by Nick Hornby
Did you know you couldn’t smoke in an art gallery? Neither did I. Fucking hell.
When I got there, there was already a crowd outside. Some of them were people queuing to see the exhibition, and some of them were protesters – they had placards and they were singing hymns – and there were TV crews, and photographers, and it all looked a bit of a mess. I just pushed through them and knocked on the front door and showed my pass through the glass and one of the guys let me in.
‘You’re in for a busy day,’ one of the others said when I went to change into my gear, and I thought, yeah, I’m looking forward to this.
Nothing much happened at first. A steady stream of people came in and looked, and a couple of them sort of clucked, but what’s really clever about the picture is that you have to get close up to get offended, because if you stand at the back of the room you can’t see anything apart from the face of Christ. So it makes the cluckers look like right plonkers, because they have to go and shove their nose up against the painting to see the nipples, and you end up thinking they’re perverts. You know, first they have to ignore the sign on the door telling them not to go in, and then they have to walk the length of the room, and then they go, ‘Oh, disgusting.’ So they’re really looking out for it.
After about an hour, I got my first nutter. He looked like a nutter: he had chunks missing from his hair, like he’d been eaten by moths, and he wore these huge specs, and he kept blinking, like some demented owl. And he dressed like a nutter too: even though it was a hot day, he was wearing a winter coat covered in badges that said things like ‘DON’T FOLLOW ME – I’M LOST TOO’ and ‘I’M A SUGAR PUFFS HONEY MONSTER’. He stank, and all. So it wasn’t like he was hard to spot. He wasn’t an undercover nutter, if you know what I mean.
He stared at the picture for a couple of minutes, and then he dropped to his knees and started praying. It was all, ‘Heavenly father who gave his only son Jesus Christ to us so that we might be saved please deliver us blah blah blah’, but what was weird was, you couldn’t work out whether he was praying because he was looking at Christ, or whether he was praying like they prayed in The Exorcist, to get rid of the demons in the room, sort of thing. Anyway, after a little while I got pissed off with it and made up a rule.
‘I’m sorry sir. We don’t allow kneeling in the galleries,’ I said.
‘I’m praying for your immortal soul,’ he said.
‘I don’t know about that, sir, but we don’t allow kneeling. No flash photography, no sandwiches, no kneeling.’
He stood up and carried on muttering, so I told him praying was out, too.
‘Don’t you care?’ he said.
‘About what, sir?’
‘Don’t you care about where you are going?’
‘And where’s that?’
‘To hell, man! Where serpents will suck on your eyeballs and flames will lick your internal organs for all eternity?’
‘Not really, sir.’ What I meant was, I didn’t think I was going to be sent to hell. Not for standing in front of a picture, anyway.
You don’t really want to go down that road, the eyeball-sucking road, do you? It’s not very … cheerful, is it? I mean, what must it be like to be this geezer? And what’s he doing here? Does he just wander around looking for stuff that’s going to make him blink and drop to his knees and mutter away? Does he spend all his life wandering around Soho and King’s Cross? Because if he does, then no wonder he’s a nutter. If you don’t spend any time playing with your kids (and I’ll tell you, this is not a bloke with kids), or drinking with your mates (and I’ll bet mates are a bit thin on the ground as well), or watching Frasier (I like Frasier) … you’re going to end up like him, aren’t you?
Just as I was wondering what I was going to do with him, a couple of women came in and he scuttled off, and things went quiet for a while. But then just before my lunch break, just as I was starting to think that it was going to be an aggro-free day after all, a bloke walks in wearing a dog-collar. A fucking vicar! He was younger than most vicars, and a bit trendier, too – he had a sort of Hugh Grant floppy haircut, and he was wearing jeans. He came into the room and stopped and stared, and I knew, because I knew all the angles and distances by now, that he couldn’t see anything from where he was stood. Or rather, he could see Christ, but he couldn’t see the nipples. So when he started to walk down towards the picture, I started to walk towards him, to block him off, and we stood there almost nose-to-nose.
‘Why do you want to do that, your honour?’ I asked him. ‘Why don’t you just stay where you are?’
‘I have to make up my own mind,’ he said.
‘You know what’s there,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows what’s there now. Why do you have to go and look at it? Stay where you are. Look. It’s beautiful.’
‘How can anything made out of pornography be beautiful?’
For a moment I wanted to get into a whole different argument. This isn’t porn, I wanted to tell him. This is just page 3 stuff. Porn is what we used to watch in the Army, with dogs and lesbians with strap-ons and all that, but you don’t want to be talking to a vicar about sex with dogs, do you? I didn’t, anyway.
He moved to his right to get by me, so I moved to my left, and then we did the same dance the other way round. He was getting annoyed now, and in the end I had to let him through; otherwise I swear it would have all gone off, and I would have been fired for decking him.
‘Happy now?’ I said after he’d been there a while.
‘Why did she do it, do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t know, your honour. But she’s a very nice young lady.’
‘That makes it even sadder, then.’
Not to me it doesn’t, I thought. If it had been made by a seedy old git whose hobby was looking up women’s skirts, then that’s one story, but it’s different when you’ve seen what Martha is like, the kind of person she is. You end up sort of trusting her, and trusting what she does, and why. I did, anyway. I can see that wouldn’t work for everyone. It wouldn’t make a lot of difference to the nutter, for example.
‘I think you’ve been here long enough now,’ I said to the vicar. This was completely out of order, of course, but the truth was I was sick of him, and I didn’t want him in my room any more.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘We’ve been told to watch out for people who stay here more than five minutes. You know, perverts and that.’ That did the trick.
If I’d just read about NippleJesus in the paper, or seen it on the news, I’d have thought it was wrong, no question. Sick. Stupid. Waste of taxpayers’ money. (You always say that even if you’ve got no idea if taxpayers pay for it or not, whatever it is, don’t you?) And then I’d never have thought about it again, probably. But it’s more complicated when you actually stand by it all day. And now I still don’t know what I think of it, really, but what’s so great about the nutter and the kinky vicar and all the other people who came to have a look that first morning is that they make up your mind for you about whose side you’re on. I’m not on theirs, that’s for sure, and the longer I have to spend with these wankers the more I hate them. It’s so simple, really. The nice ones like the picture, and they get it, and they have a look at how it’s done but that’s not why they’re staring; the horrible ones come in, gaze for hours at the tits, moan to each other (or, if they’re really mad, to themselves) … You don’t need to work out what you think. You just need to have a look at what other people think. And if you don’t like the look of them, then think the opposite.
No sooner had the vicar gone than a whole fucking zoo turns up. I recognize a couple of the monkeys in it: there’s this woman politician I’m sure I’ve seen on TV, that fat one who’s always banging on about the family and all that, and she’s brought a TV crew with her. The interviewer is that bloke who does the local news on the BBC. You’d probably recognize him too – smoothy, sharp suits, fake tan. Anyway, you should have heard this woman. She was calling for Martha to be sent t
o prison, for the people who put on the exhibition to, I don’t know, have their licence taken away or something … And the smoothy geezer was just egging her on. ‘You’ve been campaigning very hard for a return to family values, and presumably this kind of thing doesn’t help your cause …’ Stuff like that. When they’d finished I wandered over to the interviewer and had a word with him, just to wind him up, sort of thing.
‘So,’ I said. ‘You getting someone else to say something?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, you can’t have just her, can you?’ She was standing about two feet away, having her microphone taken off, so I knew she could hear me. She turned round and looked at me.
‘We’ll be talking to the artist, too,’ said the presenter. ‘She should be here in a second.’
‘Did you do a close-up of the painting?’
‘I would imagine so,’ he said. All sarcastic, like I was being thick.
‘So you’re going to show thousands of nipples on the local news? My kids watch that.’
‘Do they?’ he said, like he didn’t believe me. Like no one with a skinhead haircut could have kids who watched anything but football. Cheeky bastard. OK, my kids don’t watch the news, but that’s because they’re too young, not because they’re too thick. Wanker.
When Martha turned up, I realized I sort of had a crush on her. She looked great – fresh, and friendly, and young, and she was wearing this bright lime-green T-shirt that added to the freshness. The politician was wearing this dark suit, and she had a hard face anyway, and Martha makes her look old and cruel. She said hello to me, and asked me how it was going, and I told her about the nutter and the vicar, and she just smiled.
The interviewer didn’t like her, I could tell. He asked her whether she minded offending so many people, and she said she didn’t think she had, only one or two. And he asked her what the point of the picture was, and she said that she didn’t want to have to explain it, she thought it could explain itself, if she could tell everyone what it meant then she would have just written the meaning down, she wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of sticking all the nipples on the paper. And the interviewer said, well, some people wish you hadn’t bothered, and she said, well, it’s a free country.
I was disappointed, to be honest. I was hoping she’d talk about how beautiful the picture was – how holy, sort of thing. And I wanted her to explain that if you wanted to see the nipples you really had to get up close, like the vicar had to, and what kind of vicar you were if you wanted to do that. And I wanted to hear why she’d done it, too. I mean, there had to be an idea behind it, didn’t there? A meaning, kind of thing. It’s not just something you’d wake up in the morning and do, is it? You know, ‘What am I going to do with all these pairs of breasts I’ve been cutting out? Oh, I might as well turn them into a picture of Christ on the cross …’
Maybe they should have interviewed me. Like I said, maybe I’ve thought more about this picture than anyone. Because she doesn’t know, Martha. She hasn’t seen it in action, like I have. And she hasn’t spent any time standing in front of it, watching people looking at it. Perhaps she should; then she’d be able to say things about it in interviews.
Just before we closed, the smelly nutter with the badges came back with an egg, and tried to throw it at the picture. I saw it coming a mile off, and I grabbed his arm just as he was raising it, and the egg travelled about two feet and landed splat on the floor. It was so pathetic it made me laugh, and I remembered the kid with the rusty spike outside the club, and why I’d packed that job in; it’s hard to be scared by a scrawny weirdo with an egg. I was still angry though, so I didn’t let go of him after he’d thrown it – I pinned his arm behind his back with more violence than I needed, and he started yelling. I marched him out, and down the corridor towards the front entrance. I hated the fucker so much that I got carried away a bit – I was twisting his arm and calling him all the names under the sun, and he said he was going to sue me and report me to the police and he wasn’t going to pray for my soul and he hoped that all the agonies of damnation were heaped upon me. Pillock.
But he knew what he was doing. As I was shoving the nutter down the corridor, there was a commotion behind me, shouting and crashing and alarms going off and then the sound of running. I let the nutter go and went back to my picture, and a couple of the other security guards were in there staring at the floor. Someone had fucked NippleJesus over good and proper. They’d taken it off the wall and stomped all over it and then fucked off. There wasn’t hardly anything left of it.
I felt like crying. Really. I’d let Martha down, and I’d been stupid to leave the room, and it was only when I saw the picture smashed up on the floor that I finally realized how much I loved it. But I’ll tell you something else, something really weird: seeing Christ on the floor with his face all smashed in like that … It was really shocking. What they’d done was much more blasphemous than anything Martha had done. I wonder if they’d thought about that when they were doing it? Whether they’d had any moment of doubt, or fear? Because, I’ll tell you, if I was religious, and I thought that there was a hell where serpents suck your eyeballs out and all that, I wouldn’t go round stomping all over Jesus’s face. Jesus is Jesus, isn’t he? No matter what you make him out of. And maybe that’s one of the things Martha was trying to get at: Christ is where you find him.
Some people from the gallery turned up, people I’d seen at the party the night before but no one who’d ever bothered to speak to me. And I told them about the nutter and the egg, and how I shouldn’t have left my post but I did, and they didn’t seem to blame me much. And then a copper came, and I told him the same stuff. He seemed to think it was funny, though. He didn’t laugh or anything, but you could tell that it was low down on his list of crimes to solve.
And then Martha came in. I walked towards her because I wanted to hug her, but I worked out just in time that my relationship with her was not the same as her relationship with me, if you see what I mean. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days thinking about her, because of my job, but she couldn’t have spent much time thinking about me, could she? Anyway. I didn’t hug her. I just went over to her and said, you know, I’m sorry and all that, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She just stared at the picture on the floor, and said, ‘Oh my God’, which considering the circumstances was about right.
And when she looked up again, her face was all lit up. She was thrilled to bits, excited like a kid. I couldn’t believe it.
‘This is perfect,’ she said. ‘Brilliant.’
‘How d’you mean?’ I said, because I didn’t get it.
‘Who did this? Did you see?’
So I told her about the smelly nutter with the egg, and how I thought he’d done me, wound me up to get me out of the room so his nutter mates could do their stuff, and she loved it. She loved the whole story. ‘Perfect,’ she kept saying. ‘Fantastic.’ And then: ‘I can’t wait to see the video.’
And I was, like, ‘What video?’, and she pointed out the CCTV camera up in the corner of the room.
‘That’s part of it,’ she said. ‘That’s part of the exhibition. What I was hoping was that someone would come in and do this on day one, and on day two we could show the film, and … I’m going to call it Intolerance.’
And I thought about the vicar, and the politician, and all the other people who’d come in and stuck their noses up close and then said how disgusted they were and how shocking it was and I could see that it would be a bit of a laugh for people to see them on the telly. But that was all it was, really, a bit of a laugh.
‘So that was the idea?’ I said. ‘Someone would come in and smash it up?’
‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘I’d have been stuffed if they hadn’t. I’d have been stuck with a portrait of Jesus made out of breasts, and what use is that to anyone? It’s Dave, isn’t it? Well, Dave. Art is about provocation. Getting a reaction from people. And I’ve done it. I’m an artist.
’
I remembered the party, when she thanked me, and I asked her why she’d done that if all she wanted was for someone to smash it up. But she didn’t remember thanking me. So I said, you must remember, last night, at the party. When I took your photo, and you came over and kissed me on the cheek and said ‘Thank you’. And she shrugged, and said, ‘Oh, yeah. I was thanking you for the photo, I think.’ Like it wasn’t a big deal. Which it clearly wasn’t, I can see now. I suppose if you’re an artist, it doesn’t mean anything, kissing someone on the cheek. They do it all the time. ‘Twenty Marlboro Lights, please.’ Kiss. ‘Leicester Square, please.’ Mmmmwa. It doesn’t mean, oh thank you for the important and dangerous job you’re doing, obviously. Silly cow. I should have just stood there. I shouldn’t have gone out with the smelly nutter with the egg. Because, if you think about it … The only reason it got smashed up was because I cared about it too much. I could have just stood there, stopped the egg, got rid of the nutter; but he’d got on my nerves, he’d tried to damage my picture – my picture – and I wanted to make sure he left the building, maybe give him a couple of digs at the same time. Which is why I wasn’t in the room when it got broken. So. She wouldn’t understand this, but she needed me for her film as much as she needed them. When I went home last night, I felt stupid. I felt like I look, if you like: a six-foot-two, fifteen-stone bouncer with a shaved head who doesn’t know anything about art. I’d spent two days thinking something was, you know, beautiful, and worth protecting, and all the time it was a piece of shit, stuck on the wall because some bird thought it would be a laugh if someone smashed it to pieces. So everyone’s a prat, aren’t they? The nutters are prats for doing what they were supposed to do, and I was a prat for trying to stop them … The only one who isn’t a prat is Martha. She’s watching us and having a laugh. Well, fuck her.
Except maybe she isn’t as clever as she thought she was. Because the film’s showing now, up the corridor, and no one looks at it. It’s too long, so most of the time nothing’s happening, and you can’t see very much anyway – they cocked up the angle of the camera, so you see the painting coming off the wall, but you don’t see anyone jump on it. And it’s not beautiful. It’s just a CCTV film, like you see in a petrol station when you’re waiting to get served. And that’s what you get instead of the face of Christ in his agony. So who’s the prat, eh Martha?