This is Life

by Dan Rhodes

  ‘Good luck with everything,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. You too.’ She wanted him to stay for a few minutes, to wait with her until Herbert’s mother arrived, but she said nothing, and with a touch of his forelock, he left. The rush had died down, and she was alone.

  It was nine twenty-one. With one minute to go, there was no sign of Herbert’s mother.

  Nine twenty-two came and went, and there was still no sign of her. Herbert slept on, and Aurélie started to wonder what to do.

  XXXVIII

  Le Machine could tell that Life was going very well. In all his previous presentations of the piece, the room had started to empty in the early hours of the morning, and would only start filling up again around midday. In Paris, though, it had been full all the time. He had even found this a little disconcerting. Every night he fell asleep to the thunderous sound of his heartbeat, or the gurgling that was picked up by the microphone deep inside his belly, and as he did he felt a thousand eyes upon him, and when he awoke he felt a thousand eyes upon him, and if he ever got up for a glass of water he would look with bleary eyes at a room packed full of people watching him stumble from the bed to the sink and back again.

  In the mornings it always took a few moments for him to adjust to the new day, as he sat on the side of the bed, stretching and looking at his surroundings. When he was ready he would pick out any sleep that had built up in his eyes, and sprinkle it from his fingertips into a jar. Then he would wash his face, brush his teeth and walk over to the urinal. His morning ritual had become known as a highlight, and anybody who was there for it felt they had spent their time and money wisely.

  Today he had slept late. It was almost half past nine by the time he woke. He went through his usual routine, which culminated in an extremely long wee. As it went on and on, the early morning crowd began the chant that had become traditional at this point in the day, the combined volume of their voices just about beating the sound coming from the speakers: Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine!

  It was a good feeling. The run was going to be a success, and when it was over his girl would be waiting for him. This warm feeling was interrupted by a shudder of doubt. What if she wasn’t there as she had said she would be? What if she had second thoughts about being with him? What if she met somebody else? What if she fell ill? What if she was arrested, found guilty of a serious crime and sent to jail for several years?

  This last thought snapped him out of this state of mind. He was just worrying for the sake of it. Aurélie wasn’t going to be arrested, and he felt stupid for thinking such a thing. As he shook off the final drops, and bathed in the cheer of the crowd, he smiled at his propensity to dwell on such far-fetched scenarios. He picked up the jug and poured its contents into the big urine bottle, which was filling up very nicely.

  He wasn’t going to worry any more. She would be there.

  Backstage, Le Machine’s manager was experiencing a tangle of emotions. Life was going exceptionally well. Most of the reviews were in, and with very few exceptions the critics were agreed that it was something worth seeing. Among the naysayers, Today’s Technology Now magazine had declared that Le Machine’s reluctance to engage with social media had fatally undermined Life’s status as art, and Urban Puritan had warned its readers that while the piece was not without its merits, the sight of a gentleman in all his glory might be a bit much for their delicate sensibilities. On the whole, though, the reviewers, many of them waiting for Jean-Didier Delacroix’s verdict before following his lead, had been very positive, and attendance had been exceptional.

  They were only a few days into the run, but with the advance bookings and strong sales of merchandise they were already well on the way to breaking even. If they could just maintain this momentum they would be making a lot more money than they had anticipated. That was all good, of course, but her worry was that after this it would all be over, and to drop a production that had so much potential remaining went against her every instinct.

  Le Machine had told his manager plenty of times that he was planning on quitting, that he couldn’t face another run, but his interview with L’Univers was the first time he had expressed this in public. For years she had worked with musicians, and she knew that the dramatic retirement announcement was standard practice in show business, and that going back on that same retirement announcement was as normal as having a cup of coffee. She hoped he would be the same, that his decision wasn’t final.

  The trouble she had found since starting to work with artists, or people who regarded themselves as artists, was that they had a propensity to delude themselves, to think that what they did lay beyond the boundaries of show business. Whenever she had found herself with such a client she had let them carry on thinking this, while handling their business affairs in exactly the same way she would have done if she had been looking after a rock band, a conjurer or a gardening star. As with any branch of show business, the art world had its own context, and some of the details would be unique to it, but the fundamentals of the business remained the same: her client did whatever it was they did, and it was her job to ensure that people paid them to do it. She hoped his decision was a reversible one, that he wouldn’t feel he had some kind of high artistic obligation to stick to his declaration.

  Paris had proved that there was still a large and appreciative audience for Life. Yesterday Sweden had called, offering an enormous amount of public money for him to appear on a plinth on the concourse of Stockholm Central Station the coming year. She had wondered aloud whether it would be considered suitable for a naked man to be getting up to all sorts while children and old people walked past on their way to catch trains, and she had been reassured that it wouldn’t be a problem at all, that nobody in the country had ever been shocked by anything. There was already an offer on the table for him to present Life at Sydney Opera House the year after that, and a few weeks earlier she had received an invitation from somewhere called Aberystwyth, where the manager of their camera obscura had written to her, saying that Life would be an ideal show to put on there in the winter months, when they were normally closed. We have a capacity of forty, he had written, though sadly the fire inspector will only allow twenty-six in at any one time, which I suspect is because my wife once ran over his foot. She didn’t mean to do it, but try telling him that. As for facilities, we have a toilet (one cubicle – mixed ladies, gentlemen and disabled), and though our café will be closed for refurbishment, there will be a machine. We also have a funicular railway to bring visitors to our cliff-top location; it offers stunning views of the bay, though sadly it doesn’t run during the winter months and people would have to take the steps, or come up the back way along the road, though it’s only fair to point out that this is widely regarded as cheating. We would of course have to get permission from the mayor, but she would have a cheek to give us too much trouble about the nudity aspect as she used to be an actress – you might have seen her in The Life of Brian, where she takes all her clothes off, right down to her biffer.

  Le Machine’s manager had gently turned this offer down.

  Aberystwyth aside, there was a lot of money still to be made, but she would make no mention of that when she was persuading Le Machine to carry on. He liked to keep conversations about finances to a minimum. Instead she would tell him how he had moved so many people, and had enriched so many lives. What everybody in show business really wants to hear is that they are making the world a better place, to be reassured that they are so much more than a desperate, cash-hungry show-off. She would tell him how sad it would be for people in the future not to have their lives enriched by his work, and then she would look at him with puppy-dog eyes, and sigh as she wondered out loud what would happen to his loyal crew.

  She knew well enough, though, that his crew would all understand, and respect his decision. His lighting designer filled the time between exhibitions by touring the arenas of the world with various acts, and he would have no trouble keeping himself busy. Prior
to this run of Life, he had spent nine months on the road as a technician for Lady Gaga, during which time over three million people had seen his work, and he had undergone sex with the star of the show four times – in her dressing room, on a plane, in a cupboard full of fire extinguishers and, best of all, as part of a threesome under the bleachers at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, while an impatient audience stamped their feet, and chanted her name. Le Machine’s principal creative collaborator, his sound designer, would be quite content to go back to his day-to-day life, playing his gigantic saxophone as part of a quartet in half-empty bars while living off the royalties that still came in from some soft rock radio hits he had co-written back in the nineties. His manager knew she was the one who would miss Life the most, and it wouldn’t only be the business side of things that she would be sad to see come to an end.

  She had been with him from the beginning. Although he had been actively seeking representation, he had exhibited the artist’s customary wariness of people from the business side. She had seen potential in what he planned to do, and gradually she had convinced him that they could work together. She didn’t really understand what Life was all about, and she had never felt the need to know, but from the start she’d had a feeling that people would want to see it. She had never asked him about his motivations, and he had never volunteered to talk about them. Her role was to see that the production ran smoothly, and to maximise the money it made. She had been able to convince him that her desire to turn a substantial profit was in no way in conflict with his ambitions for the piece. There was no doubt that they were looking in the same direction: their conversations were often about how they both wanted it to reach as many people as possible.

  Léandre Martin saw just as well as she did that the art world, just like any other tentacle of show business, was a playground for the wild and the weak; a gruesome tableau of grifters and chancers and rich folk at play; a grim pit of desperation, vanity and despair, where nothing was thought of trampling on the lives of those who couldn’t keep up. If it hadn’t been for people like his manager, if it had been run solely by artists and born-wealthy dilettantes, the art world would never have been anything more than a hotbed of intrigue, failing livers, lost fortunes, unfulfilled potentials and herpes.

  The intrigue never abated, livers continued to fail, fortunes were lost all the time, potentials continued to go unfulfilled and herpes remained a constant menace, but she was able to bring order to his working life, to shield him from the chaos. She had convinced him that the last thing an artist needs is a manager who believes that self-expression is an end in itself. She had steered him on a course that kept him productive, and his profile high, and which, particularly now this run was set for success, had made him a good living.

  He was happy with her, and something he had thanked her for many times was her ability to cover up his true identity. He didn’t like the idea of people snooping around his private life. She supposed that like a lot of artists he was under the impression that he had a big secret. She had never asked about it, but unless he had killed somebody it probably wasn’t as big a deal as he thought it was, and even if he had killed somebody, she doubted it would have made that much difference.

  And then there was the girl. He hadn’t told her about the girl. Maybe she was behind it all. What if she was the clingy type, and had persuaded him to give it all up so they could spend more time together? It could be that she didn’t want to share him; she wouldn’t be the first girl who didn’t like the idea of other women seeing her man without his clothes on. Le Machine’s manager had not been there when she had made her appearances in the auditorium, and she knew nothing more about her than what she had read in the newspaper, but she didn’t like the idea of her one bit.

  After every showing of Life so far, Le Machine and his manager had withdrawn to a luxury hotel suite for three days as he adjusted back to normal life. They had an understanding that any sex that took place between them, and there was always a lot of it, was mechanical, that there was no emotional aspect to it at all, and that outside these days they would never mention it, or let it become an issue in their working relationship. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t incredible, and that she wouldn’t miss it if it stopped happening.

  Once his reacclimatisation was over, she would go through his fan mail with him and help him pick out the best of his offers from other women. Together they chose the ones who looked beautiful and hygienic, and she would call and arrange for them to meet him. She felt no jealousy towards them; she just accepted the situation. After all, they meant nothing to him. It wasn’t as if he loved them.

  But if the girl was there when he came off stage, things would be different and that would be a great pity. She hoped she wouldn’t be around, that something would happen to come between them. She wanted to be the one Le Machine turned to when he walked off the stage.

  For now, though, the production was going very well. She checked the box office statistics. They had sold almost two thousand tickets overnight.

  XXXIX

  Everybody involved in Life knew that it wasn’t possible to please everyone who came through their doors. Some people arrived with what they had thought was an unassailable cynicism, only to find that by the time they had left they were steadfast admirers of the work, but others would not be swayed, and would leave the venue spitting fire.

  Le Machine’s fiercest critic so far sat in a café round the corner from the exhibition, drinking the most obscure coffee on the menu. Most people would not have dared to order it, believing its name to be unpronounceable, but he had pronounced it not only correctly, but also with extreme nonchalance. His girlfriend had ordered a cappuccino.

  Before he had crossed the threshold of Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique, Sébastien had already made his mind up about Life, and had been furious when his girlfriend had told him she had bought them tickets. He had only gone along in order to prove himself right.

  ‘That was pathetic,’ he said. ‘I’m streets ahead of that clown. If he can shift that many tickets, I’ll have no problem when the time comes. My work’s in a league of its own.’

  Sébastien’s girlfriend said nothing. She sat there looking at her spoon, turning it over and over in her fingers. She thought of her boyfriend’s latest piece. He had drawn three circles in black felt-tip pen on a sheet of A3 paper, then he had coloured them in, also with felt-tip pen: one red, one blue and one green. At some points he had gone over the edges. That was all he was going to submit for his project.

  His fellow students were going to spend the coming weeks absorbed in their work, trying their best to produce something exceptional, but he was confident that he had already left them standing. She agreed that his circles were in a league of their own; it just wasn’t the league that he thought it was. This work, he had told her, undermined every preconception that people had about art. To call it revolutionary would be an understatement, he had said. It obliterates everything that’s come before it. He had gone on at great length about his thinking behind it. He was very, very pleased with it, and with himself.

  ‘Anybody who doesn’t get what I do is an idiot,’ he said, ‘and who wants to make art for idiots?’ He almost laughed as he thought of an answer to his own rhetorical question: ‘Le Machine, that’s who.’

  He sipped his coffee. ‘God, that’s good,’ he said. He looked at his girlfriend’s humble cappuccino. ‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. It’s so obvious.’

  She carried on turning her spoon over, and weaving it through her fingers.

  He continued. ‘I guarantee that in a couple of years’ time I’ll be getting crowds twice that size to see my work. You won’t be anywhere near as high-profile as me so don’t go expecting queues round the block, but you’ll still do well. Your sculpture has a rare quality to it – that small piece you’re working on right now, the one that looks a bit like a whelk, has more to it than twelve weeks of Life. And as for my work . . .’

&nbs
p; Sébastien had told her many times that although she was an accomplished sculptor she would never quite catch up with him intellectually or artistically, but he had always followed this with a reassurance that she wasn’t to feel bad about it because his was the great mind of his generation. Whenever he spoke to her about her work, he went to extraordinary lengths to tell her exactly what she was doing, and why she was doing it. She could never make any sense of what he said; it never tallied with what she was really doing, or why, but he was so good-looking that she had let him carry on. He would sometimes break off from a monologue to tell her that he hoped she was taking it all in: It’s so important for you to be able to talk intelligently about your work.

  Sébastien was widely acknowledged as the best-looking boy in college, and he was her first proper boyfriend, and she had been so proud that he had chosen to be with her over all the other girls, but the power of his looks had begun to wane, and she had grown exhausted by him. As he sat in the café and went on and on, the last molecules of her admiration for him evaporated. She had given him the benefit of the doubt over so much, but for a while a hairline crack had been appearing, and now the dam had burst: he was bad at art; nobody liked his work; he was stupid; he was horrible; he only ever talked shit; he was an embarrassment to himself; he had no real friends; and no matter what he thought, he was going to amount to nothing. All these failings eclipsed his looks to the point where they had just stopped working. When he had unveiled his latest piece, she had been horrified by how pathetic it was. No amount of intellectualising or posturing could disguise its complete lack of redeeming qualities. That he thought it had any kind of power or worth had made her squirm on his behalf.

  As he lectured her about her own work, he never failed to remind her that she was a quarter Cambodian, and to tell her that this somehow connected her to a mythical past which fed into her work. She was fed up with this. She had told herself that she would leave him the next time he used the phrase Khmer energy. It didn’t mean anything, it was just nonsense. She knew she wouldn’t have long to wait.