Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

Cut to the present. He is sitting at the desk in his studio looking for a letter to show the children. He can’t find it, but he has turned up old first drafts of Donald’s poems and some photographs. He has found his and Raymie’s wedding certificate from the courthouse in San Francisco and, stapled unromantically to it, a receipt from the Justice. The staircase creaks. ‘Hello Rumplestiltskin, where’s your gold?’ He looks up. Susan is standing there, a cup and saucer in her hand. ‘Hiya, love!’ he almost shouts, because he is pleased she has come into the studio to see him. He reaches round her bum and hips and squeezes her in a side hug, rattling the teacup in her hand.

She glances round. ‘Looks like a bomb’s gone off in here, Wilse.’ He laughs. ‘I’m looking for something to show you.’ To illustrate his point, he continues to flick through the stiff envelopes. She raises her eyebrows, looks about at the rubble-some room, at her father’s dishevelled hair, at the poor state of things generally. ‘Right-o, well, here’s a brew. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’ No, please don’t go, he thinks, and rises halfway out of the chair. ‘Wait on. It’s a really special letter, probably worth a fortune. It took years to reach me. Came halfway round the world! You’ve got to read it.’

She steps back. She sets down the tea and it ripples, as if a little stickleback has just swum across it. She crosses her arms and tips her head to the side, her brow lowering. Uh-oh. He knows that look. She’s annoyed. The room’s annoyed her. The fish in the cup’s annoyed her. He’s annoyed her. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Whose letter are you looking for, Dad? Another famous colleague and chum?’ Seldom misses when she aims, his daughter. He jerks his chin up and reaches for his pouch, pops it open. Yes, he knows this tone of hers. It says, ‘Oh Dad, not this nonsense of yours. Ding-dong, let’s humour you, shall we.’ Doesn’t she know, doesn’t she realise, it’s all for her? It’s all just to impress her and make her smile. He’s simply playing for affection, like Danny busking by the bandstand. What else can he do?

He slots a diff into his mouth and tosses the pouch back on to the desk. He spreads his arms wide, as if to take a deep, flamboyant bow. ‘I am looking for instructions from the bottle man. Remember, I told you about him when you were little. Made completely out of glass. Glass hands, glass legs, glass eyes. Everything he drank you could see in his tummy. Wherever he went you could hear him clinking and clanking. Poor old fellow fell out the tower of Pisa and shattered on the pavement below. Terrible, terrible tragedy.’

God, he adores her. God, he infuriates her.

There is silence. His arms remain outstretched, mid-flight. She lifts her hand up to her face. She rubs her right eye, pulls out a stray eyelash and looks towards the easel. ‘You’re painting the gorge again,’ she says.

Scene ends.

Green morning light. What a relief. In another hour it will be bright enough to see properly. It will be officially day-the right time for something benevolent to happen. Soon he can make a proper assessment. He can see if there’s a puddle of red around the boulders. He can look around for a stick with which to crowbar the rocks apart. Maybe in one of the little trenches and gullies between stones something will have gotten caught. Maybe even now he can find it. There are always brobs lying about on the floor from the trees leaning out above the ravine. Yes, he’s sure he’s seen them, many times, hundreds of them, just waiting to be retrieved. If he stretches his long arms, he’ll be able to tease one to him with his fingertips. He’ll haul it out of its rock setting like King Arthur and bloody Excalibur. It will be there. It will be waiting for him. And it will be a beauty-he can picture it-a thick firm staff, not too brittle, not too weak, a holy rod, entirely suitable for digging down under the boulder and exerting more pressure than he alone could. Archimedes will save him, with his mighty lever. You are an absolute genius, Peter!

He begins to lean forward, reaching towards the ground. A spike of pain drives up the leg with such severity it takes his breath away. He yelps and punches his thigh. The head-rush, the pain whipping him, the urge to faint. He blinks and shakes his head, waits for it to subside. It hurts too much to move that way. It feels like he’s aggravating it, tearing something open, forcing the bone through a loose flap of skin. So much for cutting the fucker off, eh, Nancy. When the queasiness abates he adjusts himself, squats down on his good knee, and gingerly leans backwards. OK-it seems do-able that way. He begins to grope behind, along the channel of the two big boulders. He feels shale, mulch, and snail shells. He fondles the wells and fissures, checking the holes like a fisherman stroking for eels. There has to be one here somewhere. Where? But already the mirage of the stick is fading. He grimaces, stretches a few more inches in his reverse crab contortion. He can hear Lydia. ‘You should come to yoga, Peter, you know you’re very stiff.’ Yes, very helpful, love, thank you. He touches the corner cover of the sketchpad, which has slipped down off the rocks in the rain. It feels swollen and pulpy. He tweezers it between two fingers, tugs it out. The pages are damp and floppy, the charcoal lines have bled. All that work, wasted. Never mind, there are more important things. He sets the pad to one side on a rock. He tries the channel behind him again. There’s nothing. OK. He’ll just have to go forward again, slower maybe, so as not to trigger the fantastic agony.

He takes a breath, grits his teeth, and tips over. He tips from the waist as if attempting to clear his balls over an electric fence. A ‘swan-dive’-isn’t that what the extra-bendies call it? Bastard it hurts! He pauses. Come on, focus, man. Don’t spew up or cack your trousers. Just try again. Turn the dial. He reaches down. Sweat breaks on his forehead, but he stays bent. The pain increases, eating through his cells. He tries to remain there. But some cautious auxiliary lobe in his brain is firing, and any minute now it is going to rescue him by over-riding the decision to self-harm. He can’t. He can’t do it. He lifts back up, his whole body weak and shaking. The walls of the gorge rotate past his eyes, grey stone, grey stone, and he feels himself carousel. He leans against the boulders, waits for it to stop. The walls slow. They slow and halt.

So. That plan didn’t work. But it’s OK. Not long now and it will be light enough to see. Then things will look better. Everything will become clear. He’ll find a way.

When Annette arrives home from the cimitero, the family is in a state of wild excitement. Uncle Marcello has acquired a television set. The owner of the electrical store, who has a small grove of olives next to the greenhouses, and with whom Uncle Marcello frequently plays cards sitting in folding chairs outside the brick office, has supplied it for half the ticket price. ‘It’s because I beat him at poker,’ says Uncle Marcello proudly. ‘It was either that or he put his hand in the till.’ The family is standing in a gracious semicircle around the device, even Tommaso, who is sniffing and coughing with his summer cold, his upper lip red and crusted.

Annette’s mother tuts. ‘I’d like to know what we would have been liable for in this manly bargain of yours!’ ‘Just some compost. It was all very harmless,’ says Uncle Marcello. ‘But that is not the point, Rosaria. I did win. And now we have joined the civilised forty-nine per cent of the nation.’ He puts his hand on her waist, twirls her round, and deposits her back where she was standing. ‘This is excellent! Now I can watch at home in my slippers instead of going to the bar like a peasant and having people talk in my ear while the news is broadcasting.’ Her mother shakes her head. ‘Could you not have got a refrigerator instead, Marcello, or a new Zanussi?’