The Art School Dance (28 page)

This is how
McCready had found himself with me, not by wanting to be with me
and straining to make it so but simply by chancing to be in the
right place at the right time. What was especially annoying, to
Griff, was that there had not even been any cleverness involved, no
question of playing hard to get; McCready had simply been
unconcerned, prepared to let things happen, and I had been drawn to
him.

Lucky dog!

*

Ahead of Griff
the art school loomed. Mounting the first flight of steps, then a
second, he turned towards the main entrance and saw McCready at the
balcony which jutted out from the second floor common room.

He was
waving.

‘
Pillock,’ Griff grumbled, and refused to return the
greeting. Hurrying into the building, signing his name in the
register which was at the office counter, he took the stairs two at
a time to confront McCready as he was stepping from the balcony
into the common room.

‘
It was
you, wasn’t it?’

‘
What
was me?’ asked McCready, walking over to the coffee machine and
dropping a coin into the slot.

As Griff
glowered he wondered what anyone could find attractive in McCready.
He was so skinny, he had wrists as brittle as parched twigs and
knees like knots in pieces of string; his nose was too big, he had
a wispy beard which ran along a narrow fertile line around his jaw
and his hair was already beginning to thin at the front.

‘
You’re
the stupid bugger who's been spraying ‘silly tree’ all over town,
aren’t you? Admit it.’

McCready
turned with a smile, a cup of coffee in his hand. ‘But I’m an
artist, Griff, not a vandal. What you’re accusing me of would be
criminal, not allowed, an up-before-the-magistrates job.’

‘
It
didn’t stop you, though, did it?’ Griff sat, slumping heavily into
one of the common room chairs. From his manner it might have been
thought that they were all his, the post boxes and lamp standards
and telephone kiosks he had seen sprayed with green paint, but it
wasn’t the vandalism which had him annoyed, but the idea, the fact
that it was McCready’s idea and the possibility -the very great
possibility- that it might be greeted favourably in some quarters
of the college. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he asked again.

Still
grinning, McCready walked over to the window. ‘You go back a
thousand years or so, Griff, and there’d be nothing out there but
trees, silly things if you’re innocent enough to see them that way,
all fluffy at the top and gnarled at the bottom, but nonetheless
tress as we know them. Now we’ve got all those other things
springing up out of our concrete oasis and they're even sillier
things.’ He turned. ‘You see my point?’

The point was
further emphasised by the ‘trees’ which McCready had recently
erected on the college lawn, not trees at all but three foot high
fibreglass cones, painted brown at the pointed and green at the
blunt end, only trees in as much that McCready had said they were,
his assertion given confirmation by his quote from Magritte that
‘any shape whatever may replace the image of an object’.

‘
You’re
out of your bloody mind,’ said Griff. ‘Off your trolley.
Insane.’

McCready gave
a shrug of the shoulders. ‘But who’s to say who’s sane and who
isn't? There’s always that to consider, isn’t there?’

Griff scowled
and stamped off, takes the lift to the fifth floor, had barely
begun working when McCready appeared again. He disappeared into the
den which he had presently commandeered from me, came out again
within seconds lugging a large canvas sack after him.

‘
Give us
a hand, Griff, help me lower this down to the lawn,’ he asked,
dragging the sack to an open window and tying a length of nylon
climbing rope to its neck.

‘
Can’t
you just carry it down?’ said Griff, impatient to get on with his
work.

‘
It
weighs a ton. Come on, it won’t take us a minute.’

Griff went
over, took hold of the rope with McCready and helped lower the bag
out of the window.

‘
What’s
inside?’ he asked.

‘
Letters.’

‘
Post
office letters?’ Griff wondered, for like me he had come across
such faded red sacks before, had felt their weight bite into his
shoulder on cold early mornings before Christmas.

‘
No.
Hardboard letters.’

‘
Ah,’
Griff nodded, as if he understood.

They lowered
the rope foot by foot until it suddenly went slack.

McCready
swore. ‘Shit. The bloody thing must be caught on a ledge.’

Apparently.
Judging by the amount of rope that remained coiled at their feet
the sack was still some way from the ground. They pulled in two or
three feet of rope, straining again against the weight of the
sack.

‘
Right.
Now drop it,’ said McCready.

‘
Drop
it?’

‘
Drop
it. It can’t have far to fall.’

The rope was
released and they watched it snake swiftly out of the window, then
heard the faint tinkle of glass, not very loud, perhaps three
floors below.

‘
Shit! A
window!’

‘
Probably,’ Griff agreed. ‘I don’t recall there ever being a
greenhouse down there on the front lawn.’

McCready
cursed Griff, not appreciating the humour of the situation, and
hurriedly bundled the rest of the rope out of the window. He moved
away, more worried about the loss of the letters than he was about
any damage which might have been done. Griff, for his part, was
secretly quite pleased by the turn of events and returned to his
own work with renewed enthusiasm; whatever the idea might have been
behind the letters in the sack, it was one which would not now come
to fruition, one at least which would not be met with the crackpot
approval of anyone in college.

*

That evening in
the canteen McCready was too anxious to eat the food before him, so
Ceri and Griff shared it between them.

‘
It’s
still not there,’ he said, ducking his head in from the window.
‘The bag still isn’t there.’

‘
Well it
won’t be, will it?’ said Ceri, thoughtfully sucking on a chicken
bone. ‘No, I think we can safely assume that it’s going to be held
until someone claims it and accepts responsibility for the damage.’
He laughed. ‘A tidy little sum that’s going to be, too, the cost of
replacing the window.’

McCready found
little comfort in his words; he turned to me, but I could offer him
none.

‘
Cheer
up,’ said Griff, enjoying his agitation. ‘You can always cut out
some more letters, can’t you?’

‘
Of
course he can’t,’ Ceri pointed out. ‘If he does then they’ll know
who broke the window.’

‘
Ah.
Yes.’

McCready
sighed and swore, asked if none of us could come up with a sensible
answer to his predicament. Though fingers scratched chins and
stroked jaws the obvious gestures did nothing to appease him. Griff
stared out at the sunset, as if the answer might be written out by
the semaphore clouds or the birds on the telephone wires; Ceri
faced the other way, looking in the direction of the canteen
entrance; I held McCready’s hand in mine, patting it as I would
that of a sick child or an ageing parent.

It was Ceri
who finally offered a solution of sorts.

‘
Why
don't you just walk up to him, apologise profusely and take the bag
from him?’

‘
Walk up
to him? Walk up to who?’

Ceri grinned.
‘Teacher. He’s just stepped through the door, looking like Santa
Claus with a big red sack slung over his shoulder.’

Groaning,
McCready covered his face and through his interlaced fingers saw
the bulky figure of the Principal make its laboured way across the
room, the sack swaying as he struggled with it and bruising the
shoulders of the diners he passed. Coming to rest at last his
sweating face was almost the colour of the ginger shock of hair
which covered his head, cheeks and chin. His mouth could barely be
seen to move behind the whiskers as he spoke.

‘
Bonjour, mes enfants
,’ he beamed.

‘
Afternoon, Teach.’

‘
How
goes it, boss?’

I said
‘hello’, too, and there was just one greeting missing; McCready
could sense Teacher’s eyes on him.

‘
Et voila
,
McCready.
Votre lettres
.’

‘
Huh?’
said McCready, taking his hands from his eyes.

‘
Votre lettres
,
Mac. French letters!’

Laughing,
dropping the sack noisily to the floor, Teacher sat down, mopping
sweat from his brow and flicking it away to land in someone’s
soup.

‘
Letters, Teach?’

‘
And
bloody heavy they are, too,’ Teacher complained, not taken in by
the wide-eyed look of innocence. ‘I must say, they scared the shit
out of poor Edith Billington when they plummeted through her
window.’

‘
Not
hurt, was she?’ I asked, faking concern to try to shift the
Principal’s attention from McCready.

‘
No.
Just shaken a bit. Bloody hell it’s rich, though! She was preparing
a lecture on Jean Tinguely and auto-destructive sculpture at the
time!’

We laughed
when he laughed, then accepted his offer of coffee.

‘
Joan!’
he bellowed. ‘Let's have five coffees, there’s a love!’

‘
Righto!’ came the reply from the kitchen, and while we
waited Teacher professed an interest in what McCready intended to
do with the letters.

‘
I’d
rather not say just yet, Teach.’

The Principal
nodded. ‘And quite right, too. There are too many bloody
plagiarists in this place.’

Joan came from
the kitchen and crossed to our table. As she was about to set down
the five cups of coffee, though, smiling at Teacher, she saw Ceri
and her face turned to thunder.

‘
You-!’

The canteen
was Joan’s life, the object of such pride that when all was well
with it she would sit back, her bosom supported on her folded arms
and her chins resting one on top of the other, and smile in
appreciation of the polished surfaces of the ordered tables, in
admiration of the glistening cutlery and the unblemished stainless
steel of the serving area which gave such perfect reflections. If
all was not well, though, if there was the slightest stain to
tarnish the clinical neatness of her realm, then those parts of her
body which relied on each other for support became flashing
pendulous things, swinging dangerously as she scrubbed and scoured
at every offensive mark.

Those
pendulous parts now trembled with anger and disgust as she set eyes
on Ceri.

‘
You
were sick in my refectory!’ she reminded him. ‘Mr Teacher, this boy
threw up in my kitchen!’

Ceri shrugged;
he didn’t remember, he was quite pissed at the time.

‘
Really,
Joan?’ said Teacher. ‘Well I’m sure he doesn’t blame
you.’

This was not
the response the canteen manageress had expected. ‘But-’

‘
It
could have been anything, a pint of milk gone off, a tainted tin of
meat. Don’t you fret about it.’

‘
But
he-’ Joan began again, but then thought better of pursuing the
subject, walked away muttering to herself.

‘
Poor
woman. Far too worrying. Now, does anyone care for some of
Teacher’s ‘Teachers’ to perk up this slop she calls
coffee?’

We held out
our chipped white cups and Teacher took his flask from his pocket,
splashed a generous measure in each.

‘
Cheers,’ we saluted, as he downed his in one gulp. The
coffee was lukewarm, as usual, but he smacked his lips around the
taste of the whisky, then seemed to smile -the twitching of the
whiskers suggested as much- as he got to his feet.

‘
Anyway,
McCready, when the bill for the window comes along do your best to
pay it, there’s a good lad,’ he said, and went off chuckling,
slapping backs and stealing chips as he passed, sauntering along
like everyone’s best friend.

Chapter
Four

‘Please,
Mr Grundy, not so hard!’ the young girl Karen protested, as the
tutor scrubbed vigorously at her nipple with a coarse hog-hair
brush which flashed like a sword, a titanium white blur. It might
have been her actual breast that was being assaulted, rather than
its image on canvas, as she begged, ‘Please, not so
rough!’

Elongated like
an El Greco saint, hunched over the painting and peering at it
closely with sunken eyes, Walter heard nothing other than the
excited thumping of his own heart. The girl is one of those sweet
young creatures from the foundation course, the sort he always
preferred, fresh from a convent or boarding school and so easily
impressed, so totally accommodating. She had been flattered at
being asked to pose, and an ideal model for Walter, with hardly any
breasts at all. He paused to consider his progress, hollowed out
his cheeks as he sucked on the end of the brush then tickled the
moist strawberry nipple of the flat-chested girl with the tip of a
sable. The soft give of the canvas fired him and he switched again
to the larger coarser brush, struck out so wildly that the painting
shook on its easel.

The girl spoke
his name softly, almost with intimacy, in awe of his creative
fervour. When he failed to respond she slipped from her stool and
padded naked towards him. Her bare feet on the tiled floor were
quiet, he was unaware that his subject had moved until the next
broad sweep of his arm brought the brush slashing across her
breast, the genuine article this time.