The Late Hector Kipling (29 page)

For a while I don’t say anything, but just hold it to my ear and listen to her crying. Lenny’s pulled out a Stanley knife and he’s cutting away the fabric from the base of the settee.

‘Mum?’

‘Hhhhecctooor.’

‘Mum, what is it, Mum? Is it Dad? How’s Dad?’

‘Hhhhecctoooor.’ Gasping. Gasping.

Is it Dad? Is this the phone call I’ve spent my whole life dreading? Oh well, it was always going to happen. One of these days the phone was always going to ring and it would be either Mum or Dad and they’d utter the name of the other in the same sentence as ‘dead’. She can’t bring herself under control. I can hear her sniffing and trying to catch her breath. Oh my God, it must be Dad.

‘Mum, it’s not Dad, is it?’

‘Hector, we’ve been burgled.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve been robbed!’ she screams.

‘Mum, Mum,’ I say, ‘take it easy, what’s happened? Tell me what’s happened.’

She can barely speak for the torrent of tears. ‘I went to fetch your dad from the hospital and – ’ drip, drip ‘– by the time we got back we’d been robbed ... It was that man, Hector. It must have been that man.’

‘What man?’

‘That man who bought the settee.’

My blood turns to frost. ‘How do you know? What’s gone?’

‘When he gave me the cheque I put it into the safe behind the Lowry picture.’

‘You did that in front of him?’

‘No, he asked if he could use the toilet, but by the time he came back I was still struggling to hang the picture back up, and he saw it, he saw where we keep everything, and that’s what’s gone.’

‘So what’s gone?’

‘Everything! I was settling your dad down into his chair and he asked if he could see the cheque. I went to the safe and it was completely empty. All our savings. Fifteen thousand pounds! He’s stolen fifteen thousand pounds from us.’

‘Oh my God! Mum! Oh my God!’

‘Your dad’s gone straight back to the hospital. He went straight back in the same ambulance that brought him home. And Sparky’s run off again. I don’t blame him. I feel like doing the same.’

Lenny’s carrying the bathroom door over to the settee and leaning it against the base. It’s too small but I get the idea. He’s doing some kind of human settee with a window and a door sort of thing. Lenny rests for a minute and looks over, aware that something’s wrong.

Mum’s taking hundreds of tiny involuntary breaths. There’s an agonizing squeak in the back of the throat and half a pint of spit. It sounds like it might never stop.

‘Mum, I’ll send you the money.’

‘Hector, it’s fifteen thousand pounds. It’s everything we have in the world.’

‘I can get double that for a new painting. It’ll take me two or three weeks to do a new painting and I’ll just send you the money. It’s all right, Mum, really it’s all right. Have you called the police?’

‘Yes, but the cheque’s gone as well and I can’t remember his name, the name on the cheque.’

‘Monger?’

‘Eh?’

‘Was his name Monger?’

‘No. What are you talking about? Why are you asking if his name was Monger? Where do you get that from?’

Fuck, why don’t I just come clean? Why don’t I just tell her the whole story? ‘Or Bolton? Was it Bolton?’

‘Hector, what are you talking about? Why are you just calling out names at random?’

‘Well, was it? Was it Bolton? Think, Mum.’

‘No, it wasn’t bloody Bolton. It was something like Parker or Parsons, but neither of those. Partridge, something like Partridge, but
it wasn’t Partridge either. Where do you get Monger and Bolton from? What are you talking about, Hector?’

Lenny’s laid the door flat on the floor and he’s going at the insides of the settee with a screwdriver. Now and then he looks over and frowns.

‘Mum,’ I say, suddenly resolute, ‘I’ll be on the first train in the morning. I’m coming home, Mum. Listen to what I’m saying, I’m coming home.’

‘Well, it’s about bloody time.’

Lenny’s crouched down with his body half inside the settee. He’s put down the screwdriver and he’s struggling to untangle something from the springs and threads. Suddenly he reels back with his hand over his mouth. He reaches in and pulls out a small bundle. On the other end of the line, Mum’s convulsing.

‘I’ll be right there, Mum. I’ll come home, and then I’ll paint this painting. Mr Myers can sell it and I’ll replace everything that’s been stolen. Really, it’s all gonna be fine. Mum. Mum, please don’t cry. It breaks my heart to hear you like this.’

Lenny’s poking at the bundle with the screwdriver, slowly unwrapping it. The more he unwraps it the tighter he holds his hand over his face.

‘Hang on, Mum,’ I say, fearing the worst.

‘What?’

‘Just give me a second.’

I walk over and arrive at the scene, just as Lenny is turning over the last fold. I stop in my tracks and Lenny retreats to the other side of the room, whimpering behind his hands.

Sparky. Sparky, me old mate. What the fuck are you doing in there? What the fuck are you doing down in London, all black and chapped and stinking and dead? What’s your story? What’s your fucking story, Sparky?

Mum and Lenny have taken themselves off to their respective hospitals. I eased Sparky’s carcass into a black bin liner and walked him down to the canal. I’d always imagined a tiny grave in Mum and Dad’s back garden, pebble for a headstone, never the Grand Union Canal with its old trikes and mattresses. I’m lying on the floor looking at the spot on the ceiling. What’s going on? Dad’s in hospital, Kirk’s in hospital, Sofia’s in hospital, I’m having an affair with a sado-masochistic Brooklyn poet, and some stranger who threw horse shit all over my painting of his dead father has robbed my parents and sent me the corpse of their dog hidden in the base of a hideous settee. I don’t know, is it me, am I exaggerating, or has my life just turned into some sort of drunken collaboration between Feydeau and Dante?

Any moment now Rosa will ring the bell and I’ll be dragged in even deeper. I wish I could sleep for ten million years.

In my dream they’re all in the same hospital. Well, actually a tent. A military hospital tent pitched in some trench. The black sky is brilliant with flares and tracer fire. Dad’s bed is shoved up one end and his face is pressed into the pillow so that I can only see the back of his sobbing head. Kirk’s sat up and quoting Poe to his hands. His hair could do with a comb. Sofia’s all raw and red on a crisp white bed, like a monstrous piece of sushi. Two small flames flicker in the sockets of her eyes. It’s a windy night and the walls of the tent are punched back and forth, back and forth for ten million years. What a palaver.

I love the shape of my fingers as they grip the charcoal. I love the feeling of my hand as it brushes across the page. I have to be careful not to become preoccupied with this elegance as I draw her. But it has always been the case. Eleni says the same thing about her hands when she plays the piano. When the beauty is flowing through you it’s difficult not to sit back a little and watch the extremities work their magic. I’m finishing off her eyes. From across the room and from the page, she’s staring straight through me. My hand leaves the page, pauses, and begins a sequence of bold, broad strokes, as I get to work on her hair. I have no idea why I can do this. Or rather, I have no idea why everyone can’t do this. Only this makes me happy. Every time I take up my charcoal or my brushes, I kiss each stick, each brush. I kiss the pad, the canvas, the tubes, the tubs, the palette, the turps, the rags and the ladders. And then I kiss myself. Each hand. Each finger in turn. And then a peck for the thumbs. If I could kiss my eyes I would. Instead I kiss my palm and lay it upon each lid. I am ready to begin and it scares the shit out of me. What if it has gone? What if the gift has fled? Sometimes I have to rush to the toilet before I can proceed. Sometimes I throw up and sometimes I just sit there, paralysed, unvisited. It’s about trust. It is not me who can do this. It is another. And others must never be trusted. I despise this compulsion. And yet only this makes me happy. Only this. How I hate it.

‘Why don’t you do all of me?’ she says.

‘All of you?’

‘I could just undress and then you could draw the whole damned thing.’

‘The whole damned thing?’

‘The whole goddamned thing. Whaddya think, soldier?’

I must have swallowed with such gusto that she took it as a yes, because now she’s standing up and beginning to undress. ‘So what do you say?’

I feel like I’m in some terrible seventies soft-core porn film –
Confessions of a Randy Dauber,
or something like that. She’s down to her underwear and before I can loosen my jaw enough to say leave the underwear on, the underwear’s off and Rosa Flood’s spreadeagled on my floor.

‘Do me from this angle,’ she says, and saucy trombone music kicks in. We’re in the smoky basement of my brain, brushes on the snare, two kazoos and a battered sax.

‘OK,’ I say and turn over the page. Though foreshortening was never my strong point.

She never questioned the explicit presence of Eleni’s chattels in the bedroom. But then there wasn’t really time. She emptied out a bottle of turpentine across my pelvis and came at me with a palette knife. Confident that she couldn’t possibly break my skin with a palette knife, I came over all cocky and croaked, ‘Go on then, slit my fucking throat.’ And that’s when, much to my chagrin, she managed to slit my throat a little. What a girl. She then grabbed a fistful of my hair, wrestled me into the bathroom and proceeded to shave my head with my beard trimmer and a Gillette razor. Too drunk and terrified to protest, I sat on the edge of the bath and groaned as she massaged my nicked dome with half a bottle of Body Shop baby oil. And then it was back to the bedroom for a prolonged bout of unhappy-slapping and something she must have read about after Googling ‘Gomorrah’. By the time we fell asleep the sheets emitted a pungent stink of sweat, turps, semen, ash, lemon juice, ginger, excrement and blood. At some point we heard Lenny come home and took great care to censor the ferocity of our throes. Though at one point I screamed, ‘Fuck, Rosa, what are you gonna do with that?’ and, to be honest, it would really surprise me if, at some future date, he claimed not to have heard it.

I woke up at eleven, put the bed sheets onto a long spin cycle and lit seven jasmine joss sticks. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror
between half past and quarter to, picking at scabs and realizing that I didn’t have the right shape of head to carry this off. There was a small trough at the crown that I feared might gather water in a storm, and that birds might settle and take sup at the expense of my dignity. I despaired, to say the least. By noon Rosa regained consciousness and I made us both a nice pot of peppermint tea. There was a note by the kettle:

Hector, what the fuck are you doing? I sat up all night with Kirk. He didn
’
t wake up once. Meanwhile . . . what the fuck are you doing? I don
’
t think I can stay here, considering. What the fuck are you doing? Shouldn
’
t you be in Crete? Shouldn
’
t you be in Blackpool? Shouldn
’
t you be down St Thomas
’
s? What the fuck are you doing? I
’
ve gone out for a long walk and a think, cos I don
’
t understand what the fuck you
’
re doing! Lenny. Who loves you – up to a point.

Up to a point.

Rosa’s in the bath. I can hear the tiny splashes and frolic of Rosa in the bath. I can smell it all from here. I can smell her eyes, her nails and the freckles on her neck. I can smell the suds and the tiles. The toothbrush, the towels, the talc and the oils.

I’ve pulled the ladders into the very centre of the room and I’m sat at the very top, hugging my knees, staring through the window. Things are going to change. From now on, things will never be the same. Not that they ever were. For suddenly it’s clear. I have the option to say no to all this. I can climb down from this ladder right now. I can confront Rosa and send her on her way. I can put twenty thousand pounds into Mum and Dad’s bank account within the hour. I could be at Heathrow by three. I could spend tonight beneath the stars with my Eleni in my arms. Sofia will recover, Dad will recover and they’ll go into Kirk’s head with their needles and their knives and scrape out all the dark. Monger will be arrested, Lenny will win the Prize and by next July there’ll be a
rosy-nosed baby squawking like a damp bird in the softly mad middle of a glorious summer night. And all I have to do is come down from this ladder. It’s the New Dawn of a Golden Age. Fuck, you know what? I think I might have given up smoking. Just now, sat atop this stepladder, just about to climb down.

I can hear a taxi out in the street. So much for Lenny’s long walk. He probably walked as far as Mile End Tube and just couldn’t face the Hogarthian squalor. ‘I’m too tall for the Tube,’ he always says. One time he even claimed to be too famous for the Tube. Yeah, Lenny, of course you are. Bless. Artists in taxis. Artists in Groucho’s. Artists in the dark corners of empty VIP rooms, sipping their tequilas, whispering about anatomy and cash.

Outside the front door I hear the groan and fizz of the lift.

Artists in lifts, instead of taking the stairs.

I don’t care if he wants to take me on, have it all out. I won’t argue with him. No. I feel like a new monk, all bald at the top of this ladder. I’m glowing. I’m radiating an extreme and magnificent monkness. And Lenny’s gonna pick up on that. After all, he’s a sensitive chap. He’s gonna stride in here all ready to strap me to the rack of his indignation, but I won’t be having any of it. Yes, I’ve done wrong. Yes, I’ve been led astray. But all this is as nothing to the right I will now do. All this pales in the light of this fresh and epiphanic resolution.

One last fag. Before the lift opens I’ll have lit just one last fag. I’ll smoke it in front of him. I’ll ask him to prepare a ceremonial ashtray, with Stella and pepper, as an end to all bitterness. We’ll sit and watch the final plume rise to the ceiling and lovingly speculate upon the moment when one can say, with surety, that it has finally passed away.