Art & Lies (6 page)

People have found it hard to live without the personal landmarks they recognise. They can’t say, ‘Look, this is where it happened.’ Now, they have no means to the past except through memory. Increasingly unable to remember, they have begun to invent.

Picasso climbed the stairs. There was nothing solid under her now. She was balanced on the girders of her imagination.

I was on the roof. My hair was lank. My skin dull from ill-use. Only my eyes were bright. I thought I was standing on a cliff top waiting for a ship to pass under the white clouds. I had feared all the ships were gone, everyone travels by aeroplane these days, I had feared all the ships were gone, this high dizzy place the last standing room of my heart. Then I saw a mast and gay sails. Your firm sides, your hold stashed with cargo. You were a deck of colour in a pale world. Red lipstick, green eyes, hair swarming bees. You were a spice ship and I could smell you on the wind.

Your scarf fluttered out like a pennant. You were wearing a canvas jacket and I wondered if I could paint you, but already you were the colours of the rainbow, your purple hat cocked. You told me your name was Nelson, but that was much later, long after I knew mine was Hamilton. I knew that night that I wanted to be your mistress and sail the seven seas in your little coil of rope. I put my eye to the telescope and regarded you. A minute can still alter a lifetime.

‘Victory’ I said that night.

‘Victory’ as I climbed the long climb back to my studio.

‘Victory.’ The word undressed me. The word took off the neat blazer and low shoes I wore to family parties. I looked at my body in the mirror. It was not pukka-proud the way you strutted yours. It was a body unused to light.

My shoulder blades were sharp rebukes. My belly was an unploughed field. Weeds had grown over my pubic hair. I was a nun among nettles.

‘Victory.’ I picked up my paint brush and began.

I painted my uncertain breasts with strong black arrows and ran a silver quiver down my spine. I took out my lipstick and drew my lips into a red bow bent. You were my target.

I painted my legs with dangerous yellow chevrons and bathed my heels in mercury. I would need to move fast. I circled my buttocks with gold rings and gave my navel its own blue diamond. Thinking of your Victory hat I dyed my hair purple.

As I painted, intent on umber and verdigris, cinnabar and chrome, the colours, let out from their tight tubes, escaped under the studio door and up and down the public staircase to the black and white family rooms. My mother broke from her flannelette sleep to cry out the name of a man she hadn’t seen for twenty years. She reared up from her matrimonial sheets, infidelity colouring her cheeks. My father slept in purple.

Matthew, slug-fat, snail-slow, worm-pink, had a nightmare. He was walking down a busy street looking for a pick-up. He saw a woman he liked, chocolate nipples and race-track thighs. He crossed towards her, his wallet sticking out, she touched his face and said, ‘Hello dear, you’re Picasso’s sister aren’t you?’ He looked down at himself, and saw that he was wearing nothing but a tutu, dyed envy-green. He reached frantically for his wallet but it had gone.

Uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, all the weights and ephemera of family life, were dreaming in colour that night. Fawn carpets turned to blood and all the beige bedding there was couldn’t suppress a single sheet of crimson. Even my younger brother Tommy, who had medals to protect him, woke in a blue funk.

In the morning, it was raining, and the rain fell in orange points on their cream flesh. They were spotted with guilt, each could see in the other, the patterns of infection. They ate their family breakfast in solitary silence. Unclean, leper-spotted, found out over night.

They wore their darkest clothes, their soberest expressions, they whispered like church wardens. They colluded in their grey, upright vanity, but when their eyes met they saw the stain.

My mother poured the tea with trembling hands. Concentrate, concentrate, one cup, two cups, safe, safe. She dropped the pot. The white china shattered on to the white tablecloth and spread the tea in a five-point star of plum.

‘Why is the tea that colour?’ demanded father.

‘There’s no colour there father, no colour, just tea.’ She dabbed at it with the corner of her white handkerchief. She might as well have dipped it in blood. The family stared at the stain and the stain stared back. Impudent with summer, rich with fertile swelling, the plum stain on the Christmas tablecloth.

‘Go upstairs, why don’t you?’ My mother pleading, wringing her spotted hands on her spotted apron.

They went upstairs. They went upstairs, two by two, to the comfortable ark of the Sunday parlour.

‘It’s raining,’ said Matthew, standing at the long window that overlooked the long garden. He saw his mother in the rain, orange arrows tangling in her hair. She was struggling to hang out the tablecloth.

‘Mother will get wet,’ he said to no-one.

‘Bit of rain won’t hurt her,’ said father.

‘It’s orange,’ said Matthew.

‘It must be the power station,’ said father.

Picasso painted. She painted herself out of the night and into the circle of the sun. The sun soaked up the darkness from her studio and left a sponge of light. The light illuminated the four corners of the floor and the four corners of the ceiling in an octave of praise. As Picasso painted she sang in eight points of light. She opened her back to the sun and let it key her spine. She opened the window and the sun scaled her. She had the sun as a halo behind her head. She shone. The sun was in her mouth and it burned her lips. She held the sun between her teeth in a thin gold disc. It was winter but the sun was hot. She looked like a Buddha in gold leaf.

Without thinking, Picasso ran into the parlour, into the newspapers, into the best clothes and the dead air. She was painted from head to foot.

‘Self portrait,’ she said to their astonished faces.

‘Call the doctor Matthew,’ said her father.

The doctor packed his stethoscope, his gloves, his warrant and his syringe. The doctor got into his car and set off. The smooth powerful car purred underneath the purple clouds.

‘For God’s sake Matthew, the snow is NOT purple. Where is your sister?’ (Hello dear, you’re Picasso’s sister aren’t you?)

Picasso packed her easel, her brushes, her paints, her bags. She packed her canvases and left her reviews. Outside, the sun had made a pole of light that struck through the cloudy hide. Picasso, in her camouflage, swung down it and on to the road.

‘It’s all over the tablecloth,’ whimpered mother.

Picasso was wearing her deep boots, her leather jacket and velvet hat. She was warm because she had had the foresight to paint herself in for winter.

‘The central heating has broken down,’ said Matthew, kicking the white radiator.

Outside, the snow was clean and fresh, it fell on her lightly like the touch of an old friend. She threw back her head, but when the snow touched her lips, it melted. She had the sun in her mouth. She smiled and walked through the silent city.

On the way, after she had been walking for some time, a man skidded up through the breaks of snow, and asked her for help.

‘I am a doctor,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ said Picasso. ‘I don’t take drugs.’

She walked on, past his purple face in his snow-shot purple car, through the silent city and into the railway station.

SAPPHO

I
AM A
S
EXUALIST
. In flagrante delicto. The end-stop of the universe. Say my name and you say sex. Say my name and you say white sand under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.

Let me net you. Roll up roll up for the naked lady, tuppence a peep. Tup me? Oh no, I do the tupping in this show. I’m the horned god, the thrusting phallus, the spar and mainsail of this giddy vessel. All aboard for the Fantasy Cruise from Mitylene to Merrie England by way of Rome and passing through La Belle France. How long will it take? Not much more than two and a half thousand years of dirty fun and all at my own expense.

Am I making any sense? No? Here’s a clue: Very Famous Men have written about me, including Alexander Pope (Englishman 1688–1744 Occupation: Poet) and Charles Baudelaire (Frenchman 1821–67 Occupation: Poet). What more can a girl ask?

I have a lot of questions, not least, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS? When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow. I look like a nicotine junkie. I can no longer read my own writing. It isn’t surprising that so many of you have chosen to read between the lines when the lines themselves have become more mutilated than a Saturday night whore.

I’ve had to do that too; go down on the cocks of Very Famous Men, and that has put me in a position to tell you a trade secret: Their dose tastes just the same as anyone else’s. I’m no gourmet but I know a bucket of semolina when I’ve got my head in it. You can lead a whorse to water but you can’t make her drink. My advice? Don’t swallow it. Spit the little hopefuls down the sink and let them wriggle up the drain. No, I’m not hard-hearted but I have better things to do with my stomach lining. And I have another question: When did he last go down on you?

So many men have got off on me. Large men, small men, bald men, fat men. Men with a hose like a fire-fighter, men with nothing but a confectioner’s nozzle. Here they come, poking through the history books, telling you all about me.

I was born on an island. Can you see the marble beach and the glass sea? Both are lies. The white sand damp-veined is warm underfoot. The sea that softly reflects the hull will splinter it soon. What appears is not what is. I love the deception of sand and sea.

‘A Deceiver.’ ‘A notorious seducer of women.’ ‘A Venom.’ ‘A God.’ ‘The Tenth Muse.’ It is the job of a poet to name things, blasphemy when the things rise up to name the poet. The praise is no better than the blame. My own words have been lost amongst theirs.

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709–84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood? Rest assured I shall have to let go of one if I am to keep hold of the other. In the end the choice has not been mine to make. Others have made it for me.

In the old days I was a great poet but a bad girl. See Plato (Greek 427–347
BC
Occupation: Philosopher) then, Ovid came along in the first century
AD
and tried to clean up my reputation with a proper tragic romance. Me, who could have had any woman in history, fell for a baggy-trousered bus conductor with the kind of below-the-waist equipment funsters put on seaside postcards for a joke. Fuck him? I couldn’t even find him. He said I must have bad eyesight, I said it must be because of all those poems I was writing, late at night with only a tallow candle to keep me company. He said I should give it up, it was ruining our sex life.

SEX AND THE SINGLE POET. Look at her, my sweet bird of prey, sleek head and gold-tipped feathers. She sits on my wrist while I stroke her. She makes a perch of me. She calls me her little perch and is glad to use her claws. I have all the scars of my art.

Am I her keeper? Who calls whom? Does she hear my cry or do I answer hers? She hunts. She hunts me. I have soft fleshy parts for the pleasure of her beak.

She is acute, high-pitched, wind-formed. Invisible lines bring her back to me. I need not jess her. It is my legs that are strapped apart, restrained from false modesty by angles of desire, we are crosswise on the same current, falcon and falconer, falconer and falcon, in single prey.

This is the nature of our sex: She opens her legs, I crawl inside her, red-hot. I crow inside her like Chanticleer, red coxcomb on a red hill. She says, ‘My little red cock, crow again,’ and I do, with all my pulmonary power. I crow into the faint red-rising sun. I crow into the dew-wet world. I split her with the noise of it, she shatters under me, in a daybreak of content.

‘My little red cock’ she calls me and I am glad to be a small domestic fowl who lives in Aesop’s bliss. The Tale of the Falcon and her Cock.

   ‘The Works of Sappho,’ said Doll Sneerpiece.

The excellent lady was dressed in red. Red from the ruby comb that pinned up her henna hair. Red at her throat in a slash of agate. Red lips in cherub bows. Red beneath the pinnacle of her bosom, and, below her waist, a parting Red sea, that fell on to Turkey slippers, snug on a Turkey rug.

‘The Works of Sappho,’ said Doll Sneerpiece.

‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle, who had at last seen the Doll’s lips move.

‘The greatest poet of Antiquity,’ said the Doll. She drew on her bubbling hookah until the narcotic calmed her. She was not calm, she was boiling with love, she opened the book.

‘Love has taken me captive.

I tremble with desire acid now now sweet.’

She closed the book. She closed her eyes. Behind her eyes Ruggiero’s face.

‘I long for him as a hind longs for a belling stag.’

She imagined Ruggiero’s antlers.

In another room across the city Ruggiero stared at the inkpot.

‘I am sick of love,’ said Sappho. She laughed and picked up her suitcase. Sick of love was surely better than sick with love?

In the past, she had been glad to get aboard any vessel that pulled alongside, show her a fat hull or a slim keel and she stashed her baggage in the hold. When her new quarters had become too cramped she had jumped ship. That had been Sappho and a pile of papers to prove it. Why was it that the Church of Rome had burned her poems and excommunicated her? Galileo has had his pardon but not Sappho. Galileo is no longer a heretic but Sappho is still a Sapphist.

‘Know thyself,’ said Socrates.

‘Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.’

The Word terrifies. The seducing word, the insinuating word, the word that leads the trembling hand to the forbidden key. The Word beyond the door, the word that waits to be unlocked, the word springing out of censure, the word that cracks the font. The Word that does not bring peace but a sword. The word whose solace is salt from the rock. The word that does not repent.