Dazzling the Gods

by Tom Vowler

‘Not really.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s all been forgotten.’

  ‘These people don’t forget. Anyway, come back for what?’

  ‘You could head my way. No one knows you there.’

  ‘Do you know how much rain southern Spain gets?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Conor flicks his cigarette out the window, tells me to take a left up ahead.

  ‘You all settled down with Jane now?’ he says.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Don’t it scare you, the same woman for the rest of your life?’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘No variety, never fucking someone for the first time again.’

  ‘There’s more than fucking.’

  He laughs, as if I couldn’t possibly believe this, and for a moment, after all these years, I almost ask him why he lied for me. Instead I say, ‘Do you ever wonder where he went? What he’s doing?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  *

  I wait in the car, apparently to keep watch but effectively redundant, a provider of transport, hands and conscience clean, eyes witness to nothing more than the initial orchestration. I wonder how often my brother does something like this these days, whether there are others in his adopted country who take care of such matters for him now.

  ‘Some people only understand one way, one language,’ he’d said last night.

  ‘And if it makes things worse for her?’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  A young couple, a little drunk, sidle along the pavement, the man stumbling into the wing mirror, knocking it askew, the woman apologising before laughing. I try to hunker down, feign indifference, but the man – a boy really, I see now – feels the need to make a point, his face an inch from the windscreen, breath misting the glass as he studies me. You need to go, I want to say. You need to go before my brother returns and things go badly for you. The girl pulls his coat, pleads with him, a hint in her voice of being witness to such events too often. My giving him nothing to feed off eventually works and after a final flourish of menace he allows the girl to lead him away, down the road, the boy howling into the night like some demented creature.

  I stare at the building across the road, the door Conor entered with the crowbar, trying to calculate how long it’s been, how many men Coughlan might have up there. I’d made him promise just to issue a warning, his visit a symbol of our resistance, that we, that our mother, wouldn’t simply roll over and pay up.

  It occurs to me that we should have parked further away, that bringing the car here in an age of ubiquitous CCTV was foolish. I consider how frightened by everything I am – being here now, the aggression of a passing boy, the guilt of an imagined affair – all of it taking me back to the dinner table that night, to the disciplining Conor saved me from.

  Had I always been a coward? So innately weak that even our father was reluctant to expose it, made as I am of different stuff? Perhaps Conor is on some level thankful for the man’s brutish hand, it hardening him, forging him like a blacksmith’s hammer, preparing him for the world he would know.

  Stepping out of the car I can smell my childhood, a ­thousand memories assembling at the promise of their indulgence. I picture Jane reading in our bed, my safe and comfortable life so removed from this place, yet the link never entirely severed. I imagine my class on Monday, the ruinous thoughts that will line up in attack formation. How I’ll do the right thing and be resentful for it. I consider my sister’s face, how something in her eyes resembles utterly my own, our complexions alike – ashen, almost ethereal – Conor’s swarthy by comparison, even before his expatriation, marking him out for our father’s attention from the start.

  Unsolicited, a mealtime routine of sorts comes to mind, a rare glimpse of another side to our father, who whenever my brother asked if he could get down from the table, would reply, ‘No, son, you can only get down from a duck.’ He said it in response without fail, the two of them trading guarded smiles as if it was the first time.

  Perhaps I will go to visit him, get away from it all for a while, arrive with every flavour of crisp. Jane might come, the trip a new start, the sun nourishing us. I picture us finding Conor on the tee, his grip loosened a little as the club scythes downward, connecting cleanly, the ball cutting without deviation through crystalline Spanish sky, mile after mile.

  The city is quieter now, burnished in moonlight. Ignoring my heart’s frequent, heavy beat I open the door across the street, negotiate the stairs in near-darkness, almost tripping as I run to find my brother.

  At the Musée D’Orsay

  They made their way, all four of them, through the glass awning and into the cavernous belly of the museum, its lavishly carved stone walls rising to a barrel-vaulted glass ceiling. He watched as Brett and Lottie ploughed through the crowd, leaving him and Sally to offer apologetic smiles in their wake. Earlier, in a rare moment of privacy, when the two couples were separated crossing Pont Neuf, his wife agreed they’d outgrown their once-friends, how visiting had been a mistake, but that it was prudent to make the most of the stay, neither having visited Paris beyond a school trip or to make a connecting train.

  The two women had met a dozen or so years ago at art college, losing touch briefly when Lottie took a job at the National Gallery, where a few months later she happened upon Brett, a hedge fund manager turned art dealer from one of the smaller Channel Islands. When Sally was offered a teaching post in the South Downs, their relocation saw the emergence of regular social encounters between the four, scores of dinner parties he tolerated for his wife’s sake. Brett immediately struck him as the sort who yearned for times an Englishman could keep a snow leopard as a pet, or could flounce around the globe drawing deference rather than contempt. The man made no concession to small talk, which seemed to pain him, and did little to hide his boredom when others spoke. Despite this they were able to occupy conversational ground that offended neither, riding the contrails of whatever topic the women initiated. Occasionally, when the two were left alone, Brett would offer him supposedly privileged advice on investments, which he politely observed, though in truth there was rarely anything left at the end of the month for such speculation.

  ‘Get on board early with this one,’ Brett would say conspiratorially, as if they were discussing an affair one of them was having. ‘Just don’t sit on them forever.’

  His own job, interviewing candidates for social housing, was often rewarding, but presumably its remuneration belonged to another realm entirely. It also left him feeling inferior whenever art, fine or otherwise, was discussed. Sally, however, clearly regarded the friendship worthy of prolonging, citing the importance of keeping company with more than one manner of person.

  The matter, though, was taken out of their hands when Brett and Lottie, appalled by the prospect of, as they termed it, another socialist government, had a year ago exchanged a flat just off the Thames for a luxury apartment overlooking the Seine. Occupying the third and fourth floors of an historic building on Quai Henri IV, the property, reached by a gilded elevator, had been decadently renovated, its showpiece a wrap-around balcony overlooking the city. The furniture was antique, the art exclusive.

  ‘Eleven hundred square feet,’ Brett had said when they arrived, as if he’d counted all of them. There was air conditioning for each of the seven rooms and a security system to embarrass a head of state.

  After unpacking, Sally had asked if they might take a boat trip.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sal,’ said Lottie. ‘Those are for the tourists.’

  By way of compromise they observed the Catacombs at Montparnasse before hanging out in the boutiques and bars of Rue Oberkampf, allowing their hosts to drizzle proceedings with what smattering of French they’d bothered to learn. Later Lottie bought Italian ravioli and a large wedge of Comté from the fragrant stalls of the Marché des Enfants Rouge, using the latter for a fondue that evening. The dinner, although overly rich, was pleasant enough, and once he’d resigned to taking a
minor role in exchanges, it seemed a certain enjoyment might even be had.

  The following day, after coffee and croissants on the sun-kissed balcony, they had cocktails in the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, before spending a boozy afternoon sampling Burgundies and Pinot Noirs in a nearby caviste, where Brett spoke endlessly of terroir and his dislike for New World reds. Later, after their hosts argued and Brett followed a tearful Lottie back to the apartment, he and Sally took a cruise down the Seine with the other tourists.

  The crowd in the museum had thinned now, their hosts suggesting they have a drink as it was still early, the four of them taking the stairs and then the escalator to the brasserie on the fifth floor. They had been due to attend the ballet that evening – Brett having complimentary tickets for La Sylphide – but a phone call to the apartment after lunch elicited in him a state of barely contained excitement. If they didn’t mind foregoing the ballet, a marvellous opportunity had presented itself. A show – one-off and strictly invitation only – was to be held in a private room of the Musée d’Orsay after closing hours.

  ‘What sort of show?’ he had asked Brett.

  ‘Nothing you’d see at home. This guy is going to be huge. He’s pushing all the boundaries of performance art.’

  ‘No one really knows who he is,’ said Lottie. ‘Viennese they think. Oh, please say you’ll come.’

  They found a table beneath a majestic, outward-facing clock, a relic, according to Brett, from when the building had been a railway station. Beginning to feel lethargic from all the excess, he ordered an espresso, picturing himself climbing the chalk hills of home, watching the sun slip behind Linch Down, not a gallery or bar in sight. Did people here live like this all the time, flitting from one cultural gorging to another, or had they been subjected to a particularly rarefied tour, a condensed version reserved for impressionable guests? He wasn’t ungrateful for such hospitality; he just couldn’t keep up any more.

  Brett was speaking of England.

  ‘Country’s gone to the dogs. We should have moved years ago. You guys should come over, buy somewhere.’ By somewhere, presumably he meant a cupboard in the suburbs.

  ‘We’d miss Sussex too much,’ said Sally.

  ‘Yes, I expect you would.’

  There was something in Brett’s eyes now, perhaps the anticipation of whatever spectacle they were about to witness, or just an air of superiority – a look that reminded him of the stag weekend he’d been obliged to attend after Sally and Lottie resumed their friendship. At the behest of Brett’s best man, they’d convened, half a dozen of them, at a cottage on the edge of the New Forest, the others, he assumed, fellow denizens of the Square Mile. Within an hour of his arriving they accounted for a bottle of Jura and several lines of cocaine, some future version of himself no doubt appalled but helpless to intervene. By way of preparation, he’d vowed the only way to get through the occasion was to indulge whatever forms of destruction were on offer, while promising Sally he’d do his best to return unscathed. Being resident in the countryside, he reasoned, would at least ensure their non-attendance at some lap dancing lair or worse. Instead, much of the weekend was spent in sporting combat – archery, racquetball, a little golf – which considering how much they drank was to be commended. He fared badly at most, yet didn’t disgrace himself. The pièce de résistance, though, was held back until the Sunday evening, just as he was thinking no more could be endured. A landowner had been paid some obscene amount to permit a few acres of woodland be given over for a nocturnal paintball melee, last man standing and all that. There followed some of the worst hours of his life, as they spent half the night stalking each other in the rain, every now and then discharging spheres of fluorescent paint at a shifting shadow or ambient noise. Only later did he discover Brett and the others had night vision scopes on their weapons, leaving him exposed to the tyranny of several drunk and high feral bankers.

  They were deep in the bowels of the building now, Lottie giggling like a child as Brett led the way through labyrinthine corridors. He’d told them earlier there would be no time to see any Degas or Gauguin, as Sally had requested, that tonight was all about the future of art. Finally they reached a door, in front of which a security guard stood impassively. Perhaps the man knew Brett, as he asked in English for them to relinquish their phones, which could, he said, be collected from reception after the show. The guard then scanned them with a handheld device, before allowing them to enter.

  The room itself was dimly lit, its far corners beyond sight. They were shown by a young woman to a row of seats that arced in a semicircle, perhaps a couple of dozen people sitting in front and behind them, the silence broken only by an occasional cough or the door they’d entered through opening and closing.

  Dating Sally in their student days he’d attended many such events, supposedly audacious exhibitions and performances, designed to shock or outrage, but which more often than not he found passé or inane. Perhaps, in one way or another, everything had been said or done, originality beyond even the most subversive of intentions. Maybe art needed a clean start, a new race of post-­apocalyptic cave dwellers, unburdened by the weight of history as they daubed the rock in charcoal. Or would precisely the same masterpieces evolve all over again, humans incapable of escaping their aesthetic destiny?

  It was a couple of miles to the apartment but they agreed the evening air would be welcome, a chance to reflect on what they’d just witnessed, and so they walked along Quai de Conti, past Notre-Dame, its stonework ochreous against the gloaming Parisian sky. He was thankful Brett and Lottie went on ahead, the orange glow from Brett’s cigarette cutting a hole in the night as he gesticulated like a native.

  Of course none of it was real, despite the artist’s assurances to that effect. And yet it was beyond his imagination how the ghastly trick was achieved. He presumed the fainting woman in front of them to be a stooge; as too the few who left mid-act, tearful or appalled. Or perhaps they were just credulous; certainly no one around them seemed to share his scepticism.

  The artist – if that was the correct term – had finally appeared through a pair of black curtains at the front of the room. Dressed in dark trousers and polo neck, he looked around 40, though was clearly younger, his eyes intense, almost pained, his face a series of sharp angles, as if the skin was being drawn from within. Physically there was nothing to him, his willowy frame rising to an ovate head, the goatee beard at its base quite satanic. His complexion was of someone who lived entirely indoors, or who had mere hours to live, yet when he spoke, his voice boomed among them without need of amplification, its timbre pealing like a church bell. There followed a rather arcane rant – the screen behind the man translating his words into several languages – the gist of which was an antipathy towards bourgeois art lovers, in particular critics who possessed no talent themselves. But instead of alienating the audience, this seemed merely to rouse their fascination, as murmurs of approval stole across the room. Apparently, few understood what true artists went through, the sacrifices that were made, least not those who sought to own their work, to own them. Yet this artist’s work, the man said, would never be owned.

  The screen was then filled with the words ars longa, vita brevis, while what might have been Wagner started up around them. An older woman, similarly dressed and with close-cropped black hair, wheeled in a small trolley, on which sat a cream ceramic bowl and a metallic tray of surgical instruments. The artist quietly acknowledged her and placed his hands in the water, drying them on a towel she passed him. At the same time the woman who’d shown them to their seats pushed a wheelchair into the room, in which sat a barely conscious middle-aged man, a sign around his neck bearing the words ‘un critique’.

  It was difficult to say how long what happened next took. Perhaps some sort of mass hypnosis had occurred, the screen laced with subliminal tidings, though all they’d seen was an endless loop of the critic’s scathing reviews, hatchet jobs that took delight in the denigration of various artists. It was, they we
re told, his forte.

  He supposed concentrating on the critic’s eyes had been the ultimate symbolic gesture, the artist literally removing the man’s ability to appreciate art again. Ensuring the act’s detail went unmissed, especially by those seated further back, a close-up appeared on the screen, as the scalpel blade was carefully introduced to one eyeball and then the other. And with Wagner almost drowning out the critic’s screams, the young woman returned, offering the artist a small liquid-filled container, in which he placed his pair of trophies.

  *

  As they walked he tried to take Sally’s hand but she was still lost to shock, her shuffle along the quayside burdened with a sight that could not be unseen. As much as anything, it was their taking part, their willingness to vote for what happened, to determine the critic’s fate. A descent, albeit fugacious, into savagery.

  ‘You know it wasn’t real?’ he told her again. ‘It was a performance.’

  ‘But the blood . . .’

  They continued on in silence for a few minutes, finally catching up with the others, who’d stopped for a drink outside a small bar. By now the Seine was ablaze with great whorls of impressionistic light, as if Van Gogh himself had been busy in their absence. As he shepherded Sally into her seat, a smug-looking Brett poured them some wine while Lottie bemoaned their having to leave in the morning.

  ‘It feels like you’ve just got here,’ she said. ‘There’s so much more to see.’

  Dazzling the Gods

  Even the bluebottles have succumbed. Half a dozen, upended on the window sill, legs sculling the air in attempts to right themselves. The room a kiln, sun furious as it seethes onto the glass, braising him in a broth of wretchedness. People comparing it to a time before all this, when there were standpipes in the road and you could cook an egg on the kerb.

  Sitting up in bed he eyes the net curtain for hints of a breeze, some portent today will be cooler. Their sheets reek again, despite his having washed them yesterday, and he unfurls them from the window where they hang in limp surrender. In the kitchen he fills a glass with ice and water.