I weighed the cold belt buckle in my hands. Wrapped the end of the rope around my left hand, making a hard pad, and tied it off. The rest of the rope hung whitely, weighted by the leather belt and hard buckle.
I made a low run to the door. Reached for the handle with my right hand. Felt the handle give as I pulled it slowly downwards. I let it back up. I stood, holding the length of rope in my bound hand. Yanked the door open and went in.
The big man was talking into the radio. The other man was smoking a cigarette and listening. The music I’d heard had stopped.
All right, the man said. All right. Just left. No, on his own. You want us to go after him? No, on his own, I told you. Nothing else we could do. What’s going on up there?
The big man looked up.
Wait, he said, Mr Kaplan, he’s here . . .
I ran at the big man, fast, as if he were a door closing, speeding up as I reached him.
The big man was still rising from his chair when I smashed him in the face with my rope thickened fist. He crashed to the floor. The dogs were at the window, jumping up in a frenzy, jaws open, thick lengths of saliva streaking the glass, claws scratching on the cheap wood. The other man stood with his hands raised. I lashed him with the rope.
The big man rose and I hit him again with the rope and buckle. The buckle split his face open and he screamed and fell.
I went back to the other man and started to hit him and he put his hands up. The big guard spat something onto the floor.
Fucking kill you, he said. Fucking mutt.
Stay down, I said.
Threw the radio on the floor and stamped on it until it broke apart.
All the time the shepherds going mad.
Left the hut. Cops and guards were coming. I could hear them shouting, crashing through the forest, beams of torchlight moving wildly between the dark trees.
The dock still burned. Way downstream I could see the bridge, returned once more to abstract forms, my paintings disappeared.
Went back to my dog. Kneeled and kissed her again.
Good soldier, I said, and then I lifted her up and carried her away into the forest.
Good soldier.
Author’s Note
In late December 2016, I went with my wife to see Slovakian artist Roman Ondak’s show at the South London Gallery. Despite living for thirty years no more than a few minutes away from the gallery on Peckham Road in Camberwell, I’d never been there before. I can’t explain this, as I was in the habit of visiting one of London’s free galleries at least once a week. Except to walk my dog, this was also the first time I’d left the house since my mother’s funeral two months earlier.
Beneath the floor of the gallery is a marquetry panel designed by the nineteenth-century artist, designer and socialist Walter Crane (1845–1915). Commissioned as a centrepiece for the gallery, which opened in 1891, it’s believed to be the only piece of its kind that Crane made.
Most often hidden from view, Ondak uncovered Crane’s floor for the first time in many years, as part of his installation. The timing was right.
It was dark outside. From its place on the floor the panel seemed to float up, and become suspended in the centre of an otherwise overwhelmingly white space (which was not white, I’m sure, in the radiant way I experienced it). Swans, bulrushes and shells, diamond and fish-scale patterns rose before me.
I was open to visions and instruction. Both devastated, as Roland Barthes wrote eight days after his mother’s death, and the victim of presence of mind. The colours of the inlaid wood, the patterns, the shells and bulrushes, the brownness, all of this reminded me of my grandad Jim, a Dunkirk veteran, and nan Millie. In the late 1960s when I was a really little kid, they’d been moved from their small house in the centre of Eastbourne to a tiny flat on the eastern edge of the town. The house and street – where I spent the first four years of my life – was demolished to make way for a multi-storey car park.
Crane’s panel reminded me of Nan’s brown furniture – her inherited dark sideboard and fold-out table, her fire screen, all so beautifully and carefully made. I remembered how Nan – my mum’s mum – took great care of these things that had once belonged to her father, Charles Lawrence, a train driver, Methodist lay preacher and Labour councillor.
At the centre of Crane’s panel is the inscription: The Source of Art is in the Life of a People.
Sometimes only the obvious will do – the words hit me like a punch, a command and a question, or series of questions. What art? What people? What is the relationship of the people to the art once the art is made? Are the people from whose lives the art is made the same people that consume, own or otherwise benefit from the finished work? What are the responsibilities of the artist who accepts Crane’s challenge? What is the relationship of the artist to the people? If the artist makes art from the lives of the people, are there certain kinds of art that can and cannot be made?
The Painter’s Friend is the result of working through these questions, as well as being an exploration of what it means and has meant to be a working class artist in a country where, as B. S. Johnson wrote in Trawl (1964), a novel published the year I was born: ‘The class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of human spirit as it ever has been in England: I was born on my side, and I cannot and will not desert.’
The Painter’s Friend is indebted to Mark Aitken’s award-winning photography project Sanctum Ephemeral, a series of portraits made inside homes in Cressingham Gardens, a south London housing estate threatened with demolition. Aitken’s decision to install the photographs as large prints on the estate’s exterior walls inspires Terry’s actions. Thanks to Mark for his counsel and blessing. Lines from Mark’s emails to me have been used, in slightly different form, on p. 171.
See also Mark Aitken, Sanctum Ephemeral (Deep River Press, 2018), with a short text, ‘Nothing Here Before’ (pp. 38–9) by Howard Cunnell and afterword by Zelda Cheatle.
This book is dedicated to the writer John Healy. Terry Godden’s expulsion from the art industry deliberately invokes Healy’s treatment at the hands of the UK publishing industry after his classic memoir, The Grass Arena, was published by Faber in 1988.
Healy’s book became a prize-winning bestseller, but after the writer had allegedly made threats of physical violence against publishing staff, The Grass Arena was withdrawn from sale. Copies were pulped and the book was put out of print.
Healy’s work was then effectively suppressed for years, depriving the writer of an income. In 2019, Etruscan Books published The Metal Mountain, the writer’s first novel in thirty years. John Healy has never stopped writing.
Burke Damis is the pseudonym of the painter Bruce Campion in Ross Macdonald’s novel The Zebra Striped Hearse (1962). Laurel Archer is named both for the character Laurel Russo in Sleeping Beauty (1973), and for Lew Archer, Macdonald’s private detective. Ariel Galton’s surname is taken from Macdonald’s The Galton Case (1959).
Island, a short story in which the people who will become Gene, Perseis and Michael first appeared, was published by Pariah Press in 2015.
Lines from p. 29 were first published in slightly different form in my poem ‘Near Bells Yew Green’, in Michael Curran (ed.), Scare-Devil (Sick Fly Publications/Tangerine Press. Tooting, 2019), p. 23.
Lines from pp. 28, 50 and 51 were first published in slightly different form in my poem ‘Some Way off the Island’, in Michael Curran (ed.), Fool-Saint (Sick Fly Publications/Tangerine Press. Tooting, 2020), pp. 16–17.
‘The mantelpiece was a decoration of no fire.’
Mick Guffan, ‘Meeting’, in Inner London Buddha: Selected Poems 1999–2006 (Tangerine Press. Tooting, 2018), p. 19: ‘Your mantelpiece remains / a decoration of no fire / public houses anticipate your / entrance.’ Thanks to Michael Curran.
‘All bones, breath and eyes, Vesna. So thin the joints showed through.’
Gary Snyder, ‘Go Now’, in The Present Moment: New Poems (Counterpoint. Berkeley, 2015), p. 63: ‘So t
hin that the joints showed through / each sinew and knob . . . her / lips dry, fierce, she was all bones, breath and eyes’.
‘When will I be done keeping this fist clenched in my chest my throat my skull?’
George Mouratidis, ‘Gentry Street Saturday 4 p.m. Greens’ (or ‘Notes While Waiting for Laundry’), in Angel Frankenstein (Soulbay Press. Sydney, 2018), p. 104. Thanks to George Mouratidis.
‘I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on.’
Charles Bukowski, ‘I Thought of Ships, of Armies, Hanging On’, in The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (Black Sparrow Press. Santa Rosa, 1969), p. 63: ‘and I thought of ships, of armies / hanging on’.
‘Making money with the sun on their backs, dreaming of a beach-bar getaway.’
Mick Guffan, ‘Workers Dream of a Beach Bar Getaway’, in Inner London Buddha: Selected Poems 1999–2006 (Tangerine Press. Tooting, 2018), p. 110: ‘But there / will be workers dreaming / of a beach bar getaway / at a negligent corner / of an impossible town’. Thanks to Michael Curran.
‘It’s become a kind of urban myth.’
In an interview for the documentary film Barbaric Genius (2001), former Faber Editor-in-Chief Robert McCrum described the row with writer John Healy, after which The Grass Arena was pulped and put out of print, as ‘insignificant’ and a kind of ‘urban myth’.
Acknowledgements
My love and thanks to the following for their contributions to this book: Mark Aitken Adjoa Andoh Irene Babinet Paul Baggaley Sean Baker Frank Bowling John Bratby Anne Briggs Charles Bukowski Edward Burra Joyce Cary Joseph Conrad Rob Coyne Wendy Coyne Walter Crane Rebecca Crow Gillian Cunnell (née Godden) Mark Cunnell Michael Curran Sandy Denny Kris Doyle Andrew Franks Marcus Harvey Ted Giles Brian Godden James Godden Jo Godden Mary Godden Millie Godden (née Lawrence) Davy Graham Debra Granik Valeska Grisebach Melissa Harrison John Healy Samantha Herron Violet Hodsall (née Lawrence) John Hoyland Mark Jenkin Tom Jenkins Keith King Sophie Lambert Charles Lawrence Cyril Lawrence Matthew Loukes Jim MacAirt Ross Macdonald Jock McFadyen Adam Mars-Jones Agnes Martin Rowan Moore Van Morrison George Mouratidis Les Murray Sophie Newell Robert Noonan Roman Ondak Jonathan Rendall David Rogers James Sallis George Shaw Gary Snyder Alan Stepney Beverley Toogood Alex Trocchi Patrick Walsh Adele Waters Steve Waters Roy Williams Tim Winton
Love to the dogs: Angel Boy Edward Fordie Hattie India Lulu Millie Rosa Sparkle Tally
About the Author
HOWARD CUNNELL’S acclaimed memoir Fathers and Sons was read on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and described as ‘unique, and uniquely beautiful’ (Financial Times); it explores his experiences as a fatherless man raising a transgender son. His novel The Sea on Fire ‘maps new noir territory in an incandescent underwater world’ (Guardian), and draws from Cunnell’s life as a dive guide and scuba instructor. He is the contributing editor of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll, which the New York Times called ‘the living version for our time’. He lives in Sussex.
Also by Howard Cunnell
Fathers & Sons
The Sea on Fire
Marine Boy
First published 2021 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2021 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5290-3095-2
Copyright © Howard Cunnell 2021
Cover image: Edward Burra, The Straw Man © Estate of Artist, c/o Lefevre Fine Art Ltd., London.
Photo: Bridgeman Art Library
Author photograph: © teddave
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