“Okay, everybody in. If anybody has constructive criticisms that they’d like to offer, I’ll quite happily enlighten them on their shit dress-sense or the mess they’ve made of bringing up their kids. Remember that you’re only here to gasp. Spill body fluids over it, you pay for it. Apart from that, enjoy yourselves within rational limits.”
And with him and Alma at their forefront, guffawing and arguing, they all went in.
Mick’s first impression was that the choice to exhibit some three dozen pieces in such a ridiculously tiny space had been determined by poor eyesight, hashish-influenced decision-making processes, or else the well-known female handicap when it came to spatial arrangements: the trait which made them imagine penises to be much shorter than they really were. His next impression, after the initial sense of overwhelming optic shellshock had a moment to subside, was that this staggering bag-lady clutter of ideas and images, these closely-spaced airbursts of hue and monochrome adorning every visible vertical surface might well be deliberate, might be a strategy for bullying the intended audience into a different and potentially far more precarious state of mind, assuming anybody other than an evil scientist would ever want to do that. This faint spark of insight was immediately interrupted by his and everyone else’s third impression, which was of an outsized three-dimensional arrangement settled on its table in the centre of the already restricted space.
With Alma having deftly slipped around this eye-catching obstruction out of harm’s way, Mick and his attendant fellow patrons still decanting through the nursery door were brought up short against the nearside of the trestle in a ragged tidal stripe of animate detritus. Roman Thompson’s boyfriend Dean went, “Fuck me,” in an almost reverential tone, Ben Perrit giggled and Bert Regan’s mum said, “Well, I never.” Mick himself could only manage a stunned silence, although whether one of admiration or disquiet at the surely obsessive mental processes involved he could not easily decide.
Built over several months from carefully hand-tinted papier-mâché, spread before them was a maddeningly detailed scale reproduction of the mostly vanished neighbourhood as it had almost definitely never been. Just over four foot square, its tallest structures only inches high, his sister’s diorama juxtaposed the Boroughs’ choicest features, irrespective of chronology. The speckled emerald of Spring Lane School’s playing field made room for the resurgent Friendly Arms halfway up Scarletwell Street,
an establishment the egg-and-spoon arena had in actuality replaced. Saint Peter’s House in Bath Street coexisted with the seven-inch tall chimney tower of a Destructor which had been demolished in the 30s to allow the flats’ construction. Spanning the wave-wrinkled river, by what looked from tiny Guinness toucan ads to be a 1940s station, was a gated Cromwell-era drawbridge. Flocking ewes surrounded smart-cars parked in Sheep Street, stippled shit on shredded paper fleeces.
Seen from overhead the centre court of Greyfriars had what looked like Rizla sheets hung from its spindled clotheslines. This omniscient perspective was too reminiscent of his Harryhausen musings from the sleepless night before. Awkwardly disengaging from the press around the nano-slum’s west boundary he squeezed apologetically along St. Andrew’s Road towards Crane Hill up at the table’s corner. Passing his own shrunken terrace row he noted with approval that Gran’s ornamental swan was now a miniaturist study in the front window of number seventeen. Despite the novelty, it fleetingly occurred to him that he’d viewed their old house from this unusual elevation once before, although he couldn’t for the life of him think when. Turning the corner into Grafton Street along the northern border, he retraced the route of his childhood truck journey to the hospital save for a right at Regent Square, but this time as a casually-dressed giant wading waist-deep through the absence where an implied Semilong should be. Alma was waiting for him on the display’s further, eastern side, looming above the mini round church of the Holy Sepulchre and leering like a monstrous Templar idol, which if Mick remembered rightly was a goat with tits.
“You don’t have to say anything. You’re honoured just to be related to me, Warry, I can see it in your eyes. Did you spot Gran’s swan in the window down Saint Andrew’s Road? I did that with a triple-double-zero brush, and they’re not even real. To be quite honest, when I think about myself sometimes, I nearly faint.”
“Warry, everybody nearly does that when they think about you. We’re not made of stone. So, what material did you use for this, then? It’s not walrus dung or anything, I take it?”
Pigeon droppings of exquisite delicacy caked the rim of a scaled-down Destructor. Gathered by the table’s southwest corner Roman Thompson and Bert Regan grinned and squinted at the junction of Chalk Lane and Black Lion Hill, where a queer turret like a witch’s hat had been mashed up with Harry Roserdale’s newsagent’s and the old Gordon Commercial, the hotel. Just the hand-lettering on the advertisements and hoardings was enough to break your heart and ruin your eyes.
“Nah. It’s all made of Rizla papers. Chewed about four hundred packets up and spat them out. It’s probably much sturdier than what they built the Eastern District out of.”
Mick surveyed the slate-hatched rooftops, the pointillist flowerbeds of Saint Peter’s Church.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But probably it’s also likelier to give you gingivitis.”
In truth, it was taking all of Mick’s determination not to look impressed. It was as if his sister had removed a clipping from the undergrowth of backstreets and then husbanded it patiently to generate a bonsai locale, even or perhaps especially those features which had disappeared. His every eye-movement uncovered more of them. The rising curve of long-gone Cooper Street up to Bellbarn elicited a muscle-memory of straggling past the fading rose gates of Fred Bosworth’s haulage yard halfway uphill, with at the top of the chewed-paper incline a painstaking reconstruction of St. Andrew’s Church so perfect in its Gothic detail that the building’s 1960s demolition seemed flatly impossible, not merely unbelievable. By leaning like one of the clearance area’s perpetual derricks over Sheep Street, Broad Street and the Lilliputian back yards
of St. Andrew’s Street, Mick could just make out the infinitesimal front window of his childhood barber, Albert Badger. So why had they always called him Bill? Painted there on the tissue glass in spidery fluorescent pink, he was obscurely heartened to find an illuminated Durex sign. Three doors down was the Vulcan Polish & Stain Company, no larger than a lesser Lego brick and wholly non-existent in Mick’s memory until that moment. Ant-proportioned hopscotch grids in coloured chalk sweetly defaced the vanished tilt of Bullhead Lane, and microscopic milk bottles next to sienna-crusted loaves of bread bedizened the front steps on Freeschool Street. Attention seized by every hair-thin drainpipe, by the petrol spectra reproduced in every other puddle, it occurred to him that you could go mad looking at this stuff, let alone building it. Beside him, Alma’s forehead corrugated pensively.
“You don’t think that there’s some element missing? As if I was using all the obvious effort as a camouflage to hide the fact that I’m not saying very much, the way I used to plaster every piece of illustration work with that laborious stippling, all little dots, when I was starting out? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if this whole exercise had nothing to it but ridiculously grandiose nostalgia?”
Mick frowned at his sister in astonishment, not so much at her vanishingly rare attack of doubt as at the lack of self-awareness evidenced by her last question.
“No, of course I wouldn’t, Warry. No one would. We’re scared of saying anything in case you turn on us with a debate about things we don’t understand. I think it’s fair to say you won’t get honest criticism out of anybody in arm’s reach of you, because you’re such a touchy bitch.”
She narrowed the blast-craters of her soot-ringed eyes as she considered, unkempt head cocked to one side, her level and unblinking gaze fixed on her brother for long, anxious seconds before Alma ventured her reply, surprising him by resting a comradely hand on his left shoulder.
“That’s an excellent point, Warry, and well made.”
She took the hand away, but not before he’d worried that she planned to drop him with a Star Trek nerve-pinch. Mick, of course, knew there was no such thing, but what if Alma didn’t? Other people were arriving now, latecomers poking trepid heads around the nursery door on the far side of the oppressively meticulous tableau. He recognised his sister’s actor friend, Bob Goodman, although that was hardly more of an accomplishment than saying that he recognised Ayers Rock. Mick could at least tell one of these eroded landmarks from the other, principally by the fact that Ayers Rock never wore a leather jacket, a black beret or such an abiding look of deep resentment and mistrust. More cheeringly, behind the thespian with his death-watch demeanour Mick made note of Alma’s shipwrecked transatlantic artist pal, Melinda Gebbie, someone with whom he could have an entertaining conversation if the exhibition flagged. Moreover, since his older sibling had privately ceded that the pretty Californian was by a head the better painter of the two, Mick felt that he could shelter behind her authoritative statements and opinions if his sister engineered to give him an artistic duffing up. Accompanying her was someone else that he’d met at least once before, Lucy Lisowiec, an extramural muralist who also worked in the Boroughs community and whom he thought Alma had said was helping to secure the daycare centre for this afternoon. The women laughed and chatted, hanging on each other’s arms, the younger of the two so wonderstruck by the art-smothered walls that her lids appeared insufficient to contain her eyes. More punters dribbled in through the propped-open door behind them, some he thought he knew and some he didn’t. Alma, by his side, sighed heavily, still brooding over her reconstituted natal turf.
“I can see that I’m going to have to reach my own conclusions about what this installation might be lacking, rather than relying on your valuable insights. Listen, I think Roman Thompson said he’d got something to tell me, so I’d better go and have a word with him. If you were going to look at any of the other pieces, start to our right of the door and work your way around the room from there. Oh, and I hope you’ve got a lighter on you. I’ve left mine at home, so if I need to pop outside and have a smoke I’ll have to borrow yours.”
Mick nodded, waving her away, struck by the use of the word “if” in her last sentence, as though Alma popping outside for a smoke were some remote contingency rather than the abiding certainty that they both knew it for. With the pretended gallery beginning to fill up, its jostling horde squeezing together in embarrassed waltzes between wall and table-edge, he called to mind when this place had been Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dancing school, cadet Nijinskies clattering on open parquet. Anybody teaching toddlers the Gay Gordon these days, he reflected, would be on a list. Deciding that he’d better make a start on staring blankly at his sister’s pictures if he wanted to be out of there by nightfall, Mick took a last marvelling glance at the fag-paper precinct – a metallic silver painted pond between the tanning-yards along Monk’s Pond Street; seed-sized starlings just discernible against the school’s slate rooftops – and negotiated a laborious course between the jam of punters, heading for the exhibition’s recommended starting-point behind the nursery’s wedged-open door. This turned out to be a large canvas, hung or rather propped so as to partly cover the adjacent window. Never having been to one before, Mick wasn’t absolutely sure what art shows were supposed to be like, but with that said he was fairly certain that they weren’t supposed to be like this. The claustrophobic kindergarten squash of imagery didn’t look organised so much as it looked like someone had detonated an art-teacher in a confined space. Already irritated, Mick turned his besieged attentions to the sunlight-blocking rectangle that had been specified as the extravaganza’s point of entry.
Fastened to the window frame above the exhibit with blue adhesive putty was a note in biro giving the acrylic painting’s title, Work in Progress, with a rather patronising scribbled arrow angled down towards the frame below, as if intended for an audience of hens. The sense of sloppiness suggested by the hasty caption was, in Mick’s opinion, also present in the piece of art to which it was appended. The thing clearly wasn’t finished, as if Alma had lost interest two-thirds of the way through. Which was a shame because the bit she’d bothered to complete, a lustrously embellished area
around the upper centre of the work, was actually quite good. Judged by its trailing sepia jellyfish of Conté under-drawing, the intended scene was a plain wood interior seen from a steeply angled point of view, as if that of a crouching adult or perhaps a child. The viewer looked up from this disempowered perspective at a towering quartet of rough-hewn and broad-shouldered men with the physiques and leathered hands of labourers, who nonetheless were clad in what looked to be outsized christening gowns of white applied in such a manner that it somehow shimmered. The four figures stood about what Mick deduced must be a sawhorse, with the pristine draped expanses of their backs presented to the onlooker and their heads bowed in muttered consultation, no doubt a discussion of some technical necessity from which all save the hulking craftsmen were excluded. Only one of the assembled crew appeared aware that he and his three co-workers were being watched, turning a prematurely bleached head to gaze down across one shoulder at the cowering observer, tanned face stern and sapphire thunderbolts in his affronted eye.
Still wondering how his sister had effected the ethereal sparkle on her navvies’ dazzling and incongruous frocks, Mick squinted closer to discover that what had appeared to be a uniformly snowy hue from further off was actually a plain matt undercoat to which gloss squares and oblongs filled with similarly shiny spirals, glyphs or leopard spots had been fastidiously added, white on white. Looking up past the radiant workmen with their faintly Soviet connotations, deep into the composition’s further ground from the distorting worm’s-eye vantage, he could just make out the sketched-in wooden beams and rafters of the ceiling’s underside, from where a single naked light-bulb dangled on its flex above the heads of the conferring artisans. That vague ellipse of fully-rendered content, in the higher middle reaches of the canvas, was realised so beautifully that the straggly brown traceries surrounding it, the dropping folds of the white robes, the caterpillar curls of shaved wood at the huddled carpenters’ bare feet, made Mick feel actively annoyed at Alma’s slapdash attitude. Why couldn’t she have put more effort into it? As far as he could see, between the cluttered, amateurish presentation and the half-done opener the only statement she was making seemed to be “I can’t be arsed”, though to be frank she wasn’t even making that with much conviction.
Somewhere in the throng behind he heard Ben Perrit laugh, although that could as easily have been at some veiled subtlety in Alma’s oeuvre as it could have been at a knock-knock joke or, indeed, an Al Qaeda outrage. Or a Crunchy wrapper. From across the room Rome Thompson’s circling vulture rasp was interrupted by a raucous outburst that he recognised at once as issuing from his distressingly close blood relation.
“Rome, for fuck’s sake. Are you serious?”
Elsewhere, infrequent bursts of Californian cackling or David Daniels’ lulling murmur were distinct above the rustle of the rhubarb. Hoping that things might pick up, Mick shuffled to his right to best appreciate the next course in this oddly flavoured taster-menu, a far smaller job in oils with a much more elaborate frame, identified in ballpoint pen by an adjoining Post-it sticker as A Host of Angles.
Now, this was more like it. The restrained dimensions, something like twelve inches by eighteen and dwarfed by their gilded surround, barely contained a concentrated field of light and magnifying-lens embellishment. The portrait-aspect vignette, like its predecessor, once again presented an interior although on this occasion it appeared to be that of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Curdling yellow luminosity, as though from an incipient storm without, allowed for burnished highlights of warm gold like syrup to emerge from the prevailing umbers of a scene which Mick presumed, despite its air of authenticity, to be imaginary. On the decorated flags beneath the building’s Whispering Gallery was erected an impossibly tall gantry strung with pulleys and stout hawsers, the innumerable struts and crossbeams of the scaffolding’s construction starkly contrasting with the predominantly circular designs of the cathedral and perhaps embodying the many angles mentioned in the painting’s title. At its loftiest extremities the feat of engineering looked to be supporting a precarious pie-slice platform, but if that were so he was unable to explain the purpose of the surely dream-scale sandbag with its stupefying mass hung only a few inches over the immaculately polished floor. It had to be some kind of counterweight, yet for the life of him Mick couldn’t figure out what it was balancing until a closer squint revealed less than a foot of clearance under the huge framework at the centre of the composition. The whole thing was hanging from the inside of the dome above, conceivably so that the nineteenth-