The Art School Dance (29 page)

‘
Now
look what you’ve done,’ she said, like a mother scolding a child,
and standing beside him, her hip against the rough tweed of his
shoulder, she leaned across him to pick up a cloth. She rubbed it
against her body, smearing the paint around to give a chiaroscuro
shadow which made her breast seem larger than it was.

‘
It’s
McCready who’s got you so worked up, isn’t it?’ she said, hoping to
be contradicted, hoping to be told that it was the sight of her
naked body which had him inspired to fever pitch.

He
admitted nothing, but she was right, it
was
McCready who had him rattled. She sighed and
rested against him, fighting an impulse to curl a comforting arm
around his shoulder.

‘
Those
letters he’s got scattered across the front lawn,’ she said. ‘What
are they all about? I mean, I know what they say, but what do they
mean?’

What
they said was ‘
This was green, this is yellow
’, in twelve inch hardboard type. What they
actually meant was another matter altogether and open to
interpretation. McCready claimed that the simple sentence
constituted a complex art work, conceived and begun by him but left
to nature to complete and bring to fruition. The sun would shine
down, weather permitting, and the grass beneath the hardboard
letters would lose its colour, fade. Then, when McCready made a
triumphant reappearance and removed the letters the message would
be there on the lawn itself for all to see:
This was green, this is
yellow
.

But what did
it mean? What did it say?

That nature
imitated art?

And was it?
Art?

Walter seethed
at the effrontery of it all and his hand shook visibly as he
clenched his paintbrush.

Karen tutted
and gave a soft laugh, said, ‘Just look at me. I’m a painted
lady.’

Walter looked,
was aware for the first time of the paint he had smeared across her
body and took the cloth from her to help clean it away.

‘
And
I’ll stink of oil,’ she added, moving her pancake breast a little
closer to his face. Who knew what was in the child’s mind, what her
next move might have been if Ron hadn’t come barging into the
room.

‘
Mr
Grundy! Mr Grundy!’ the cleaner cried, caught his breath
momentarily at the sight of the naked girl who was almost in the
lap of the tutor but was too excited by other matters to hold his
silence for long. ‘Mr Grundy! He
has
got a chicken down there in the studio! I’ve heard it just
now!’

‘
Then go
tell the Principal,’ said Walter, bundling Karen away from
him.

‘
I can’t
find him, Mr Grundy. He’s nowhere to be seen.’

Teacher had,
in fact, hidden himself away in Rose’s sensory deprivation centre
once again, but this was know only to a few people.

‘
Mr
Goode, then,’ Walter suggested.

‘
He’s
still on paternity leave,’ the cleaner reminded him.

Of course.
Which was why there were so many paintings to be found in the
studio, studies from the naked model and from still life.

‘
Very
well then, come on,’ Walter sighed, and led the way from his room,
down the narrow staircase to the painting studio.

They marched
into the studio, Walter tall and thin and piping like a reed, Ron
shuffling along at his side, coughing and wheezing as he struggled
to keep up.

‘
Down at
the end, Mr Grundy,’ said Ron. ‘That’s where he is.’

‘
Alright, Ron. Let’s see.’

They hurried
down the studio like a double act late for a show. Griff, working
on his painting of Pam, was so intrigued by their urgency that he
dropped his brush into a jar of turps, pulled a chair into the
centre of the room and sat down to watch. Pam shared the seat with
him, a gown wrapped around her for the sake of decency.

Walter and Ron
came to a halt outside my den.

‘
McCready!’ cried Walter. ‘Come out of there!’

‘
Cluck
cluck,’ was the faint reply.

‘
There
you are!’ said Ron exultantly, and jumped up and down in delight,
his brown overalls flapping excitedly. ‘I told you he had a chicken
in there! I told you!’

‘
Okay,
Ron, calm down.’ Walter patted Ron on the shoulder, then shouted at
the den. ‘McCready! You’ve got a chicken in there, haven’t
you?’

‘
No!’
McCready shouted back.

‘
He has!
He's a bloody liar!’

Walter told
Ron to be quiet, then shouted out his accusation a second time.

A second time
McCready professed his innocence.

‘
So come
out and let’s see!’ Walter challenged.

‘
No!’

‘
Then
I’m coming in!’

There was a
pause, a moment of deliberation, then McCready said, ‘Don’t! I’m
coming out!’

Walter and Ron
smiled at each other as they listened to the rustlings from inside
the den.

‘
That’s
a chicken if ever I heard one, Mr Grundy.’

‘
No,
Ron, that’s McCready.’

McCready
emerged, blinking in the daylight, grinning at Walter and scowling
at Ron. ‘I can’t spare much time, Walter. I’m very busy.’

‘
Aren’t
we all?’ said Walter, thinking of young Karen waiting for him
upstairs, and gestured to Ron beside him. ‘He reckons you’ve got a
chicken in that den of yours.’

‘
A
chicken? That’s silly.’

‘
So
what’s clucking, then?’

‘
Clucking, Walter?’

Clucking. A crazy staccato chatter. ‘
Cluckcluckcluckcluck
.’

There was a
sudden flurry of activity behind McCready and the black polythene
of the den was forced outwards, stretching first and then tearing.
Ron yelled triumphantly as a chicken squeezed through the
ever-growing hole.

‘
Don’t
just stand there! Grab the fucking thing!’ McCready
yelled.

Walter and Ron
broke into a comical jig, trying to escape the hungry beak which
pecked at the floor, and Griff and his model applauded as McCready
threw himself to the ground, grabbing the chicken by a leg and
fighting to get it under control while its screeches echoed about
the studio.

‘
There,
there,’ he said, smoothing the bird’s ruffled feathers.

‘
I said
all along he had a chicken in there,’ Ron gloated.

‘
Piss
off!’ McCready cursed, thrusting the chicken towards Ron’s face,
and the cleaner leapt back, away from the claws which lashed
out.

‘
Alright, Ron, you can go now,’ said Walter. ‘I’ll handle
this.’

Gratefully Ron
moved away, muttering as he walked down the studio: ‘I knew he had
a chicken in there. I bloody knew it.’

McCready
cursed him loudly, Griff congratulated him for ‘shopping’ McCready,
but he was unaffected by either; he just tossed his head and
continued on his way.

‘
Right,
McCready,’ said Walter.

‘
Yes,
Walter?’

‘
The
chicken. It can’t stay.’

McCready
hugged the bird to his chest. ‘But it has to. It’s my life
model.’

‘
Don’t
be stupid, McCready. It can’t be.’

‘
Why
not? It’s live, isn’t it?’

‘
You’re
supposed to be working from a
life
model, a naked homo erectus, not a
live
model, a chicken or whatever other creature might
take your fancy.’

‘
Now
you’re just quibbling, Walter,’ McCready smiled. ‘Splitting hairs.
Or feathers.’

Walter
patiently pointed out the impracticality of using a chicken as a
life model, dwelt on the difficulties of keeping livestock in the
painting studio, the cruelty done to the creature by confining it
in the dark claustrophobic atmosphere of my black polythene den.
McCready nodded, accepting the relevance of each point, apparently
swayed by the tutor’s arguments.

‘
So?’
said Walter hopefully.

‘
So we
need to make it more comfortable up here, give it a healthier
environment.’

‘
Bloody
hell, McCready! Be reasonable!’ Walter pleaded, his hands clenched
tightly at his side to contain his frustration.

‘
No,
Walter, you be reasonable. If you want me working from life then I
will, but I choose the subject. The alternative is for me to go
back to the old ways, Barney’s ways, painting is a redundant
activity and all that guff. Which would you rather see, Walter,
paintings around the studio or sheaves of notes arguing against
them?’

Walter needed
his acolytes, he needed students working his way to justify the
salary he received.

‘
Paintings,’ he admitted. ‘Even paintings of chickens. You
have to keep the thing under control, though,’ he warned, ‘if only
to pacify Ron and keep him off my back.’

‘
Right,’
McCready agreed, nuzzling the bird to his chest, assuring it that
everything would be fine. ‘I could build a hutch for it, or
whatever it is that chickens are kept in. What
do
you keep chickens in, Walter?’

Walter
shrugged, impatient to get back to his study. ‘Search me.’

‘
I’ll
need your help with it, of course,’ McCready added.

‘
My
help? I’m senior lecturer in fine art, McCready, not the bloody odd
job man. Get the timber from sculpture and do it
yourself.’

‘
But Jim
won’t give me any. You’ll have to persuade him for me.’

‘
Come
on,’ Walter sighed.

McCready
secured the chicken and the two of them took the lift downstairs to
the basement, where they had to pinch their nostrils against the
smoke and dust as they entered the sculpture studio. It was an
inferno of a place when busy, noisy with saws and electric drills,
dangerously bright with the sparks from welding torches. Stepping
carefully over lengths of timber and scraps of metal, they went to
Jim’s office.

When they
entered Jim was seated on his camp bed, pulling on a pair of
socks.

‘
Surely
not just getting up?’ McCready joked. ‘It’s almost midday,
Jim.’

A nervous man,
pale faced and timid because of the sheltered gloom of his chosen
habitat, Jim was the type to blink anxiously when confronted by
daylight or caught unawares. He started when McCready spoke.

‘
Oh,
it’s you,’ he said, pushing his feet into a tattered pair of
slippers. ‘And no, smart arse, I haven’t just got up. If you must
know I’ve been over to the polytechnic’s sports centre for a
shower.’ He hitched his trousers more comfortably about his waist,
asked suspiciously, ‘What do you want?’

McCready
looked about the office, taking in the wardrobe, the prints which
decorated the walls, the Calor Gas cooker in one corner. ‘I must
say, Jim, you’ve got the place done up quite nicely now. It looks
more like a home from home every time I come down here.’

‘
Cut the
bullshit, McCready. What do you want?’

‘
He
needs some timber,’ Walter intervened, wanting to be done with the
affair and get back upstairs to his painting.

Jim shook his
head. ‘No chance, Walter. He’s had enough off me already this term.
The materials down here are for sculpture.’

‘
They’re
for fine art, they come from the common requisition,’ Walter
pointed out.

‘
It’s
for my chicken hutch,’ McCready explained.

‘
For a
piece of sculpture,’ Walter corrected him.

‘
Come
on, Jim, just a little bit of wood,’ McCready begged.

‘
And how
much is a little, McCready?’

‘
Oh,
about a hundred and twenty five feet of timber.’

‘
A
hundred and-!’

‘
And the
chicken wire to cover it.’

Walter gasped
as Jim did, his as much an expression of exasperation as of
surprise.

‘
It must
be a fucking big chicken,’ Jim blinked.

‘
It’s
for a piece of sculpture,’ Walter continued to insist.

‘
Of a
monumental kind,’ McCready smiled, and with all the ambition of a
Frank Lloyd Wright explained that the construction will be seven
feet high, seven feet wide and twelve feet long, large enough for
everything to be moved in there; himself, his work, the chicken,
everything.

*

Rose wondered
if McCready might be leaving. ‘Passing on’ was the particular
phrase she used, more dramatic than ‘moving on’, as if he might be
suffering from something more terminal than a love for me or an
innocent eccentricity.

I understood
her meaning, though.

Rose was in
the canteen, though the serving bay has closed, because Teacher had
once again sought refuge in her black box; I was there having a
late lunch of Joan’s congealed leftovers, late because I had been
waiting for McCready to collect me. A cold lager and a sandwich
were what he’d promised me; a lukewarm cup of tea and beans and
toast what I got. He, of course, had been all the while in the
sculpture studio with Jim, negotiating for materials for the
construction of his new den. Rose had overheard his plans.