Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

His eyes slitted slightly and he rubbed at his nose with the hand not holding his wine glass. ‘Everything in life is a conquest. Each thing is different. At this moment I believe I’d feel the same excitement in my gut even if I were fifty years older and creating this object for the hundredth time. I feel the sort of sense of achievement that comes from doing something well. That’s enough. It’s enough for me anyway, like a physical empathy with objects. It’s like I’m God and I’ve created a perfect tree or a perfect river. It’s like I now understand what makes the world tick.’

She couldn’t resist laughing at him. He stared at her, his expression one of surprise.

Eventually she said, ‘You sound so naïve. It’s really funny. Refreshing too I suppose, but funny.’

He led her into the living room. Before she entered the room she glanced towards the front door again and said. ‘Why haven’t you opened any of the letters on your doormat? There’s a whole pile of them.’

He shrugged. ‘No point. I’m too busy. Forget about them.’

She followed him into the living room and looked around in amazement. The floor was inches deep in chips, slivers, specks and flakes of wood. She said, ‘When I was a kid I had a hamster and it lived in a place like this.’ She felt she was going to sneeze. ‘Doesn’t this stuff get up your nose? Surely you wear a mask while you work? This fine dust could destroy your lungs.’

‘I can’t be bothered.’ He grimaced, then ran his hand down the base of the coffin, which was now complete, like a big round canoe with flat ends. He looked up at her. ‘What do you think?’

She frowned. ‘Explain it to me. It seems a strange shape for a coffin.’

He smiled. ‘Remember when we were chatting last time and I said that I wanted to make something which had a meaning beyond its purpose? Something which satirized death, brought it down to earth and yet celebrated it? Well that’s what this is, that’s what this shape means.’

Melissa interrupted him. ‘Has someone commissioned this then? They must be very weird. I bet it’ll cost them a fortune.’

This put John off his stroke. He sipped his wine, ‘Yes, it’s been commissioned. It’s for someone who …’

He paused. ‘It won’t be too expensive.’

Melissa put out her hand and touched the wood. ‘God, it feels really smooth, no splinters or anything.’

He said, ‘I want it to feel as smooth as steel, smooth and cold.’

Melissa ran her hand around the inside. ‘Well, why didn’t you make it out of steel then?’

He laughed, frustrated. ‘Because it’s a coffin, stupid. Coffins are made out of wood, that’s the whole point of them. This is a coffin. It will look like something else, it will have an appearance to the contrary, but it will still, intrinsically, be a coffin.’

She took her hand from the coffin and blew away the fine dust which had accumulated on the tips of her fingers, ‘So how will it look? What will it be, apart from a coffin, that is?’

John pointed towards the pictures that he’d tacked to the wall, many of which were now rather bedraggled and dog-eared. ‘It will look like a silver can, a tin, a container. I’m using Warhol’s ideas but taking them further. He made art from everyday objects. I’m doing the same thing but my art is functional.’

Melissa frowned and chewed the corner of her bottom lip for a while. ‘You mean that this coffin is going to look like one of those Campbell’s cans? That’s strange.’

John shrugged defensively. ‘It’s no stranger in real terms than the outfit which you are wearing today. How is this different?’

Melissa was wearing a pair of flared tartan trousers and a pink turtleneck top with bell-shaped sleeves. Altogether she looked rather remarkable.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, but I think fashion’s somehow different. It doesn’t really involve the feelings of other people so much, does it? Your family and friends would all have to be extremely level-headed and dispassionate if they weren’t going to mind seeing you buried in a Campbell’s soup can. It’s a bit of a joke.’

John was irritated by these comments. He was silent for a moment, disappointed. ‘I thought we’d agreed that already, I don’t know, I thought we’d talked about this and that you understood about how death wasn’t a situation beyond irony, beyond a beauty of a different sort, beyond intellectualization. You sound very conventional all of a sudden.’

Melissa took a sip of wine, then looked into the glass because she could detect traces of sawdust on her tongue. ‘I’m not being conventional, I’m not a very conventional sort of person. God knows. I wouldn’t dress as I do if I was.’

John interrupted. ‘That’s just a part of your job though, isn’t it?’

She shook her head, ‘Well, no, I didn’t have to work where I do. I chose to. Anyway, some people who work in fashion houses aren’t all that bothered about fashion.’

John said, ‘Fuck fashion. I don’t give a shit about that. This coffin is something of great beauty and dignity. It parodies art and it parodies death …’

‘In your opinion,’ Melissa interrupted.

John was furious. ‘Bugger my opinion, that’s what it does. When it’s completed it will be a thing of beauty in its own right. It will be something that pretends to be infinitely disposable — a tin can — but it will be something infinite, it will be the sum total of hours and hours of work and planning and precision and plain sweat.’

Melissa walked over to the wall on which the illustrations were tacked. She stared at them again and then looked at John. He was touching the handle of his metal plane, making a pattern with his finger in the dust. She could tell by his expression that she had offended him, and that confused her. She said, ‘I didn’t mean to be horrible about your work. It just seems strange to me. I’ve never been a big Warhol fan, maybe that’s the difference between us.’

John didn’t stop making the patterns. ‘Neither have I, that’s not the point. The point is something beyond Warhol, beyond art but about art. I can’t be bothered explaining it again.’

She tried to smile. ‘It’ll be fun painting it, I bet.’

John said nothing. He was sulking, but not lightheartedly.

Melissa continued, ‘I can see now why you thought the material was a good idea, all silvery and glossy. How will you line this thing?’

He shrugged, uninterested. ‘I suppose with silver-topped wood tacks, all close together on both the top and the bottom.’

She laughed. ‘I thought it would have to be sewn on or something. That was stupid.’

His silence confirmed her opinion. After a while he stopped what he was doing and stared at her. She looked such an inappropriate figure in his living room, brightly coloured and frivolous; she looked uncomfortable, and he wished she’d go. Eventually he said, ‘Would you like some more wine?’

She didn’t answer directly, just shook her head and said, ‘Now you’ve built this thing it’s not just an idea in your head, is it? It’s more than that, it’s also everything that everyone else may happen to think or decide. I suppose that the idea was something very pure but the object … I don’t know.’

John sighed. ‘I think that line of thought is a waste of time. It’s pointless. I want to get on with my work now. You can stay and watch if you like but there’ll be quite a bit of noise and dust.’

Melissa put down her glass on the mantelpiece and said, ‘I’d better be going anyway, before it gets dark.’

John nodded.

When she had gone he felt very tired. He sat on his sofa with his legs drawn up and didn’t move for several hours. Then he slept with his head resting on his arm.