From a cheap book of quotations. It was even worse than his Duchess book – it constituted almost every word he had ever said. The plagiarist. I decided to write up my proof and present it to him, as a gift, on our departure. As he was out and she too, and I could do nothing, I sat and read all the underlined quotes and took apart the basic arithmetic of his so-called intelligence.

  How to create a Saulism:

  You take a simple proposition, widely accepted as a commonplace truth, say ‘work ennobles man’, then you swap the words around and invert the proposition, thus: ‘Work is noble but I have never seen a noble who ever worked.’

  Or just take a word, say ‘desire’ and turn it against itself. ‘My only great desire is to cease desiring.’

  Or: ‘Indifference seems to be the only thing I’m indifferent to.’

  I had wasted years marvelling at his witty ripostes, and all of them were an equation, a formula, for ignorance, in fact.

  ‘There is nothing more ugly than the manufacturing of beauty.’

  How piteous a character to always be just playing with words throwing them back in people’s faces, to make them laugh at the undoing of what they’d just said. But never to progress beyond reaction, as those you have played with are given pause and say, ‘How true, how true.’ And what a hollow victory.

  ‘I can think of nothing less natural than people communing with nature.’

  Oh yes, I saw him clearly then, after years wasted worshipping his words. He would weep, I thought, when he read my analysis.

  ‘Staring into the void is greatly overrated.’

  And people found him a wit.

  ‘Wilful stupidity seems to me to be the only intelligent course of action.’

  ‘Blind faith is the last refuge for those who have seen too much.’

  And his other variations:

  ‘Never forget that we live in the era of forgetting.’

  ‘Ignorance is bliss is a thing I’ve only ever heard intelligent people say.’

  ‘I feel rather lured by the allure of failure.’

  We had believed in him and he had trashed us, like so much rubbish. He could no longer pretend to a life without repercussions. Finally, he must have seen there was a cost. Finally I had the courage to spit in his face and leave.

  I heard the door open and his boots down the hall. I made my preparations.

  — Can you come through? he called out.

  I took a breath and headed to his room, brandishing the book of quotations.

  His appearance, when I opened the door, seemed completely haggard. He was still wearing the clothes from the night before. He had the Duchamps on very quietly. ‘Disparu’. His face smeared with wept mascara. I fought against the impulse to pity, raised the book in
my hand.

  — Shh, listen, he said as the singer reached that horrible crescendo with that screaming so out of tune and the audio samples of people wailing as if dying against the plinky-plonky eighties synths and the vocals with north of England accents singing Nous avons disparu.

  — Look, I’ve had more than enough of . . .

  The sight of him kept me from finishing. He burst open a sherry box and pushed the plastic lever and started guzzling it. His eyes were bloodshot and I noticed a fleck of vomit on his chin. As if remembering I was there he offered the box to me. I refused. All over the floor his records and tapes were scattered as if he’d been trying to finally find the sleeves for each.

  — ’bout time you saw this.

  He was holding up some newspaper clipping. Of a band from the early eighties, posing. I glanced to his wardrobe; in the back there was a pile of maybe twenty or thirty empty sherry boxes. His brow was sweating vinegar piss.

  — Read it, he said.

  I sat and gave him another minute, looked at the stupid clipping.

  LOCAL BAND IN TOP 100. It was from the Hull Courier. 1984. ‘In at number 89 in the charts, Ashton Bar favourites the Dooshamps . . .’ Even the spelling was wrong. In the photo five guys in their early twenties were dressed with scarves round their waists à la Spandau Ballet. Each was androgynous with tons of face paint, like Cleopatra. One was obese, another anorexic-looking; by way of unity they had ‘pirate’ boots sprayed silver and ribbons in their hair, all pulling very serious expressions. One had a fist in the air, another had a keyboard strapped round his neck and a growling expression with black lipstick. What this was about I had no idea.

  Saul tried to relight a fag end and broke into a hideous cough. I was about to hand the clipping back when he raised a finger and pointed to a body half cut off, no face visible, just an elbow at the edge of the frame.

  — I did tambourine, he said, — on track four.

  I was in shock. I was close to laughing even.

  — No way, you?

  He nodded, fell silent, smoking and pointed to one of the other faces. The one on the edge.

  — Edna, he said.

  The fat boy with feathers in his hair.

  — No way!

  Saul had blown smoke into his own eyes and they were watering. I felt about to burst into hysterical laughter. The song ended.

  — I want you to be honest, he said.

  I nodded. Waited.

  — It’s really not very good, is it?

  For the first time ever he had reached to hold me and it was me that withdrew. Even at risk of offending, I could not stay a second longer and had to hide my laughter. I got up and along the hall came the sound of the cough, then the retching. Alone in my room I allowed myself a little giggle then chastised myself for being so weak again – I had gone there to assassinate him, but had emerged with only pity. How could I not? The source of everything he thought was true and unique and good, the basis of his aesthetic tyranny, and all he had ever achieved in his life had been this. An elbow in a photo of the band that wrote ‘Disparu’. From my room, I suffered the sounds of his vomiting, his guts tearing themselves inside out trying to find something solid to puke up, but finding nothing.

  All the rest of that day and through the night I waited for her to return. A 10 a.m. the next morning I heard the door open. Her face was sleepless, maybe stoned. She said she’d spent the night at Edna’s. She let me hug her. Her clothes were dirty and she stank of booze. I took her into my room and helped her off with her jacket. She was talking deliriously.

  — We could just get on a plane . . . go to Tuscany . . . my dad’s got a villa there, or Rome . . . we could get high . . . or take Edna . . . or run away or . . .

  I tried to calm her, get her to lie down. No point running away.

  — Just tell me what to do, she said.

  — Well.

  — Tell me and I’ll do it. Please.

  Her eyes waiting on me, her hand gripping mine.

  — Well, I’ll help you with your degree show, we can do it together, then once you graduate we can maybe go away, I said. — Let’s stay a few more days, wait and see, we’ll work it all out, together.

  I reached to kiss her but she raised her hand to say no.

  — Just wait and see, she repeated, just do nothing?

  No, no, I said, and tried to explain. But she stood and walked away. I tried to grab her back but her fingers slipped from mine and she was gone. I knew it even then. She’d needed me to take the lead but I’d been practical, passionless, pathetic. I sat on my bed as next door, back in her solitary room, I heard her picking up her many broken things.

  In the days that followed violent fluctuations left her ever more drained.

  — I have to apologise to Pierce, she whimpered over and over. — Poor Pierce, I have to find him and say sorry.

  — Forget him, let’s just think about your degree show, OK?

  And she’d flash with rage.

  — Fuck art school! Did fucking Duchamp kiss ass to get a degree, did the Duchess? That cunt Pierce. I’ll slash his fucking face.

  She truly did not seem to care if she graduated at all. I kept her busy and away from Saul, whom we hardly saw in those days as we were up at dawn. I practically dragged her out of bed every morning, dressed and fed her, although she pushed every meal away. She also cared little about her appearance. On the tube to Goldsmiths, her T-shirt was torn and many eyes stared at her bra, some laughing, whispering. I wanted to ask her to cover herself up but any mention or touch of her body made her shrug away from me.

  I tried to get her enthusiastic as we entered, pointing out the students who were turning the studios into gallery space with their boards of MDF, hammers, nails and gallons of white paint, but I could tell the repetition of the same scene we had seen at Bug drained her.

  A tutor accosted her. She still hadn’t told anyone what she was going to be exhibiting. It would be unwise to spring a surprise on everyone, he said. I saw him eye her from head to foot, intimidated or perhaps aroused. She should come to his office and discuss it, he said. She walked away from him, with utter uninterest. I followed her, past large cibachromes of breasts and weeping faces, a sculpture made entirely out of Coke cans in the shape of Michelangelo’s David.

  A young male student stopped her and asked what dimensions she needed her space to be. Did it need to be blacked out?

  — No idea, she said. — I don’t even know where the fucking thing is.

  She pushed past him. He gave directions and I took note and followed. Her blankness I knew from before, from the night of Valium, but she was more down and distant, so much more than before. She would not meet my eye.

  — He said to the right and past the cardboard car, I said.

  — What?

  — Your space.

  A female student was hanging dozens of medical blood bags and catheters from the ceiling. Two men in overalls were painting the walls white. Dot stopped and stared.

  — Institutions, they’re all the fucking same!

  — Sorry? It sounded like something Saul had said.

  She paced away again. I located the cardboard car and found her space beyond. White, empty, a Post-it note with her name on it on the wall. I got her to stop, took out my list of things to do. The video projectors we needed and some screens delivered from the company I’d found for her. I asked – where would they go? Should we hire a technician? Could she afford it?

  — This place is sick, she kept saying. Her mouth was slow, wet, as from pills.

  The empty white space seemed to scare her.

  — If you could just tell me what to do. Please. I took her hand in mine.

  — Take your fucking hands off me.

  — I just want to help.

  — Oh, so very you, always helpful, always trying to fix everything, mother’s little helper. Don’t you have any desires of your own?

  I couldn’t leave her like that no matter how much she seemed n
auseated by me. She was belching, almost gagging on her words.

  — We have to try to calm down.

  — We? You’re like a fucking mirror. Empty when no one’s there.

  — Dot, this is –

  — No, no, I see your game. That’s what you do, you just tell me what I want to hear, give me what I want. I thought it was his fault, him. But it’s you. The weak always bring the strong down to their level. You’ve dragged him down. He wouldn’t be such a failure if it wasn’t for you. If you didn’t clean up his shit all the time, he’d face his fate. You’re nothing compared to him. You do things deliberately to upset him . . . I know your game. Soap and toilet roll and God knows what suicidal crap . . . Why don’t you just admit it – you’re begging for his big cock to fill you up cos you’re empty! Weak . . . so fucking . . .!

  I waited for her to run out of steam.

  — Dot? Are you OK?

  — Stop it, just stop it!

  — What?

  — If I’m sick let me be sick! Stop taking care of me, it makes me sick, really fucking sick!

  — Sorry.

  — Stop saying sorry . . . Leave me alone. Go! Go home to your lover boy, before I stab him in his fucking sleep! GO!

  I froze. She pushed me and I stumbled back. I reached to hold her, but she pulled her hand away, put it to her mouth.

  — You break my heart, she muttered as she turned and ran out, leaving me in her big empty space. You break my heart.

  Other footsteps sounded beyond from her partition. A young trendy-haired student came in, all big smiles, and asked if I knew where to find Dorothy Shears. He’d been appointed to help with technical things. Within seconds of having my attention he started talking about his own work. He made sculptures out of microwaves and was inspired by the ecology movement and Joseph Beuys, he said. Was I here to buy art? I excused myself and left to look for her.

  Corridors and then the refectory and no sign. I ran to the station, and she was not there.

  I waited for the train, then headed home to make sure Saul was OK.

  fn1. Ed Weaver has commented on how the work deconstructs the conventions of the slasher movie, with the hand-held point of view of those asleep always being that of the killer before the act of murder. See The Darkest Light, Interim Press, 2001.