Ménage (4 page)

But yet, as I paused at her door, I told myself that, perhaps, she would come in time to see that he had done her a great favour as he did for me. His critique of Western civilisation was correct. What was the point of adding more art, more reproduction of the same to the stinking stockpile of crap that was our culture? Why give the wealthy the opportunity to buy status objects that told them how sophisticated they are when their wealth was made on the suffering of millions? Stop being creative and embrace the beauty of destruction. And in that moment of suicidal despair, reach for your first breath as a truly free soul. That was what Saul believed, or did the last time I’d asked.

In the days that followed she hid herself away and went for long walks alone. I took the liberty of peeking into her room. The things she’d moved in: packs of bedlinen, towels from Marks & Spencer, unopened, three Sainsbury’s ready meals; a stack of notepads, books on psychotherapy, self-help,
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran and one by the Dalai Lama. Her canvases lay by her bed, torn from their frames.

I imagined her then walking aimlessly through streets in tears, remeasuring the world. Disillusionment with all is the first stage in the conversions of Saul. The Road to Damascus is long and very few survive the revelation that
the
figure at the end is a man on the dole. I told myself not to worry, she would come back, as I did.

After she had returned and tiptoed past my room, I decided to confront Saul. To ask him please, try to be nice, give her some appreciation for the rent situation. What did he actually want to achieve by this war of attrition? For her to give us money and then leave?

— That would be ideal! he said, as he put on a track by Rapeman. — Women, he said, — pah, they leave smells and cosmetics in the bathroom. Have you ever witnessed a bloody tampon in a toilet bowl?

Could he at least stop scaring her, sit down and talk with her? I asked.

— Talk, talk, talk, Freud was an imbecile, talking cures nothing.

I knew there was no possibility of an apology as he closed his door on me. I waited, fearing the worst and it came. Japanese avant-garde industrial noise music. Recordings of buildings exploding and women wailing. Hiroshima on a twelve-inch. Nagasaki on the B-side. That was it, I couldn’t stand it, I had to at least apologise to her for his conduct.

I heard not a ‘come in’ or a ‘hi’, just a noise, affirmative, telling me it was OK to enter. She was sitting by the window on that office chair Saul and I found in the street, hands upturned on her lap, as if meditating. There was no view from that window, just the wall and ten years of accumulated crap that could be a garden if anyone cared. I sensed I was intruding on something horribly private and I was embarrassed, no longer sure why I’d come in. But she gestured towards the bed for me to sit.

— Sorry, I’ve just taken a Valium.

— Really? I asked her. She nodded slowly. The silence between us was violated by his music. I apologised.

— He can play it rather loud at times, he’s just probably
a
little freaked out about having another person here. He’s eccentric, but he means well. The fact that he’s ignoring you and so rude means he’s scared, that’s all. He considers fear the basis of devotion, if that’s any help.

— There’s a little tree out there. I have to find positives, my shrink says. She’s a cognitive behaviourist.

She pointed and I was grateful then for the excuse to get closer, to touch her shoulder as I leaned to see. And yes, there was a tree, growing from the rubble. She allowed my hand to linger on her shoulder. Saul couldn’t stand my touchy-feelyness. I sat back and tried to recall what it had been like in that time before Saul’s voice had sat in judgement of my every action. She stared at her upturned hands.

— Lithium for breakfast, Prozac for lunch, Valium before bed.

It was like a little song to herself. I told her it was quite a cocktail, that Saul and I believed medication was a form of oppression, even though we did hash and speed when we could blag it.

— My mum’s on antidepressants and Valium too. I’m not supposed to do hash because it can set me off – I’m manic-depressive, she said as if she’d just introduced herself. I got the impression that this was a rite for her, something she told everyone or was told to tell everyone. She was staring at her hands again. The strangest thing, this kind of honesty would have usually had me running for the door, but something told me that my presence was not a problem. Time was different for her. Valium time.

— Well, that was the last diagnosis. I dunno. My dad thinks I might have an obsessive personality disorder too.

All of this made me feel quite awkward, but morbidly curious.

I searched for something to talk about and saw a little folder on the floor.

— Are those more of your paintings?

— Just old photos, I was just looking through, you know, trying to remember why I started in the first place.

I thought if I expressed an interest it might repair some of the damage Saul had done.

— Can I see?

She motioned for me to sit next to her as she picked it up. I calmed to her pace and listened as she flicked through the pictures. We weren’t flirting: there was just this incredible candidness. The photos were of her many paintings from maybe since pre-puberty. At first figurative and amateurish; people’s faces, then many self-portraits, the face gaunt, teenage, skull-like, the details growing as the skill developed as the face aged.

— I did these ones in art therapy – after my episode.

— Your episode?

— Yeah, my mum had one too after Josh died – he was my brother. They say it’s hereditary but I don’t believe it – the episodes, I mean.

A dead brother. I didn’t want to pry. I asked to see more. In every self-portrait that followed the style changed: one was like Munch, then Rembrandt, then Picasso, the lines thinner, then bolder, harsher, black and white, then cubist, then torn and collaged, as if exhausting every art movement, looking for the one true face.

— These are really good, I said. — So who started you on art therapy?

— My dad. He prescribes my medication too. He’s a –

— Your dad’s a shrink?

— Yes, Harley Street, stinking rich.

That was weird. Very controlling. I was developing a theory about her art being an attempt to escape a sick mother and tyrannical drug-administering father.

— It was kind of handy when I went nuts, she said.

— I’m sure you weren’t crazy at all. Maybe you were
just
rebelling against some people who were trying to control you.

— How very sweet you are, she said and gave my hand a little squeeze.

— Can I see the rest?

— They’re really crap, she said. But I insisted. As the paintings became more abstract and the faces vanished from the surfaces, I could feel Dot relax beside me. Swathes of colour, imaginary fields and planes, bright and luminous. I sensed how much her art meant to her, how painful a voyage it had been from those first tentative scratched pencil portraits to the bright bold washes of pure primary colour.

— These are really lovely, I said, but then my eyes came to rest on the torn paintings by the door and I remembered Saul’s venom. How could he have dismissed all her effort and struggle as if it were all a joke? My chest grew tight as the anger rose.

Her hand was on my shoulder.

— Hello? You OK?

She told me I was hyperventilating and took my hand and squeezed it, explaining that it was acupressure and might help.

— You want a pill?

She held these things in front of me. Plastic and silver wrapping. Beta blockers. Or if I wanted she could give me half a Valium. And she was sorry, people often responded like this when she showed them her past. I said yes, to all, to both tablets. She asked if I was sure. I said please. She placed two pills in my hand, got me a glass of water.

A knock on the door.

In all the time we had been in there Saul had paid us no heed and had played Ministry and Foetus and Millions of Dead Cops and even
William Shatner Sings the Blues
, but now, his ugliest records exhausted, he was at her door.
Mister
-and-something-else-is-happening-and-I’m-excluded – so I want to be part of it.

— Hi, he said, all cutesy in a whole new get-up: torn flares and his Prince T-shirt and purple eyeliner, doing that oh-so-awkward-I’m-so-sensitive-lost-for-words-staring-atthe-floor thing that he did when he wanted something.

She gestured for him to sit and he seemed so excited or was faking it.

— So what’s going on?

I tried to explain, but she was before us with the contents of her medication cabinet. I played it smart.

— We’re doing drugs.

— Drugs, huh. I did three acid before breakfast once and it had no effect whatsoever.

The liar.

— Mind-contracting drugs, now that’s what we need. My mind’s over-expanded enough as it is!

I wanted the Valium, just because he’d have to take it too, and I knew for a fact he’d not taken half the drugs he claimed. He’d never hugged strangers on E, or been lucid on speed like Lou Reed. He found all these things signs of weakness in me. And I knew he would only heap scorn on the confessional Dot and I had just shared. It being something about depth and truth.

She gave us three pills each and we sat with them in our hands like kids in school taking their vitamins, as she explained what each did and how the lithium wouldn’t really have any effect because it had to be taken every day and build up in your metabolism. She was laughing but I was worried, the forever practical me, that in taking them we were depriving her of what she needed.

It was strange to see the new rapport between them. Her forgiveness of his former obnoxiousness, and the transformation in him, like a goofy kid.

Valium. It’s nothing. Things happen and you feel nothing.
Things
that were boundaries or taboos collapse. All of my anxieties vanished, but there was no sense of the liberation, of the break or the joy of overcoming. Just nothing.

— Bit of a disappointment, Saul declared. — If we’re going to explore the void, we may as well listen to some Abba while we’re at it.

In Saul’s room, Dot was looking through his records on the floor and he was putting on track after track, no memory of what, none of my usual analysis of what mood he was in by reading his music, no sense of excitement or dread over his next choice. Iggy Pop or Parliament or Mahler. And in that Valium nothing I did not care; he could have overdosed or slashed his wrists and I would have just stared at the turntable going round and round. Horrific, that her father had fed her these pills for years. In the name of love, these pills that make love or hate impossible.

We ran out of tobacco and were all quite spacious so I suggested we play the Rizla game. Dot had never done it before, so we taught her.

Saul wrote
HITLER
and stuck it on her head. I wrote
THATCHER
and stuck it on his. She wrote
MADONNA
and stuck it on mine. Dot didn’t quite get the rules, but found the whole thing hilarious.

— Wait, am I John Wayne? Or no, no . . . what’s his name?

— You’re the one who’s supposed to guess!

— Superman?

Saul, as always, was the first to work out who he was and I was sure he always cheated and had a little mirror stashed somewhere among his mess. When it was over, Saul turned suddenly pale, excused himself like the perfect gent and ran, hand to mouth, to puke in the kitchen sink. I thought perhaps the mixture of sherry and Valium. When he came back through Dot told us both, — No more drugs, not for you, not for any of us.

We watched as she flushed all of her pills down the toilet. I asked her if it was a good idea, wouldn’t there be withdrawal symptoms or . . .

— You’ve convinced me . . . I don’t need them any more, she said, but would not explain what I had said or done to convince her. She smiled with a gentle wisdom that told me she’d survived depths I had only glimpsed and Saul had only read about. In that moment she seemed the most beautiful creature I had ever witnessed.

It was the last week of September 1992.

fn1
. While still in their artistic infancy, recent art graduates were plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi, making this the first artistic movement in history created by an advertising magnate. His rapid buying of an entire show and all the artists within it, then his swift reselling of certain works, rewrote the rules of art galleries which had formerly been concerned with building an artist’s career over a lifetime. Many former YBA ‘successes’ now make a modest living as teachers.

fn2
. Saatchi & Saatchi was responsible for the successful election campaigns of the Conservative Party through the Thatcher years (‘Labour Isn’t Working’) then through the ‘lame duck’ administration of John Major, in which the YBAs emerged. Saatchi, reinvesting the money he made through advertising into art, made a mockery of the hype that promoted these artists as ‘rebels’.

fn3
. Group exhibitions were temporary in nature and held in non-art spaces with names like City Racing (an old betting shop) and Die Yuppie Scum. The warehouse shows in Camden, Hoxton and Docklands would not have passed health and safety standards, but were exhilarating.

fn4
. Britpop bands like the Stone Roses, Blur and Pulp were selling millions internationally. New Brit became a brand for both music and art. Jarvis Cocker (musician and former art student)’s showing his arse while Michael Jackson sang at the Brit Awards became a symbol for this typically irreverent British attitude.

fn5
. Van Gogh syndrome – the belief that certain artists are only
appreciated
and elevated to a high status because of their tragic personal histories. See R. Clements,
The Life and Death of Jean-Michel Basquiat
, Random House, 1999.

fn6
. WRT – Tracey Emin, the claim that Emin’s documentation of her working-class victimhood became unsustainable as she climbed the commercial ladder. See J. Cambridge,
Variance
, IFP, 2003, ‘The Oppressed Minority of One’.

fn7
. Note the many pop promos, advertisements and political campaigns that have exploited Shears’s ‘vérité’ grunge images.