Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

‘Hey,’ he calls. He steps over the lettuces and onions, and the row of stunted marijuana plants that have failed again. In the place Lydia has been kneeling there is a little plastic doll with bald genitals and empty sockets where the legs should be. A string has been wound around its neck.

Peter knows he is dreaming. Part of him is all too aware that he is lopped over on the wet rocks, his chin on his chest, awkwardly asleep. He can almost hear the owl, calling from the fence post above the Gelt ravine, almost feel the cold tightening around him, but he doesn’t want to return to the harsh waking world. He would rather the surreal, disquiet of the subconscious, with its soft threats and lies. So he commits to it.

He’s wandering round the outbuildings, unlatching the door of the barn and going inside. The barn is perpetually shedding its skin. Some time soon he is going to get a quote for re-plastering it. He is going to convert it into a gallery, and have people look round when they call on him, instead of traipsing through the cottage, leaning on the bookcases and fiddling with Lydia’s bowls of sea glass. There is a distinct odour in the barn, a birdy, limey pungency. Strange light infuses the structure, admitted through the four narrow slit windows, between the bolts and slates and the open doorway. The walls are audibly crumbling. Flakes of mud and grout slough off and drizzle down. The floor is soft with feathers and sediment, years of debris. It feels pliant when he bounces on his heels.

Susan is there, in the corner. She is wearing her little purple jeans and her hammer-and-sickle T-shirt. She is small, perhaps five years old. She points down. ‘We’re on the back of it,’ she says. He looks and it’s true. The floor of the barn is soft fur: between the tufts there is yellow skin, a smattering of follicles. It is rising and falling slowly, breathing. The barn has been built on the back of a slumbering behemoth. ‘Shhhh,’ she says, ‘it’s going to wake and ride us away.’ They hold hands and stand very still. Dust is in Peter’s nose. He wants to sneeze. Every rustle and skitter of crumbling plasterwork sounds like the stirring of the Baba Yaga barn beneath them. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he whispers. ‘Where’s Danny?’ Susan grins.

He looks around. In the corner is the dilapidated agrarian equipment he rescued from the old farm down the road. There is a huge iron roller, which looks heavier than the world, and an apple-press with a broken handle, its pulping bucket full of bird shit. The rusty industrial frame of something unknowable, perhaps a thresher or a mangler, hulks in the corner, casting a shadow shaped like a bear. The massive slab of piebald marble he had shipped over from a quarry in Italy leans against the gable. Everything is moving up and down as the floor inhales, and exhales. There’s the flap of wings in the rafters above, the slow warbling drill of a pigeon. ‘Shall we go and find Danny?’ he asks. ‘OK,’ she whispers. They start jumping furiously.

Blackness when he opens his eyes, as if he’s buried in a rough stone coffin, as if his eyes are stitched closed and laid over with coins. Where is he? He hears oars in water. Someone’s laughter. What is this hard thing beneath him? Ah, yes. He is here. In this hellish position, in the empty dock of night. The dark is so dark. Nothing will ever be created from it again. If he thinks too clearly he will ache from the twist of his hips, the strain of his neck, and the brace of his good knee against stone.

So, don’t think of it, Peter. Don’t go back to those tired legs, and that dry tongue. Don’t enter the wakeful mind with its helpless honesties. Be kind. Come away. Yes. A sweet voice, so comforting. It is not his, though it is familiar.

The sky has a slight wash of green to it when he wakes up. The first streak, like a chemical development. After wanting dawn so badly, he was sure it would never come. There is stiffness throughout his body. Cramp in his side, a chill in the marrow of him, and pain. The very gift he asked for an hour or so ago is back in his ankle. It is good. Nice and sore. Nice and living, clearing his head, making him sharp. The night is draining and he feels rinsed of the panic and fear.

It is pain of a genuine variety, that’s for sure, and competing with all the other pains he has experienced in life. Root canal infection. Bacterial meningitis. Hangovers. They were simply trials for this, the real thing. How much pain can a person withstand, he wonders? They used to saw off limbs on board ships and on battlefields. They used to hold folk down, dose them with spirits, then saw through shanks of bone with blunt unsanitary instruments. They used to cauterise the stumps with tar. Some of them survived.

An interesting thought now, and one that is surprisingly alluring: he could get rid of it. He could cut off the leg. If he had the little red-handled knife he uses for trimming the block of resin in his tobacco pouch, he could get to work. There are plenty of stories about outdoor types having to remove frostbitten lumps of themselves. Plenty of farmers sever hands and arms in combine harvesters then, heroically, carry the mangled limb to hospital in hope of reattachment. Amazing what the brain tells you to do in an emergency. Amazing what is imperative.

He could do it. He’d go at it quickly, just below the knee, where things might be reasonably tidily separated. No hacking with the blade and making a mess, but carefully scouring through the flesh, and jointing the bones, like dismantling a rabbit. Yes, if he had the little red knife that’s up in the car, he could most certainly do it, right now.

Howay! Of course he couldn’t. Every fibre in him would revolt. There would be a mutiny upstairs and Captain Kneejerk of the Black Amputation would be made to walk the plank. Honestly, what kind of desperate lunacy is this? Lack of food and water and warmth is messing with his higher faculties. He has mentally buckled. The facts of the matter are embarrassingly simple. He has not been here that long. He has not been here long enough to contemplate mad acts of self-butchery. He will be found, eventually.

He’s almost quite sure he told them where he was going. He thinks he can recall at least one conversation with someone in the family before leaving, that indicated he was coming to the ravine to work. Perhaps Lydia. Perhaps they rolled down the windows of the cars as they passed each other on the moor and he said, ‘Hiya, love, I’m just heading to the gorge. Won’t be long. If I’m not back for supper something is definitely wrong.’ No. Blatantly false. Total self-delusion. How about Danny? Did he talk to Danny-Dando? Danny was in the bath, then the boy went to town on the bus, maybe with his guitar, but they didn’t actually say goodbye. In fact he really only saw Danny when he was in the buff, passed out at the bottom of the stairs.

Then it was Susan he told, the disgruntled daughter. It was One of Two. Yes, it was definitely her. He can remember the exchange. He can picture the scene. He can rerun it again like a film and find the exact moment when he told her where he was going, which will be vital evidence in the case of the missing father. Rewind. Play.

It is two o’ clock yesterday. He’s in his studio, surrounded by clutter. On the desk, chunks of crystal, microliths, pen holders, papers. Under this tip, somewhere, his computer. He is leafing through ingots of loosely bound envelopes, letters bundled together year by year and secured with elastic bands. His fingers are walking up and down their edges to reveal geographical franks, recognisable or forgotten handwriting. He is considering the value of more shelves and drawers, though where he would put them is a mystery; the room is full to the gills already. He has been lost to his thoughts while searching. ‘The spirits have lifted you, lad,’ his mother would always say, peppering a herring, shaking flour over it and patting it down, while he stared out of the window on to Alnwick Street, wishing for what exactly he did not know. ‘I wonder when the spirits will drop you back to us, Petie.’ His mother, with her nylon pinnie and her tired eyes, beginning to forget things, saying, ‘Where’s Nev gone, why’s he working on a Sunday? Has the pit collapsed?’ Walking the street in her slippers and wetting herself. Oh, Dorothy.