Ménage (32 page)

— Drink your coffee, I said.

— Only make him famouser. Funny ha ha, eh? Five years, mark my words, everyone’ll have one . . . like fucking Che Guevara. Poor fucker. Brains to the wall, fucking T-shirts everywhere, face all over the place . . . collector’s items, wait and see.

Enough. I turned off the TV again. Put myself between it and him.

— Don’t be silly, I said. — Cobain’ll be fine. Drink your coffee and sober up. We need to try and find Dot. OK?

He stared at me hard as if trying to focus. He reached to hold me.

— D’you think I’m a bad person?

— No, not at all.

— Could you sub us a fiver for some . . . juice?

I called Goldsmiths. I called Sarah Lucas’s shop and ran down Old Street to Dazed to see if anyone had seen or heard from her. I even ran into Sadhi’s corner shop and asked there.

I took the liberty of going into her room and trying to find her address book, to find her parents’ home number. Books and things on her floor; soiled panties and half-eaten food; make-up, empty pill boxes and vodka bottles; crisp packets in their dozens; Mars Bar wrappers; empty food packets hidden in corners and under the bed: Pot Noodles; a multitude of Post-it notes, covering the walls in layers: JOIN A COMMUNE; A BIG PROJECTION ON THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT; IMAGES ON WATER; ON CLOUDS; FILM A SUICIDE – WACO. A piece of paper on her desk, scored in marker pen, underlined: THE TRUST GAME – IN SUPERMARKET – ON STREET – WALK BLIND.

Her camera charger was there, but not the camera. The wrapping for a pack of twelve tapes lay on the floor. I pictured her, walking around alone filming herself, walking aimlessly, falling into things, people, eyes closed, stumbling into danger.

There were three Shears in the phone book in her part of town. One on Harley Street. Her father. I dialled and I got through. — Hello the Stratford Clinic. I hung up.

I took the train all the long way to Goldsmiths. No sign of her in the corridors, in the hall, or refectory. I tried the studio. Video equipment had arrived, the screens and video projectors I’d ordered for her lay in huge boxes, unopened, while all around the other students were hanging their pictures, assembling their structures.

A hand on my shoulder. I turned and it was the shit-is-art student from before. Before I could speak he asked me, — You seen her? She’s leavin’ it a bit late, mate.

He asked me if I knew what instructions she’d given for her show. Everyone else was done, the tutors were going nuts.

I didn’t know. Had no idea, but since I could think of nowhere else to search for her I thought it best to venture some suggestions. Something had to be saved. Given that
she
wanted to show video clips on screens it had to be dark. I took the liberty of telling him to construct a space a bit like a cinema. He seemed content with that.

— So where do you want the projectors, mate?

— Sorry. Uh, no idea, I guess, facing the screen? Eh, look, sorry, I’ll get her to call you as soon as I find her. OK?

— It’s gotta be finished tomorrow, man.

I made my apologies and was running out again.

I opened the door to home, calling out for Saul, but his room was empty. The hall floor was streaked with vomit in trails all the way from his room to the bathroom. It was getting late and the rain was pissing down. I cleaned up his mess with a cloth and some Vim and paced the hall, waiting for just an idea of what I could do. She was out only God knew where wearing fuck knows what.

Looking for clues I went back to Saul’s stupid Duchess book.

The epilogue said there were no surviving artworks by the Duchess. She committed suicide the day before her first group show, the 1923 surrealist retrospective in NYC – in which she was to have exhibited herself dressed as a chess-piece. She had been missing for a week. Her naked corpse was found in a dumpster on Twenty-Third and Fifth. Deep holes had been cut into her flesh, around the genitals, the breasts and mouth. Some claimed she was murdered by jealous male artists. Others that she had had a history of self-mutilation and satanic ritual. After her death Duchamp became a millionaire and declared surrealism dead. He vowed never to make art again and took to playing chess. It was a patchwork of total lies and half-truths, but Dot had believed it real and inspirational. She could have been at that very moment living out the tragedy of the Duchess. I was thrown into total panic.

I paced my room then charted its contents as the
minutes
became hours. The lowered ceiling and walls of dust-filled swirly Artex. Posters of Gerhard Richter’s Baader–Meinhof portraits covering the holes in the walls. The old broken typewriter found in the street. The sign ‘Danger of Death’, drunkenly pinched from the electricity generator on the corner, the plastic Amstrad stereo with the two mismatched speakers, found in the street, linked by many sections of electricity cable stripped from kettles, computers and TVs all found in the street. My old BBC personal computer, with its green text on the black screen that gave me migraines. The two single mattresses piled on top of each other, one with kiddie hot-air balloon patterns on it, that together were so soft that it was impossible to get up from them. The broken Xpelair fan on the window. The many books of Saul’s I had borrowed and only ever half read. The three years’ worth of stolen charity-shop clothes in a pile as big as a corpse. The fungus spores on the wall that connected to the bathroom. The many bits of paper with Dot’s ideas scrawled on them. Covers of videotapes, stickers for video spines. A pair of her panties under my bed resting among dust balls. The iron bars on the windows. The broken fire escape, missing its first five steps. The lights of cars on the overpass. Vertical shadows against my wall, like bar codes. I looked out and pictured myself out in the rain on that road, walking under the pissing sky, camera to eye, screaming at the cars that screamed past. I thought I saw a figure out there. I pushed my face to the cold glass, but couldn’t see. The dirt on the outside softened every detail into grey. A shadow passed between the headlights. It stopped, by the railing, seemed to hold something to its face, a bottle, a gun, a camera.

I ran outside, trying to locate that space, up towards the pedestrian walkway. A few figures ran past with umbrellas, one in a shellsuit. I turned the concrete corner onto the bridge, and there ahead was the figure again,
hunched
over the rail, in the middle, an inhuman form, that somehow seemed familiar to me. The six lanes of cars speeding white and red light below its feet.

— DOT! DOT!

The figure turned as I ran forward. It was a man, seemed an old man. The old tramp, I thought. As I got closer there was a flash of skin beneath his trench coat. Rain obscuring bare chest, cock in his hand, dribble of piss in air, falling to the cars below. I stared in disgust but then the face flashed in the headlights.

— Jesus, Saul! What the fuck . . .

He tucked his cock back inside, rubbed his eyes.

— Come on. You’re going to catch your death.

I put my arm round him and took his weight, leading him away.

— Sorry, sorry, he said. — It’s all my fault.

— It’s OK.

— You find her?

I shook my head. He was trembling all over.

— Got to call her dad . . . or pigs . . . sick girl . . . got to call her dad.

But what would her father do but take her from us?

— Let’s get you home, I said. — Maybe she’ll be back there waiting for us.

Car lights threw dark dreams across my pillow all that night as my ears strained to make every creak of wood, every passing footstep or slowing car cohere into her form. No sleep before the sun rose and no word and I could not endure the waiting with her words circling in my head: ‘Wait and see, that’s all you ever do, you do nothing, nothing! Empty man, mirror man, gutless!’

The number of her father’s medical practice was in my trouser pocket. The repercussions of calling it were horrific to imagine. I had to do one thing first.

I went to the public library to check the medical dictionary. I already knew the names from the empty pill boxes she left in the bathroom. Diazepam was easy enough. Lithium – a mood stabiliser – taking the edge off both the highs and the lows – it built up slowly in the system like salt or nicotine or smack. Three months it took after withdrawal for the levels to reduce to zero and the withdrawal had to be phased so as not to risk triggering mania. Hers had been total and abrupt. Cerebrex – used in the control of extreme manic episodes. Manic depression can have seasonal triggers: up in spring and summer, down in autumn, winter. She was up and it was spring coming into summer. Can be triggered by exposure to cannabis.

I sat there in the empty library, an old woman on a Zimmer frame passed me by. A clock ticked. Seventies lino and fake wood. A display showed the latest Jeffrey Archer. An institution. If I called her father, Dot could be placed in an institution again.

I read on, looking for excuses. But the evidence mounted against her. Her sudden eruptions of hatred then quiet whispering, then touch, then withdrawal. Further signs of mania: the subject talks in quotations – they may have been studying, reading obsessively. It is not uncommon for manic patients to expound totalising world views, end-of-the-world theories, to have sudden conversions to obscure religions, to have an answer for everything, to laugh at your questions, to show signs of extraordinary conviction – that only they have the key to understanding it all, that these visionary insights are too complex to explain to a normal person – to identify with extreme historic figures, to suddenly give up on projects that have been worked on with commitment for months on end. Bulimia is common, as is an increased testosterone level and erratic, heightened libido.

I felt dizzy and nauseous.

Goldsmiths was the only place to look for her and I
dragged
myself onto the tube but then, halfway there, all the bodies tight round me, I thought I was going to faint, vomit. I needed air.

I walked the streets of Soho, trying to get my head together. Past the fruit-market stalls and the stink of last night’s pubs, the crushed fruit underfoot. A pair of stilettos clicked past me and cockneys whistled. Was I to blame? Had I not encouraged Dot to give up her pills? Only to expose her to hashish?

I passed adverts for sex shows, cards for prostitutes in phone boxes; the Ann Summers shop and XXX video stores with handwritten signs tacked up on their blacked-out windows. FIST FUCK IV, TEENTOTTIE.

But she had not really been sick that time, in her teens. I tried to remember the words she’d told me. She’d pretended, with her parents, and then the pretending made her sick – that was what she’d said.

A skinny-looking woman in a corset and fishnets was sitting on a stool in a doorway before me.

— Fancy a show, sir? Only two pounds.

The sign behind her said ‘LIVE COUPLE FUCKING’.

And I had watched Dot and Saul writhing naked. ‘VIDEOS VIDEOS VIDEOS’ a neon flashed. Dot and her videos. If she was mad now, it was not the drugs, not that at all. It was the video-making, the inability just to live – ‘The unrecorded life is not worth living.’ It was the tyranny of Saul’s aesthetics that had made her mad.

‘XXX. YOU MUST BE OVER 18 TO ENTER.’ I entered, maybe to drown out judgement, to kill the growing guilt. The sounds of video orgasm flooded the shelves. Three hundred varieties of sexual perversion available from
Anal Intruder
to
ZooGirls
to take home on VHS for £15. The guy behind the counter turned his TV screen round to show a waiting client, Saul’s voice was over my shoulder. ‘There is nothing less sexy than sex.’

No, the fault was mine. Me and my weakness for sex. I had pushed both her and Saul into it, from some sickness inside me. Fuck it. There were at least three arguments in my mind from every perspective. Three sides to every story:

Two scroungers had exploited a rich girl, taken her money, ruined her career and driven her insane. A failed artist had manipulated two youngsters into acting out his debased fantasies as a revenge against the world that had rejected him. A bored rich girl with a history of madness dragged two innocents down into her cyclic condition without giving them forewarning.

I was inventing alibis. I was to blame. The fault was all mine. Mine, fuck me. I needed to do the stupidest most extreme thing possible. Dot had made us wear her mother’s clothes. I had wanted to wear her mother’s clothes. Fuck me. Fuck me dead.

Madame Jay’s, the back-street transvestite bar, I had passed it many times. The dark purple smoked glass mirrored my daylight grey self back to me as I hesitated at the door. It was still early, and there were very few customers there on the purple velvet seats. The place smelled of bleach. A tall TV girl came over to me in a spangly dress, fishnets and heels, fake eyelashes and rouge that on her black skin looked like a bruise. Could I buy her a drink? Her voice not just a man trying to sound like a woman but a cockney trying to sound like an American queen. Her many flirtatious questions and her hand on my shoulder kept me there as I tried to leave. She talked about her implants and stroked my thigh. She wanted to show me. We could go to the toilet. Thirty and she’d give me a suck, fifty and I could fuck her. She took her hand and put it on her thigh. I could feel her cock through the fabric.

— I got quantity and I got quality.

I tried to excuse myself, didn’t want to offend, she had been very charming, I said, I couldn’t afford it, was on the dole, but she brought down her prices.

— Ten for a suck. You get finance, I give you romance.

The briefest flash, then all hell broke loose within me, why not, why not fuck a trannie, get fucked, get addicted, get sick, get pills, live to fuck to forget to fuck again till you die of it. Fuck me and Dot and Saul and all our petty little problems we thought so important.

She crossed her muscly legs. Then it came to me. Edna.

I didn’t have Edna’s number but something visceral told me Dot was there. I excused myself, and ran to the door, down the street, past the stench and sex to the tube. This madness had started with Edna. Yes, Dot would be there, where else in the world could she be?