Love Your Enemies (17 page)

He’d had to measure himself very precisely (it felt morbid) so that he could make sure that the coffin was as short and compact as possible. He wanted to create a box which was realistically tin-shaped, a practical length and not too wide. He realized that there were likely to be restrictions on size when it came to coffins in terms of burial space. To make it too broad would be inadvisable.

He was still thinking about the lid. Initially he had been keen to have a hinged door on the coffin, probably following along the edge of the label, which would open up like a car door to reveal his body within. Eventually, however, he’d been forced to acknowledge the fact that this design was too complicated to construct and also that it would make keeping the size to a minimum and fitting the body – his body – into the coffin through a slightly more restricted space problematic. He supposed that it would be possible to push and slide the body into the coffin head-first, but felt that this would be a bit inelegant and undignified.

Instead, therefore, he opted for a classical coffin lid design; although the lid would not hang over the base of the coffin, it would fit together with the base, leaving barely a hint as to where the actual join was; like one of those brightly painted Russian dolls which smoothly opens to reveal several others inside, each smaller than the other but all intrinsically identical.

John pursued realism in his design like a bloodhound on a scent. He wanted his tin, his coffin, to look like an original Campbell’s soup can but also to look like Warhol’s paintings of the cans. The difference was subtle but significant. The beautiful silver material that Melissa had brought him would
line the can, the coffin, and it would be a legitimate colour, have an appropriate sheen for the inside of a tin; enclosing him, preserving him like a product, a foodstuff for worms. A can of decay.

As he worked he smiled grimly at the notion of placing a sell-by date on the top half of the tin, something like
BEST BEFORE FIRST MONTH OF INTERNMENT
. He imagined people excavating his coffin in hundreds of years’ time and studying it, finding meaning where he had intended it to be; maybe even more meaning than he was capable of understanding at this juncture, from his own limited perspective, caught in the moment of creation as he was, restricted by his time to only understanding so much. He revitalized himself by thinking, ‘This thing I am creating has more meaning than even I can understand’.

During the following week John left the house only once, and that was to go to Safeways for some provisions and to a hardware store to buy wood tacks, nails and a wood file. He also bought glue. The rest of the time he stayed inside and listened to the radio, worked solidly and took to sleeping at night on the sofa downstairs. He wanted to conserve his energy, which was at a minimum, like a coin-fed gas meter at its lowest ebb, ready to run out, to close down.

Melissa was very sunny at work and busy with life. She looked forward to seeing John again but wanted a dignified period to pass before she pestered him. Her next visit was on a Saturday afternoon. Steve had agreed to cover for her if she went home early from work. She said she wanted to buy more material for her clothes designs. In fact she went straight to an off licence to buy some wine, then down to the tube.

John took a good while to answer the door. During the previous week or so this had been his technique for getting rid of frivolous callers. There had only been a couple.

He had thought about Melissa a great deal over the past
eight or nine days, not romantically, although had he been anticipating staying alive for more than the shortest of periods he would almost definitely have attempted to view her in such a light. In his state of violent activity he thought of her in terms of a confidante, an inspirationee, someone he could revitalize with his last dregs of energy.

When he opened the door he smiled widely and said, ‘It’s great to see you again, come in!’

Melissa was shocked to see how different he looked. He appeared to be much thinner, more gaunt, but his face was now hidden by the beginnings of a red-tinged shaggy beard. His eyes were grey and his clothes were terribly unkempt. There seemed to be a fine pale sheen that covered him from head to foot; after a moment she realized that this must be a million tiny specks of sawdust.

John noticed her expression and said at once, ‘I know that I look a mess, it’s just that I get very involved in what I do. I’m driven. I don’t seem to have much energy for anything else.’

She followed him in and said, ‘You do look a bit like the Wild Man of Borneo.’

He smiled and took the wine that she offered on the way through to the kitchen.

No washing-up had been done since her last visit. Everything was dirty, everything had a sawdust sheen. She said, ‘Do you have any clean glasses?’

He ran a tap and washed a couple. ‘I’m sorry about this. I’ve been really busy.’

Melissa found a bottle-opener and pulled out the cork. He shook the glasses dry – she was relieved that he didn’t use one of the dusty tea-towels available – and she poured in some wine. She said, ‘I’m glad you were in. It looks like you haven’t left the place since last week. Have you achieved much?’

He took a sip of wine and smiled as he sighed with gratification. ‘I’ve done so much that I feel bloody reborn. I can’t
explain it, I feel so gratified. It’s like magic the way that things just slot together. If they don’t work out you just have to try again, focus all your attention, find endless patience and eventually you attain your goal, no matter how tiny it is. You put in a nail straight or you file something into a perfect curve, make a join that is faultless. It’s fantastic.’

As he spoke he used his hands like descriptive tools. Melissa hadn’t noticed this before. He looked like Michelangelo to her. She almost felt jealous, he was so much like a child. She said, ‘I can’t believe your enthusiasm. If I were you I’d collapse from exhaustion if I got so excited about every dress that I made. Do you treat every piece like a first?’

His eyes slitted slightly and he rubbed at his nose with the hand not holding his wine glass. ‘Everything in life is a conquest. Each thing is different. At this moment I believe I’d feel the same excitement in my gut even if I were fifty years older and creating this object for the hundredth time. I feel the sort of sense of achievement that comes from doing something well. That’s enough. It’s enough for me anyway, like a physical empathy with objects. It’s like I’m God and I’ve created a perfect tree or a perfect river. It’s like I now understand what makes the world tick.’

She couldn’t resist laughing at him. He stared at her, his expression one of surprise.

Eventually she said, ‘You sound so naïve. It’s really funny. Refreshing too I suppose, but funny.’

He led her into the living room. Before she entered the room she glanced towards the front door again and said. ‘Why haven’t you opened any of the letters on your doormat? There’s a whole pile of them.’

He shrugged. ‘No point. I’m too busy. Forget about them.’

She followed him into the living room and looked around in amazement. The floor was inches deep in chips, slivers, specks and flakes of wood. She said, ‘When I was a kid I had a hamster and it lived in a place like this.’ She felt she was
going to sneeze. ‘Doesn’t this stuff get up your nose? Surely you wear a mask while you work? This fine dust could destroy your lungs.’

‘I can’t be bothered.’ He grimaced, then ran his hand down the base of the coffin, which was now complete, like a big round canoe with flat ends. He looked up at her. ‘What do you think?’

She frowned. ‘Explain it to me. It seems a strange shape for a coffin.’

He smiled. ‘Remember when we were chatting last time and I said that I wanted to make something which had a meaning beyond its purpose? Something which satirized death, brought it down to earth and yet celebrated it? Well that’s what this is, that’s what this shape means.’

Melissa interrupted him. ‘Has someone commissioned this then? They must be very weird. I bet it’ll cost them a fortune.’

This put John off his stroke. He sipped his wine, ‘Yes, it’s been commissioned. It’s for someone who …’

He paused. ‘It won’t be too expensive.’

Melissa put out her hand and touched the wood. ‘God, it feels really smooth, no splinters or anything.’

He said, ‘I want it to feel as smooth as steel, smooth and cold.’

Melissa ran her hand around the inside. ‘Well, why didn’t you make it out of steel then?’

He laughed, frustrated. ‘Because it’s a coffin, stupid. Coffins are made out of wood, that’s the whole point of them. This is a coffin. It will look like something else, it will have an appearance to the contrary, but it will still, intrinsically, be a coffin.’

She took her hand from the coffin and blew away the fine dust which had accumulated on the tips of her fingers, ‘So how will it look? What will it be, apart from a coffin, that is?’

John pointed towards the pictures that he’d tacked to the wall, many of which were now rather bedraggled and dog-eared. ‘It will look like a silver can, a tin, a container. I’m using Warhol’s
ideas but taking them further. He made art from everyday objects. I’m doing the same thing but my art is functional.’

Melissa frowned and chewed the corner of her bottom lip for a while. ‘You mean that this coffin is going to look like one of those Campbell’s cans? That’s strange.’

John shrugged defensively. ‘It’s no stranger in real terms than the outfit which you are wearing today. How is this different?’

Melissa was wearing a pair of flared tartan trousers and a pink turtleneck top with bell-shaped sleeves. Altogether she looked rather remarkable.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, but I think fashion’s somehow different. It doesn’t really involve the feelings of other people so much, does it? Your family and friends would all have to be extremely level-headed and dispassionate if they weren’t going to mind seeing you buried in a Campbell’s soup can. It’s a bit of a joke.’

John was irritated by these comments. He was silent for a moment, disappointed. ‘I thought we’d agreed that already, I don’t know, I thought we’d talked about this and that you understood about how death wasn’t a situation beyond irony, beyond a beauty of a different sort, beyond intellectualization. You sound very conventional all of a sudden.’

Melissa took a sip of wine, then looked into the glass because she could detect traces of sawdust on her tongue. ‘I’m not being conventional, I’m not a very conventional sort of person. God knows. I wouldn’t dress as I do if I was.’

John interrupted. ‘That’s just a part of your job though, isn’t it?’

She shook her head, ‘Well, no, I didn’t have to work where I do. I chose to. Anyway, some people who work in fashion houses aren’t all that bothered about fashion.’

John said, ‘Fuck fashion. I don’t give a shit about that. This coffin is something of great beauty and dignity. It parodies art and it parodies death …’

‘In your opinion,’ Melissa interrupted.

John was furious. ‘Bugger my opinion, that’s what it does. When it’s completed it will be a thing of beauty in its own right. It will be something that pretends to be infinitely disposable – a tin can – but it will be something infinite, it will be the sum total of hours and hours of work and planning and precision and plain sweat.’

Melissa walked over to the wall on which the illustrations were tacked. She stared at them again and then looked at John. He was touching the handle of his metal plane, making a pattern with his finger in the dust. She could tell by his expression that she had offended him, and that confused her. She said, ‘I didn’t mean to be horrible about your work. It just seems strange to me. I’ve never been a big Warhol fan, maybe that’s the difference between us.’

John didn’t stop making the patterns. ‘Neither have I, that’s not the point. The point is something beyond Warhol, beyond art but about art. I can’t be bothered explaining it again.’

She tried to smile. ‘It’ll be fun painting it, I bet.’

John said nothing. He was sulking, but not lightheartedly.

Melissa continued, ‘I can see now why you thought the material was a good idea, all silvery and glossy. How will you line this thing?’

He shrugged, uninterested. ‘I suppose with silver-topped wood tacks, all close together on both the top and the bottom.’

She laughed. ‘I thought it would have to be sewn on or something. That was stupid.’

His silence confirmed her opinion. After a while he stopped what he was doing and stared at her. She looked such an inappropriate figure in his living room, brightly coloured and frivolous; she looked uncomfortable, and he wished she’d go. Eventually he said, ‘Would you like some more wine?’

She didn’t answer directly, just shook her head and said, ‘Now you’ve built this thing it’s not just an idea in your head, is it? It’s more than that, it’s also everything that everyone
else may happen to think or decide. I suppose that the idea was something very pure but the object … I don’t know.’

John sighed. ‘I think that line of thought is a waste of time. It’s pointless. I want to get on with my work now. You can stay and watch if you like but there’ll be quite a bit of noise and dust.’

Melissa put down her glass on the mantelpiece and said, ‘I’d better be going anyway, before it gets dark.’

John nodded.

When she had gone he felt very tired. He sat on his sofa with his legs drawn up and didn’t move for several hours. Then he slept with his head resting on his arm.

Melissa sat on the tube feeling irritated and depressed. It wasn’t just that she had upset John – an artist, a sculptor, someone who made things change, someone who was inspired – it was also that she couldn’t make him understand what she meant. He had mistaken how she was, what she wanted to say, and had twisted it, had made it seem senseless. That wasn’t what she’d wanted at all, not what she’d intended. In her heart she respected John for his determination and purposefulness, and she envied him. She even liked his ideas. But she wanted to see each situation from every angle, to uncover every mystery and to analyse it, to understand things completely. She wanted to be able to appreciate everything, the totality of things. She sat on the tube and thought, ‘Maybe I only want total understanding because there is something wrong with me. Maybe it’s like Steve says, that I think about things too hard, feel things as a kind of excuse for doing nothing. I wonder if that
is
what Steve says …’ She couldn’t clearly remember.