Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

In 1998 Bike Magazine had a special Harley Davidson issue with an insert including a piece on the Harley Owners Group (HOG). It really is a way of life, said a member, with any other motorcycle you pay up at the shop, buy the bike and that’s it, but with a Harley that’s just the start. He said it was all to do with meeting likeminded people who knew that you didn’t need to do 160 mph everywhere to get a buzz. He said you ended up with friends all over Europe, the tours meant that you met people with the same biking interests as you, but with varied backgrounds.

I said

The berimbau is a unique percussive instrument, consisting of a gourd with a single string. Played with a bow, it produces tone with a beat! Much used in Brazil, the berimbau will add that unmistakable ‘samba’ sound to your music, and will make you the envy of all your friends.

We are sending you this remarkable instrument in the hope that you will sponsor Anya, daughter of a former musician. Anya, a hardworking student, is keen to go to college. Sadly, Anya’s father Nick is unable to help Anya achieve her goals. That’s why we need people like you. People who remember all the pleasure musicians like Nick have given in the past. People who want to give the younger generation a chance.

We hope you’ll help Anya, Pete. But whether or not you choose to help this deserving young student, the berimbau is yours to keep.

Pete said What the fuck?

I put the berimbau and the bow on his keyboard.

I said I want to be a banker. I want to make six figures. I don’t want to sell shit on a market stall.

Pete said And Nick won’t give you the dosh? The mean bastard.

I said I’ll pay you back. It’s three years and a year in Egypt.

I explained the connection between Arabic and six figures. I said I needed four figures a year.

Pete said Is that all? He dug under a lot of papers and he took out a chequebook and he wrote a cheque for five figures.

He said Hey! hey! hey! Anya! Don’t cry! hey! hey!

He said Let’s see how this little fucker works.

He took the bow and bounced it softly on the string and he sang

He looked up and he said You know Nick

He said

Nick, you know, he was into that rock thing, people watching, the money

He said

You know, just before our US tour we were in Gibraltar and I went over to Africa ’cause I didn’t think it would take that long to get back. It was just after our second album came out, and Steve had changed a lot of shit to make it like the first album. And that album was really popular, the fans didn’t notice, so I felt like the fans were total wankers. I felt betrayed. And Steve had booked us for a whole year of gigs, just playing the same shit the same way every time.

So I walked along the beach, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought it would be better just to walk into the water and die than go through the year, and I couldn’t understand how they could do it. They turned my life into something worse than nothing, into this torture, for the sake of extra sales, well couldn’t we just have had enough sales and something in it for me? And how could they just decide like that that my life didn’t matter, it didn’t matter if I was in, like, agony. But the thing is they didn’t know they were doing it. They didn’t know what they were taking away because they never had anything real to know what it was like when everything was a fake. They could get a lot of money and blag about the business. The money was the only thing there could be for them, and they’d never have anything else.

He said

Don’t get so you can’t have anything but money, Anya. You don’t want to be like Steve.

He said

But what the fuck, do what you want.

He said

Booga dooga dooga

De white man sucks

Booga dooga dooga

He really sucks

He said

I like this baby. Hey!

‘It is really a very sobering thought,’ said Trevor, ‘and one which the local talent, I’m afraid hasn’t quite cottoned on to, that a painting of a beautiful subject is almost invariably a rotten picture. Guaranteed kitsch, in fact, don’t you think?’

Lily and Trevor were sauntering along the Cherwell in the University Parks; it was late afternoon in early July, and the drowsy calm of the sky, the languid sway of the trees, the deep shadows cutting sharply across the grass, all so fondly, so lamentably repeated on a dozen or so canvases, did seem to bear him out. The faintest, merest, tenderest hint of a blush in the sky reminded, with beautiful delicacy, that evening was coming on; several paintings gestured at this moment, but even the least little touch of pink gave them an air of digging an elbow in the side of the spectator, of announcing ‘the approach of even’ in a carrying stage whisper.

‘It just goes to show that a little pink really does go an awfully long way,’ said Trevor.

‘And how,’ said Lily. She spent most of her conversations with Trevor agreeing with Trevor, so much so in fact that the conversations were at times positively Socratic — at least in the variety of ways Lily found to express assent. But as they stood looking back across the park (they had reached the duck pond) she was struck by the unity of tone of the pale hot sky, the pale trees moving on the hot air: the wonderful tranquillity of the scene seemed to owe something to its evocation of sketches in chalk or pastel. And those stands of trees in open ground or clustered by the river — those lovely masses of foliage — for Lily, at least (but then she was American), part of their charm lay in being so very much the sort of thing she had admired in the Constables in the Ashmolean. That did not, of course, mean that the principle was wrong. There were all those wrecked ships by moonlight, naked girls with dabs of impasto at the nipple, all those sunsets over the desert to sustain it.

But then, she pursued doggedly, what about Botticelli? Did one not suppose him — had he not supposed himself — to have been painting beautiful paintings of beautiful subjects? Venus? Primavera? Was it perhaps simply a sign of our time that it was impossible to be Botticelli — that now painting the beautiful remained firmly within the province of Maxfield Parrish? So that the relation of painting to beauty was perhaps something that must be referred ultimately to socioeconomic factors: and all because Botticelli was not kitsch. Or perhaps — and here she nearly stopped in her tracks at the audacity, the sophistication which she fathomed, suddenly, in Trevor’s aperçu — perhaps an argument could be made, taking a larger view, that by certain lights Botticelli was kitsch.

And it was only at this point that her speculations, at first a mere trickle which might as well flow subterraneously as not, swelled to a stream which must come to the surface sooner or later, ought indeed to have been out in the open all along.

‘Was Botticelli kitsch, would you say?’ she ventured. Who can say what Meno or Polus was thinking underground, to give themselves such an appearance of being incapable of proper argument?

‘Oh,’ Trevor exclaimed now, ‘if everyone were a Botticelli …’ a little impatiently, for his own stream of remarks had been gurgling and chattering in the sunlight briskly on, and had just been coursing down a little cascade of cheery murmurs about tea, so that the abrupt cessation of the agreeable warm undercurrent of consent, the eruption of an earlier current of conversation in a geyser at the foot of the fall, were chilly, unwelcome surprises. They had turned up the avenue which runs parallel to Norham Gardens (Trevor lived at the top of a mustard-coloured house overlooking the park), and after a brief pause (the waters eddied furiously around the intrusion),