The Late Hector Kipling (21 page)

‘Yeah?’ I said.

‘Or the bedroom of the Unabomber. Or the aftermath of some random shooting. You should move out of just painting heads. You should be painting what Goya would be painting if Goya was still painting. Did you know that by the time Goya was forty-seven, six of his seven children were dead? You should paint like Goya! Or you could paint some guy who’s thrown himself off a skyscraper, call it King Kong.’

Was she just coked out of her mind or what? Or was this just her?

‘Like what happened to my friend Charlie?’

‘What?’ I said, horrified.

‘My friend Charlie,’ she said, ‘threw himself off some skyscraper and signed his suicide note “King Kong”.’

‘Charlie C?’ I said and raised, or tried to raise, my eyebrows.

‘Oh, you read my Zippo. Yeah, Charlie C.’

‘Why did he do that?’ I asked, appalled.

‘Cos he was crazy. His name was Charlie Conga, and we all used to call him King Conga, and then just Kong, and I guess it all kinda went to his head somehow, and next thing you know he’s taking the elevator up to the top floor, mashed on ketamine, and he smashes a window and bang, splat. Charlie Smoothie, right there on Fifth Avenue. It was only for reasons of taste that they didn’t just haul out the shovels. You see what I’m saying? You should be painting this kinda shit, man.’

‘I will,’ I said, and you know what? I really think I will. I liked this girl. Fuck, I really liked this girl.

‘I mean after you’ve painted me. If the offer’s still open.’

‘It’s still open,’ I said. Rather smoothly, as I remember.

‘I’m glad,’ she said, and peeled off one of her eyelashes, dropped it on the floor and flicked it across the room.

‘So is Charlie C,’ I said, ‘Charlie Conga, the guy you were talking about in all those poems the other night?’

Rosa stood up and stubbed out her fag in the eye socket of what I took to be the skull of a kitten. ‘Shit no, I never wrote no poem for Charlie,’ and she sat back down, laughing, covering her beautiful white teeth with her beautiful white hand.

‘So who were they for?’

Rosa turned her head and stared at the candles like she had no intention of answering.

Silence.

The sound of a tear appearing in the corner of her eye.

‘They were for some fuckin’ asswipe.’

‘Ah,’ I said, not unfamiliar with MTV.

‘Some fuckin’ jerk who ran off with some fuckin’ stripper at my twenty-first.’

‘You had a stripper at your twenty-first?’

Rosa scowled at me. ‘No, fucker, she wasn’t working; she was just there. And then they left. I should have killed him. I thought about it.
I mean it, I seriously thought about killing him. I counted the ways. I had a gun. I was gonna go with the gun. I was just gonna shoot him in the back.’

‘Yeah?’ I said, and nodded, casually, like this was the sort of conversation I had every day.

‘Yeah, shoot him in the back. Since he’d already stabbed me in mine.’ She lit another cigarette on Kong’s Zippo. ‘That’s when I came over here. I met this English guy in New York. A dancer. He invited me over to London to stay with him. And then we got married.’

‘You’re married?’

She smiled, relishing my dismay. ‘Yeah sure. Only so I could get my papers. He’s gay’ She smiled again at my poorly concealed relief. We gazed at each other for a long time. Two pairs of eyes, charged in the candlelight. Two warm brains, softly electrocuted. Eleni was already betrayed.

‘So how about you?’ she said, still looking me in the eye. ‘You seeing anyone?’

‘No,’ I said. And then I said it again: ‘No,’ I said. And then: ‘Not at the moment.’

Indecent silence.

Understandably concerned that one of us might say something to scotch the moment she took me by the hand and lifted me to my feet. The clink of her bracelets and the smell of musk beneath the wax.

The bedroom was as black as the living room had been white. The walls, floor and ceiling, all blacker than any black I had ever encountered. A black clock on a black desk. A black chest on a black rug. Black curtains on a black rod. Black books on a black bookshelf. There was a television in one corner, painted black, and on top of the black television a black Madonna cradling a black Christ. Black candles on black china plates. Two black guitars and a black tambourine. She lowered me onto the black bed and rested my head upon the black pillow. She took off my top, eased down Brenda’s jeans and nestled down beside me.
Before I had time to implement the fine points of my will, her hands were finding mine and she curled her body around my back like a cat. Like a warm black cat. Like a warm and disastrous cat; The Cat That Ate Thomas Hardy’s Heart. That cat.

Fade to black.

It’s dawn now, and I’m stretched out in the bath gazing at my penis. The water is filled with shining white bubbles and my penis is in there somewhere, bobbing on the surface, like butter wouldn’t melt.

I’ve never been the sort of man to give it a name, nor imagine that it’s something other than me, with eyes and a mouth and a mind of its own. I’ve always steered clear of those cartoons that suggest such a thing, and I call it a penis, not a dick or a cock or a knob or a tool, I call it a penis. My penis and its balls. What a mess. What a fucking mess. All men have had these moments, lying back in the bath, in times of sexual crisis. All men have looked at their penises like this. And perhaps women look at their breasts in this way or sometimes their vaginas if it’s a shallow bath. Comforting to know that practically everyone on the planet has at some time lain back in a bath of some sort, in a time of sexual crisis and damned their genitalia. You could publish a book. Books.

‘Fucking parasite,’ I say, ‘fucking leech.’

I imagine that there’s nothing there. No penis, no balls, no hair. Not that there’s a vagina there. Not that I’m lying back in the bath imagining that I’ve got a vagina. Nor am I lying back in the bath considering castration. No, it’s simpler than that. I mean that there’s just nothing there. The legs meet and there’s just a smooth patch of skin, like the inside of the elbow or the back of the knee. Smooth, hairless, harmless. It doesn’t even have a name. There’s no arsehole and no urethra, because we don’t need to shit or piss. We don’t need to shit or piss because we don’t need to eat or drink. No need to reproduce. We are not born. One day we just appear and continue to keep up appearances
forever – we never die. It never rains and there is no disease, decay or even doubt. Since we have fewer organs we are much smaller creatures. But we still have a brain. But a splendid brain. We need to be neither soothed nor hugged nor made to laugh. And everything just looks and sounds as nice as it could ever look or sound. And no one ever lies. And there is no such thing as love.

I lean back my head on the rolled-up towel, put my hands together and pray that I might spend eternity in this bath. No genitals, no hunger no sickness, no longing, just me and the bubbles and it never gets cold.

My phone is still switched off and sits on the edge of the bath like a black box of pain. I take it up in my hands and go through the stored numbers – forty in all. Not even enough to take up the phone’s memory. But all of them owed a call. I access the voicemail. ‘Welcome to Orange Answerphone. You have nine new messages . . .’

One day I’ll learn not to feel this way. One day I’ll have learned to pour milk over this agony. One day the next thing I do won’t be the wrong thing to do.

The next thing I do: I hold the phone under the water. I have it by its throat. I hold it down by my fat hip and watch it give up its bubbles. It slips from my grasp like soap and clatters against the white enamel. The light goes out.

Silence.

I lean back my head and gaze out the window. After weeks and weeks of grey the sky has cleared to blue. I don’t know where I am. All I can see is the backs of houses and a few low roofs. There’s a woman on one of the roofs learning to walk the tightrope. She’s not very good and keeps falling onto a pile of old mattresses. I seem to be facing east. A mellow sun hits the mirrors and in turn the bathwater which ripples and swells across the flaking paint of the ceiling. The water’s getting cold. I bring the phone up into the air and toss it onto the towel. I half expect it to flap.

There’s a Chinese dressing gown draped across the sink and I try to
put it on. After splitting the stitching under the arms and wrestling with the knotted blue belt I take it off and make do with one of the towels. There’s a mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet and when I look into it there’s a face. Not a face I recognize. Not a face I like. Not really a face at all. I need to lie down. I really need to lie down on this scarlet floor. I stare deep into my own eyes and think of all those tiny things that scrabble about our bodies. I see them as a mob of drunken revellers. I see them as the disenchanted citizens of a Utopian society. I see them as busy and ravenous little shuttles from their mother ship Lucifer. Multiple millions of them, industrious, feeding, excitable and abandoned in every crevice, knob and socket of my body. It makes me feel less alone. I look away from the mirror and up to the ceiling. There’s an ugly little spider navigating the broken bulb.

Idea For a Piece: Fill polished copper wombs with spiders. A hundred and twenty wombs all over the gallery floor. Twelve thousand spiders in all. Allow them to get about. And if they get up the punters’ trousers, well fuck ’em. They shouldn’t have come to the show in the first place. Call it
Fuck You. You Shouldn’t Have Come To The Show In The First Place
.

The creepy little fella starts on his way down. His spittle thread glinting in the sun. I’m put in mind of Robert the Bruce. I’m sat in a chalk cave, in a kilt, with a burning red beard and a planished brooch. But I don’t feel like taking up arms against the English. I don’t even feel like rousing myself from the cave. I’m just anxious that the little twat might land on my towel. But then, in the next moment, sensing my meat turn to vegetable, maybe I do want to take up arms against the English.

‘O England, My England . . . You and me. Outside. Now!’

I bid goodbye to the bathroom and walk into the black bedroom. Rosa’s lying on her front, covers kicked off, naked, still. One hand is tucked beneath her thighs and the other lolls on her head. Between her
fingers and in her hair a cigarette has burnt itself out. A two-inch worm of ash curled across her scalp. I blow and some of her hair comes away. She needs looking after. She has a little bald patch. One day she’ll kill herself. I kiss her on the cheek and bless the silence.

She made an awful lot of noise last night. And at one point hurt me quite badly.

I tiptoe out of the room and spend the next five minutes trying to button up Brenda’s jeans. I scribble a short note and leave it by the kettle (the kitchen is entirely blue):

Rosa, thanks for finding, helping, saving me last night. Whichever one it was, (perhaps it was all three), thank you. Please don’t think that I have crept out, (although I obviously have), but if I was silent it was only to allow you to sleep. It is unthinkable for us not to see each other again so, my beautiful poet, if I may retire into prose, here is my number: 0208 . . . etc
.

I steal out of the front door with all the stealth I can muster given my age, state and girth. I close the door behind me and draw a deep breath, relieved to have pulled off such a shabby exit with such nimble aplomb. I am, therefore, a little vexed, to say the least, when I stumble over a small army of bottles, left out on the landing, and suddenly find myself rolling down the stairs, bouncing on my shoulders and shins, watching my homburg hat beat me by a few seconds to the hard green tiles of the second floor. A few of the bottles come along for the ride and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if one of them doesn’t split itself in three on my forehead just before my nose hits the skirting board. Lying here at the bottom of the stairs, with small drops of blood pattering down onto the green tiles, I begin to remember something of the night before. I had been dragged into this house on my hands and knees, and now it looks like my departure will be equally discreditable.

Here I am, look. Here I am. I’m squeezed into a phone box on the corner of the Roman Road, and Mum’s all over the place. Mum’s in little pieces that won’t fit together.

‘Well, where are you?’

‘I’m in a phone box, Mum.’

‘I didn’t think they had phone boxes in London any more.’

‘Well, they do, Mum, and I’m in one.’

I’m surrounded by twenty girls all with their knockers and pants askew. It’s like trying to talk to your mother from the inside of Hugh Heffner’s head.

‘Hector, love, come home, your father’s broken out in sores.’

‘Eight hundred and forty pounds, Mum; I’m sending it to you right now.’

‘Don’t you dare, Hector.’

‘Mum! Mum, remember when I had all those warts on my fingers and you bought them off me, 25p each? Well, it worked, didn’t it? The next day they were gone.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Well, Mum, I’m offering you eight hundred and forty pounds for Dad’s sores. I’m sending a cheque.’

‘We’ll rip it up.’

‘What am I gonna do if I come home? There’s nothing I can say to Dad that’s gonna make him feel better about you blowing that much money. All I can do is replace the money. Mum, please let me give it to you.’

Mum sounds like she’s crying but she’s trying to hide it from me. ‘Just come home, Hector love. I need a hug. How did the show go?’

‘It went fine, Mum. Don’t cry.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are.’

‘I’m not crying, Hector, I just need a hug from my son. Your dad needs a hug from his son.’

‘If I come home will you let me give you the money.’

‘No.’

‘Well, I’m not coming home.’

What kind of son am I? What kind of horned and scaly ice-cold fish monster am I? Why don’t I just get on the train right now? It’s only three hours and my mum needs a hug. My dad needs a hug. What kind of dung beetle am I? I can hear whispering coming from my skin.

‘Mum, what’s that noise?’

‘What? Sorry I can’t hear you?’

‘I said what’s that horrible noise?’