The Painter's Friend

by Howard Cunnell

  Fucking freezing, he said. Can you walk?

  In an out of the fog of his breath went his face.

  Did I piss myself?

  You’d know better than me.

  More or less had to carry me. The steps down from the wheelhouse to the cabin were too narrow for both of us. He went first in case he needed to break my fall. He was so big he had to go down sideways.

  The cabin was cold and damp and was smaller with him in it. The cold closed air was smoky with all the fires I’d made that winter. He helped me lie down on the broken-springed settee in front of the burned-down fire.

  Want me to take your boots off?

  No, I said. The lamps though.

  He lit the gas lamps, and a pattern of lighted bars and shadows appeared on the floor and walls. I looked at my hands. No blood.

  The giant banked up the almost dead fire. There was a tin of lighter fuel by the stove and he whooshed some of that on and the flames rose.

  Grit crunched under his boots as he moved around the boat.

  He seemed to duck down reflexively, as though he was used to everywhere being too small for him.

  You’ll be all right now I reckon.

  Moving closer to the fire. My wet clothes began to steam.

  I reached into my coat pocket. The bottle was unbroken.

  There’s rum, I said.

  I don’t drink, he said.

  Where did you come from?

  The outsized youth gestured towards the forest.

  He was looking at the worktable heaped with drawings.

  Not just a piss artist then.

  Look, I said, I appreciate the help.

  But fuck off, right? I get it. You got your bottle stashed away. Have a nice drink in peace. I’d get out of those wet clothes before you start though. Catch your death.

  Not like that.

  Adam, he said. Merry Christmas.

  When he left the boat lifted in the water, without the weight of him holding it down. After a long time I managed to get up and padlock the doors to the cabin steps and turn off the gas lamps. Then I sat in darkness broken only by the diminishing light of my fire, breathing hard.

  Christmas morning he was sitting against the wheelhouse wrapped in a big sheet of dark green tarpaulin he’d found from somewhere. I barely made it up the stairs from the cabin to the wheelhouse. I was holding onto the doorframe. Even in the cold I was sweating. At the same time the rain was freezing against my face. I was foul smelling. Everything hurt. I tried to stand up straight. My back felt broken.

  Rain drummed against the boat, and made endless expanding circles appear and disappear on the surface of the river. There was a narrow lip where the roof of the wheelhouse extended out, and a band of dryness on the deck under the lip, maybe two or three inches, and as far as he could, which wasn’t much, he was sitting in what shelter this offered, with his back against the curved white exterior wall of the wheelhouse. His back would have been dry but the rest of him, even wearing the tarpaulin like he was, would be soaked through. His heavy-looking boots, wet and shiny now, were stuck out in the rain on the dark planking of the stern. I guess he would have got tired of trying to sit cross-legged for the difference it made.

  The day was lead-coloured mostly, with a dull silver band showing in the sky above the arched bridge of Portland stone, and the far riverbank, what I could see of it, looking further away in the rain than it was. The big youth seemed to be looking at the traffic of floating things that were carried downstream without pause on the always moving water. A branch with a plastic bag caught on it. A jaunty-looking piece of white polystyrene. He turned to look at me when the wheelhouse door slid open, his fair beard dripping and sticking out from a gap in the tarpaulin, green eyes shining.

  Had a dry bag with him.

  I can’t have anybody here, I said. I don’t. I’m not.

  The giant pushed himself up from his inadequate shelter. As he moved, rainwater ran from the folds and channels of the tarpaulin.

  You just turn up, I said.

  Lucky for you. Be dead otherwise.

  Adam, you said.

  That’s right.

  And you live in the camp.

  What I said.

  I stood blocking the doorway.

  Let me out the rain at least, he said.

  I stood aside.

  A zephyr of fresh coffee. I looked across to the old man’s boat and saw him through the blurred porthole watching us over the lip of his cup.

  Adam was reaching into his dry bag and putting things on the corner of the banquette. I watched the rainwater make a little pool around his feet.

  There was a dirty towel on the floor, just inside the door.

  Use this? he said.

  I nodded.

  He used the towel to wipe the surface water off himself, and then rubbed his face and hair. Balled the towel and dropped it where it had been.

  You can’t stay here, I said.

  He looked at me.

  Painkillers, he said, shaking the plastic container so the pills rattled. Strong. Four a day. Don’t fuck about or they’ll fuck you. Plus, I didn’t know what you had, so I got you some things, see you through for a few days.

  A jar of coffee, tins of soup and beans. Corned beef. Bread. A tin of peaches. A thick battered paperback book. Burke Damis on the cover, dark hair swept back, sparkle in his eyes. Modern Art, the book of his TV series. With colour plates. Must have been thirty years old.

  Where did you find this?

  I’ll be back in a day or two, he said. You all right for gas and firewood?

  I said I was.

  You’ll need money, I said. For all this.

  Sort it out later.

  Threw me a roll of toilet paper.

  Almost forgot, he said.

  What kind of pills? I said.

  The good ones.

  I can’t take them.

  They’re really good.

  I looked at his broken face.

  I know, I said. I can’t.

  Adam looked at me hard and nodded.

  Going to hurt to wipe your own arse, he said. When the drink wears off.

  Yes.

  Get you something else?

  No.

  If you change your mind, he said.

  All right, I said.

  Merry Christmas.

  And to you.

  I sat in the wheelhouse after he left. The unopened book on the banquette seat beside me. The rain slowed almost to nothing. The wideness of the river slowly revealed in the early morning. The water tiger-striped in light and shadow, its surface now an endless series of moving helices. A diving cormorant, trim, softly angular, knifed into the water. The immense shining undersides of a plane passing overhead reflected on the pleated, cold-looking water. The river was moving fast, the current boiling up the muddy bottom in cinnamon-coloured clouds. Pale rising sunshine made the riverbank broken gold.

  Dreaming of painkillers in the floating bow, I remembered drawing Nan as she watched the snooker.

  I didn’t know I was an outsider until Evelyn Crow called me one.

  Among the gleaming vitrines.

  I just lived in the world I lived in with everybody else.

  All of us struggling to get by, as Nan would have said.

  I gave her Great Expectations and she said, I can’t read that.

  Some other idea of myself there.

  Punk was a help. Set me right.

  Friday nights Nan sat with the men in the public bar.

  After she died I went out into the country, drawing. It barely needs justifying. It’s as old as singing.

  House and all the other houses gone. Knocked down. Everything gone. Way of life.

  I drew travellers, squatters, runaways, unemployed blokes.

  Geezers in pubs. Pawnbrokers, pound shops, the bookies, churches.

  Drew the pub the pub the pub the pub.

  Empty factories, demos, riot cops busting heads.

  Plastic blue mattre
ss, locked door.

  Winos in doorways. Sleeping standing up.

  Cars with different coloured doors, rubbish, dogs.

  Paintings of post-industrial desolation, Crow had called them. Damaged and fractured.

  From the gone world.

  The dogs don’t know what they are, Adam said. Long ago they might have been something, but now you couldn’t put a name to them.

  Bloody mongrels, he said. That’s what they are.

  There were four in the box, two black and white, one all over tan and one tan and white. The tan and white dog had one white sock and three white rings around three ankles. She had a tail with a white tip like a fox brush.

  A black and white dog ran back and forth by the riverbank, snapping at parcels of froth the onshore wind was making airborne, the froth alien and white in the lead-grey late afternoon. The dog stalked the white foam, her pointed ears raised, ruffled body hunched with tension that was released when she lunged, jaws snapping.

  Adam put the box down. The pups moved over each other, blinking, making soft effortful noises from the back of their throats. A warm biscuit smell came from the box.

  You want a dog? he said.

  They were so small. I put my hand in the box and the pups mouthed and nipped at it with their sharp, unbelievably white teeth. I pushed their fur back against the grain and gently pulled their tiny ears. I put my hand on the belly of the fattest one, the tan and white dog, and it was hot with the blood of new life.

  No mate, I said.

  The old man been looking after you?

  Look after myself.

  Fool me.

  Never asked for your help, I said.

  Grinding pain. Beginning low in my spine and tunnelling up my back and down my legs. Pain that varied its route and intensity from moment to moment. Anger rode along if allowed. I was made of sullen, badly fused blocks of self that I heard crunching against one another whenever I moved.

  Didn’t go mad then, cut your ear off.

  Fuck off.

  The tan and white dog bit my finger.

  What’ll you do if you can’t get rid of them, I said.

  I’m not trying to get rid of them, he said, I’m trying to find them homes.

  What if you can’t.

  Drown them in the river, the big youth said, his eyes shining, what do you think?

  That mum? I said, nodding at the dog on the riverbank.

  That’s mum, Adam said.

  What’s she think about you giving her pups away?

  Maybe she thinks it’s easier than looking after them all, Adam said.

  The old tyres used for fenders squeaked against each other and made the pups open their eyes wide. They climbed and rolled and mouthed each other in the box that was lined with a clean-looking red flannel shirt.

  The old man came into my wheelhouse without knocking. Raised his hand and took off his wool hat. I hadn’t heard him coming, or felt his presence changing the movement of the always moving boats.

  Wrong to say that sound travelled a long way on the island. Clear days it did. Still days. When you could hear a stone whisper. But since I’d arrived I could count on one hand the number of clear and still days. Sometimes it rained so hard I wouldn’t have heard bloody murder happening on the next boat.

  Adam was right. For days after falling it was all I could do to wipe my own arse without screaming. I couldn’t sleep. Shouted and raged. No more, I said over and over.

  Locked in a cell all you can do about the screams you hear is to ignore them. Can’t help anybody. Youth prison is the worst, borstal. I was in a place called Send. Doesn’t take much and I’m back there. Every night you’d hear somebody breaking or being broken. Drugs kicking in too much, or not enough. More than once the screams came from inside my own head. With no love for God you pray for it to stop. Promise anything. See anybody dead if they don’t fucking stop.

  Shut the fuck up, somebody shouts, fore I give you something to fucking cry about.

  Sometimes it stops. There’s a loud silence. You finally fall asleep. A chair being kicked over wakes you, the sound of choking. Alarms shatter against the cold walls.

  I camped out in the wheelhouse.

  Murder getting up there, but better than going mad stuck below all day. The dark closed-in feeling.

  The old man still crossed my boat twice a day. I watched him. Wrapped in sour blankets and the clothes I never changed, because it was too painful to try. Pens and paper in my lap. Ready.

  I began to see him. The skin tight against the shape of his skull, so that the evenly proportioned features, lead-coloured eyes, high cheekbones, wide nose, were not what I remembered when he was gone. Instead I thought of a surface rocky and unyielding. The colour of damp sandstone. A face formed for privacy, so used to hiding its secrets and hurts that the contrary was true. The old man radiated strong feeling.

  The Perspex window, most often blurred with rain, was a barrier between all the things I thought and wondered about him, and my inability to raise my hand.

  He saw me and thought about me, too. Had to. Looked straight at me with a stone face.

  From the start after my fall I was worried about the portaloo. Lifting it. Taking it all that way to the cesspit. To put off needing to lug the full container up the steps and into the forest, I sometimes went over the side of the boat at night, muffling the sound as best I could by pissing on the fenders, against the side of the boat, anywhere but directly into the water. Shivering in the cold. Trying not to wet the blanket.

  Couldn’t put it off forever. Didn’t want to ask for help. Adam, Stella. Do it myself, fuck it.

  Managed to drag the heavy shit container out of the tiny shower unit, sloshing and bumping it across the floor.

  Tried to lift it and climb the steps at the same time. Stupid. Fell down hard and yelled like a bastard.

  The old man’s face had appeared at the top of the wheelhouse steps and looked down at me.

  I was brought up to believe that God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, he’d said.

  The old man nodded at Adam without really looking at him. He was fixed on the box of pups. Rubbing his thick hands together. The tan and white dog looked back at him and sounded like she was humming.

  Let me see those dogs, John Rose said.

  John Rose’s dog lay asleep on my wheelhouse floor, the tan of her coat fiery in the light. The big window gathered and contained to the space we sat in the April sun. River a smooth brightness. Metallic seabirds flashed upstream.

  The young dog’s lips were drawn back from her teeth, exposing her pink and liver gums, and she was growling and yipping in her sleep. Twelve weeks old or thereabouts, her green feet paddling and softly brushing against the wood floor.

  Why don’t you take the blessed dog out? John had said, the two of them at my door before I’d had coffee.

  John looked me up and down.

  Stuck in here all winter, he said.

  Turning back like he’d left the stove on.

  Dog near enough bouncing up and down, barking happily.

  In the forest, the winged fruit of ash trees parachuting down all around, the dog had jumped into a water hole thick with algae. In the warm wheelhouse she smelled strongly sulphurous. Green stains hid her one white sock and the white rings around her ankles. The tip of her tail was green.

  John wrinkled his nose and looked down at the dog. The heat of the light she was lying in made the bad egg smell stronger.

  Why you let her jump in the stink?

  She never asked me, I said.

  Contrails blossomed then disappeared across the window-framed sky.

  A partly inflated plastic bag on the water glowed with captured sunshine as it moved downstream. Insects fizzed just above the surface, promoting fish to rise, the patterns of their rising spreading and vanishing on the water. Below the surface were dark locomotive shadows in turns visible and not as the fish returned to deeper water.

  A small colony of goldfinches had s
ettled or returned to the trees near my boat, and I could hear their high liquid singing even through the closed wheelhouse door. I had thought of feeding them but they were doing fine without my help. They were getting fatter by the day.

  Never spent time alone with a dog before. Steered clear. Living rough you met a million dogs. Some friendly, some not. I was worried she’d run off. Home in one piece. What more did John want? Laughed when she snapped her jaws at falling ash fruit bouncing off her nose.

  Coming out of the forest, people I didn’t know and hadn’t spoken to smiled at the dog and me with her. I felt the muscles in my face soften, my clamped mouth relax. I looked down and smiled at the dog.

  People sat on their boats, on battered camp chairs turned to the sun, though it was not yet warm enough to go without a fire inside.

  Winter clothes and bedding brought up to air, narrowboats crowned with folded mattresses. Thin columns of woodsmoke.

  The boy Danny waved and yelled: Terry!

  Jumping over the gangplank and coming to hug the dog.

  She’s wet and smelly, I said.

  The boy stuck his face in her fur.

  Mmmmmmn, Danny said.

  The dog sitting patiently, letting the boy love her.

  You like the coffee? John said.

  It was phenomenal.

  It’s all right, I said.

  John had brought me back from the dead with his magic brew. When he found me down there with the shitter.

  John had lifted the heavy container and stood it upright. Tightened the cap.

  Sit up son, he’d said.

  I’m a grown man, I said.

  I came to know his embrace. Sweet breath. The reefer coat like worn steel wool. Hands were old tools. The island seal of woodsmoke, damp, the special impress of boat life. Some other faint astringent. Not turpentine. Sharper, a bit on the nose.

  Now the old man looked at me across his coffee. Light flared in his eyes. He looked at the dog.

  You are not the only one with no sense, he said. And who needs a bath.

  The dog yipped in her sleep but didn’t move. Like the goldfinches, I could almost see her growing.

  No drink since Christmas. Knew enough to be careful. Been here before.