Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

He followed the agent into a vault below the east wing, past the guard who looked at him with no less suspicion or distaste. The man removed his jacket and gave it to Peter to hold. He delicately turned back his cuffs, brought a diminutive frame out of the stacks and leant the painting against the wall. Then he backed away. ‘Vetro cuore Italia,’ he said. ‘Please, enjoy.’

The painting was nothing for a moment, and then it was everything. The blues and browns shone, and the dust on the glassware was dense, like velvet. The signature was inscribed almost vertically in the lower right-hand corner. Peter sat himself opposite and looked at it until he felt his head clear. When he turned, the agent had moved off to another part of the storage room and was checking dockets. By the vault doorway, Dyas had hold of Raymie by her shoulders; he was shaking her, and then putting his arms round her, but she was not crying. Ivan looked over at him and smiled, and for a still, luminous minute Peter had thought everything was going to be OK.

Then there he was, an ordinary boy from the North-East, getting married in San Francisco. And then spending Christmas in upstate New York, entertaining his wealthy new in-laws after they had insisted on flying them out, while his wife stalked brattishly about the mansion. Her father, the owner of a chain of hardware companies, had pumped his hand up and down, grateful perhaps that he wasn’t like any of the previous boyfriends, had married her at least, while the mother, razor-thin and heavily pearled, had been several degrees removed. They thought he was Scottish, asked him to recite Burns. With her family, he quickly found out, Raymie was ugly as sin. She stole their prescription medicines if she thought they looked interesting, slapped her mother when she discreetly handed her a psychologist’s card. Her older brother had died in Indochina. His ashes were on the mahogany mantel. Raymie said he was the lucky one. There had been spells in school abroad, but she had never fitted the mould. She had wanted to work in Paris: Liverpool had been a compromise. He felt sorry for her, though he could see she knew how to work the switch in men, using their instinct to assist her, if she acted the victim. But that was the attraction. Beside her pale long limbs and the shirts unbuttoned to her navel, beside her obvious careless talent and fashionable, chemical liberalism, the distress was fascinating. He felt good, auditioning to be her saviour.

She was a genius, almost. Her work was hideous and unique. She collected the extracted teeth from dentists’ surgeries and sewed them on to teddies. She stuck chicken bones and fingernail clippings on to dolls. Dyas had once said she was the vanguard of a folk revival, that this was outsider art. But there was no ambition, no reason for her parents to have paid the college fees. She simply dabbled. Peter relentlessly encouraged her. ‘Why are you being a flunkey? You’re better than the rest of us put together. You have ideas. Why don’t you paint something instead of messing with that stuff?’ She’d snort and draw out a cigarette. ‘It’s easy for you, Pete. You don’t have the inhibitions and the stiffs for parents. You’re the capable one, remember. Every time I try to find my own anatomy I’m obstructed by blood, like fucking Leonardo.’ The click of the lighter at the base of the hookah. The glitter of her black, black eyes. She gave up showing her work, began modelling for other up and coming artists, Brylcreemed and panty-less, a cosmetic blush applied to her labia.

It wasn’t that he tired of trying, or tired of the way she arched her spine to the ceiling when orgasm hit her. It wasn’t the mess she made of the apartments, the ashtrays, syringes, the intimate waste, or her decision that sobriety was an unbearable state. Not her voice calling, ‘Peewee, Peewee, pass me some Lysol for my bad arm.’ Calling, ‘Please, honey, pass me some ice, pass me some cold. Shut off that bulb, it hurts my face.’ It was not finding the masticated lumps of jerky wrapped in little bags and hidden in the corners of the freezer, or seeing that she didn’t care enough to clean herself properly, when she reclined on the futon, angular and filthy as a coal-town bridge. Where other users ran the course, then left handbags full of needles on the counter for their Wall Street fathers to discover, Raymie did not want sponsored therapy. Nothing stopped her. Not the volcanic nose bleeds, not the miscarriage — they hadn’t even known she was pregnant, until the toilet was full of pink slurry — and not even the incident with the kitchen knife when he had to hold her down to stop her cutting out the red-eyed locusts, which were hatching in her veins.

He was accepting, concerned, protesting, a good husband. Yeah, he was probably OK. What sent him home wasn’t falling out of love with her. He loved her, loved her desperately, this haunted girl, this hungry ghost. And he would tell her so, holding her slack, puking head and whispering in her stinking ear, or shouting it across the street when she pulled away and walked towards PCP Larry. ‘Hey there, officer, got any candy for me?’ It reached the point where he begged her on his knees to stop. It reached the point where he knew nothing he could say would prevent her. One day, during that second New York winter, he just knew he had to go. The weather was so cold, cold enough to freeze the piss pot in the bathroom, and she was sleeping underneath every blanket they owned, maybe not sleeping but unconscious, and he, missing the way it had been, missing the calm smell of paint, went out into the blizzard. He walked all the way to the Met through the snow, without his coat, and then sat on a gallery bench for an hour in front of a now priceless painting. Nature Morte, 1964, the very last in the series. He’d known then that he couldn’t watch her do it any more.

It would make a great story for the kids. And the journos and the critics. The beautiful destructive wife. The sixties casualties. The peace signs. What he couldn’t tell them about coincidences; what he couldn’t say about meaning and fate. He could confess it all, every intimate detail, pouring out his big loose heart. They might even believe him for a change. But he hasn’t told anyone, not even Lydia, not when they lie together at night, not in anger, not for absolution. The truth is that truth has no grand story. He packed his suitcase, borrowed money, and took those planes back home, hop-scotching from Boston to Gander to Shannon, and finally to London, from where he hitched north, migrating home. He left her to her noxious spiral. He left her to sink into oblivion. Within three months she was gone.

Old pain-that’s how it feels now. Pain that has been accommodated, and is familiar. Life goes on, and the pain hangs around. He can live with a bad leg and a limp. He can live with no leg if that’s what it comes down to. But one thing is certain-he does want to live. He wants to go home. Over his shoulder he can see the landscape now, out beyond the ravine, gorse and moor grass, rowan and elder, and the summits of the blue and yellow fells. In front of him is the dark face of the gorge. Something has to happen if he’s going to get where he wants to be. And what choices are there really, other than to say, I am this, and I am here?

He takes a breath and leans forward as far as he can. The pain is immediate and blurs his vision, until saltwater drips from his eyes and he can see clearly the rocks below. He reaches down into the crucible, between the stones, to the point of compression. He reaches further through the agony, and touches the leather of his boot, which is trapped in the narrow shaft between the boulders. His boot that is wider than the foot inside it! The light epiphany arrives. But pain in his leg is speaking directly to his brain, wanting to shut him down. He claws at the laces frantically, tugs at the fastening until the struggle is too intense. He rises, puts his palms down either side of himself, and hunches his shoulders. He shouts. His head bows. He is crying and laughing. The sound is broken and grateful and helpless and determined. Sorry, Peter, sorry. There is a world, un-chosen, and in it is a bastard lot of suffering, before you get to joy. Come on. Try.