Paint. The art of scam. (2 page)

Bruno, in a brief
moment of bravery, had pointed this out to his father and the possible problems
that could arise from so much animosity amongst the gang.

His left eye was
still slightly bloodshot from his reply.

Seymour Capital, artist.

Seymour Capital lay on his back on the bed, eyes open, wrists
crossed on his chest like a laid-out corpse. It seemed appropriate.

He had been
faking sleep whilst Polly had readied herself for work. It had been a loud
thumping performance, unsuccessfully designed to
instil
l
guilt. He was now waiting for Polly to slam the front door of their flat.

She did, harder
than usual. She really meant it.

Seymour's eyes
flipped open in order to roll them, his head slightly nodding in time with the
twenty-three pounding steps on the creaky wooden staircase it took for Polly to
reach the main entrance door onto the street. She hadn't slammed that door for
over a week now. Its fine old handmade lead-light panels threatened to give way
at any moment, rattling in their now supple lead cradles with the slightest
nudge, caused by years of punishment, especially since they had moved in.

Polly loved that
door and it was possibly the only thing she did love at the moment.

Seymour sighed in
defeat and stared at the ceiling that had become a familiar friend, his mind
groping around to make some sort of sense of what was happening and, once more,
what on earth he could do about it.

The screaming words
of insult tennis they'd had the night before, flew around his head like lotto
balls. They had been delivered in frustrated anger; their content, although
initially firmly diplomatic, led to one thing: he had to get a job and stop
lazing around like some pointless waste of space pretending to be an artist.
That hurt.

They had always
fought a lot, but somehow before it had seemed like some sort of weird foreplay
to the amazing, almost violent, sex that would ultimately follow.

Raising their
hatchets so they could bury them.

But not lately.
Things had changed. She was showing signs, in Seymour's eyes anyway, of playing
the dreaded feminist card. She wasn't, Polly was not a feminist: she was a
woman living with a man who had no regard for her, women in general or indeed
anybody. But Seymour, of course, never saw things that way.

Things were
turning sour in his life: a tedious pattern was once again emerging.

They were broke.
That was what it was all about, money. Money was something that just happened
to Seymour, always had. He had never chased it nor ran from it, it had always
magically turned up like a reliable friend when it was needed. Not necessarily
his money, mind, but that didn't matter.

Seymour had
developed a near hatred for money and its consequences and he knew what he was
talking about. He'd experienced wealth first-hand, having inherited the
substantial, hard-earned fruits of his parent’s lifelong labour after they had
died. It nearly killed him: he was lucky to be alive. He had blown the lot on
drugs, alcohol and anything he could consume.

That, according to Seymour Capital is what money does for you.

He had met a few
wealthy people in his time, all of whom hadn't impressed him beyond an initial,
momentary mild envy. This soon dispersed when they showed the symptoms of
stifled instincts, instincts trained to navigate humans through a creative
life, fired by the spirit of survival. Instincts that had become lost and disorientated
through boredom caused by the illusive security that money was supposed to
provide.

Take Graham
Taylor, for example. Graham had won the football pools. Money had transformed
him from being a miserable, machine oil-soaked lathe operator in Manchester to
a miserable booze-soaked drunk in Spain living in a fly-blown fortress. He had
had money at last, and no bastard was going to take it from him. Nobody did. He
drank himself into a horrible lonely death.

Then there was
Crispin Bartholomew. He had inherited a fortune from various relatives and was
last seen, drunk, stumbling around glitzy bars in London looking for a friend.
Anyone would do.

Then there was
Shirley, a successful hairdresser who ended up with a chain of franchised
salons. Seymour liked Shirley a lot and had a brief fling with her until she
met Richard Bingham, who had a string of boutiques. Shirley promptly dumped
Seymour and went on holiday to Majorca with Richard where they were killed in a
boating accident.

Nope, money was
the most evil thing humans had ever come up with and Seymour despised it for
the pain it inflicted.

And here he was
again, the dreaded money monster's hands around his neck, attempting to
strangle him.

Seymour's eyes
squeezed shut as he tried to halt the spiral of doom he was in.

Then he
remembered The Vase Lady.

He sat bolt
upright, rubbed his eyes and looked across at his easel. There she was in all
her glory, finished at last – well, nearly. He wasn't happy with those
toes, were they too dumpy, too cherub-like for her lithe ceramic-skinned body?
Maybe: but he had tried changing them before, and it didn't work, too real,
made her somehow so perfect you couldn't believe her. Still, she was alive now.
He had spent weeks on her. At first she was just a bog standard vase, but now
that vase had become a woman that sent a shiver down his spine. He closed one
eye, zoomed in on her and bit his lip. Was she too perfect? Too much like a
photograph? He smiled at her. She winked at him.

‘That's it
Seymour, I've had it! I'm quitting! You get a fucking job for a change!’

Polly's words
leapt into his brain and punched Seymour's head back down onto the pillow.
Seymour closed his eyes.

The
Vase Lady watched him for a few moments, rolled her eyes and went about her
business.

Seymour's work,
love it or hate it, was the only constant in his life, and had been since the
moment his rubbery infantile hands had smeared nail varnish on his mother's
new, fit-inducing, maroon paisley wallpaper in 1958. The wallpaper had
intrigued him. Staring at it close-up, unwittingly ripped on an overdose of
high octane chocolate and sherbet, the strange paisley pattern seemed to move.
A squirming mass of strange alien organisms writhed around as if they were
trying to find a way of escaping. He had tried pencil to help them out, but the
new washable wax-like surface, which
had been held up as another momentous leap of
mankind's ingenuity, proved impenetrable. The nail varnish was perfect: it even
had its own brush.

His mother's
violent reaction had been painful yet inspiring. It flicked a switch, which
ignited a fire,
which
engulfed his entire being. He had discovered the
power of disruption through creation, a power he wanted more of and he would
nurture it for its true pleasure for the rest of his days, no matter how much
it hurt.

Many a child
would have thought twice about repeating that destructive act of expression, perhaps
developing an allergy to nail varnish years later, maybe becoming impotent with
women who wore it, or winding up wearing it with a matching dress. But to young
Seymour, it was an introduction to a whole new world which was huge and safe,
where he could isolate himself and feast on a diet of self-indulgence.

Throughout his
forty years, his work had driven him into deep depressions as well as
exhausting, uncontrollable highs. It had kept his broken heart pumping when the
several women he had pretended to love had left him, usually for other men with
less selfish obsessions, and who actually produced hard cash.

Painting occupied
his dreams by day and night, gave him erections and made his rare viewers
laugh, cry, hate and love him His art was his window, from which he could
observe everything that was of little concern to him; where he could be smugly
amused by everything out there which made everything in this strange world
happen.

He had never
actually got to own the window, however, and now, again, it was becoming as
fragile as Polly's buggered front door.

So far,
pre-Polly, his record duration for a relationship had been around six months
before the rot set in. He had been with Polly for a year now. He or she was on
borrowed time.

Seymour opened
his eyes again and studied a faithful crack in the decaying plaster ceiling. A
tuft of horsehair, just visible, made it seem organic, yet dead and mummified.
Sometimes when the windows were open the hair would move. He could have sworn
it was growing.

'Bitch,' he muttered as he slapped the quilt and caught a waft of
Polly's sweetness.

The Meeting

Seymour and
Polly met in Brighton just after Madeleine Reece-Jones, a local minor socialite
celebrity, had thrown Seymour out for attempting to shag her mother. In his
defence, he claimed that it had been an accident. He'd forgotten she was
staying with them, it was dark, he was drunk, she felt and smelt the same as
Madeleine and besides, she didn't object. Madeleine just wouldn't understand.
Still, it just went to show how ridiculously insensitive and selfish she really
was. He was better off without her and her money.

He had sworn to
himself that that was it, no more relationships, no more lies, no more
compromising, no more depending on other people to live. They always let you
down in the end anyway. He would get a job, develop his work, make a bit of
money, travel - whatever. The very idea of it all petrified him, but driven by
the lack of options and imminent destitution, he answered a small ad in the
Brighton Bugle, a small parochial newspaper that boasted headlines like “Parking
space fury!”

“Night watchman
required, free accommodation, good rate of pay, must be experienced,” it said.

With the help of
the few tips on interviewing skills he'd picked up at the Job Centre twenty
years before when he'd had a previous close brush with reality, the whole process
of getting the job went surprisingly well.

It was the
perfect job for someone of Seymour's calibre and within two days he was living
in a musty little caravan under the entrance section of the West Pier, recently
destroyed by a mysterious but convenient fire that had turned it from a once
majestic icon of the Victorian era into an embarrassing political hot potato.

What he was
guarding against, he wasn't sure. Vandals? A vandal could do nothing but
improve its condemned, rusty frame. Thieves? Help yourselves, nobody wanted
it. His job was pointless and matched his qualifications perfectly.

The caravan was
disgusting, having been inhabited by several of his predecessors in the past,
all of whom had left their unwholesome mark in some form. The damp, dank stench
of sweat, beer farts, rancid socks and cigarettes would live there forever,
soaked into the itchy nylon upholstery and sticky plywood.

Outside, the
caravan was caged in a small fenced compound full of abandoned bad ideas and
was sheltered by a decaying, dripping concrete structure that had once served
as the entrance to the pier. The slightest breeze was amplified by sea walls
and sea front buildings, and howled through the sides of the compound. A
blessing on warm days, but cruel on cold nights.

Just outside the
compound, on the promenade, rickety stalls appeared in the early hours manned
by various sub-culture characters selling their wares. Seymour watched as
strolling punters suddenly found themselves becoming customers, drawn in, Seymour
suspected, by the romantic whiff of the fringe dwellers who served them. It was
here that Seymour opened his first gallery. He had never attempted to sell his
work before, beyond exchanging it for long overdue debts. It had never occurred
to him, but the opportunity, staring him in the face, was obvious even to him.
He had managed to salvage a few paintings from Madeleine's house after her
ridiculous outburst; some were lacerated beyond recognition by her lashing
talons, others were repairable. But he needed more stock.

The spooky
environment that was now his home and workplace was strangely inspiring,
possibly due to the groaning spirits that wandered around the old pier in the
dead of night, the strolling masses that ambled past him by day, and the new-found
liberation he had thrust upon himself.

Within a just a
fortnight he had pulled together a healthy body of work. He had set up shop
next to Sean, a rough but amiable retired blacksmith from Glasgow, who sold
bizarre metal animal sculptures fashioned by welding rusty nuts, bolts and cogs
together. On his other side was Tracy, a large handsome gypsy- looking woman,
who read Tarot cards.

Tracy had been
largely responsible for Seymour's newly found dynamic spirit. On his very first
morning of waking up in the caravan she had knocked on the caravan door with a
cup of disgusting flask coffee. He later learned that it wasn't because she
fancied him, which of course was the conclusion that he had jumped to, despite
the fact she had never laid eyes on him before. Which, it must be said, never
occurred to him. No, the few stall-holders who set up there, as a matter of
course, always welcomed the new night watchmen. They had no permits and were
convinced that bribery would secure their immediate future. Truth was, the Brighton
council didn't give a damn about them, provided they didn't cause any trouble.
In fact they were unofficially glad of them, as it was possible they might
divert attention from the embarrassing skeleton of a pier that was, and always
would be, in the council's 'too hard’ basket.