by Nick Laird
Kimberley distributed the invites on the first morning of the term, and David spent the entire day worrying. The mad idea of asking Singleton gnawed at him. They were corresponding on a daily basis, and though their talk was still guardedly abstract, though he didn’t even know her name or age, they really seemed to get each other. There was definitely something there. Even so, a boatload of watching students was not the ideal backdrop for a first date. It would have to be deferred.
That evening Glover, late for work, pulled back the front door to find David tipping forward, key poised, his moon face startled. David tugged out his earphones and asked immediately whether Glover would come with him to the party. He was reluctant, he said he’d heard too many horror stories, but David persisted, persistence being his most significant asset. He promised that it would be interesting for Glover to put faces to the names and he reminded him that he was acting as his best man, and that it was only for one night, and what were they talking about, really? Three hours probably, four maximum. Glover hated to be painted as a man who might let someone down, and finally he agreed, telling David they could always smuggle in a pair of lilos to escape on.
On the night itself it took some time to actually locate ‘London’s premier floating disco’, the SS Carolina, and they traipsed down several alleyways in Vauxhall before they came across it. Moored close to the riverbank, it was strung with lights and made moist, unnerving slapping sounds as it responded to the river’s movements. A slatted wooden bridge took them aboard to Kimberley, the official greeter, who pressed the flesh and flicked her hair and whinnied. David introduced Glover, and then Kimberley presented David with a card from the class, to thank him for his efforts. It featured a quote from James Joyce on the front to the effect that our errors are portals of discovery. David felt that was overly optimistic of them. That class’s errors, that class of errors, were simply mistakes, fuck-ups due to arrogance and laziness, and misplaced faith in their own capabilities. His students thought self-belief was a good thing. They didn’t understand yet that it was the most dangerous delusion of them all. It could ruin your life. Still, it was nice to get a token of their appreciation. He showed it to Glover and watched his gaze skim lightly across it.
David had a fag before going in and the flatmates propped their elbows on the railings out on deck, side by side and mesmerized by the quick, black legion water. Its machinations—turbulent, tubular—left David dizzy. A police launch passed on the far side, lit up and noisy and moving at speed. The boat made a gross sucking noise as the wake of the launch lifted them towards the looming office blocks.
The music had started inside and David was cornered in front of a speaker by Marissa, the teacher who normally ran the debating society. He watched how her mouth, drawn on inexpertly with purple lipstick, made a variety of shapes. The bad nineties pop was much too loud to let him hear whatever she was saying and he simply nodded. She was supposed to be on maternity leave, but had still turned up for the party, proudly swollen in a flowery canopy. Holding her hand was her husband, Benny, a short, bald, bearded Mancunian. He had one of those faces that is also a face if you turn it upside down, and he kept looking hopefully around him as if he might at any moment wake. Faizul pranced towards them and David escaped to Glover and the bar. As he stood against it, awaiting a drink, the underfoot vibrations of the engines began; then the boat peeled away from the bank and London began to scroll past the window. Glover was looking the girls over with small sly glances, following their progress as they crossed the empty dance floor or stood at the bar. They took their beers and walked down to a booth. For a few seconds David tried to pull the table out so he could squeeze round it, before realizing it was bolted to the floor. Glover smirked and David felt irrationally humiliated, and almost tearful.
Most of the evening David spent talking about American literature with a very serious student called Michael. Michael wanted to ‘be a writer’, a very different thing, David suggested, from wanting to write. He had white filthy dreads and his paisley-print shirt was too short on the sleeves. Glover was having fun, dancing with Kimberley and a group of her friends. Whatever else Ruth had given him, she had bestowed a new kind of confidence. David had never seen him so happy and fearless. He had two moves—a kind of little shimmy and a clap—but they were good ones. Unlike the other males on the dance floor, he neither overexerted nor embarrassed himself, and he smiled. The faces of the rest were agonies of concentration or frozen in the Caucasian’s funky overbite. When Kimberley’s group sat down Glover followed. David walked over and hovered until they budged up in their booth. He ensconced himself by Kimberley’s sister Rosie, on whose far side Glover sat. She was pretty, David decided, but mostly because she was young, and animated with the same irritatingly jovial manner as Kimberley. David examined Rosie’s porcelain blondeness. The skin above her slightly pointy breasts displayed a network of submerged blue veins, a faded river map. A black cropped top showed off a taut, in-curved midriff, where a red jewel sparkled in her navel. David had to make a conscious effort not to stare at it and he fixed his eyes on the rim of his pint. There were six girls around the table, all tipsy and made up and incredibly loud, and he didn’t quite know what to say, or where to look, or exactly why he was here. He leant across the table and asked Clare about her English paper; she just smiled and pretended not to have heard.
Shots of tequila appeared, which everyone slammed on the table while David held his beer so it wouldn’t get spilt. Later, when Rosie said she was doing international relations at UCL, and David had to stop himself responding And I’ll bet you’ve done nearly all of them, he realized he was drunk again. He squeezed out from the table to get a glass of water. At the bar, Alistair, a new history teacher with extraordinary halitosis, wanted to discuss subsidized travelcards; then they were both trapped again by Michael. When David escaped for a smoke, Glover and Rosie were out on the deck, talking intently in a doorway. He was about to join them when he noticed how their heads were inclined towards each other, and how she had laid a hand on Glover’s chest.
When they moored again the lights came on, instant and harsh, and all at once everyone was sweaty, bedraggled and grey. Glover reappeared and briskly announced he was heading off to a house party with Rosie and Kim. David said he should get back anyway, that he was knackered, and Glover nodded. David wandered for a while through the night cold, soundtracked on his iPod by Maria Callas’s Aida, and finally found a minicab office on Vauxhall Bridge Road. He sat in there waiting, listening to the Caribbean operator swear creatively at his drivers. David was thinking how even by appointing him his best man Glover had just formalized his idea of their relationship: David was his liege, his understudy, his ballboy and his footnote, his Sancho Panza, his Mercutio, there for service, nothing more.
At 4 a.m. he was still awake—on the internet—and Glover hadn’t come in. And the next morning his bed was still made. At ten-thirty David heard his key scrape in the door and found him in the kitchen, at the sink, kink-haired and gulping down a pint of water. The radio was on the pirate reggae station and softly played a dub version of Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’. He was hurrying, he said; he had to grab a shower and get back into Soho for his shift. David remained in the doorway. Nobody was going anywhere.
‘But how was the house party?’
‘Oh, fine, fine. Nothing too exciting. I kipped on someone’s sofa.’
He was lying. The speech was too rapid, the information given not the information requested. He had prepared, and badly. Now he glanced out of the window, interested suddenly in what the sky was up to, what shapes the clouds were forming.
‘And Rosie?’
Glover grinned then, despite himself, and said, ‘Nothing. Nothing really.’
David laughed nastily—it was such a childish answer. Glover looked back at him; guilty, a little fearful. The two vertical slits in his forehead appeared and he rubbed at them with his fingers and thumb.
‘I didn’t sleep wit
h her. Not really. A kiss and a cuddle.’
David said nothing. Glover stepped backwards and leant against the worktop, and the physical movement triggered some internal collapse. His head lolled forward as though a cord had been cut.
‘Ruth rang this morning when I was walking to the tube and I couldn’t even answer it. I didn’t know what to say…’
‘Are you going to tell her?’
He looked up, appalled, rubbed at his forehead again. He was unused to sinning.
‘Jesus Christ…’ David said. He leaned in like someone who could help and asked, quietly, ‘Were you angry with her? About Jess?’
Glover shook his head, opened his mouth but produced no sound. With his hands clasped together, preacher-like, imploring, he turned back to the sink and looked out on the newly disordered city. David felt an obscene urge to laugh, but instead plunged two slices of white loaf into the toaster; watched the filaments buckle and redden with localized fury.
Invisible presences
All Sunday David’s mind skittered round in circles. At midnight he washed two herbal sleeping tablets down with a mug of Pinot Grigio, and entered violent dreams involving aggressive, talking eels and keyholes and his Auntie Yvonne’s one-eyed cat. The next morning, after groggily setting his A-level group a chunk of Chaucer to parse, he locked himself in the disabled toilet and rang Ruth. She was abstracted, concentrating on something, and said, ‘Sure, of course, come over to the studio around six.’
By the time he stepped into the cobbled yard the sky was dark, and although she’d said she never turned the strip lights on, finding such fluorescence too clinical and cold to paint beneath, their polar glare was visible through the pane of glass above her door. He knocked diffidently, a suitor.
She was standing in the middle of the studio, at work. Amidst the mess, the cardboard boxes, the salvaged tea chests and stacks of canvases, the paints and pots and planks, the easel that she stood at seemed to David like some long-limbed grazing animal come on in a clearing, which she was stroking, and which might, at any second, bolt. She whispered hi and then turned back to the canvas, so he picked a quiet way through the clutter to the sink and filled the kettle. Her engrossment gifted him a feeling of privilege; he was eavesdropping with her on great, invisible presences. As he scanned for mugs along the cluttered surfaces he saw the glass heart in its shoebox, crystal and bulky on a bed of scrunched newspaper. It looked finished and was so delicate, David found—as he ran a fingertip along one caulked edge—that he was holding his breath.
The old clock radio on the draining board flashed 00:00. Tuned to a talk radio station, it stayed on all day, but with the volume set too low to pick up the actual conversations. When she was a little girl Ruth would lie in bed in their red-brick walk-up on 67th listening to the muffled sounds of her parents and their friends talking for hours, on the far side of the peach-blossom wallpaper. It still gave her a feeling of safety to know that somewhere people were talking things through, she said, that she wasn’t alone in the world. When she told David these things, even after the engagement, he could not quite stop that old stirring of warmth and protection. And he felt it now.
The canvas faced away from him but she stood at an angle to it, and he could watch the whole of her. She looked good in work garb, the hair tangled and held back with a black headband, which on closer inspection became one leg of a pair of tights, tied. On her hands and narrow wrists were smears and spots of paint. The apron, David thought, was strangely flattering, emphasizing the curves of her chest and waist and hips. At the clink-clink of him stirring the coffee, she came over and took the mug in both hands, blowing on the top of it and sending the steam to him in a winter breath. He wanted to sit her down and hold her, let her melt into him again; he wanted to tell her everything.
‘I’m writing today off. An utter waste of time.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘I don’t know when to let the thing be finished. I have to always…’ She looked up at David suddenly. ‘I can’t talk about the project now, you know. I have to finalize the exhibition and before that—’
‘Oh no, no, that’s okay. It was something else, actually…’
‘Hmmmm?’ She left her coffee on the table and then lifted up the canvas, turned it round and rested it against the wall, on the far trestle table. For the first time, David saw what she was working on, and set his coffee on the draining board to prevent it spilling. Glover.
The middle band of the painting, from his thighs to his lips, was exact and photographic. Here were his square shoulders and lean chest, the light definitions of his belly. Here were moles on his skin, the raw zip of his appendicitis scar. Faint, whiskery hairs on the pectorals, a thicker line of hair descending to the pubic swarm, and here his narrow hips led in a V to the penis, substantial, whitely luminous, with a fat vein running slant across it. Here were his arms lifted and turned outwards, with brilliantly foreshortened hands beseeching the viewer. But to what end? To seduce or fight? To flee? There was an ambiguity about the pose: the nakedness was sexual, the stance adversarial, the entire thing unsettling. The torso was cropped uncleanly, as if by the two imaginary Tropics. Above the full lips with their cupid’s bow, an invisible latitudinal line marked a drifting from focus, and the painting lightened and blurred until a foot or so higher it merged with blank canvas. There was only a mess of a nose, and no eyes to see, no ears. At the thighs the Tropic of Capricorn began, and the same drift and blurring occurred. The legs faded, nebulous. The figure was trapped in the canvas like quicksand.
David felt woozy with embarrassment. He looked away, then back again. The backdrop to the picture was Ruth’s living room in the Barbican. She must have been working from a photograph. Ruth had been thinking about those unfinished paintings by Michelangelo that they’d seen in the National. She’d taken the strong lines, the dislocations, the spooky lacunae, and made from Glover this ghoulish, headless, legless, camp-fucked Christ.
‘Oh, don’t look at this. It’s not finished,’ she said, turning off the main lights.
Gratefully, without comment, David sat down on a tea chest, his back to the canvas, and sipped at his coffee. Ruth stepped out into the courtyard and he heard the soles of her white Converses slap across the cobbles. There was a plate-sized magnifying glass, angled on a bendy stem, and David examined his index finger under it, seeing the whorls magnified to tree rings and oxbows. It was impossible not to find connections when one looked closely at something, he thought. Art itself was a kind of lens, messing with perspective, and it could focus light on a single point, which might catch fire or might not. Art was like prayer; which was like concentration; which was like patience; and patience, David thought, was the most beautiful word in the language. Calm down, he said out loud. Calm down.
He was standing by the door of the studio smoking when Ruth came back from the bathroom and began rinsing brush heads at the sink, refracting the transparent beam of water into its disparate spectral colours.
‘What was it you were going to tell me earlier?’
The little nubs of her shoulders in her white cotton T-shirt drew together as she spoke. David looked at Glover’s melting face.
‘Oh, nothing, really.’
‘James said you’ve been talking to someone online. Have you met yet face to face? We should all go for dinner.’
‘No, no, nothing’s happened. We’re just talking. I mean it’s only an internet thing. I don’t know that it’s even going to get to—’
Ruth turned and put a finger to her lips. Working all day alone had left her childish, solicitous and exhausted.
‘Ssshh, don’t say that. You never know what’s about to happen.’
She walked over and held out her hand. On her wedding finger was the smallest diamond David had ever seen. It was a speck of diamond, a grain, a neutrino.
‘Isn’t it cute? Glover gave it me last night. He’d even wrapped the box.’
Exactly what an image does
/> Ruth was the only person David knew who still brandished a chequebook. She had credit and debit cards but claimed she could never remember her PIN codes. It was the evening of Ruth’s opening, and after Jess had got her Campari and soda, Larry his gin and tonic, Walter his whiskey, and the boys their beers, she had pulled the chequebook from her bag and was now waggling it over the bar of the ICA, awaiting her glass of Petit Chablis. When the bargirl noticed the antique method of payment she winced, and said that Ruth would have to wait until Orlando was free. Orlando, the dapper little manager in the ruffled shirt, with slicked-down hair and an apprentice moustache, threw them a glance of practised hauteur, and David was reminded of Proust. He felt, as he supposed he was meant to, daunted and inferior, and he insisted on paying with cash. Ruth, before leaving with her glass of wine, rooted around in her bag and pulled out her fat black purse. She thrust it at David and said, ‘No, please, take this. I think there’s money in here.’
And there was: three pounds and sixty-three pence, among the business cards and boarding passes.
The evening crawled for David. When Larry pulled Glover forward to introduce him as ‘Ruth’s partner’, David had stepped back and then wandered the rooms, taking notes in case he decided to write something on it. Half an hour later he came upon his flatmate again. Glover was sitting on a plastic chair, by an exit sign, secretly playing Snake on his mobile. He told David he’d overheard a woman ask whether the artist was ‘still with us’.