Ménage (11 page)

On rounding a stack of crates he found only a woman, middle-aged, scrawny-looking in jogging pants and T-shirt on a phone, Dot’s assistant, no doubt. He walked past her into the space when her voice called out.

‘Hi, there.’ He turned and found himself once again in those big open eyes. She motioned to her phone, waved her hands around in a frenzy that he took to mean have a look around I’ll be a minute. He had been wrong, not scrawny, just slender, and the jogging clothes were more hip or hip hop. He did not want to be caught looking. If he could just find an excuse to delay, to leave.

He heard her hang up but no sooner had she done so and he turned back nervously to speak, than her mobile rang. She threw her hand in the air in some mime of sorry and picked it up. As he watched her she seemed like a Wall Street broker or PR girl for some transient product that was basically herself. Minutes more he fidgeted by her packing cases, increasingly embarrassed as her every moment was taken up with admin. A woman entered and started asking her questions. To Owen’s horror she turned out to be that deadly serious Israeli artist who made quaint watercolour landscapes with her own urine, whom he’d panned in
Time Out
a few years back.

He was hiding himself behind a crate that read ‘Barcelona’ when the hand touched his shoulder. She smiled at him, was trying to talk on her mobile and kiss his cheek all at once, her mobile about to fall from her hand. Her eyes had tiny crow’s feet but glowed still in that way he knew.

‘See how crazy it is?’ And before she had time to explain she was talking to the other voice in her ear.

‘No, the screens have to be Panavision Presentation, twelve by eight. Wait, I have the number for the hire company here somewhere.’ Then she was flicking through laptop screens. ‘Fucking formats!’

No animosity or vengeance, no sit down and let’s face the past. He was making hand signs that he should just go, another time maybe, but she indicated to stay, sit, but there was nowhere to sit. As he stood there awkward, she undid a blouse button, fanned the air as if it was too hot. From where he was standing he could see the lacy outline of her bra. So casually then, as she phone-talked, rubbing her neck, her collarbone, as if inviting him to stare at her increasingly visible cleavage, as if he was an executive toy she was idly playing with.

‘I could resend it on PAL? DVD. And the projector is six thousand LM, luminance? . . . It has to be because it’s
quite
a dark image, can you confirm that for me? No, that’s great, yes, send my regards to Ed, tell him I love him to bits and I’ll be there for the opening.’

He was looking round to see if excretions-woman was anywhere to be seen, if he could find a way to leave, discreetly.

‘
Bitte
,’ she said to the phone. ‘
Vielen Dank
.’

As she hung up she suddenly stopped touching herself. He was stuck, struck speechless.

‘God, but you know the thing is . . .’

‘What?’ And ‘hello’ and ‘sorry’ he wanted to say. But this was so Dot, so old Dot – the way she’d start mid-sentence, even after an argument, after an absence of hours, even days, and say: ‘And another thing . . .’ He waited for the next fragment.

‘ . . . what the fuck am I even doing here?’ He was about to reply that yes, he felt somewhat the same and if she wanted they could call the whole thing off.

‘Sorry, I should have . . .’ she said. And there was no moment when they stood apart and took time to assess what time had taken from them or hopefully healed, or even said hello as two total strangers might, only this weird familiarity in fragments. She had not even said his name.

‘ . . . I mean, my sugar level. I’m about to go hypoglycaemic, we have to eat NOW!’

‘Oh, I see, OK. Yeah, sure.’

Over the chichi sushi lunch, in the fusion place a block away, which she wolfed down – some indication perhaps of the damage she’d done to her system in the year of near anorexia with him and Saul – he tried to keep it business. They had been talking art, not past, just art.

‘So . . . how do you find time to make any new work?’

She stuffed raw tuna into her mouth with her second Diet Coke.

‘Truth is I haven’t really made anything, not since . . .’

He thought she meant like the neo-conceptualists, Douglas Gordon et al. He’d witnessed Gordon at work before. At his laptop, he didn’t even have a studio; his work had almost become pure concept. Like, say a wall in the Schwartz Gallery covered in the names of everyone he could remember in a day. Around two thousand. One version was in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. He wrote down the names on the plane and in arrivals emailed it off to the gallery with a list of dimensions, font size and number of hours it would take a team of a certain number to stencil the names on the wall, then turned up for the opening.

‘No, no, God, I wish I was that smart,’ she mumbled as she stuffed down his hardly touched Thai noodles. ‘I mean, nothing at all, for years, I’m serious, nothing new . . . I’m like a photocopy machine or a –’

‘But surely, you must want to . . . again.’

‘No, I’m just glad it’s a day job, you know, making sure they’ve got the DVD players in Barcelona, and the layout maps and the PR’s up to date. I haven’t had a creative thought in years.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Seriously, I’m done with art, I mean, what’s the point, I’ve made all this money and now I’m probably gonna lose it all with the banks going down anyway.’

‘But I thought the government was protecting savings over, well, a certain amount.’ His voice sounded banal in his ears.

She looked at him as if to say, Silly man, I’ve lost millions, already.

He wanted to say, Isn’t it funny, we met after Black Wednesday and now we’re on Meltdown Monday. He wanted to say he’d rather write off the fifteen years between and go back to total poverty as there was at least some comfort in it.

‘I dunno . . . I just want to grow vegetables or knit socks
or
 . . .’ she said. ‘Cos since Molly, she’s my . . . she’s four, you’d love her, all this travel, God! New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, this was just in the last . . . I mean the flights, Tracey says the same thing.’

‘Sorry, this is Tracey Emin?’

‘Yeah, yeah, and this subversive thing, they always say she’s so subversive, I’m so subversive, blah de blah. But we’re so totally square. I mean, what’s left to subvert anyway? What do they want us to do, kill ourselves?’

He could have said that indeed it was not a joke. Her premature death would probably quadruple her market value as it had done for Basquiat, that there had been conspiracy theories about possible murder, but he considered it in poor taste.

‘Where was I anyway?’

‘Uh, you were talking about your daughter, flights . . .’

‘Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, they keep asking me to make new work, and I try and try . . . Did you see it, that one at the Lieder, with Molly in it? It’s shit, I mean . . .’

He had not seen it and apologised.

‘I pulled it from the show, last week, so there’s only eight now. Fucking thing’s called Nine and everyone’s embarrassed cos I’ve got to take the Nine to Zurich. I was kind of hoping you could maybe . . .’

‘Hoping I could?’

‘Well, give me some ideas. I know, sorry, it’s a dumb idea, I should never have asked, sorry you’re . . .’

‘No, not at all.’ He was flattered, but still reeling from her onslaught.

‘Anyway, I’m just worried that when broadband gets good enough they’ll just stream all my stuff and I won’t have any FedExing to do any more and I’ll be out of a job anyway . . .’

Dot! he wanted to say. Hello Dot, can we just slow down, say hello and start again? She seemed drained by all the talking and reached for his hand.

‘Can’t we just go snooze?’

‘Ah . . . really? Sorry?’

Still there had been no addressing of the question of the years. No ‘I forgive you’, or ‘I hate you’.

‘I’m whacked . . . I’m so . . .’

‘Sure . . . but where?’

‘Home.’

She laughed as she touched his hand, burped, then giggled, covering her mouth in that way she used to.

‘Sorry, I mean . . . my place.’

On the taxi ride to Notting Hill he picked up more fragments. It was an affluent des-res town house, a full three floors in a trendy tree-lined street, but as soon as he stepped inside he cracked his knee on a packing case and with every step there was even more mess. Dot was fussing, trying to apologise, explain.

‘ . . . and what with the commute to the studio . . . for fuck’s sake I’m supposed to be selling this place. Bastards – I mean, it would save so much time in commuting and then I’d see more of Molly and . . .’

He nodded when it felt appropriate and made it past the obstacle course of scattered cuddly toys, books and CDs and found his way to the lounge. The windows were immense; the floor of beautifully Victorian pine, but barely an inch of it visible beneath piles of clothes and more teeming packing boxes. Dot was in the open-plan kitchen area; the units had expensive aluminium splashbacks by some exclusive Italian designer, a full selection of hanging Le Creuset pots and pans, but then in the middle of it all an incongruous bottom-of-the-range white plastic Argos microwave spattered in sauce. Dot’s Post-it notes practically covered every surface.

‘ . . . and Consuela can’t travel with me, cos, well . . . I only found out . . . she’s not got a real passport . . . Venezuelan
 . . . Molly adores her . . . a political refugee . . . but she’s so sweet, you’ll love her . . .’

He was struggling not to laugh as he tried to find a seat that was not covered in kiddie stuff. There was what seemed an authentic Bauhaus chair, sitting on top of a kitschy seventies vinyl black-and-white-spotted rug. And a cheap Ikea clothes rail teeming with designer dresses right in front of the antique seventies sci-fi-looking TV. A dead yucca was covered in last year’s fairy lights and handmade tinfoil angels.

‘ . . . but I mean I really need to get Molly into a nursery so she can get socialised . . . Montessori would be ideal, there’s a good one in Camden, isn’t that funny? . . . I mean, really I should be living over there . . .’

She uncorked some wine, took a slug and fussed around looking for glasses in the cupboards. She opened one and it was full of plates, another and it was stacked with DVDs. Above her head, stuck to the glass of what seemed an authentic Warhol of Jackie Onassis, was a kid’s crayon drawing of a house with a big smiling yellow sun. It was like she was some magpie student squatting in a stately home. The look could have been called deconstructive if it had been deliberate.

‘I have to go east . . . I got gazumped . . . so I’m in a kind of holding pattern right now . . .’

Finally, she handed him the wine in a kid’s plastic tumber, kicked some books from the floor and sat cross-legged in front of him.

‘What would you do?’ she asked.

So Dot, so Dotty. He couldn’t hold it back. The laughter.

Over a dinner of takeaway pizza and a tour of the other rooms, largely stuffed with packing boxes, Owen put together the entire story.

As she spent so much time touring her art abroad, she really needed one big single space that could be artist’s studio and crèche, that she and Molly could call ‘home’.
Really
close to a good nursery because she was going to have to let Consuela go. She’d been about to move to a big warehouse in Camden, but the exchange of contracts fell through because of the housing crisis and now nobody was buying so she couldn’t sell. So she was stuck, half moved out with no time or energy left to find a new place.

These are the burdens of the international jet-setter, Owen thought as he watched her sitting barefoot by his feet, rubbing her neck. In the silence that followed he sensed it was finally time for what they had been avoiding.

‘So how’s –’

‘I heard you were –’

‘You go first . . .’

‘No, you . . .’

‘Married, yes, not for long and you . . .’

‘No.’

The tentativeness, the second-guessing.

‘I assumed. Molly’s father . . .’

‘Oh no, he was really a . . .’

‘ . . . a bastard? A . . .?’

‘No, a sperm donor . . . Sorry.’

They laughed.

‘He sends cheques but he’s in New York now. But you . . . married? Owen. Who’d have . . .’

‘Well, classic mistake stuff, thought it would . . .’

‘ . . . make you a better person?’

‘Ditto, but you . . .’

‘Well, I have Molly . . . How about you . . . do you . . .?’

‘No, no kids. I was a bit of a let-down on that front. You know.’

But of course she didn’t know. He tried to change the subject.

‘Must be convenient, with Molly, having your folks in town?’

She was silent then.

‘We don’t talk any more.’

‘Oh . . . of course. Sorry.’

Her father and the hospital. He’d been a fool to say such a thing.

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

Dot placed a hand on his knee.

‘You look so . . .’ she said. She smiled. Thank God.

‘Different?’

‘No, no, well, sort of, but . . .’

There was some discussion of exactly what about Owen was so changed. Dot said he might have filled out, had he been to a gym? He laughed and said it was fat, not muscle. Then she was trying to remember something.

‘What was it he used to say about gyms?’

‘Sorry, “he” . . .?’

‘Saul. He used to . . .’

The sudden mention of Saul threw him but he thought it his job to try to recall.

‘The cult of health is a sickness?’

She shook her head, so he tried again.

‘A gym is a gulag one pays to get into.’ She laughed, lifted her hand from his knee.

‘Never heard that one, it was something about push-ups.’

‘Ah! His definition of sex.’

‘What?’

‘Doing push-ups till you’re sick!’

She rolled about with laughter and hugged his knees.

‘So have you . . .?’ she asked.

‘Had sex?’

‘No, silly – heard from him? You were so . . .’

‘No, no, nothing.’ Silence then. He reached for her hand, her fingers quickly intermeshed through his and relaxation flooded in. He resisted the urge to kiss her. She leaned her head against his knee.