How to Paint a Dead Man (5 page)

A tourist has become trapped under the flower stall for the duration of the storm. ‘Hello’, Annette says to her. ‘Hello. The weather is bad. It is raining.’ The woman is German. She has a phrasebook. Perhaps she is making a tour of Piero and Fiorentino. Perhaps she is seeing the ruins or the misericords. She has been separated from her travel companions-they have all ducked into cafés and under awnings, or they have gone into San Lorenzo to see the unusual altarpiece. The woman makes a selection-irises, freesias, and two roses. It is a hasty transaction-clearly she feels she is obliged to pay for being kept dry. ‘Can you be able to make them?’ she asks. She has noticed Annette’s tilted face, her lost eyes. Annette smiles. She positions the flowers in complementary order, sorting through the leaves, pinching each stalk, and stacking the bouquet upwards, almost weightlessly.

‘Can you see my colours?’ the woman asks. ‘Is the smell?’ She is intrigued. Annette smiles again, and nods politely. She could tell the woman that the white iris of the Florentine has a scent identical to the violet. It is one of nature’s comedic little duplicities, Uncle Marcello says. She pulls the thorns off the rose stems with a thumbnail so they will not prick the German woman when she carries them back to the rented apartment or the hotel. She fastens the arrangement inside a paper cone. The woman takes Annette’s hand. Into her palm she presses three coins. ‘That is true.’

It’s easy for Annette to decipher the markings of currency. She can run her fingertip across the franks and the corrugated edges, or weigh the coins, or Elemme might be called over to supervise the payment. But it is not necessary to make these checks. Even though her mother warns her some people will try to take advantage of her, even though at night her mother counts the money from Annette’s soft purse, Annette trusts the customers. People seldom play tricks on the blind.

But the world of her mother’s imagining is full of jeopardy. At home she tells Annette not to go further than the courtyard garden. On Sundays she is permitted to walk to the church, alone or with her brothers, and afterwards to the cimitero di campagna where her father is at rest, his photograph framed in the niche. At the market she must wait for Maurizio to collect her and dismantle the stall. She can purchase game or fish from the vendors who know her; she can go to the growing plots where her uncle works, with a new order or to assist with the transfer of seeds between mossy cases. Beyond this sanctioned territory, there are untold hazards. There are traps and snares, like the hidden rabbit wires on the hillside. If she is not careful she will trip, or burn herself, or snag her skirt on a piece of wood, a door handle, a buckle, or under someone’s foot. She will become lost in the crowds, never to be found again. People will treat her with cruelty. They will corrupt her. There will be immorality.

Sometimes, as her mother braids Annette’s hair, she issues warnings. ‘Do you not see it? From a distance the boys will think you are attractive. They will whistle and flirt with you. Then when you come close they will see this,’ she taps the bone around Annette’s eyes, ‘and they will laugh at you. There are so many other pretty girls. And I could not bear such cruelty against my daughter.’ Her mother sighs. The braids are so tight that Annette feels the hairs breaking.

‘In which ways might they find me attractive, Mamma?’ she asks. She has outgrown the last edition of herself she was able to see. Eleven years old, flat-chested, with spurs of bone at her elbows and ankles. Now she is older she has curves that she can feel with her hands. She has soft breasts, which are very sensitive, and silky little hairs. Inside she also feels different. Her mother will not answer such immodest questions. Instead she continues with her defence of the limitations she has imposed. ‘In our home everything will always remain the same. Furniture will maintain its exact position-Marcello and the boys know better than to leave a chair out from the table. You can count the steps from the window to the cupboard and know there will always be this number of steps. Nothing will be rearranged. There. Doesn’t that make you feel safe?’

She is no longer allowed to go to school. She has proved with her bruises and her laddered stockings that it is impossible for her to continue learning. And she is of an age now when others around her are beginning to wake from the sleep of innocence, her mother says. Her reputation might be insulted without her ever knowing it. ‘Suppose you were to come home groped-how would we check? We would have to inspect you every night for marks, and take wire wool to you like a tarnished kettle.’ Annette wonders whether Maurizio is patched and discoloured when he arrives home from the cinema after watching
The Sign of Satan,
or whether his eyes have turned black. She wonders whether his tongue becomes mottled when he talks about the heavy bosoms and long legs of the actresses, and when he dances with her in the kitchen singing, ‘Sexy, sexy, yeah yeah, baby.’

If she protests, if she says that she would like to continue at school, or that she can still see the shapes of light and dark shadows, that she can hear traffic and can cross the street safely, her mother loses her temper. ‘But you cannot read from the blackboard or even the pages pushed up in front of your nose, Annett-a! We have been through this! The doctors can do no more for you.’ It is better for her to help with their family business. In this way she can be useful, and in this way protected. At the end of these discussions her mother takes hold of her hand and squeezes it hard. ‘Listen to me. You don’t know what is out there. You must resist succumbing to a wandering spirit, like that of the unfortunate Sicilians. Do you understand?’

Mauri often tells her that she is beautiful. He whispers to her across the table that she is the most beautiful girl outside of Paris. He kisses her cheek in the flower van, and when Annette asks Elemme if her cheek is black, Elemme says that it is not, and asks if Annette has been cooking squid or performing some other dirty occupation in the kitchen. The fish vendor and the butcher also call her pretty when she arrives for smoked eel and for pork. They often put aside the best cuts of meat for her family, or keep a handful of mussels on ice when they are delivered from the coast. At the fruit stall she presses fruit with a gentle thumb, smells the deep dimple at the stalk, or pulls out a leaf, and asks for a lower price if the fruit is not yet ripe. ‘Yes. Of course. Anything for you, beautiful Annette.’

As she listens to the racket of the market she imagines the dark world beyond. Buses with no brakes to slow down for sightless, perambulating girls. Railings as sharp as pikes to skewer the skirts of the unsuspecting, or disembowel them like the spears of the Crusaders. And the notorious open drains, into which she could fall, and in which a breed of violent Southern men live-they who emigrated north twenty years ago and found it too cold to live above ground. But she cannot picture the immoral acts her mother suggests are happening on filthy beds in the dark rooms of apartments and in the bars, behaviour her older brother understands and can be forgiven for, but she cannot. And though she tries so hard, she cannot picture the face of the Bestia as he leers at her from the gateway of the summer theatre.

The day passes. The roses are bought and some are given to Father Mencaroni for the church. From the bakery ovens comes the smell of pastry. Annette asks Elemme to mind the stall for her. She eats a small baked crust. The Romany by the fountain gives her two long beans that have been strung with wire over his grill. Outside the high enclosure, she can hear the growl of traffic on the cobblestones, the zuzzing of mopeds, and the grumble of old farming carts as they judder and box their axle shafts. The pedestrian steps sunk into the Etruscan walls echo. A train rattles on its track as it arrives from the city. There are no screams. There are no alarms ringing, no calls of murder. There is no lewd breathing.

She returns to the flower stall and thanks Elemme for keeping watch over her trays of buttons and threads. ‘I haven’t seen your mother in a while,’ says Elemme. ‘Is she still unwell?’ Annette inclines her head. ‘Yes. Headaches. She gets them all the time.’ Elemme says that she is sorry to hear this. ‘But at least she has your brothers and your uncle to care for her, which is good.’ ‘Do you have brothers too?’ Annette asks. ‘I do. But they’re in North Africa. They’re unable to come here now. They are bullies but I really miss them. To have brothers is lucky. Especially such handsome ones as yours!’

Annette would like to ask Elemme about all the things she finds confusing, all the things she knows so little about and that have not ever been explained to her. Like the scenes cut out of the projector reels that Mauri complains about. Like the blossom she feels in her abdomen before it begins to ache every month. Once she asked Elemme if she had ever seen the Bestia, and Elemme laughed and said, yes, the night she got married. Annette asked what he was like. ‘I can tell you that he was not gentle. He was quite wild in fact.’ When Elemme said this she did not sound scared. It was like an amusement, and Annette wondered if perhaps in North Africa the Bestia was not the worst of all creatures. Whenever Annette asks Mauri about the Bestia he pulls her to the floor and says, ‘It’s me, it’s me.’ Then he growls like a dog and barks and pretends to be possessed by a demon. He digs her in the ribs and crushes her until she is breathless, or until their mother finds them and pulls Mauri off, slapping him and sending him out of the room.

Her mother will not be drawn on the subject–it is too upsetting. Her voice plunges into dark blue regions when she talks of it, like the reaches of water in the middle of the lake where no one swims. ‘I don’t know what he looks like, Annette! He looks like the most grotesque thing imaginable. A monster from hell! Your poor father,’ she cries, ‘he saw. He heard the flies swarming. He felt the red shadow falling over him. Why must you punish me with this question all the time?’ She weeps and makes Annette promise not to let him take her away, not to make herself vulnerable or open herself to him.

Annette promises. She tries to picture this famous scene in the gardens, when her father died in the most terrible of circumstances, but the picture will not come. Uncle Marcello once let slip in an argument that there was also a woman present. Annette’s mother became very upset, and said ‘Never speak of that whore,’ and Uncle Marcello tried to take her hand and comfort her, but her mother would not be touched. The mystery woman was not mentioned again. Annette wonders how her mother knew that her father heard flies swarming around the head of the Bestia when he died. He could not have told her so, because he was dead. Perhaps her mother was there in the gardens too. She says she was at home, feeling faint and asking God for forgiveness, as if she knew something terrible was occurring. By the time Uncle Marcello and the police arrived, the Bestia and the mysterious woman had disappeared, leaving only a pool of red evidence. Annette suspects that her mother has in fact seen the Bestia, and knows exactly what he looks like. The trauma was extreme and now she is simply too frightened to talk about it.

Annette wonders whether there is a strict tradition involved when it comes to the Bestia. She wonders whether other people hear flies and feel the red shadow before they die, or whether they hear and feel other things. Perhaps to some people the Bestia might, instead of flies buzzing, sound like Olivetti keys tapping, or a cat hissing, or a firework wailing into the sky. If they were expecting flies how would they know to run? How would they know to kneel and pray to be saved? It is a mystery.

The market begins to close. Behind her Maurizio steps up and hugs her fiercely. ‘I’ve come back for you, even though you treat me with such contempt.’ He puts his hands over her mouth. ‘No, Mother, no one can hear you scream!’ Elemme laughs and claps at the performance. Annette wriggles free. Her brother smells of musty potting soil and the vinegar solution with which he and Uncle Marcello have been dousing the greenfly.

Other than those strange six months with Dr Dixon and his creepy insects, your childhood was good. You liked being brought up where you were, in the border expanse. It was rural and difficult, and you felt hardy and capable because of that. You and Danny ran wild. The fells were on your doorstep, those brown and red massifs that your dad brought into his studio and undressed and made profitable. You swam in the rivers and waterfalls, made dens, climbed trees. You took over the tumbledown barns, swung off the beams, and reared yourselves among the bleating livestock. It was an exterior childhood, and you and Danny were exterior children. There were gales, floods, hardships, funerals; you were taught that this was nature, and you’d better respect it.

The north of your youth was practically pre-industrial. You are always amazed when you hear people’s ideas about idylls and pleasure grounds, the myths of the sublime. Back then it was a landscape of filth loosened from fields, ringworm, walls of snow, and long, sickening bus rides to school. It was bad weather, burning carcasses, kids with disabilities, black-eye Fridays and badger baiting; collecting wood off the fell and trying to keep it dry under tarpaulin so the logs didn’t fizzle with sap, hiss and blacken on the grate, because that was how you stayed warm. No Economy 7. No piped gas. Fowl were strung from hooks in the outbuildings by your parents’ cottage. In another shed trout was smoked. The heating range, which was installed by your dad when you were fourteen to run some radiators, was bought from a local farmer, a cut-and-shunt boiler, previously used to incinerate stillborn lambs. Your mother washed all the clothes by hand until that same year, when his paintings started bringing in good money, and a machine was bought and plumbed into the greasy, goose-hung bothy.

And when your best friend Nicki collapsed with an asthma attack on the moor, she was airlifted to Newcastle Infirmary by helicopter, after forty-five minutes of lying under a witch-hazel bush, her brain bluely solidifying. It was January. The black furrows were frozen and an earthy winter scent radiated from the ground. You ran back from the phone box along the road and wrapped Nicki in your coat and held her hand. It was the first and only time you’ve had to dial the emergency number. You waited for help, so insanely long, it seemed. Then the sky was ripped open by noise. You watched the Sea King buzz down through sleet, and you opened Nicki’s mouth because the wind from the propeller blades seemed strong enough to re-inflate her lungs. The witch-hazel carried pale orange flowers on its bare twigs, the blossoms impossibly delicate in the storm of the landing.

And that was that for Nicki. Deep Indefinite Unconsciousness. Technically, she is still alive. Officially, she was lucky. They got to her just in time to scrape up off the hillside the last biological part of her life. It’s not hard for you to associate the north with tragedy. Nicki. Danny. There’s always half a truth to cliché.

You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you. For example, when will Nicki’s family finally give up hope and switch off the machines? She lies there, day after day, as she has for years, living by medical proxy, her hair glossy as conkers, electrically retrograde behind her skull. You still visit her when you are home. You’ve got used to it–being chatty and fey, nothing but the sound of your voice in the room and the soft flushing of the ventilator. You tell her what is going on in the world, wondering if she has any notion what year it is now. After the nurses leave her room, you ask her to wake up. There is never a response. You whisper down into her ear. It’s like making a confession to the oblivious ground, or blowing across the top of an empty bottle.

Her sisters send you Christmas cards each year on her behalf–the secretarial custodians of Nicki’s half-life. How could they know if a week after The Decision was made–after they had brushed her hair and changed her nightgown a last time, and told her
goodbye we love you darling girl
–that this was not the week she was due to sit up, finally, and ask what she got for her A level history, say she fancied a Rich Tea biscuit, and wonder if her boyfriend Andy had been in to see her. Only to find out the prick had married her younger cousin, a year after she went under.

The doctors measure her brain activity. From time to time there are electrical spikes, heat blooms. There’s no way of knowing how aware she is, what she is hearing, what she is feeling. The doctors say the green flares might be dreams. They say: don’t dismiss her existence in case she is trapped within herself. Her spirit rattling around mutely, like a pea in a dead whistle.

On your fifth date you told Nathan about Nicki, about what happened when you were teenagers. You were in a café on Betterton Street. There was a plate of cheese on the table in front of you, a basket of bread, two glasses of red wine. Downstairs there was a reading going on. Every few minutes you could hear thin choppy clapping, like the clapping at a village cricket match. His face fell.
I know it’s sudden, but I love you, will you marry me?
It was as if it was you who had survived near-death in the winter snow, as if the true miracle was that you were sitting there eating cheese, and it was vital that he ask you.

He reached over and put his hands behind your neck, and in doing so caught a finger in your hair-band and pulled out your ponytail. It was an awkward moment. Your hair spilled forwards. He kissed you. You said nothing. There was silence for a while, then sporadic clapping. He has never asked again. He was hurt, you’re sure. But you kept going out, regardless. You became comfortable, dependent, you enjoyed mutually satisfying sex. You cooked fresh pastas in the evenings, slept against each other’s backs, holidayed abroad. Then you moved in together. You upgraded from two shared suburban houses with fox-skunked gardens to one stylish sky-lit conservation-area flat, right by the heath.

Here, you have domestic security. The mortgage goes out by standing order; sensibly you pay more than the interest every month. Laundry collects in a wicker hamper and is regularly washed. The floors are slick, dust-free; in the cupboard is one of those click-together devices to sweep, with detachable cloths that attract cobwebs like magic. Ladles and spoons live in the second down of four fitted pine drawers, below a sophisticated granite counter. Everything in the flat is ordered, utilised, pleasing. The second bedroom, with its expensive pro-photo lighting rig, umbrellas and snoots, serves as a small studio. The bathroom, a makeshift darkroom. You like to develop yourself, check temperatures, make timings; you’re old-school. You still work with film whenever you can. You like the bursting shutter, the winding motor, the choice of lens. None of the equipment has recently been used.

There is a roll of film in the bottom-loading rangefinder, your first decent camera, which contains Danny. He is sitting on a bench in the train station, surrounded by pigeons, on his last visit to London.

Over the last few weeks you haven’t been spending much time at home. You’ve been at Borwood House organising the new exhibition, or out running on the heath. You’ve been going up north to see your mum and dad, to make sure they are managing OK. A few times you’ve gone into the city to meet your lover, in the bars in Soho, or by the lock. Once the two of you went to a club down a flight of stairs in Shoreditch with an entry fee and dark letterboxed rooms. Afterwards you fell upon each other in the church grounds nearby. A few times you’ve used a hotel. You let him undress you, and put pillows beneath your stomach. You watched the local movement of his hips and waist in the mirror opposite the bed. You were hurried and left your phone switched on. The ringing didn’t stop you. Afterwards there were messages from Nathan, which you deleted.

In the beginning things were fine with Nathan, and you felt happy. You used him as a muse. You photographed him, exhibited the prints, exposed him to the scrutiny of the public. He was good-humoured, sat for you nude, let you manipulate his poses. His body was interesting; he wore his muscles tautly against his skin. You got right into the polished crevices, the brackish ghylls. He was the subject of your most acclaimed series of compositions, which was short-listed for a major prize, and widely reviewed. The press compared you to your father, talked about geo-portraiture. There was talk of fetishes. Reviewers wondered whether this was a response to the legacy of Peter Caldicutt, whether you were trying to be difficult and controversial.

Once, when you were shooting the series, you put Nathan in your best tie-top stockings. Agent Provocateur. The hairs of his legs broke through the black mesh and his muscles gave the material an interesting look. It excited you both, and you went to bed and didn’t speak, but instead took turns doing whatever you wanted, with urgency and experiment. You tried it again a few more times, but the eroticism lessened, then failed, and you stopped.

The two of you are different now, calmer. There is still sex, occasionally, but it is no longer a priority to seduce or be seduced by him. You recognise him more as a housemate, a person who becomes gently furious at the news every night, a decent cook. All the powers you have for capriciousness, all the potency you wield-and you do wield it, with dark sedge eyes, good legs, the ability to turn male heads on entering a room, and talent–seem superfluous to the dynamic of the relationship now. You still bring him tea every morning, and comfort his headaches with paracetamol. You are generous with birthday presents. But there’s no entitlement to your body any more, granted through arduous solicitation, an obvious hard-on when you undress. Now you wear your best lingerie to work, the silk dampening, the lace cuffs stiff under your dress. Your mind tracks to someone else when you touch yourself, and you think of that time in the churchyard, his mouth nuzzling against your soaked underwear, the desperate thrusts. At night sometimes the ache becomes unbearable. You leave the room where Nathan is sitting reading or watching television.
You OK, Suze?
he calls. To leave a room abruptly might still mean a sharp descent into sorrow. You say you’re fine, just going to the bathroom. You lock the door; lean forward against the cold mirror. You feel down inside your bra, unfasten however many buttons on your jeans you need to.

The first time it happened was at Borwood House. You’d been thinking of Danny. You were downloading the certificates of objects that are being sent to the gallery for the new exhibition-the odd little artefacts that once belonged to the great twentieth-century painters and are somehow relevant to their legacies. Angela had just decided on a title for the show:
In the Artist’s Shoes
. She had gone to buy you both coffees from the café on the heath to celebrate, and you were thinking about Danny, about the red trainers he always wore, like a man ten years younger, like a boy. He had multiple pairs. For a moment you thought about crying. You knew it would make you feel better, but the distance to the emotion seemed too far to travel.

Something came over you, a different impulse. You shut the laptop, stood up, and went to the snug room at the back of the gallery where Tom was making notes on the texts. The door was closed. You didn’t knock. You opened it, and went inside. He was working as usual with the curtains drawn, in lamplight, bent over the documents on the table. You moved behind him, and stood there. Then you leaned over and kissed the back of his neck, just beneath his dark hairline. He made a soft-throated noise, and turned slightly. Perhaps he didn’t see that it was you, perhaps he didn’t smell your perfume. Perhaps he knew. But he did not recoil. Instead he reached up and held the back of your head so you wouldn’t pull away. Then he stood up and drew you to him. You felt a rush of chemical gold overwhelm you, like something taken intravenously.

There was only the humidity of your mouths as you kissed. The excitement passed between you on your tongues. He put a hand round your neck and pulled back.
Where is she? She’s not here?
You looked at his mouth, glazed from your own, his beautiful lips, with the tiny white scar on the membrane. He put a hand underneath your dress.
Non voglio fermarmi.

You pushed him back on the desk, unzipped his trousers. He was hard, the skin smooth over the tightness. You kept him in your mouth even at the end when he tried to gain polite release before coming. It was easy. It was inexcusable.