The Painter's Friend

by Howard Cunnell

  Years. Finally stopped fighting and drugging. Put a heavy lock on my anger. Into the squatting scene. Started making art again.

  Scavenged materials. Paintings and drawings of the world around me. Worked as a painter on building sites to support myself. Years of that. Jack’s as good as his master. Work hard. Drug-free.

  Put on a couple of small shows. In a squatter’s cafe. A room above a pub. Local reputation. I even sold a few. Not expensive. Mate’s rates or in exchange.

  Evelyn Crow was the person I’d given up believing would ever come.

  Fig and mint soap like a brand. Dark suit always with a darker, nearly invisible stripe. Somewhere there had been a reinvention, he’d polished himself up. Could play the kiss or the stiletto. An open wallet, a fixer. A key. I never thought of him as a friend. Smart though. Went along with him, because I believed he would take me to the sun country at last.

  I’ve talked to Burke about you, he said.

  Looked around, cleared the chair of drawings and paper. Took a white handkerchief from his inside pocket and wiped the seat and the arms of the chair. The small piece of cotton blazingly bright.

  Burke Damis? I’d said. I thought he was living in a castle in California?

  A chateau, Crow said. Let me just say, when I first met Burke he was living in a place not much different to this.

  I fucking doubt it, I said.

  Two rooms above a boarded-up and empty cafe. The head of a crossroads. Heavy traffic. For sale sign had been up for eighteen months. Bars on the windows. Metal fire escape up to my door. I could hear anybody coming.

  My rooms were unfurnished except for the chair Crow sat in, and a mattress on the floor. My pictures covered the walls. The wood floor was splashed with paint. I tried to keep at bay the film of grime that covered everything else. The mantelpiece was a decoration of no fire.

  Had enough of shared houses, squats, that’s what I told myself. Past fifty. But more than one person had made it clear that I was considered difficult if not impossible to live with.

  There was a small window in the bedroom, facing the south. I worked in there.

  The moment is coming for marginal art, Crow said.

  Kept quiet. Looked at him. Lot riding.

  Crow looked at my drawing books and pictures for a long time.

  Clearly you’re not ready for a real show, he said at last. But work hard for a year, eighteen months, and you might be.

  A year?

  Maybe two.

  The young, ambitious and famously poor Burke Damis had once been Ariel Galton’s assistant. Crow’s book said a vision sent Galton to the south, below the downs and near a river. There she built basic structures to live and work in. She lived alone except for Damis, who turned up unannounced at her door.

  Seven years later, Damis and Ariel Galton, who was twenty years older, married before leaving on a long-planned trip to Colombia, where Ariel’s voices had told her she must go. The couple disappeared into South America for eighteen months. They were separated within a year of their return. Galton’s mental illness the reason given. We never heard Ariel’s story, not least why she finally walked into the sea. Whatever she had to say was in her work.

  The series of paintings Damis began after the separation, Burke and Ariel in Barranquilla (1993–94), became wildly successful, and made both Damis and Crow, his dealer, famous.

  The best known painting was a huge canvas of Galton after she had been given electroconvulsive treatments in the hospital in Barranquilla, where she was kept for a month after Damis had committed her.

  They never divorced, and after Galton killed herself by swimming out to sea, her home and paintings went to Damis. He bought the land and buildings outright, and preserved her studio. Damis also asked Evelyn Crow to be his dead wife’s biographer.

  Between them the two men owned quite a few of Galton’s most important pictures. Crow’s book established her as a great, forgotten artist. Galton’s remaining works were sold to private collectors. Damis had later fronted a popular programme about modern art. Never got shown now because all the artists were white men.

  I come from southern working people who value privacy above their own well-being. A problem shared is a secret given away. Whatever stories were told among ourselves were never written down, and nobody else thought we were worth writing about.

  That’s why I don’t know why Nan was bringing me up in the first place, or why my mum, who I did not see, was unable to. What series of bad events had brought me to Nan’s door. She never told me. Nan was expert at using silence against loss and absence.

  My dad was never spoken of. Didn’t stop me thinking about him.

  I could draw for as long as I can remember. Everybody except Nan tried to kick it out of me, when I was a kid, but it was who I was.

  The few people who bothered told me to learn a trade. Something more realistic.

  Say the word Nan and you think of an old lady but she was younger than I am now when she died.

  Clearing out her things I found a small black and white photograph with Terry, 6 months written on the back. A baby sitting on a blanket on a shingle beach, staring out to the sea that even in this colourless picture dances with points of light. Nothing has changed.

  Hard to remember what she looked like. Dark and small like many southern women. Hooped earrings of flattened gold. Cigarette voice. Hard hands. Kind kind kind. Lost to the heroin that flooded the town, arriving with northern gangs whose own towns had been lost to shipyard, pit and factory closures. When she went into the fire on a cold May day Nan weighed less than four stone. What I remember is her arm across my chest, lightly holding me still while she talked to a younger man also with gold earrings who may have been her dealer, or who could have been just about anyone else. I push against the loving bar of her arm but she holds me in place.

  After she was gone I took off. Nobody could have stopped me and nobody tried. Not the man with gold earrings or anybody else. A sixteen-year-old runaway.

  I’d go along all right for a month or half a year but then the sky would fall in and I’d wake up behind a locked door. Cold bars on the window. How bad it was depended on whether I was strapped down.

  The summer when I was twenty-one. Walking to a strawberry farm where I’d heard I might get work as a picker. I was covering the south of the country this way. I got lost somehow, turned around. At a white gate to a small private road, I saw a sign for an exhibition of paintings by somebody I’d never heard of.

  I walked up the private road that curved towards the house. Expecting any moment to be stopped. There was that sweet suspension of the air you sometimes get on early summer days. I can’t remember if the road was lined with flowers, just this droning sweetness that made me forget my sore feet in boots, my hunger. But it was England in the summer so there must have been flowers.

  A small display of drawings. Some letters, a notebook full of columns of numbers. A large black and white photograph. Ariel, side on, is climbing a stepladder. Long hair thickly plaited. She holds onto the ladder frame with her left hand, in her right she carries a large level, or maybe a two by four with an edge she trusts. Wearing what looks like a quilted Chinese jacket. A palette knife and a decorator’s brush are sticking out from the pocket. She’s looking beyond the photograph. Smiling.

  The paintings were in another room. There were four of them. The first floated in its frame and stopped me. I carried everything I owned on my back. I took the pack off and put it on the floor and then I sat on the pack and looked at the painting. Maybe ten feet tall and twenty feet wide. No human or animal forms. Bands of muted but reverberating colour arranged in a pattern, handmade, vulnerable, a grid made by visible pencil marks. Grey or grey-white paint, pale at the edges of each band almost to the point of absence. Ariel said that the pattern of a painting, the dimensions of the grid, was preordained in visions. The quilted squares of her jacket made another grid, and I wondered if she was conscious of that.

  The process,
she wrote, was like waiting for and then writing down the characters for a language she did not understand but was trying to learn. Hard work and practice as much as inspiration. She destroyed paintings she decided were failures.

  I couldn’t say where the house was, or who it belonged to. Near Chiddingly maybe. Somewhere on the downs. It’s the feeling that remains. There was a show of her work in New York a few years ago but how was I going to get to New York? I can always make the floating grids appear.

  I have visions too. The loving bar of Nan’s arm. Bars of cold iron and radiant paint. My angels in the trees.

  Crow was looking out at the unexceptional street. Checking to see if his car was still there. There were kids on the corner. They had nowhere else to go, but I guess Crow saw trouble. The hats and hoodies. A young woman I hadn’t seen before jogged down the street, her buttery ponytail bobbing. The kids watched her pass. A dog barked once and then stopped.

  A few days before, a skip had appeared outside the cafe downstairs. Two young blokes had pulled down the boards and begun stripping the place out. It was only a matter of time.

  What did Damis say about me? I said.

  Picturing the two men by a blue pool. Behind them the floating American hills. Hibiscus petals on the moving surface of the water like flowers of blood.

  Damis had exaggerated his youthful poverty. Traded on it. Not been on the street or anywhere near it. Hitched around Europe with a guitar and a paintbrush. Getting loved-up by the senoritas.

  Burke’s not had it all his own way, Crow said. Recent reassessments have been critical. The representations of the Wayuu tribespeople in the Colombia series are now seen as problematic. But he’s in good spirits.

  I should bloody hope so, I said.

  Burke said to tell you to listen to me.

  I can’t afford to work for another year on your say so or his.

  Crow reached inside his suit again. Came out with a thick roll of money in an elastic band.

  Keep using this cheap paint, he said, it’s got an interesting quality. These abstract pictures look recent. They don’t convince. Knock it off and stick to working these up.

  Crow handed me a pile of loose drawings, and sketchbooks with pages marked.

  The dogs began barking again as the wind seemed to pick up off the river. Like someone they didn’t know was wandering around out there. Invaders. Dogs bark when they want to tell you something.

  I stood in the dark, listening to the dogs and thinking about Evelyn Crow and Burke Damis. Ariel Galton and Michael’s stones and the camp in the woods. I thought about the old man thumping across my deck. I’d put on my bed every blanket I could find. Cold despite the fire that still burned in the cabin. I hoped they had shelter up there.

  You’d want a generator, or some way to cut into the island’s power source. Each winter worse than the last. Nobody on your back though. No guards or cops. What else was there? The red berries that might or might not be poisonous. Different kinds of mushrooms. Whoever was up there would need to know a lot more than I did. Useful to know how to forage. Never learned. Knew what to do in the city, where the big waste containers can provide food and shelter.

  Maybe they had friends on the boats. Get a hot shower, charge your phone. I imagined small raiding parties going into the city.

  I liked the way the shape of Michael’s stones remained unchanged despite the bad weather, but at the same time they were always different to look at. Dark with rain, or collaged with blown debris from the forest floor.

  I heard the helicopter coming up the river from a long way away.

  Cops. Searchlights from the thundering machine flooded the boat. Held its position directly above me. The boat rocked violently on the disturbed water. I held on to the frame of the wheelhouse. As the helicopter finally passed over the moorings, and the storm of its progress lessened to a kind of deep churn that made me bite down to keep from shouting, I watched with other dark heads now appearing from open hatches. The old man’s star-rimmed outline, Stella, her arms around the boy, the dark figures of the couple I’d seen at the boatyard and had not seen since. The helicopter, port and starboard lights red and green, hovered over the treetops, stripping the last of the leaves and making the branches whip back and forth, its searchlight on full beam and raking, no doubt, through the camp in the forest.

  I knew they could always decide it was you they were looking for.

  When it finally went away all the dogs on the island continued the wild and furious barking they had begun before the helicopter came into sight or reach of human ears, and which had been drowned out by the deep thumping noise of the machine’s rotating blades.

  The kind of sunless, freezing day when the sky seems to finish just above your eyeline and the top of your head feels heavy. I’d been without gas for three days and had come up to the boatyard hoping to find the place open, determined to get in the yard somehow and take one of the bottles if it wasn’t.

  Finding the place open for business I exchanged bottles with the sandy-haired man.

  I bought some instant coffee, four tins of beans, the kind with sausages in them, and two tins of potatoes. Some bread that wasn’t quite fresh but it would do for toast. More tobacco and liquorice papers and two tins of sardines. I ignored the plastic litre bottles of wine. He wanted a pound for a chocolate bar and I wouldn’t pay it. Paid for everything and put it all in the canvas bag I’d brought with me. The man didn’t offer to help. He was looking at the paper he had open on the counter. The paper was the wrong way round, but I could see he was reading the sports page. A small picture of two upside-down boxers going at it.

  Two kids in muddy boots tramped across the churned-up ground outside the hut. Nearly teenagers if they weren’t already. Mucking about. I’m a golden one and my name is Goldie, one called to the other. I’m a golden one and my name is Goldie. They were marching across the yard in a game but I couldn’t work out the rules. You could see the breath of the girl who was talking.

  The other was wearing a rubber wolf’s mask. Danny. I think there were about eight kids living on the boats. More at the weekends.

  Danny smiled and waved at me and I was so surprised I waved back.

  I hoisted the gas bottle onto my shoulder. Danny and the other kid ran off.

  The man followed me out into the yard. He was doing up his wax jacket.

  What are you doing here?

  Buying gas, I said. Which I had to wait three days to do.

  You’re Terry Godden.

  I looked past him.

  You’re not going to cause any trouble.

  I took a breath and looked at him.

  Rain fell between us.

  What kind of trouble?

  The kind you were in before.

  I didn’t answer. Stayed where I was. Couldn’t just walk away from him.

  Would you have gone through with it? he said.

  With what?

  Killing that man, the gallery owner.

  I have two large Galtons, Crow had said. At the house in France. Remarkable power. The vision thing sells. The mad shaman. More true to say she worked hard, and the harder she worked the more visions she had. She was fighting her illness all the time.

  I hadn’t seen Crow for weeks.

  Private club. In town. Crow known by name of course. I’d come straight from work. Show about to open. Finishing touches that would ruin the picture if I wasn’t careful.

  Should have put that in the book, I said.

  The wine was sweet. I drank some more.

  Took hold of my knife and fork and made them do the cancan along the edge of the table. Thick white linen. Doing the music. Somewhere else. Visions of sea light honeycombing before my eyes.

  We’re going to have to move to a smaller space, Crow said.

  What? I said.

  The interest isn’t as high as I’d expect it to be by now, Crow said.

  To use the big gallery will eat into any money we might make.

  Terry, he
said, we should lower the prices.

  Terry, are you all right?

  I burned with an ancient hatred.

  You robbing bastard, I said, you fucking cunt.

  I looked at the sandy-haired man. Anthony, the woman had called him. It was cold in the yard and both of us were trying not to show it.

  I told him I’d cut his head off if I found out he was stealing from me, I said. It was a figure of speech.

  I don’t see the difference.

  Neither could he.

  So you wouldn’t have killed him.

  Last time I looked he was still alive, I said, and making money.

  Christmas Eve I got drunk on the mainland and fell down into the boat late at night. The tide had changed. The boat was low in the water and in the dark I didn’t account for the greater drop. Was pissed. Eight or nine feet but to me the fall lasted forever. I lay under a surface covering of mist that made the night silver and into which the river and the electrical cables and the trees had disappeared.

  Don’t know how long I lay there. It was very late or very early.

  Standing over me when I woke up was a blonde giant whose green eyes shone out from his battered face. Wondered where I was, in the half moment before I felt the boat moving beneath me and tasted the dampness edged with river funk. The sheepskin-lined canvas jacket I wore saved me from broken bones and freezing to death.

  The giant was just a kid.

  When he spoke he almost disappeared behind his visible breath.

  Lucky, he said.

  Fuck happened.

  Had a fucking skinful mate. Recognize the signs.

  You’re too young to have a face like that.

  You hit your head? he said.

  A big busted nose and scarred eyebrows that shelved out above those shining green eyes. A full beard put years on him. A voice I couldn’t place any more accurately than West.

  A black wool hat. Gaffer tape covering the maker’s name on his waterproof jacket. Boots. Huge and thick. Woodsmoke, sweat and cooking grease.