Speaking With the Angel

by Nick Hornby

  So. We had the induction hour, and then we were led through the gallery to our positions. On the way I was trying to work out whether I’d ever been in an art gallery before or not. You’d think I’d remember, but the trouble is, art galleries look exactly like you think they’re going to look – a load of corridors with pictures hanging on them and people wandering around. So how would I know if I’ve been to one before? It feels like I have, but maybe I’ve just seen one on the telly, or in the films – there’s that bit in Dressed to Kill, isn’t there, where that bloke’s trying to pick her up, and they keep seeing each other in different rooms. I can say this for sure, though: I’ve never had a good time in one. If I have ever been, it was on a school trip, and I was bored out of my skull, like on just about every school trip I was taken. The only one I remember now is when we went to some Roman ruins somewhere, and I nicked a few stones out of this mosaic thing. I stood on the edge and loosened a few with my foot, and while the teacher was talking, I crouched down as if to do up my shoelace and slipped a few in my pocket. And when we got back on the coach, I showed all the other lads what I’d done, and it turned out they’d all done exactly the same, and we were holding half the fucking floor in our hands. And the next thing we knew the bloke in charge of the place was chasing the coach down the street, and we all had to go to the front and put what we’d nicked into a carrier bag. We got in a lot of trouble for that. Anyway, what I reckon is we did go to an art gallery somewhere, and I don’t remember because nobody walked off with a painting.

  The thing is, this gallery’s like the normal sort of gallery for the first few rooms – pictures of fruit and all that, and then it starts to go weird. First we went through a couple of rooms where the pictures aren’t pictures of anything, just splodges, and then when we get to our bit, the new exhibition, there aren’t many pictures at all. There are bits of animals all over the place, and a tent, and ping-pong balls floating on air currents, and a small house made of concrete, and videos of people reading poetry. It looks more like a school open day than an art gallery. You know, biology here, science there, English over at the back, media studies next to the toilets …

  ‘I could have done any of these myself,’ said this miserable old git called Tommy who’d already moaned once about the length of the coffee breaks. ‘Yeah, you could now, you old cunt,’ I said to him. ‘Now you’ve seen them. Anyone could now. But you didn’t think of it. So you’re too late.’ I was pleased with that. I pinched it off of a teacher at school, apart from the ‘you old cunt’ bit. That’s mine. We were reading this poem at school, and some kid said exactly the same thing as Tommy – ‘I could have done that.’ Because it was an easy poem. It was short, and we knew all the words, and it didn’t rhyme. And the teacher said, ‘No, you couldn’t. You could now, because you could just copy it out. But you didn’t think of it.’ I thought that was smart. Anyway, Tommy hasn’t spoken to me since I called him an old cunt, and I’m glad.

  I don’t give a fuck about whether it’s art, or who could do it. The thing is, it isn’t boring, our gallery. The other rooms, with the pictures of cows in, they’re boring. But our rooms, with the actual cows in, all cut up, they’re not. There’s got to be a lesson in there somewhere, hasn’t there? It wouldn’t work for everything, though, I can see that. I mean, it works for cows and tents and small houses, but it wouldn’t work for, like, the fucking river. You’d still have to do a painting of that.

  Anyway. Our group was getting smaller and smaller, because the woman taking us to our positions was sort of dropping us off, like we were in her bus. And it turned out that I was the last passenger. Like when me and Lisa went on a dodgy package holiday to Spain, years and years ago, before the kids came, and there was a coach to pick us all up at the airport, and every other bastard got dropped off at their hotel before we did, because it turned out that our hotel was two miles from the fucking beach. My painting was sort of the same thing as that. It was off to the side, in a room all of its own, and there was a curtain across the entrance, so it was separate from the others. Outside, there was a sign that said: ‘warning! This room contains an exhibit of a controversial nature. Please do not enter if you feel you might be offended. Over 18s only’. The woman didn’t say anything about that. She just ignored it – never asked me if I might be offended.

  ‘You’re in here,’ she said. ‘Watch out. We’re expecting trouble.’ And then she went off.

  I went behind the curtain, and there on the far wall was this massive picture of Jesus. I’d say it was probably ten feet high, five or six feet wide, something like that. It’s kind of like the pictures you’ve seen before – eyes closed, the old crown of thorns on his head. That was when he was on the cross, wasn’t it? It’s sort of a close-up, head and shoulders, so you only see a bit of the cross, but what this picture has that the normal ones don’t – not to me they don’t, anyway – is that you can really tell just how much it must have fucking hurt, being nailed up. Usually, it looks like he’s having a kip, but this one, his face is all screwed up in agony. You really wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, I’ll tell you. So the first thing I thought was, bloody hell, that’s a good picture. Because it makes you think, and I don’t often think about things like that. I haven’t been anywhere near Jesus since Lisa’s sister got married, three years ago.

  And the second thing I thought – I’d forgotten about the sign and the curtain and all that for a moment – was, who the fuck would get offended by that? Because you can go into any church and see the same sort of thing. Not so realistic, maybe, a bit more PG than R, but, you know, basically the same sort of stuff: moustache and beard, crown of thorns, sad. Because you can’t tell how it’s done from a distance, see. When you step behind the curtain, you just see the picture, and the face. You have to get quite close up to see anything else. So I couldn’t understand it, why there was all the fuss. I just thought: religious people. Nutters. ’Cos they are, most of them, aren’t they? I mean, to each his own and everything, but you wouldn’t want to marry one, would you?

  There’s a chair in front of the picture, and I walked towards it to have a sit-down. And as I got closer, I could see that the picture was made up of hundreds – thousands, maybe millions – of little squares, like the mosaics I pinched from the Roman ruins. And when I got really close, I could see that these millions of little squares were actually little pictures, and every single little picture had at least one female breast in it. So … you know those pictures that are made up of dots? Well, that’s how this Jesus picture was done, except all the dots are nipples. And that’s what the picture’s called – NippleJesus. There were big breasts and small breasts, and big nipples and small nipples, and black breasts and white breasts. And some of the pictures had as many as four breasts in them, and I could see then that all of the pictures were stills from porn mags, and he’d cut them all up and stuck them on. Must have taken him years. So now I understood what the sign was about.

  I hated the picture then. Two minutes ago I’d liked it, now I hated it. And I hated the bloke who’d done it, too. Wanker. I went to have a look at the name of the artist, and it turned out to be a woman. Martha Marsham. How can you be a woman and do that? I thought. I could have understood some bloke doing it, some bloke with too many dirty magazines and no girlfriend. But a bird? And I hoped that someone did manage to fuck the picture up somehow, and if they did, I said to myself, I wouldn’t try to stop them. I might even give them a hand. Because that is offensive, isn’t it, a Jesus made out of nipples? That’s out of order.

  One thing I forgot to say before: this was about six o’clock in the evening, and the exhibition hadn’t opened to the public yet. It was opening the next day, but we’d been called in to do the first-night party. I was actually still looking at all the little pictures when the first people came in, holding wine glasses. I felt a bit of a tosser, like I’d been caught looking at dirty pictures, which is actually what I was doing, if you think about it. Or even if you don’t. I stopped lo
oking, quick, and stood by the chair with my hands behind my back, looking straight ahead, like I was on sentry duty, while these two people, a man and a woman, looked at the picture.

  ‘It’s rather lovely, isn’t it?’ said the woman. She was about my age, short hair, quite posh.

  ‘Is it?’ The bloke didn’t seem too sure, so I decided I liked him more than her, even though he had floppy hair and braces and a suit.

  ‘Don’t you think?’

  He shrugged, and they left the room. There was none of that stuff, the stuff they take the piss out of in TV comedies, where they stroke their chins and talk bollocks. (There never is, in my experience, which has now lasted two days. Most people don’t say anything much. They look and they go. If you ask me they’re scared of talking bollocks, which pisses me off, because once I was sat here for a while I wanted the bollocks. Something to laugh at. But there isn’t any.) The next couple were younger, early twenties, studenty types, and they were more interested in me than the picture.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said the bloke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at him.’

  And the girl looked at me, and laughed. It was like I was part of the exhibition, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Can you blame them?’

  And then they went, too. By this stage, I was starting to feel a bit sorry for this Martha woman. I mean, you spend fucking who knows how long doing this thing and people come in here, look at me, laugh, and then fuck off again. I might ask her for half her royalties, or whatever it is she gets.

  The moment the students left, the curtain swished back, and I heard this woman’s voice going ‘Ta-ra!’, and then a whole group of people came in – two younger guys, an older couple, and a young woman.

  ‘Oh, Martha,’ the older woman said. ‘It’s amazing. That’ll get them going.’ So I looked at the group, and straight away I guessed it was her mum and dad, her boyfriend, and maybe her brother. Martha is about thirty, and she doesn’t really look like I thought she’d look – no dyed hair, no pierced nose, nothing like that. She looks normal, really. She was wearing this long, green, sort of Indian skirt and what looked like a bloke’s pinstripe jacket, and she’s got long hair, but … she’s nice-looking. Friendly.

  I wondered for a moment whether her mum and dad knew about the nipples and all that, because I liked the picture when I first came into the room. But then I realized that was stupid, and she would have told them something about it before they came, or ages and ages ago. So what kind of parents were these? I know what I would have got if I’d told my dad I was making a picture of Jesus out of women’s breasts. He probably would have wanted to see the breasts, but he would have given me a pasting for the Jesus bit. So I looked at Martha’s mum and dad and tried to work them out. Her dad was tall, and wearing jeans, and he had long grey hair in a ponytail; her mum was wearing jeans too, but she looked a bit more like somebody’s mother than he looked like somebody’s father. They all looked like they were artists, though. They looked like they all sat around at home smoking dope and painting. Which was why no one had given her a back-hander for making a Jesus out of porn, probably.

  ‘I want a photo,’ Martha said. ‘With all of us in it.’ And then she looked at me. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Martha, by the way.’

  ‘Dave.’

  ‘Hello, Dave.’ We shook hands, and then she gave me her camera, and I took a picture of them all, standing there grinning and pointing, and I didn’t know whether it was right, what with the kind of picture it was. But at that precise moment, I wished that I knew them better, or people like them, because they seemed nice, and happy, and interesting. I wanted a dad with a grey ponytail instead of a miserable old git who was always going on about the fucking Irish and the fucking blacks; it seemed to me that if I’d had a dad like that, I wouldn’t have ended up going into the Army, which was the worst mistake I ever made.

  I wanted to ask them questions. I wanted to ask her, Martha, why she’d wanted to do what she’d done, and why it had to be nipples, and why it had to be Jesus, and whether she actually wanted to upset people. And I wanted to ask them whether they were ashamed of her, or proud of her, or what. But I didn’t ask anything, and nothing they said made me any the wiser; after the photos they talked about where they were going to eat, and whether someone else that they knew had come to the party, and then that sort of thing. Before they went, Martha came over to me and kissed me on the cheek, and said, ‘Thank you.’ And I went, you know, ‘Oh, that’s OK.’ But I was really pleased that she’d done it. It made me feel special, like I had a proper, important job to do.

  Martha smiled, and I was left on my own again.

  I told Lisa about the picture when I got home that night, after the party. She couldn’t believe it – she said it was disgusting, and how come it was on the wall in a famous gallery. For some reason I found myself sort of defending it, taking Martha’s side. I don’t know why. Maybe I fancied her a bit, maybe I liked the look of her family – maybe I trusted them, and, like, took my lead from them. Because I knew they were nice people, and if they didn’t see anything wrong with NippleJesus, then maybe there wasn’t anything. And anyway, the stuff that Lisa was coming out with … It was just plain ignorant. ‘You should take it outside when no one’s looking and smash it to bits,’ she said.

  ‘After all that work she’s put in?’ I said.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said. ‘I mean, Hitler put in a lot of work, didn’t he?’

  ‘What harm is she doing you?’ I asked her. ‘You don’t have to go and look at it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like knowing it’s there,’ she said. ‘And I paid for it. Out of my taxes.’

  Out of her taxes! How much of her taxes went towards NippleJesus? She sounded like one of those lunatics you hear on radio phone-ins. I got twopence out of my pocket and threw it at her. ‘There,’ I said, ‘there’s your tax back. And you’re making a profit.’

  ‘What you gone all like this for?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I think it’s good,’ I said. ‘Clever.’

  Lisa didn’t think it was clever. She thought it was stupid. And I thought she was stupid, and told her, and by the time we went to bed we weren’t speaking to each other.

  So yesterday morning, I get on the bus to go to work, and I pick up the paper that someone’s left on the seat, and there it is, my painting, all over page seven. ‘PROTESTERS TARGET SICK PICTURE’, it says, and then there’s all this stuff about what a disgrace it is, and people from the Church and the Conservative party going on about how it shouldn’t be allowed, and someone from the police saying that they might want to interview Martha and maybe press charges of obscenity. And I read it, and I think, I’ve never been in the news before. Because it is me, sort of. That’s my room there, my private space, and I’ve even started to think of the picture as mine, in a weird sort of way. Probably no one apart from Martha has spent as long looking at it as I have, and that makes me feel protective of it, kind of thing. (Which is just as well, when you think about it, seeing as that’s my job.) I don’t like these people saying it’s sick, because it is and it isn’t, and I don’t like the police saying they’re going to charge Martha with obscenity, and I don’t like the idea that they’re going to take it out of the exhibition, because it says outside the door that you shouldn’t go in if you think you might not like it. So why go in? I want people to see what I saw: something that’s beautiful if you look at it in one way, from a distance, and ugly if you look at it in another, close up. (Sometimes I feel that way about Lisa. When she walks into the room when we’re just about to go out, and she’s got her make-up on and she’s done her hair and that, you’d think she could be a model. And sometimes I wake up in the night and I roll over and she’s an inch away from me, and she’s got bad breath and she’s snoring a bit, and you’d think … Well, never mind what you’d think, but you woul
dn’t think she’d make much of a model, anyway. So maybe Martha’s picture, it’s sort of like that a bit.) But if these people have their way, no one’s going to see anything, and that can’t be right. Not after all that work. All that cutting up and sticking on.