The Art School Dance (37 page)

‘
That’s
okay. Just don’t talk to any more strangers while I go off for a
pee.’

‘
Yes
dear. Whatever you think best, dear.’

‘
I
should’ve twatted the bloke,’ McCready told Griff, as they stood
side by side in the gents.

‘
No,’
Griff said. ‘That’s the wrong attitude. This is Ceri’s birthday,
you don’t want to go causing any bother.’

‘
No,
suppose not,’ McCready agreed, accepting that this was the sensible
way, but he failed to keep Griff’s advice in mind, for outside the
pub at midnight he tried to pick a fight with another who he
thought was being a little too friendly towards me. There was much
pushing and shoving, a cocktail of voices, threats and advice and
incoherent screeches, but this all subsided when a cruising police
car pulled up. Apologies and excuses were then exchanged, cautions
and promises offered, hands were shaken and vows made to let
bygones be bygones in order to preserve Ceri’s party spirit.
Reasonable enough, the police accepted, and drove away, but by this
time the reason for the party spirit had gone missing.

‘
Where’s
Ceri?’ someone asked.

‘
There.’

‘
Where?’

‘
Over
that car.’

At the end of
the road, just visible in the amber glow of the street lights, Ceri
could be seen running over the tops of parked cars. A group of us
chased after him, McCready and Griff reaching him first and pulling
him to the ground. When he smiled up at them his boozy breath
scorched their faces.

‘
What
the hell do you think you’re doing?’ McCready demanded, giving him
a shake. ‘There’s a police car on the prowl, you know.’

‘
Fuck
em,’ said Ceri. ‘Come on, let’s see if you wimps are up to
it.’

‘
Up to
what?’

‘
Gerrover a car in three strides. Hop,
skip'n'jump.'’

No one else
was quite that drunk, not even McCready, so Ceri shrugged himself
free and was off again, galloping like a shire horse in the general
direction of home. Once on the bonnet, once on the roof, once on
the boot he went, or took them in reverse order depending on which
way the car was facing. His head bobbed in and out of sight between
the parked vehicles a time or two, and then there was a scream as
he disappeared completely from view; because the scream came from
Ceri, though, no one took it seriously, and the rest of us just
sauntered along at the same steady pace. When we reached Ceri he
was lying on the ground at the rear of a mustard yellow
Volkswagen.

He was moaning
pitifully. ‘Fucking Beetle. No fucking boot.’

‘
Serves
you right,’ said Griff, taking his arm and lifting him to his
feet.

Ceri screamed
again and collapsed to the floor.

‘
Come
on, Ceri,’ said McCready, going to help Griff. ‘That police car
will be back soon so stop pissing about.’

‘
Leg!’
Ceri yelled. ‘Leglegleg!’

Rose thought
he might actually be hurt, Griff believed he was faking, and each
time anyone tries to move him he screamed all the louder.

I knelt down
and looked at his leg. ‘He just might be hurt,’ I said. ‘Is this a
bit sticking out?’

Bone breaking
through the fabric of his jeans? The others crouched around to get
a closer look, someone gingerly prodded Ceri’s thigh until he
cursed us all away.

‘
For
fuck’s sake get me an ambulance!’ he screamed.

‘
Perhaps
we ought to do, just to be on the safe side,’ Griff suggested, and
there followed a general discussion about whether or not we
should.

Rose, sobering
up more quickly than the rest of us, went off in search of a
telephone, found the discussion still in progress when she
returned. Ceri was moaning, now, rather than screaming, and Griff,
sickened by the sight of the damaged leg, was throwing up in the
gutter.

She took off
her poncho and draped it over Ceri.

‘
I’ve
not snuffed it yet,’ he said.

‘
I’m
trying to keep you warm, arse hole!’

‘
Then
come a bit closer, give me your body heat,’ he drooled, then
grimaced as another wave of pain washed over him.

Rose did move
closer, though, knelt at his side, but only to brush the hair back
from his face and stroke his brow.

‘
Compassionate, isn’t she?’ said McCready, with a strangely
wistful expression. ‘Erotic, too, in a way, hovering at his side
like an angel of death.’

‘
Sober
up, McCready,’ I told him.

‘
Those
dark glossy lips, the deep shadows around her eyes, you could
imagine her kissing him and sucking out his soul.’

I ignored him,
stood at the pavement’s edge, looking out for the ambulance.
Finally it arrived and Ceri was manoeuvred onto a stretcher.

‘
Right,
who’s coming with him?’ asked one of the paramedics, when Ceri had
been loaded into the vehicle, but no one answers. ‘Well someone
needs to come along.’

‘
Griff
and McCready,’ Rose volunteered. ‘You’re his closest
friends.’

‘
Friends? He doesn’t have any,’ said Griff.

‘
Don’t
be so nasty! Go with him!’

‘
Go on,’
I urged McCready, and reluctantly they went.

*

For the first
hour Ceri lay in the casualty department, being reassured by the
two of them; two hours after his arrival he was still there,
mumbling incoherently while Griff dozed on a trolley and McCready
searched the corridors for a coffee machine; three hours pass and
there was still little sign of action other than a petite blonde
nurse who gave a shimmy of the hips whenever she walked past
them.

They were both
cursing when they finally arrived home, McCready angrily kicking
open the door as soon as Griff turned the key in the lock. Rose
came out of her room on hearing them.

‘
What
kept you so long?’

‘
The
bastard was so drunk they couldn’t do anything with him,’ McCready
told her. ‘They’re still waiting for him to sober up.’

Rose laughed,
raised the cup of coffee she held. ‘Either of you want one?’

‘
Not for
me, I’m getting straight to bed,’ said McCready.

‘
Ah,
well you ought to know that Virginia’s been sick, then,’ Rose told
him, as he started to climb the stairs to the attic. ‘Must have
been too much drink, she threw up in the bathroom. Right after
she’d popped her pill, too.’ There was a wicked delight in her
tone, the suggestion of a laugh waiting to escape as she said, ‘No
nookie for you tonight, McCready.’

‘
I
wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ he spat back, stamping on up the
stairs.

‘
Oh
dear,’ Rose tut-tutted.

As McCready
strode into the bedroom I told him I’d heard what he said.

‘
Heard
what?’

‘
What
you said to Rose. Here am I, sick as a pig, and all you can think
about is your nightly fuck.’

‘
That’s
not true,’ he said, beginning to undress. ‘I didn’t think what I
was saying.’

‘
Liar.’

‘
It just
came out.’

‘
You
selfish unfeeling bastard.’

‘
Oh sod
it! Fucking well sod it!’ McCready cursed, kicking his feet beneath
the blankets to get into bed.

One blanket
remained stubbornly wrapped around his foot and in his temper he
kicked out more wildly, at the bed, at the floor, at thin air and
at the bedside table on which stood my old oil lamp. The lamp hit
the bare floorboards, inches to the right of the rug, and its
dimpled glass sphere shattered into fragments, in the myriad
reflections I could see the two of us on our first night together,
regarding the lamp as if it was something more than functional,
something more than decorative. As if it had some special
significance for me.

I’d told
McCready that it had been a gift from a friend, a friend who was
gone. Well so was that person’s memory now.

Gone

*

Of course I
forgave McCready. I always forgave McCready, it was the one habit
which typified our relationship, but on this particular occasion he
didn’t even notice. There was a meekness about his mood the
following morning, a sadness about mine which was rather swamped by
a sickly hangover, but his spirits were quickly lifted when he
arrives in college to find the letter waiting for him.

In the common
room, by the pigeon holes, he read through the letter twice, read
it again in the studio, making a point of doing so in full view of
Griff.

The smile on
his face was a worrying thing.

‘
Good
news?’ guessed Griff.

‘
Sort
of. I’m having a show,’ McCready answered, and named a well-known,
well-respected London gallery.

‘
A show?
You mean like an exhibition?’ Griff gave a derisory laugh,
dismissing the notion as too ridiculous. ‘Come off it, McCready.
You don’t have anything to show. You don’t have any
paintings.’

‘
So?’

‘
So!
What're you going to exhibit? Not your twelve foot Hamlet, copied
out word for bloody word and scene for boring bloody
scene?’

Executed in
pen and ink of canvas, excused by McCready as an exercise in
narrative art.

'Your silly
trees?

‘
No.’

‘
What,
then?’

‘
The
walls.’

‘
The
gallery walls? Suffering saints tonight!’ Griff shouted out, to the
studio and its occupants. ‘The berk’s going to have an exhibition
of an empty gallery!’

The sarcastic
words of congratulation murmured by those present were gratefully
accepted by McCready, who grinned smugly and said that the gallery
would not be empty but would be littered -his word- with the work
of Hockney or Hamilton or whoever was showing at the time; while
that person was exhibiting their customarily banal stuff, he,
McCready, would be exhibiting the vacant spaces between.

Griff thought
it was crazy, he would never get away with it, no self-respecting
gallery or artist would ever permit it.

‘
But
they already have,’ said McCready, making the expensive notepaper
crackle as he waved the letter beneath his friend’s nose.
‘Everything is arranged. There’ll be posters up stating that while
this other chap, whoever he is, is exhibiting his paintings I will
be showing the parts of the wall that are left visible.’

This idea,
even more than any previous one, grievously offends Griff’s sense
of values or aesthetics or whatever it was he held dear; it was
nothing more than a con trick, he complained, it had nothing
whatsoever to do with art.

McCready
laughed. ‘And what do you know about art, Griff? You surely don’t
class those sickly romantic nudes of yours as art, do you?’

‘
Ha! At
least I know which end of a brush to stick in the
paint!’

‘
So you
need a brush and paint to produce a work of art, do
you?’

No, of course
not, Griff had not intended to suggest this, but he was too annoyed
for reasoned argument. ‘You know, McCready, your ideas nauseate me
at times. They really turn my stomach.’

‘
Which
is just how your paintings affect the rest of us,’ McCready
countered, looking at the latest nude study of Pam, all pastel
pinks and greys, almost monochromatic.

Incensed,
Griff took a step forward, menacing. McCready did likewise,
following a threatening choreography, and things might have turned
nasty if Barney hadn’t entered the studio in time to understand
what the argument was about.

He inserted
himself between them, quite delighted that his students should feel
so strongly about their work, said, ‘Now, now lads. Constructive
criticism, remember. It must always be constructive criticism in
preference to brawling.’

This from the
man who had given a colleague a bloody nose and a black eye.

‘
Well!’
Griff complained. ‘You just wait until you hear his latest
idea!’

‘
I did
hear, as a matter of fact, and I think it’s quite
interesting-’

‘
Jee-sus! I might have known!’

‘
-interesting if only because it poses the question as to
what is a work of art.’

Tempers
subsided at Barney’s insistence, Griff and McCready were encouraged
to sit down, which they did cautiously, as if their anger was
escaping slowly from over-inflated bodies.

Barney pulled
one of Griff’s paintings from a stack by the wall. ‘Now take this
painting-’

‘
As far
away as possible,’ McCready quipped.

‘
Now,
McCready!’ Barney cautioned.

‘
Sorry.’

Barney placed
the canvas like a barrier between the two students, just in case
tempers should flare again. ‘The painting. Look at it,’ he
insisted. ‘Now if I say that it’s so many feet by so many feet, am
I making a statement about an art object?’

There was
silence.

‘
Come
on!’ he pressed. ‘Well?’

Griff said,
‘I’d like to think so.’

McCready
shrugged. ‘Can we make statements about anything in this world, art
or otherwise?’ he asked, in accordance with his doctrine of eternal
uncertainty; it was usually effective in evading an argument.