Apartment 16 (17 page)

No classical nudes survive from this period, when it was compulsory to produce them at the Slade. Only his fastidious depictions of dead animals and human deformity have been found.

Stillborn triplets, the preserved faces of those who had perished through disease, and the bulbous skulls preserved by the Royal College of Surgeons were his favourite subjects. In all the awfulness of nature’s distortions visited upon children, he attempted to distil and re-create the full impact of specific images that caused horror and revulsion in an onlooker. The sudden uncomfortable surprise, the inability to prevent the stare, the gaping open perception and astonishment at the malformed: it was this reaction he wished to inspire.

‘It is so much more plentiful than beauty,’ Hessen had written in his failed journal. In decay and deformation and ugliness he found far more evidence of what existed within the Vortex.

Imbuing his obsessive drawings of cadavers and body parts with a peculiar life, he created an animism. As if, after life, after the end of self, a new animation existed through a sense-memory of the physical remains – a sign of what one would become after death, or rather, of what one would become trapped as, inside the Vortex.

And in the chapter about Hessen’s re-creations of animal and human hybrids that followed this phase – ‘the grotesque figures stricken by despair and painful contortions that gained Hessen a small posthumous notoriety’ – Apryl learned more than she cared to about his slide into primitivism.

Still controlled, his expression is not quite free enough from, or unconscious of, what he learned at the Slade while exposed to the Italian masters. ‘Figure Bowed Clutching Face’, ‘Toothless Woman Drinking Tea from a Saucer’, and his other earlier figurative drawings reflect his radical affront to traditional aesthetics and notions of beauty in Western art, and yet they only hint at his own voice, at the signature that would become shockingly apparent just before his work ceased. Here, towards the end of his surviving portfolio, his drawings are full and pulsing with an acknowledgement of the essential ugliness of mankind as he saw it, and the attendant isolation and bewilderment of existence. Subjects are barely recognizable as the people he’d observed in streets, cafes, pubs, and shops. Some of the figures appeared more canine than human. Others had limbs more reminiscent of the goats and jackals he’d drawn at Regent’s Park zoo, and the figures possessed the faces of apes. They were drawn with the surety of someone observing life, more than simply showing what had been imagined. Hessen himself claimed that this was actually what he had trained himself to see in those around him.

Apryl read on, uncomfortable with the mind the biographer was unravelling for her. A mind that had inflicted its terrible vision on Lillian and Reginald.

When he began to use gouache, ink, chalk and water-colours, ‘the influence of surrealism and abstraction on Hessen became visible.’

Miles Butler went on to describe the backgrounds in these works, with detail that Apryl found deeply unpleasant. She’d only begun to notice the backgrounds of the drawings the second or third time she’d looked at the pictures.

Half-formed misty landscapes drifting into a sense of a moving nothingness, of infinity, at the edge of each picture. Around the thin silhouettes at windows, or the hunched figures in corners or holes, he tried again and again to portray a sense of vastness. Never static but alive, seething, turbulent, cold and vacuous. There is an absence of shape or solidity surrounding and swallowing the claustrophobic studies of these figures trapped in dingy rooms, or performing seemingly repetitive tasks alone. Most are reduced to all fours and resemble apes or puppets, their faces pushing relentlessly against walls in a futile attempt at escape.

So he was a nut. But the last chapter about his painting was more relevant to what she wanted to know. Though no easier to read. Frowning in concentration, and ignoring her glass of wine until it had gone warm and tasted sour, she squinted at the sentences and often read them twice over, struggling to connect these bits of information to his influence on Lillian:

Why would a man who spent so long pursuing such a vision, and perfecting the line in order to capture it, suddenly stop creating? It didn’t make sense if he never considered his sketches to be anything but preparatory notes – preliminary studies before the greater work was attempted: a depiction of the Vortex in oil.

Maybe prison put an end to his frightening ambition, or he destroyed his own work. That was all the author really offered to explain the fact that not a single painting by Hessen had ever been found.

His intentions were clear in the surviving issue of
Vortex,
as was his frustration at the amount of preparation needed to equip him sufficiently to achieve the vision. But of course he painted at some point. He must have done. Hessen was too determined, too single-minded to be distracted from a work before which all else had become secondary. Was it really feasible that such a monstrous ego, with such an epochal vision, would never progress further than line drawings and gouache? Most probably these ultimate works were destroyed by the artist’s own hand.

He couldn’t have destroyed them, because Lillian and Reginald had seen the paintings. The author also questioned what Hessen did alone for the four years after his release from prison before his disappearance. These remained the two mysteries debated endlessly by his admirers and critics alike:

There is little information in existence about this period of his life. Even before the war, he was largely an enigma. And the few visitors and models whom Hessen allowed into his studio in Chelsea in the thirties told conflicting stories. The painter Edgar Rowel, who rented a studio close to Hessen, attested to seeing paintings he found ‘profoundly affecting in Hessen’s rooms’.

Contrary to this, not one of his acquaintances from his time at the Slade claimed he showed any evidence of ever having painted a single canvas. Nor did he ever admit to such. But contradicting this position again, a model called Julia Swan mentioned locked rooms, dust sheets, the existence of art materials, and the smell of paint and cleaning spirits in his mews studio in Chelsea – all the paraphernalia of a painter at work in his own lodgings.

There is also another mention of Hessen’s studio in Chelsea in the memoir of the French painter Henri Huiban, who assumed Hessen was a sculptor due to the loud noises he made at all hours. And there was a rumour of actual oil paintings spread by the alcoholic poet Peter Bryant, who briefly befriended Hessen at the British Library. He wrote of ‘giant paintings glimpsed in Felix’s darkened rooms’. But in the Fitzroy public house, Bryant was also fond of declaring himself the reincarnation of a Celtic king, so his testimony is, at best, dubious.

Giant covered canvases stacked together, but turned to face the wall, were also reported by Brian Howarth, an acquaintance of Hessen’s from the British Union of Fascists, who once called on him at his studio to collect some papers.

Infuriatingly, the book asked more questions than it answered, but at least the author admitted this:

And where did the artist go? How could a man of his wealth and position just vanish without a trace?

But traces did exist. Traces that were rapidly vanishing as time passed. It was becoming, Apryl realized, a case of no one having looked in the right place.

SIXTEEN

His vision was jerky, unable to fix on anything. Instead, his eyes flicked about and took in fragments of things on the street. Short of breath and clumsy, he repeatedly tripped over paving stones or veered drunkenly as if unused to walking upright. By trying desperately to move away from the other pedestrians, he was somehow drawn off-balance towards them. He became enraged and wanted to shout.

He should not be in London. But he had damned himself to it with some vague romantic foolishness about art. He’d stranded himself here. Shipwrecked himself among the dreadful screeching of the apes.

It could be felt as much as observed; this alteration in the environment, in the very atmosphere. Wherever people congregated in the street, in this drizzly cold, lit only by street lamps and flickers of fluorescence, outside the little supermarkets and off-licences, fast-food restaurants and dreary pubs, he felt a total aversion. Some invisible contamination made his guts seasick with nerves. Some kind of unseen pressure, perhaps electrical, filled his head with a buzzing static noise, indecipherable transmissions or echoes of somewhere else, but now here too, as if he travelled beneath or between what everyone else was experiencing.

But it was hard to describe exactly how the world had altered. Only a visual vocabulary would suffice. Did he have the clarity? His sketches were probably nothing more than gibberish and graffiti. And wouldn’t that be the worst frustration of all: to be at last presented with some insight into the true nature of things – a truth so blurred by the media, by education, by these endless social systems and codes, the benign totalitarianism that distorted existence – and yet to find his new perception incommunicable?

When he finally reached the tube station, Seth leant against a tiled wall to roll a cigarette; he was unable to speak when a beggar asked him for a smoke. He had forgotten how. His lips moved but the triad of vocal cord, tongue and jaw refused to coordinate. He swallowed and then produced a rasp.

He wondered why he was here. What had compelled him to leave his room again. His original purpose was lost to him.

The blue light of the cash machines and the red and white illumination of the Angel underground station stimulated some vague anticipation of travel. He briefly gravitated towards the lights, but was soon warded off by the crowds pouring out of the tunnels.

He moved past the station but was halted by an impassable crossroads of hurtling traffic, slapping winds and jostling elbows. It all vibrated through his bones. A crowd waited for the lights to change. But no amount of perfume could disguise the fishy-vinegar reek of the women. Had he once thought these creatures attractive? There was something physically wrong with all of them. Lipless, protruding eyes, overlapping teeth, misshapen noses. Ears too red, discoloration of the skin under make-up, pink-rimmed eyelids, calcified hair. Seth shuddered. The men fared no better with their apelike swaggering, wet dog nostrils and blunt shark eyes. Intimidating, dangerous animals with a brute strength increasing its potential to explode as every drink was quaffed. Murder beasts reeking of dung-straw and brewer’s yeast.

Seth didn’t manage to cross the road; a moment’s hesitation, and another flash flood of cars, bikes and buses shook past, further blurring the smudgy buildings with their headlights, and leaving him stranded on the pavement.

It was as if he had been abandoned in a foreign city without a map and failed to understand a single word spoken. An overwhelming desire to be free of London made him shake with frustration. Anything, even to be penniless in another town, was better than merely existing, baffled and buffeted, in this unfeeling place.

Head down and defeated, he moved away from the traffic. He couldn’t go back along the Essex Road; there were too many people down there. He’d slip back through the adjacent side streets. But as he tried to remember a route home, he spied an empty-looking bar set underneath an ugly concrete office building. Maybe he could shelter in there, in a quiet corner by a radiator, and drink whisky.

Already it was as if he could feel and taste the fiery, revitalizing liquid in his cheeks and throat. He moved towards the door of the bar and lingered outside. There was music inside and one or two loud voices trying to rise above some other noise. The idea of entering made him anxious, as if such a move was no longer an easy thing to accomplish. And even if he could reach the bar, he wondered if he would be able to speak. After whispering his own name down and into the lapel of his coat, Seth pushed the door open.

It was like walking onto a well-lit stage. His instant immersion into bright light and sound made him giddy and afraid. A lump formed in his throat. Gingerly, keeping his eyes down, he concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other in case he crashed down among the tables and chairs. At the bar he looked up, doleful and insecure, and waited to be served.

There were only a handful of people in the scruffy place, and all gathered around a giant video screen to watch a football match. He was glad of the distraction; it saved him from attracting their eyes.

He looked dreadful, he realized the moment he saw his disgraceful reflection in the mirror underneath the optics; pale and creased and stained and downtrodden. He cringed with shame. But it had been a long time, nearly a year, since his appearance mattered. He could see the results of a chronic inattention to grooming, diet and lifestyle. There was a miserable and lined aspect to his mouth. His eyes had shrunk to tiny, hard things, set deep in the bruised skin of the sockets, as thin as tracing paper. There was an unnatural lividity to his complexion too, the only colour provided by the networks of broken blood vessels across his cheekbones. He looked sixty, not thirty-one. This was a death mask. He saw callousness, despair, revulsion, the loss of all hope and all compassion. His face was the one true work of art he’d created in the last year: a detailed and living representation of the city.

At a corner table away from the other customers, his euphoria for escape grew with every shot of whisky downed. Sipping at speed, the glass was never out of his hand or far from his mouth. The alcohol made his thoughts go faster. And he could no longer think of a single reason to stay in London. It had been a rapid and grim descent from day one. Uneventful months smudged into each other to become a year; a long, dismal and greyish smear of existence. A year in which he had ended up barely civilized, almost inhuman, like the others.

But it had always appeared impossible to get out of the city. And improbable that he could change this life, or slow the momentum of decline, with so many things conspiring against him. He’d never been able to find the time between night shifts to organize himself. It was not possible to think clearly with so many thoughts, so many memories, so many scenes playing out in his imagination. The whirlwind in his skull had always kept him rooted to his chair, or perched at the end of his bed, smoking. And perhaps he’d resisted the only true alternative – a shame-faced return to Mother’s spare room – out of a conviction that it would destroy him. But little was left to be destroyed. At least there he could recuperate, stop working nights, catch up on sleep. On so much sleep. He could change this debilitating pattern, rediscover his will, regain some enthusiasm. Yes, he saw it all in the fifth glass of whisky. Going home was not so bad. He wouldn’t fool himself a moment longer: getting out was now simply his only chance of survival.

He’d phone his mother the following day, and then hand in his notice at Barrington House in the evening. Then get out. So easy it seemed, on that stool in the bar. The smile on his face felt strange. Stiff. These features had moved so little of late. He suspected the tiny muscles of his face had atrophied.

He stabbed out a cigarette in the ashtray and hastily dropped his tobacco and lighter into the side pocket of his overcoat.

Outside, he experienced a sudden trepidation at the mere thought of returning to his room. He worried the familiar torpor would overwhelm him once he was back at the Green Man. That the same urgency for escape could be gone tomorrow afternoon when he woke after a long, dead sleep.

He had to act right now, tonight. Start packing. Anything. Already he sensed the aperture through which he must escape was closing. The rain, the blowing litter, the wet stones, the endless thoroughfare – these were all ropes intent on binding him with knots that his cold fumbling fingers could only paw at ineffectually.

Bowing his head, Seth pushed out at the wind. Huddled into himself, he made mental lists of tasks to be completed. At least he had some money in the bank. His wages were pitiful, but he’d stopped spending money on anything but food a long time ago. There was enough in his current account to get him out, back home, and to tide him over for a few months.

Perhaps, he thought later, had he been allowed to get back to his room at the Green Man without delay that night, all would have been well; he would have followed through with these plans and saved himself. And saved the others too.

But as he walked past the overflowing bags of soiled clothes and broken children’s toys left outside a charity shop, his future was decided.

All of the motion and light in his mind was instantly obliterated.

For a moment he was not sure of anything – which way was up, which way down, which direction he was facing, where his arms and legs were. His entire body was weightless until his shoulder hit the window of the charity shop.

Inside the shop, unwanted teddy bears, a tiny porcelain teapot and a book about cats all shuddered on their shelves. He had been thrown against the window. When the cold glass slapped his face, the world and its dimensions reassembled around him.

Bent over, looking down, off-balance on unsteady legs, it was then he saw the shoes on the wet pavement. Three pairs of whitish trainers surrounding him.

Suddenly he was upright again, wheeling backwards on both feet, throwing his arms into the air, chin raised. Inside he was all white and jerky, but the left side of his head felt different: it was a gigantic numbness.

The cold was forgotten, the cyclone of mental listings vanished. His darting eyes tried to assess the situation and size up all those involved.

‘Cunt,’ a gingery mouth said from nearby.

‘Come on. Fuckin’ come on,’ a dark face barked from under the peak of a baseball cap.

Their eyes were full of cruelty, and a strange anticipation too, as if they were impatient for a predictable reply. Both of the assailants were in their late teens. And Seth had seen the gingery youth before, slurping arrogantly from a bottle of Diamond White cider he later smashed outside the betting shop. The third one he couldn’t see, but sensed him behind, standing too close.

There was a moment of silence – a suspension of everything – and then the world was a rustling of nylon sleeves as a salvo of punches from small hard fists came in at him.

The first blow hit his cheekbone but didn’t hurt. He took the second punch against his forehead and the third impacted against the side of his neck. His head flicked back and forth, but the punches made no sound and there was no pain at first. It felt like he was being pushed by different hands while trying to move in a straight line. For some reason he tried to walk away as if nothing was happening. This made his assailants really angry.

More rustling, more prodding fists and kicking feet made all the strength drain out of Seth’s arms and legs. He couldn’t feel his hands or feet. He said ‘Fuck off’ in a weak voice without thinking. Warm air filled his body and he felt buoyant. He seemed to weigh nothing.

But inside his head something slapped around his skull like an animal trapped in a cave. It made him feel sick and so scared he would have done anything to become one of the unwanted teddy bears on the shelves of the charity shop, instead of this – a piece of meat to be kicked, punched and tenderized by the white trainers and red knuckles.

He couldn’t speak. His eyes were flicking everywhere but not fixing on anything. Then he was yanked around by small iron fingers, and the knocking from side to side started again. The gingery kid in the white Tommy Hilfiger jacket was flailing his arms at Seth so fast it was as if he was afraid his target would disappear before he got his freckled knuckles into its face.

Twisting and ducking, Seth took most of the punches on his shoulders, the back of the head, against an elbow, and in the ribs. But now they began to hurt.

He jumped at a space between the flailing arms to get away, but a hand seized the collar of his overcoat and kept him upright so his face would remain exposed to the flurry of fists.

He made a sound like a crying baby. He tried to think what he might have done to make them so savage. Nothing could explain the urgency of their fists and feet. There just wasn’t enough time for them to properly destroy another human being. Gravity slowed them down and infuriated them.

When a coal-black fist hit Seth’s teeth, his head filled with cracking ice. Linen ripped inside his mouth. The same hand came in again, again, again. The smudgy, jerking world disintegrated into bright white motes, all falling downwards.

I’ll die. They’re not going to stop until I’m dead. Seth went cold. His eyes were full of water. There was something crackling and tingling inside his nose. A big loop of spit and blood came out of his lips, to be smashed flat against his cheek.

He thought of trying to jump away from the fists again, but the thought never became action. It was getting hard to think of anything.

‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’

Their breathing became grunting. They were trying to punch and kick so fast they were getting tired and slow. In his dark upside-down world, lightning was flashing.

When Seth fell over, they stopped shouting ‘Cunt!’ But as he lay on the unforgiving pavement, he heard a whinny of excitement from one of them.

Another one hurt his foot with the first kick. The other two began a scuffling, kicking kind of dance, putting their toes into Seth’s face, shoulders, back, thighs, stomach. It was the stomach they wanted most.