Ménage (35 page)

You turn and start to watch but then there are voices from another. After hours, you learn this, to treat the three as one, to let the voices that interrupt lead your eye astray. To not try to focus on the one. I was staring at my face on the screen waiting to be slapped and I heard Dot’s voice from behind me.

— So, I’m dead and I killed my girlfriend and I’m famous. And on another screen I saw my face flinching as Dot’s mouth entered to kiss me.

I turned to watch the Rizla game and Saul was on screen, Jesus written on his forehead.

— Did I ever write a book? he asked and Dot’s voice laughed, told him that he didn’t but he inspired one, a big one. And I turned and watched Saul and me in her mother’s clothes, shaking our legs cabaret-style and hear her voice from behind me.

— Do people hate me? she asked, from behind.

Three hours and never the same image and sound, endlessly out of sync, as the eye roamed from one screen to the next. And in that time these three videos that distract from each other did not detract but add. The space between, the floor, the ten feet of floor, in which you stand, and some sit, the images and sounds. The spaces between things. Between people, these were alive.

A middle-aged woman was weeping beside me, she had
been
there for a whole half-hour, transfixed. Her partner asked — What’s wrong? She was telling him she was fine. — Just leave me, please, give me another ten minutes, love. There was laughter too, from the young people, a crowd of eight, in hysterics over the cross-dressing, over the Rizla game.

My voice from the screen.

— Am I Marlene Dietrich?

The man behind me took notes.

As I left I heard some man at the door announce his credentials to a woman and ask where he could find Dorothy Shears. Handing his card. The woman said she’d been trying to contact Dot for days, she’d put him on the list. There were whispers about the police. There were others too, waiting to get inside. Dot’s name on many lips. As I left, I passed endless studio spaces, young artists sitting alone, staring at their white walls, waiting for just one person to enter and look at the work they had spent four years making.

He had fallen silent, in that last day as we waited for word of her waking. He’d cleaned up the entire flat all by himself, silently. And his appearance: the stubble gone, no trace of eyeliner, his hair, washed clean, his clothes – his first attempt at looking respectable. My jeans and a white shirt, shoes polished, in every way the image of every man he once despised.

The vodka was my going-away present. I put the Duchamps on repeat and we sat in my room drinking it from coffee cups, silently staring at the little wheels on the tape player going round and round.
Vous avez disparu
. Then it stopped.

— It’s scary, he said.

— She’s going to be OK.

— No, the silence, he said.

— I like it, I said. — Always have done.

— You scare me too, he said. — Always have done.

I told him, shh. In the silence the question came to me, one that had been unasked for too long. I think he sensed it too. I had to know if the hell we’d put Dot through had been some product of something repressed between us. I could only ask it with touch.

I got undressed and climbed under his covers. I asked him just to come in and not worry. He sat there for another ten minutes, finishing the bottle; he held it upside down and let the last drip fall to the carpet.

— Scared, he said.

— Shh, let’s just sleep.

So slowly he removed his clothes. I recall just fragments. I kissed his neck and he resisted. He pinned me down, wrestling, using his weight against me, his dick soft against my leg. I reached to kiss his mouth and for a second our lips touched, our tongues met and circled, I felt him grow weak in my arms. Then he threw me off.

I tried to hold him, he hid his face, pushed me away, turning his back to me, curling up into himself. I tried to sleep, but was unsure where to put my hands. At least the question was answered. I had not been aroused. There was nothing in that way between us, not without her. But the greater question loomed, was this not a foretaste of what would come with others, years later? When alone with just one, I would be haunted by the trace of the other.

He fell asleep in my arms, snoring. Hours later, I pulled back the covers to look at him naked. I kissed his shoulders, his back. He did not wake. I watched over him as he slept. The rhythm of his lungs against my chest. I held him all night, his foetal form in my arms. My friend, my father, my once role model.

Cars and daylight woke me. I turned in the bed and his bags had gone. I stood in his room. So many things he’d left behind. So many of his special things. The snakeskin cowboy boots that he never let me wear; the Nirvana T-shirt,
his
Palestinian scarf and pinstriped flared seventies suit, his leather chaps, his SALE T-shirt. Eyeliner sticks, his hundreds of records no longer scattered but in two stacks as high as my chest, his books, my God. Books are heavy and his bags must have been small, Nietzsche and Wilde were still there by his bed. And his sheets. The dark mark on his pillow where his dyed black hair had rubbed off. His many improvised ashtrays, a coffee cup teeming with butts.

He said, that night before, that he wanted to go to France but would not give me details of where. France was dead, a museum culture, he’d said it himself. He would not find Sartre or Henry Miller there. It was a little lie and his tone was not one of hope but of resignation, as if heading back, not forward. I sensed he had gone back to his mother, wherever, whoever, she was.

He didn’t say goodbye. I was too hung-over, too in need of sleep to hear the door, a pillow over my head. Maybe it was better that way. He was never good in the mornings.

I called the hospital to ask after her. I wanted to tell her about Saatchi and the Lieder and her sell-out success and how she’d graduated with first-class honours and won the Schwartz Prize. All these things from the messages.

— She’s sleeping, the nurse said.

— Is she . . .?

— She’s out of danger. She’s stable.

— Stable.

— Yes. She woke in the night, she was wide awake. You can call around midday.

— OK, I said. I’ll call back, thanks.

But I could not face hearing her voice so distant, on a phone.

The more I thought about it, the more hours I sat in silence, the more I realised that neither could I truly face her face.

She would wake and I would not be there. I would not
plead
for forgiveness, or seek reconciliation or try to explain. It would be better that way. Better for her. I would do my penance. Never again would I let anyone get close enough for me to hurt them. Best if I stood on the sidelines, remained at a safe distance, cautious, critical. Best to kill my need for touch, to save others from it.

That was what I told myself as I carved the date into memory.

That last day.

He had gone and she would live.

The 3rd of June 1993.

fn1
.
Trust
, 1993.

fn2
. It has been noted that two of the ‘names’ were former ‘partners’ of Shears, gallery owners and media celebrities. A well-known indie photographer, acclaimed for capturing the movements in grunge and heroin chic, was among them.

fn3
. J. Thompson claimed that Shears had made a career out of filming
drunken
party games; that her art was a product of a generation so politically disenfranchised and disengaged that their only possible reaction to the serious adult world of responsibilities was to poke fun with ‘ironic and childish games’. ‘The Party Is Over’,
Independent
, May 2002.

TWO VOICES IN
the dark. Him and her.

She: Wake up!

He: Let him sleep, he needs to rest, that’s what they said.

She: Wake up please.

He: You’re tired, go home and sleep, I’ll stay with him.

She: I’m going nowhere. You go!

He: It could be hours yet, you look tired. You go and I’ll stay.

The voices seemed half dream, each sound, so close to his ear; the sticky smacks of saliva, the sighs and small movements, slowly forming into an image around him. He did not want to wake, did not know if he even could, felt comforted by the voices, like some half-memory of being half awake as his parents fussed over him as sick child, if that was even his own memory, or was it something Dot had said, maybe something from her memory once told to him – borders were not clear. Keep your eyes closed, feel them holding your hands, pretend to sleep and suck in all that affection, because it will disappear as soon as you open your eyes and re-enter the world of the questions asked and answers expected in the light of day.

As he came to fuller consciousness, there was pain, in lower gut and arm; he fought the impulse to take stock, wake and talk.

She: He just moved. I saw his eyes flicker.

He: He’s probably just dreaming.

She: How do they know it’s not a coma?

He: They’ve done tests.

She: What the fuck do they know?

He: Why don’t you go check on Molly?

She: Why don’t you stop telling me what to do?

A beep of a heart monitor in rhythm. Funny. It must have been his own. The other sensations then were of tightness, in arm and hand, both hands.

They were on either side of him, his bed, so he must be at home, but He had said, Go home, so it must have been . . . yes, the smells confirmed it: a hospital. And the pressure in his hands was theirs holding his, one on either side, and maybe a drip in his wrist. This was the image unseen, but imagined as if from above. He could hold them here as long as he kept his eyes shut.

She: God, I’ll never forgive myself.

He: Shh. It wasn’t your fault.

She: Whose then? Yours?

He: Both of us, maybe not. I don’t know.

She: OWEN!

What was it Dot had said? – I made myself sick and they held my hands. I pretended to be asleep and they stayed by my bed.

He: Stop shouting. He can’t hear you.

She: How do you know? Just shut up.

She was weeping for him now, and He was reaching over to hold her.

She: Don’t touch me!

He: I was just –

She: This is all your fault.

It was a struggle to keep his eyes closed. He did not want the fighting to start, for one to leave. He moved slightly and they did as he wanted, separated and the silence could only have meant that each was staring at him.

She: Owen, my love, are you OK? Can you hear me?

He: Hey, buddy, you all right?

Time stretched in the pretending. It seemed like hours passed, and gradually each fell silent and the hands left his
and
they each went back to their own ways in the waiting. It pained him then to hear her fussing.

She: You know, to hell with the show, if he doesn’t wake up I . . . I’m giving up art forever anyway . . .

He: I know, I know.

She: If I hadn’t been so selfish this would never have happened.

He: No, it’s my fault, if I hadn’t turned up, you two would have been . . . anyway, he’s going to be fine.

She: What if he’s not?

Something came to him then. Not a thought or feeling. But an image through the dark. He was walking into a vast darkened space and to his left and right were two separate screens facing each other, huge, the size of a cinema each. On each were moving images of mouths talking. One female and one male. But not talking to each other. They talked to the third screen, on which there was no image, no sound, nothing. Blank, bright white. They talked to it as if begging it to come to life.

It took all the energy he had to suppress the urge to sit upright and tell them.

She: If he doesn’t wake, we’re not going to make it.

He: Me and you. I know that. Come home with me now. They’ll call us when he wakes.

She: Don’t touch me, please.

It seemed then that each gripped his hands tighter. And although he felt for their distress the grip of the image was tighter on him. In his mind he stood in the gallery watching the screens. He turned and saw the third screen reflected back in the eyes of the audience. He saw tears as they stared into the empty white that represented fear, total fear of loss, inexpressible. This artwork was the ninth and the one that would save her career. And the image was not of her making at all, but maybe it was – as it had always been – his own.

She: Why did you come back anyway?

He: Just wanted to see my buddy.

She: Bullshit, you were afraid no one’d remember you. You must have heard about the essay and wanted to be in it. You make me sick.

He: You’ve always been fucking dumb, you know that. You’d forget where your fucking head was if I wasn’t there to tell you.

She: Oh, really.

He: Yeah – in fact, if I hadn’t come along you’d still be doing fucking watercolours and listening to Joni Mitchell.

She: Well, actually, I think you’ll find, Owen was a bigger inspiration – in fact, we did most of my work together.

He: That a fact?

She: Oh, fuck off and leave us alone.

He: After you, madam.

Don’t fight, little children, he thought. Daddy’s here. How they were in terror of being left alone, together, with his absence. They would each beg him to tell their story. And he could change everything, all the details, put words into the mouths of each other, finish Dot’s unfinished sentences and make Saul speak with his own voice, even have the man erased entirely. He could rewrite everything, make himself the victim or the hero and still they would thank him for it. Maybe they were all he could hope to shape or mould in the world, but maybe that was enough.

A hand was holding his again. The other hand clasped then, as if the second was jealous of the first.

She: Owen, I’m sorry, can you hear me?

He: Whatever I’ve done, mate, whenever, all of it.

He was bursting with it. He knew, finally, that in the hands that clutched his he held not only the story of their pasts but their hopes for the future. He must have been gripping hard because both started talking, excitedly.

He: He squeezed my hand.

She: His lids are moving – look.

He felt the energy flow from skin to skin and fought the desire to open his eyes and confess.

She: Owen, please wake up.

He: Please, mate, please.

Yes, he would keep them waiting like this in their warm need, a few minutes longer, maybe more. He wanted only to make this moment go on. He was both their sickly child and their caring father. Their judge and creator. Joy welled inside him, he was at their very centre holding them both together and apart. Caught between weeping and laughter. Compassion and control. My God. He had to keep a straight face. Be quiet, make it last, he told himself, just another moment. They squeezed him tight. He kept his eyes shut and felt the power they had given him. Felt what it was like to hold a life in each of his hands.

He: Look, he’s smiling.

She: Owen, it’s me. Can you hear me?

He: We’re both here.

She: I love you, Owen.

He: We’re right here.