Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

Peter liked the geese best. He liked their orange webbed feet flopping on the ground and their matching orange beaks. He liked the way they reared up and flapped their wings, nodding and honking when he arrived with a pail of vegetable scraps, as if saying yes, yes, we’re hungry, hurry up, Peter. Their proud white breasts. When they were mad about something they hissed like snakes.

The scruffy fell ponies still come up to the wall when they’re passing through. Lydia still feeds them.

The mist thins. A modest warmth glows from the bare sun. His clothes are only damp now, not wringing wet. He needs to unstiffen though, and move out of this awkward twisted position. He needs to run some life back into his arms and thighs and think about looking for that stick again, now he can see the ground. He has taken off the tourniquet. It was far too tight. It was this that probably cut off the feeling in his leg for a while, before the rain slackened it and the ache returned. Florence Nightingale he isn’t. There’s no red stain below-not that he can see. If he’s bleeding it probably isn’t too serious. He’s a little dizzy, yes, but it’s likely just tiredness and hunger.

There has been no sound of traffic on the road above. He thought he heard a dog barking, but when he yelled only his voice in the gorge echoed back. He will have to try moving again. He will have to confront the pain. He will have to run headlong into it, like the proverbial buffalo into the storm. He’ll have to face down the ripping febrile sensation, take anguish square on the chin, stand up to it like a man. The damage is already done-he will simply be acknowledging it fully, the way you have to acknowledge such things before you can ever move on and recover. Recovery. Is it possible?

He doesn’t often agree to think about her. When his mind goes there, it isn’t with his consent or because it is something he ever wants to air. He keeps hoping she will vanish, that, one day, he will have a blank in his memory where she has been, and she will be gone. Sometimes it seems to be finished. There are long periods of no disturbance. Then, all of a sudden, the comfortable absence is broken, and without warning she is there, as she was in the bathtub yesterday. She is there singing ‘It’s Me My Love’, and asking: ‘Why don’t you ever help me, Petie?’ She is there lying provocatively on the floor, or untying the belt of her orange silk dressing gown. She is there slumped over the table, blue-mouthed, and violated, exactly how they found her.

And this now-this trial being held by a higher power with a shitty sense of humour, this meaningful little opportunity to reflect on past crimes, and wonder which it is he is being charged for-this is when treachery and blame can really rain down on him. If it is punishment, if it is divine penalty, then it’s not for the minor offences and the negligible sins, his flaws and foibles: booze, pinch, grouching, thievery, filthy language. It’s not his escaping of class, putting too much salt on his spuds, inflating his business expenses, or even screwing over Ivan. It’s her. She is the reason, isn’t she?

Raymie could last a month on a packet of beef jerky. She ate almost nothing else, but she had a thing about protein, thought it would keep her ovaries healthy. And that was her solution-dehydrated saddle meat. He never understood it. The stuff was awful, as chewy as desert leather. It was days after eating it before he could go to the toilet. But it was cheap and she was convinced it would option her health later in life. He never understood the renouncement either, but it was popular for those trust-fund kids to go rough, to slum it. He’d always been skint, as a boy, as a student, even with his scholarship and the supplementary wages. But she was from money, she had access to accounts, she could have bought a loaf occasionally.

There was seldom food in their apartment kitchen in San Francisco — a little fresh tomatilla salsa in the summer, packets of cereal now and then. The indigestible, desiccated jerky. Sometimes, Raymie would make a show of making butternut soup from scratch. Seeds all over the joint. God, it was manna; it felt like liberation! He missed pastry, dripping, battered haddock. He used to dream of banquets and fairytale feasts. They lived like French fucking symbolists, meanly and fashionably. But, there was a narcotic accessory for every occasion, for every gathering of friends, every gig attended, and their wild assisted sex. Some such thing was always produced from her little case, and if not by her then by other struggling, landed artists. There was even a little green ampoule for the enhancement of their marriage. Love made bright, so they could taste its colours, so they could kiss every poor surprised Chinese on the street as they walked back to their apartment. He liked to drink and he liked to ride, but she was bloody fearless. The first Mrs Caldicutt. Raymelia Coombs. Her nerve was awesome. She terrified him. It was the power she held.

‘Those were the times,’ he’s said in interviews, to students, and even to his own kids when they got interested in his herb pouch. But what times were they really, when he was sour with liquor and developing ulcers? What times were they, when her body at intervals was barely human, her breastplate corrugated like a prisoner of war’s, the flesh inverting off her pelvis, when she was emaciated enough to stop menstruating? Protein to keep her ovaries ticking for a baby, eaten strictly like medicine through the week, even while she smoked her gums up off her teeth and blew angel dust through her receptors until her vision went blue and she couldn’t feel him moving inside her.

The truly messed-up thing was that though she was skeletal, she looked so heavy, like iron or pewter, like a piece of classical sculpture that wouldn’t be lifted. ‘Hey, nothing is wrong with my body, sweetheart,’ she would say, stepping a heel on to the chair like a screen vixen. She was breathtaking. For all the passing out, the skipping of meals and vomiting past five mouthfuls; for all the hair growing thick on her arms and legs, she still had him convinced she was A-OK, in charge, beating the odds. ‘Chill out, Goldy,’ she would say, when he commented she’d only had one bite of her homemade soup. ‘All I need is Larry to fill my prescription.’ A blind spot-is that what he could call the relationship? A disaster, out of his range of vision?

And Dyas loved her too-that much was certain. There would be no recompense for winning her away from him. Though Dyas had had other feisty madams in the college, though he was the great Mersey seducer, it was Raymie he wanted, Raymie he left his wife of twelve years for. He and Peter had been so close for that first term, and it was like getting another father. He had found Ivan Dyas behind one of many sports papers in the Roscoe Head, where the carpet was sticky, the tiles chipped and the ceiling fag-stained, but the ale was good. ‘Ah, now then, Petie, this your watering hole too, eh? Sit down, and we’ll have a jaw about the RCA. Which of the lovely ladies have you got with you? None, oh, that’s a shame. I tell you what, why don’t you make a little venture to the bar first and ask Blanche for my usual? You can save me from my wife’s casserole. Spot on.’ Six months later, the man’s bags were packed and he was hooked on the beautiful American who had come to Liverpool because of Stuart Sutcliffe and hoping to meet Lennon.

They had travelled about, the three of them, to Glasgow, Leeds, and to the capital, in Dyas’s Sunbeam Talbot-now that was a car to drive, that was a classy motor! The trips were supposed to be educational, extra-curricular. They would debate loudly for the first hour, Raymie challenging them on all things repressively British, and Ivan swerving across the corners as he gesticulated. Then they’d switch driver, and Ivan would snore in the passenger seat with the road atlas open on his lap. She had no licence and insisted on using the outside lane. Dyas knew people everywhere it seemed, and all of them were moderately famous. The Hungarian glass sculptor. The cockney actor. The poet laureate’s beautiful cousin, who had been one of his regulars before true love reformed him, who was put out to be hosting the new girlfriend and not at all interested in Peter as a replacement. There was always a camp bed or a futon, a mattress or a pallet, in some hip city flat, and a gathering last thing at night where gay patrons, musos, and teenage prostitutes mingled. There was always an invitation to an exhibition opening. Peter was out and about. He was circulating, being current. He was going to be a painter and he didn’t mind saying so. It was the decade of having an attitude.