Ménage (3 page)

— Waking the masses from their slumbers, are we?

I took offence and explained that Marxism was an analysis of –

— Yes, yes, yes . . . he interrupted, – cultural hegemony, historical necessity and all that jazz.

I was shocked that he knew the lingo.

— I’m sure equality seems lovely to you, but let me tell you, people will always find a way to fuck each other over. You see, there’s no such thing as Left and Right, there are simply those who shaft and those who get shafted!

I picked up my papers and headed for the door.

He called after me: — In time you may come to see the simple beauty of this.

With no money for the tube I headed to the intersection
at
Shoreditch in a fury. A minicab screamed to a halt before me; I passed a sex shop, beneath the shadow of the high-rises where drug dealers loitered – the shafters and the shafted, and how dare anyone say this was anything but ugliness and hell. The sky was bearing down on me, burning yellow. On the overpass thousands of headlights screamed red beneath my feet. I looked up and an ancient tramp was there, ten feet from me, alone at the railing. What little change I had I decided to offer him, and walked to his side.

— Lovely, ain’t it? he said, almost to himself. The headlights lit his drunken teary-eyed face that seemed moved as if by poetry. He did not take my money but smiled, turned and walked slowly away, carrying his one plastic bag. I stood where he’d stood and stared out.

It was then as I felt the cars push wind on my face, as I surrendered to their power, that I realised I would never escape from that voice that dared to show me the world in negative, to turn all I had known inside out, and speak to me through other people and things. In that moment all judgement fell away and I glimpsed the fatal beauty of it all. The cars were unstoppable in their force, capitalism could not be overthrown, these things were not external to me, to be critiqued, but inside me, as alive as the toxic car fumes in my lungs. I was of it, and it of me, and the headlights became stars that wept for me. I roared with laughter then and fell headlong into that scepticism that had long been brewing. I fell and all I once believed in fell away. At the end of the overpass I threw my papers to the ground and walked away. Within the week, I had said my goodbyes to Debs and my degree and I became the student of the terrifying laughing man who saw beauty in the crap of the world.

It seemed a miracle. I had been scanning the For Rent pages when Dot rang to say she would move in. I said yes, unconditionally, then recanted: I’d have to clear it with Saul first.

He agreed on two conditions: that we lie about the price, and that she paid us, not the council, so we could skim a couple of hundred off the top. Six-fifty a month was ridiculous (as we both paid two hundred) and it was humiliating to have to call her back but he hung over my shoulder the whole time whispering the price. Money was not a problem, she said. She liked us and would move in the next day.

Why the hell she would want to live with us? It was an hour or so’s commute to Goldsmiths. She had mentioned that her father had bought her a flat in Golders Green but she felt lonely there and she needed the company of ‘real artists’. Were we? Con artists more like. I felt guilty about bleeding those extra hundreds out of her, and Saul was despicable, yet his deceit had saved us from eviction. I couldn’t help but marvel at what the promise of a few hundred quid had done to him as he dived into the spare room and started carrying out the remaining rancid bin bags and stacked them out the front. Slime was dripping stinking trails across the floor, as he declared: — I suppose wealth is preferable to poverty, if only for financial reasons!

Of course he had disclaimers – we weren’t to speak to her – she was a capitalist cash crop – women were a distraction, nothing more. He made me swear I would not succumb to the temptations of the flesh, that if I slept with her he would leave without discussion. I made my vow of abstinence as we stood there with twenty reeking bin bags between us.

We made a shoplifting trip to Pricecutter for Neutradol – the world’s number-one room spray odour destroyer – and some cheese because he was peckish. All we bought was a copy of the
Sun
, because it was the cheapest thing in the shop. As soon as we were outside he threw the paper to the ground. He had no ethical issues over stealing from Pakistanis or subsidising Rupert Murdoch to the value of twenty pence, now that we had real toilet paper.

As I tidied her room for her arrival, I wondered what Dot would make of Saul on actually meeting him: an obnoxious character, no doubt. Beneath his hundred ironic veils, the clashes of cultures he played with daily, was there an essence to the man, an essential Saul? There were some basic facts. Saul was by no means tall. Five foot seven was my guess, although he was rarely barefoot and his Cuban heels added three inches and his cowboy boots perhaps two. (They looked vaguely orthopaedic and may have had a few hidden inches inside.) His feet were extraordinarily large, a size twelve, and the rumour about feet and their correlation with male endowment, I gathered, from glimpses through his ever-shifting kimono, was in fact the case. On the few occasions I saw him almost naked I determined that there seemed not an inch of him that was not covered in thick black hair. In two days he could grow a moustache that would have taken me three weeks, and when he wore foundation his five o’clock shadow spiked its way through at around 3 p.m. He had a Kirk Douglas chin, and his nose was large and long and slightly crooked, which gave him the appearance, on his days in a trench coat, of being some modern-day Fagin (although he denied Judaic origins). His eyebrows added to the effect, being heavy and almost meeting in the middle, although I recalled that time – he was going through his Dolly Parton stage – when he shaved them off entirely and wore eyeliner instead. He was prematurely greying, although that would be a premature judgement as he carefully concealed his age. I’d guessed somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two. The hair came and went in length too, some days a ‘yuppie ponytail’, others shoulder-length, once he wore it in two pigtails – one on either side of his head – like a schoolgirl (an effect he called pornographic), most days it was matted, but never dread-locked, as he despaired at the Rastafarians. His chest, beneath the hairs, was as sunken as his arm muscles were shrunken,
lending
validation to the impression that he’d never done a day’s exercise in his life.

This – the man naked, pieced together from fragments I was maybe not supposed to have seen – still did not answer the question.

Any time I got close to some truth about where he had come from I got the same riposte. ‘I am who I am today, nothing more.’ I gathered that he had spent his twenties studying the arts and political sciences but whether at university or in his bed, I did not know. He liked the word ‘autodidact’.

His accent should have given me clues, but it was a hybrid of many things – some Americanisms from the adverts he quoted, but largely the nineteenth-century affectations he’d pinched from Nietzsche. It was only when he quoted in French that I detected the tiniest trace of something that may have been from the north of England. (Had he a Brummy French teacher in school?) He despised rave culture – the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses and even before that the Smiths. The sensitive socialist Morrissey was maybe his public enemy number one, which may have been more evidence to prove that he was born within a mile of the man’s home. As he would not discuss his parents or childhood, disclaiming it all as ‘just so much Freudian nonsense’, I was left none the wiser. Perhaps his quest to be a new person was the product of some deeply embarrassing truth about himself, a childhood of squalor in Manchester perhaps, a single mother, a working-class background (which may have explained his hatred of the proletariat; maybe his father had been one of the miners that Thatcher crushed?). He did after all frequently say, ‘Art saves us from the prison of history.’ But as soon as I started examining I would hear him incanting: ‘The truth of oneself is not hidden inside, it has yet to be invented!’

As I waited for her arrival Saul declared that he had
changed
his mind and did not want to meet the ‘incumbent’. I was to handle all the practicalities of her move as he would be gathering his thoughts and was not to be disturbed. He went to his room and put on a record. As the cheesy synths jangled through the flat I knew it was the dreaded one. ‘Disparu’ by the Duchamps. They were some long-disbanded failed eighties band a bit like Spandau Ballet meets Stockhausen meets a karaoke singer doing Pavarotti. It had audio samples of animals played backwards and the keyboards sounded like a kiddie’s home computer. As I tried to shield my ears from it, the vocals came on. The notes were flat and the voice was of a sick androgyne singing falsetto and mispronouncing French lyrics with a trace of a Yorkshire accent.

‘
J’ai disparu, nous avons disparooo, vooo disparooo
.’

It was possibly the worst and definitely the most pretentious album of all time. An album so up its own bottom that no one perhaps other than Saul could have ever found it; that symbolised Saul’s ethos of rebellion against the forces of mass culture, the elevation of obscurity to a virtue and his belief in worshipping failure in a world based on the cult of success.

He had played it to me that first time I met him, as a test, and somehow maybe in a kind of fucked-up way I had gone from fearing, to loathing, to kind of loving it. I had to laugh at what the girl called Dot’s first reaction would be upon hearing the sounds of ‘Disparu’.

It was surreal, this company she’d hired, three men in matching overalls, carrying in her possessions in identical boxes: a music stand for, maybe, a violin; eight or so boxes of books or CDs; a large television. She apologised profusely for her many things: a cappuccino machine; easel; surround-sound stereo; teak bookshelf; one of those new Apple Macintoshes and a printer.

Saul’s door was locked throughout, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ blaring from within. The council clone came again to the door and the scene was impossible but beautiful. Him demanding the back rent and Dot extending her hand to shake.

— Hello, my name is Dorothy. Who are you?

Her posh voice must have freaked him — and the Wagner and the wad in her wallet. He called her ‘ma’am’ then, said thank you again and again as she gave him the dosh, then backed away, his lowered shoulders and posture that of a subservient dog. She had paid our arrears. I chatted to her after, helping her plug in things and apologising for the lingering smells and Saul’s absence and his Valkyries.

— He’ll maybe say hello in a few days.

As if hearing me he strode past us both as if on a catwalk, wearing his bare-bottomed leather cowboy chaps, a Winnie-the-Pooh pyjama top and ballet pumps, without even casting a glance at Dot.

— Hello . . . she tried to say: — Saul?

But he slammed the toilet door and within seconds we heard him retching. His stomach was sensitive to any changes in routine and he’d asked me for two quid earlier which I was sure had gone on a box of Don Quixote.

— Is he OK? she asked anxiously.

— Oh, yes, this is perfectly normal. He just takes a while to get used to.

I committed to spending the evening with her, chatting. To not come across as mercenary as Saul. To find the real person, not the chequebook. In her room I saw her paintings stacked against the bed – abstract and brightly coloured – and I worried then, because Saul despised paintings and colour in all its manifestations. Furthermore, she was a trust-fund kid and somewhat hippy-ish and on a daily basis he screamed for the genocide of both. She put on her favourite record for me: Joni Mitchell – and if there was one thing
Saul
despised more than anything it was the ‘heart-felt mewings of that menstrual monster’. I tried to smile as the acoustic guitar started up.

All week it had been coming, this scene of the most crushing despair. From her locked door I heard her sobbing and it took me back to two years before, when, having just moved in and filled with enthusiasm, I attempted to show Saul my latest writings.

She’d talked to me for hours that morning about how much her art studies meant to her, when Saul wandered through in his kimono, curious, no doubt, to find out what he was being excluded from. He said very little, but was judging, I could tell. He returned to his room and in excitement she followed, carrying two small canvases. I could not stop her, so sat, peering round the door, as she set the canvases by his wall and asked what he thought.

They were too far away for me to hear clearly, I only heard bits when Saul raised his voice . . . Bourgeois . . . reactionary . . . obsolete! You may as well destroy them! The eraser says more about you than any mark you wilfully make. If you must paint, then paint your face, or your room, tattoo your tits, or graffiti a flyover. Do it like Warhol if you must – car crashes in lilac, electric chairs in pastel peach – a hundred a day. There is more art in my ashtray than in a hundred thousand paintings. Why not exhibit my soiled bed sheets, a more damning indictment of our time you will not find! Fuck art and turn yourself into an artwork. Steal a video camera and record yourself eating, sleeping, taking a shit!

As she wept in her room, he played Bach’s cello solos in his, the ones in the minor keys, as if the necessary destruction of egos caused him some subtle pain. The same record he played after my ego-death.

I worried for her then, with her fragile ways. The quiet
way
she carried herself, the look on her face, of fear at the simplest of things. Her inability to finish her sentences, the waiting when you had to guess and then she said, ‘Yes,’ as if it was easier for her to let you speak for her. She was in her last year at art school and had to have something to show for her graduation. Perhaps he had already destroyed her education. I had to go through and see if she was OK, apologise on his behalf. Confess that I too had been thwarted by him, how her fear of the empty canvas was the same as mine of the empty page.