A Tree on Fire (12 page)

Ralph heard him, and did not hear. The words registered, but did not hurt. Paranoia absorbed his tirade, and vanity took the bite out of them. Handley didn't like him, because he was almost as invulnerable as he was himself, with that firm jaw, penetrating brown eyes and a pride that, because it didn't fit the final uncertainty of them, was flawed in a grave way.

‘Is that all?' he wanted to know.

‘Yes, but it's only the end if you make sure I've seen the last of you.'

There was no apology, explanation or voice of regret. He climbed into his Land-Rover in silence, started the engine as Handley, face pounding with rage, backed his car into the road and drove off.

Chapter Ten

The pint of coffee went cold as he paced his studio, but he swigged it off straight as if it were beer. It's no use thinking about the state of the world when you lift that pot and wield your paint-brush at the great white canvas bigger than you are tall. In all ways vast, it dazzles you with off-white pallor, limited by the clear borders of a giant oblong, ambitious to become a tabloid of colours that mean something to every eye but only all to mine, my third Polyphemus peeper with the black patch off, opening into me and burning like magic its green and red rays over that canvas. I paint, and the world pours into the neck of an egg-timer, distilled sand in the bag of myself drowning out through that fragile lit-up funnel onto the sandless desert of my canvas.

I forget all else and others when the feeling for this big one is building up and over me like pot-seed culled from the far side of the sun and peppered in front so that my nose unknowingly breathes it in. Empty for weeks and never waiting, but living in the acceptable torment of domestic war until now I'm waking, walking, set to paint in the land of the dead. For I'm dead when painting, a corpse because nobody in the land of the living can get at me, paint best when I'm that sort of corpse, temporarily dead, self-induced deathly dead so that colours can pour in and I'm set for a trance like throwing a switch during those days or weeks, and in that trance I'm flying.

A time of inner torment is slowly building up from part of my submerged everyday life so that it's almost unnoticed. Then as if at some pre-set signal the anguish stops, and I die, begin to paint a picture. It lasts some days or maybe more, and I die because while painting I'm not aware of my existence, become a vampire, half dead, a foot in the grave and one in life, wondering whether I'll live to finish it, whether the world will end before I can – a stake to be driven in my heart to finally finish both me and this painting off.

I'm so sure of myself I don't even hurry when priming the canvas, hours, days and weeks are insects crushed under my boots as they vanish into the land of the living. Forked lightning of way back and a sharp distance forward don't flash by in a shocking and temporary junction but stay locked in me, shake hands in my brain and declare peace in my heart as they travel through me hand-in-hand like two filaments meeting to light me up, mixing energy in my hands to paint by day and night. I don't call it anything or even think about it, because to explain at such a time is to destroy, refute, negate, spit at the stars, and belch at the sun when it comes from behind the clouds.

The biggest colour began as green, fields, oases, valleys, seaweed and estuary, life-perpetuation, love in the environs of Venice and Voronezh, vile green effluvia falling from bomb-canisters lobbed on paddy-fields, lodged in ditches where green men were fighting or burning (a change of colour here towards yellow, orange, saffron robes of Buddhist monks firing modern and complex artillery with deadly precision from fortified pagodas) or flashpanning out over hamlets from which men have fled but women and children cannot. Green gas yellowing over green fields to destroy all seeds and shoots of life. A leg goes green, gangrene, dead-green and livid, jealousy of green by those who are dead for the living flowers of people unconscious in life but full of work and struggle. Iron and steel go green in that humid green forest, blistering enmouldering green, emerald of defeat for the iron merchants and industrial strong whose chewing-gum tastes of spite and who try to belt down the guerrilla men and women of the coming world. The green hand lopped by the sinewy arm of a riceman who cometh for the whole lot to eject them into the green and boiling sea, is carried off by a green snake into a part of the forest-world no one can penetrate. The green mould from far away is rotten, the diseased soul trying to transplant itself on their earth, but the homegrown home-green forest of the sovietcongo partisans hides them in ambush and makes them invincible. Green is my fear, green is my friend, and on they go fighting with no end possible except the ultimate friendships of green because green will be my peace in which to paint the colours of mine or somebody's soul.

Grey is a sky, a bird, turning into a dive-bomber I shot at in the war, now an airliner, a vanguard whale of a hundred people lifted into that grey cloud and through into the far-off corner blue of dome-sky, a hundred souls divided between four great engines bursting with primal power, making one co-ordinated soul of ascent and hoped-for descent. Grey is machinery, machines in a factory, each with its stream of sud-bile sizzling over metal and shavings, grey flour caked in years of grease, I've worked in long enough to know, like and dislike of long ago, remember how those grey faces turn pink or pallid on stepping into open air, as if that putty-colour was only in the noise of grey machines. Christ, what haven't I done in my two-score paltry years, walked or crawled through every colour I can think of or make up. Take red, a rust-red blood on newspaper deadened with age in a green copse, dark brown, as if somebody had been wounded and spilled himself on print before staggering for help. The red blood left had been shone on by warm sun, dried, left by the green summer bush till going orange like the saffron of those Buddhist monks and composition returns to life, out of suicide which was only a trick to frighten it back into the cosmic order striven for. Blood on that mantrap, for evil be to him who poaches, and a shock of steel teeth grabs him round the waist when he walks towards a patch of cowslips all yellow and bright. You had no business here, you know, but neither had yellow, yet in it goes, over red, green and grey, blue and bile, throw my semen on the canvas and paint a magic eye in it, mark of generations and regeneration, showing the third eye, the cosmological squirt and squint in bile and blue and grey and green, far-seeing and deep-sighted as you step inside and look at it from foot and window-distance among work and colour there already.

The grand design comes up and gets my throat, starting with skeleton fabric, working from each rim and edging in, fix the middle and moving out, creating this engine with universal gears, forests and fields, sealine and winking sun, moon and magic eye, flanking fanbelt cogwheeling the existence of all men and making me momentarily wonder whether I'll ever paint another picture after this, but knowing that I will before forgetting such an insane question and setting to.

Red is the thing I can't get away from, blood-red and blind red, dazzling crimson and falsehood carmine streaking down the back of a shorthorn cow in one of the top corners, and vermilion merging to rust-red down the back of a man riding it. Red and rust, all forms of shamblemark making horrorpitch in various set places easing from the blues and greens of oblivion. That's fine maybe, but what I'm always shying off is brown, the baking earth-cracked paper brown, meaningless cloaca brown unless perhaps it means the final unfeeling melting back into underneath with which I never can be bothered. I spit on my hands and leave such a vein, this pit-seam in my lowest galleries, turn my headlamp up and go on to red again and rust if temptation gets my throat and won't let go. A hundred subtleties make big crude things, but even they can be refined, splayed and coaxed back into their subtle coats, yet this time grander still and more exactly what I wanted and will deem worth while.

Out of the forest, down from the mountains, back towards animals and men, yellow of butterflies meeting in valleys and vineyards of abundance, coming like smoke from farmhouse chimneys, bridging the banks of the lazuli river and patching the gardens among ox-blood and olive, emerald and Baltic-blue. Tributary streams burn quicksilver down the hillsides, a waterfall at one point verging to yellowy brown as it filters through soil and rocks and all this is the big eye of a cow under the chiselwedge of a slaughterer, the enormous bovine peephole of the world of Albert Handley's painting growing day by day under my fungus hand and furtive eye.

The other eye is green, already done and gone, dead and finished with, a jungle holding its own, backed up by the men who make their own guns (or steal them, which is more my line), wear tyre sandals, grit rice between their teeth and call it a meal. When in doubt say yes, do it, walk, but best is never to be in doubt, like them, unless from caution, when weigh it in your hands before throwing it like a hand-grenade at the feet of whoever is coming forward without seeing you. Fight shy of the stiltmen of Spital Hill, because a demon has breathed on them, a tatterfoal haunting the lower slopes, lurking for unwary travellers that pass at night, facing a shaggy foal that leaps right out and hugs them to death in mist and darkness. A grey-black tatterfoal lurked at the exit to his abundant valley behind primeval cowland Lincolnshire before ditches were dug, its eyes so wide they must be blind, but deepening nostrils beamed on unwary people gloated with meat and knowledge staggering safe out of cottages but never to return, having laughed at legends but never taken them as warning, the wandering wild tatterfoal still and silent as a milestone on a mud road until it got you in the night and put the lights of that valley out of your eyes forever in death by hugger-mugger, as you swirled for eternity through the colours of the rainbow and some that the rainbow had never thought of, a painful spectrum paying you out for the sins of your art and the indiscretions of an occasionally unpalatable palette.

Mount your painting like a horse and ride it away, or better, let it carry you, control the uncontrollable so that the uncontrolled can control you. The burden of the spirit is a sack of flour that you need to live on. But the sack gets filled as you tread those fields of yellow corn and are born again, borne on the wings of Pegasus, no longer the shaggy tatterfoal of myth and nightmare from the quaint tales of old and scatty Lincolnshire.

In one far corner the sun turned blue, raylight merging with the sea that was always humid, made to appear limitless, and phosphorescent. The oxy-acetylene stars joined this enlivening universe, beneath which there had to be sea, for otherwise there would be no life. And so had the sun, because both were the soul of blue, the twin lifedip of electricity. Sweat bled and blood perspired in a land beyond all tarns and towers, hummocks and nipple-hills. The barbed wire had bled him white, but his own land had been claimed out by the brute force and iron in the soul of a born survivor, and the bridge of jungle rope from himself to the canvas, slim and dangerously swaying yet somehow eternally secure, was used by the jungle men cast off from himself who crossed it with grace and depth, colours on their backs as they flattened themselves onto the empty desert plains of the canvas to escape the devastation – guns of self-criticism and turned into a humanised landscape at last. Then the devil in him churned it up, goodness of evil that soon came closer to what he'd intended in the beginning when the work of transference was once more complete.

To crawl from the forest and slime of your work, fly above it and levitate by the engines of imagination, sit in that plane-seat and fasten your safety-belt when the dark-haired blue-eyed beautiful steward-goddess looks at you with a brain-scorching gaze that furnishes the energy of all joints and muscles, makes them move with you unaware of it. The earth of your painting is left behind, and trying to forget the fear of the plane floor shaking beneath you unclip the safety-belt and look out of the window at the colours and contours and inhabitants of the work you are making. It doesn't exactly tally to the map spread on your knee, but that is usual and as it should be. Out of a nearby cloud come the unapproachable hooves of nightmare, but the plane veers and you look instead at the close configuration of ash-grey mountaintops, eyes at the end of binoculars, cocktail-sticks searching out the individual valleys of desolate beauty balanced by their inhabitants of men and animals. Eyes wilt and tire, fold back into you, and soon you become frightened at being so far above the earth with nothing to stop you bouldering down if the energy of one engine baulked against its supergravitational task. He sweated against death, spinning into the colours of creation and never waking up, every minute expecting it in the hope that it wouldn't come. The journey went on, as dangerous as autumn when it won't become winter, till suddenly the engines fluttered and the beautiful dark-haired woman stood at the door, and the descent was smooth coming down, down, a quiet and gentle drift towards the canvas once more in human proportion and set on its easel before him.

He stayed in his studio at night, strip-lighting dazzling the air brighter than day and throwing over the canvas a metallised glaze that, if the actual colour, could only have been done by a man in the last stages of kidney disease. The stopgap night of Lincolnshire blackened outside, and when he switched off the lights, opened a window and looked out in his shirt-sleeves the silence was profound and complete, not even a dog barking, or a crow shaking its mangy spirit free. It was mild June, smell of foxglove and late cowslips, the demise of spring, and a cool drift of fresh air threw a few heavy drops of rain against the leaves of an alder-tree below.

Colours mixed, and before him were two canvases, one for day and one for night, boodland and deepgreen forest that never came out of the swamp of fecundity boiling on pot and sleeplessness; butterflies and bovine eyes with world on the wing and in retina, the viable inexplicable shapes and colours, themes and highlit pictures of the land and spirit where he had no maps to follow, all came out of his blue-cooled ice-drawn soul-filled heart. Drugs and pot, I'm high all the time on the powders of my own brain, the tadpole blood of my veins – except when I'm not and am low in the swamps of life. I'm free-wheeling over this great plateau, neither young nor old, clock-smashed, calendar-burned and picking my teeth with the compass-needle after chewing flintlock lilies and limestone daisies.