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Authors: Hugh Fleetwood

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BOOK: The Beast
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RTK
: You say your characters ‘get what they want’. But I sometimes find myself wondering how they would manage to go on with their lives after the last page.

HF
: Well, that’s something we all have to deal with, isn’t it?

RTK
: Earlier you mentioned Patricia Highsmith as an influence on your writing. Highsmith famously said that she was ‘interested in the effect of guilt’ upon the heroes of her stories. Do you think you are interested in something similar?

HF
: No – not ‘guilt’, that’s not something I really
recognise
. I would say I’m interested in characters coming to terms with things, in themselves and in the world. It’s about their arriving at a knowledge, of murder, of death … And then they use this, and grow out of what they were. That’s a conscious theme of all my books.

RTK
: In your own life would you say you’ve had experiences that affected you in just this way?

HF
: I think for my generation a big part of it was growing up just after the war, in the shadow of that, which had a
profound effect on me, certainly, and from an early age. I remember, at school, reading accounts of concentration camps. And you were told this was what the Germans were capable of – or the Russians, in the case of the
gulags
. But these things weren’t dreadful because they were done by Russians or Germans. I thought, ‘This is what
human beings
are capable of.’ It led you to wonder how you would cope in that situation – cope, I mean, whether on one side or the other, whether one was in such a camp or running it.

The other main theme in my books, I suppose, is the ‘beauty and the beast’ element – that you have to have them both, you can’t have one without the other. Beauty without the beast is shallow, meaningless.

RTK
: Would you say it’s a necessary acknowledgement of evil in the world?

HF
: Not ‘evil’, just the facts of life. I don’t really ‘do’ evil (
laughs
). I hate the word ‘innocent’, too – I know what people mean by it but I just don’t buy it. There’s
ignorance
and then there’s knowledge, or there should be.

People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald
Crucifixion
in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.

RTK
: So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?

HF
: Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than
anyone
else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re
less
.

He stood over her with an ash-tray in his hand and his face shrivelled into a hideous little mask of fury; and as she watched him she repeated to herself, again and again: don’t answer him. Don’t, don’t, don’t answer him.

‘Look at you,’ he shrieked. ‘Fat, hideous, disgusting! I loathe you.’

Don’t answer him. Don’t don’t don’t answer him.

‘You’ve destroyed me! Everything I’ve ever tried to do you’ve made fun of! When your friends ring up it’s always “What are you doing?” and “How’s everything going?” But you never ask me, do you? You don’t care. You
want
to destroy me!’

Don’t answer him, she told herself. Don’t, whatever you do, answer him.

‘You just sit here all day and mock me! You hate me!’

Look at the room, she told herself. Look at the red worn sofa, at the flowery armchairs, at the wooden African statues, at the Indian table cloth and the china ornaments and the brown canvas curtains. Look at the view from the window, at the back of the building opposite. Look at him even; at his enormous brown eyes and his dark brown hair and his funny too-red mouth. Look at his body and remind
yourself how beautiful he is when he isn’t shrieking; look at his hands, look at his feet, look at his ears. Look at
anything
, everything; but don’t, don’t answer him.

‘You say I’m violent, but you’re violent in a different way, and your way’s much worse!’

Don’t answer him.

‘You think just because your life’s been ruined you’ve got to ruin mine.’

Don’t answer him.

‘You’re always finding jobs for other people, aren’t you? But you never find one for me. You want me to be a failure!’

Don’t don’t don’t, she told herself. But finally—as always—the temptation was too strong.

‘You wouldn’t want a job even if I found you one. You’re always telling me you don’t want to work.’

For a second, as he realized—and she did, too—that he had won, a look of triumph came into his face; which made her wonder, as she sometimes had before, if he was clinically insane. But then he stormed home for the kill.

‘I do want to work! I want to paint! But you won’t let me. You spend all your money on records and then tell me you’re too poor to buy me a single canvas.’

She couldn’t even struggle any longer. ‘I mean real work,’ she snapped crossly.

‘Painting’s real work!’

‘Work you earn money for.’

‘I could earn money with my paintings if you didn’t destroy them.’


You
destroy them.’

‘You make me destroy them.’

‘I don’t make you do anything. It’s by your own free will.’

‘It isn’t. You get me worked up like this and you know what I do when I am and you work me up just so I will do it.’

‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Liar. Weak, conceited, vain self-pitying liar. That’s what you are and that’s all you’ll ever be.’

And that, of course, was the cue for the contents of the ash-tray to be flung in her face …

She should have known the script by heart now, and been prepared for all that happened, yet she could never help wincing as the old butts fell in her hair and down the neck of her dress, and as the ash filled her eyes and mouth—just as she could never help, after she had wiped her eyes and mouth with the back of her hand, starting to whimper, ‘please stop it. Please stop it. I can’t bear it.’

‘Stop it,’ she cried, as he didn’t, and as the tears started to run down her cheeks.

‘Stop it,’ she cried as he got down on his knees and started to bang his head violently on the floor.

‘Stop it,’ she cried as he leapt to his feet and rushed from the room screaming ‘all right, I know what you want me to do.’

‘Stop it,’ she cried, more weakly now, as he returned to the room with the two paintings he had been working on for the last six weeks.

‘Stop it,’ she almost whispered as he lifted them into the air. ‘Stop it stop it stop it’ she chanted as he smashed them down on the back of a chair. ‘Stop it’ she cried as she saw he’d cut his finger on something and as he ripped the canvas to shreds with his hands.

And finally, after he had flung the pieces to the floor, flung himself on top of them, and spat up at her ‘I hope you’re satisfied now,’ she closed her eyes and whispered, but to herself now, ‘oh no, I can’t bear it.’

And she couldn’t bear it; this horror that was repeated every two months if she was lucky, and every ten days if she wasn’t. And she wasn’t, often. She couldn’t bear the ugliness, she couldn’t bear the squalor. She couldn’t bear seeing her son reduced to a jabbering lunatic, and she couldn’t bear seeing herself reduced to a tearful, quivering blob, with ashes and cigarette ends all over her. She couldn’t bear the scenes themselves, and she couldn’t bear their
aftermaths
. The silent recrimination, the looks of accusal, and ultimately the appalling—and again tearful—epilogue, as Mirko threw himself into her arms and begged her to tell him why he was so terrible, and to tell him what he could do to prevent such things happening again, and why he hated himself so much, and why he was so unfortunate, and unlucky, and wretched, and—and why, when she knew how he’d react, she had provoked him …

Oh no, she couldn’t bear it; and yet she couldn’t think of any solution. She didn’t even believe that there was any solution. She just saw them going on like this month after month, year after year, until—she didn’t know. And the real trouble was—and why she couldn’t envisage any solution—that though he was, possibly, slightly mad, he was also, in a way, right.

She
was
fat and disgusting—a colossal lake of a woman, a lake she kept continually filled with a steady drip of cakes, and candies, and chocolates—and she
did,
if not precisely make fun of him, always look at his paintings, and everything else he did, with an ironic eye, and she
did
take more—superficial—interest in what her friends were doing than in what he was doing. But then she cared for her friends less than she cared for him, and she didn’t want to take a superficial interest in what he did. She wanted to take a profound, immense, soaring interest in him, and she
wanted him to do something profound and immense and soaring to justify this interest. Yet—she wasn’t sure if she believed in the profound and immense and soaring, or, if she could manage it, whether she trusted it. Wasn’t the superficial not only the best, but the only way in this world? Yes, she told herself when dealing with her friends; and no, she told herself when dealing with her son. As a result of which—and it was a result, she was miserably certain—he had reached the age of twenty-five—though he looked only nineteen and acted a precocious nine—without having done a thing, without being likely to do a thing, and without any hope or belief that he would ever do a thing; or indeed that there was anything worth doing. She had, in a word—and as he had said—destroyed him. She had done it silently, and she had done it without meaning to—meaning to do the very opposite in fact—but she had done it nevertheless. She had made him believe that everything in the world was an illusion; without making him realize that if this were so—well, that belief itself was an illusion. And though she longed for him to live entirely beyond illusions on some high, extraordinary metaphysical plane, so that whatever he did do—whether paint, or something else—would be not just good or interesting, but, quite simply, great, never having reached such heights herself, nor knowing how to reach them, nor even if it were possible to reach them, she had obviously expected too much of him; and rather than give him everything, had given him nothing; or taken away that which he had. And now she had—they both had—to face the consequences.

But what could she do, she asked herself, as she stretched out a hand and touched his hair. If she threw him out of the house and changed the locks, as some of her friends had advised her to do, she didn’t believe for a moment that he
would go out and find himself a job and somewhere to live; go and become, as they said, a responsible adult. He would, if he couldn’t batter the door down, just go and sit
somewhere
and feel sorry for himself until he literally died. And clearly she couldn’t face the idea of that. Besides—and how she came back to it always!—she wasn’t sure she cared if he became a responsible adult. She had had her experience of responsible adults, and what had it done for her? Made her into this grotesque, huge creature sitting in a small slightly shabby flat in a country that wasn’t her own,
earning
a pittance by sewing and repairing and making the occasional dress, and getting her only taste of emotion, love and life by listening to records of nineteenth-century Italian operas. And then again—if she did, instead of buying her records, deny herself even that pleasure and spend all her extra cash on canvases and paints for her son—what was the point, since every time they had a fight he destroyed whatever he had done? Even if she suddenly came into a lot of money, which would have enabled him to paint all he liked, there would still have been no point, as long as he continued to see in her, in his vast wretched mother, the beady eye of truth. She wasn’t the truth, or certainly not the whole truth, she was almost sure; but how could she convince him of that unless she could find some alternative for herself, and unless she was
absolutely
sure?

Oh if only, she thought, she could have gone home …

*

She was still thinking about going home—to pre-war Poland—five minutes later, when the door-bell rang.

‘Are you expecting anyone?’ she asked Mirko, who was still lying on the floor at her feet, and when he didn’t reply started, slowly, to get to her feet.

It had been a foolish question, since Mirko never
expected anyone—how could he when, with one rather odd exception, he knew no one and had no friends?—but she had asked because she wasn’t expecting anyone herself; and nine o’clock on a Sunday evening in February wasn’t normally the time when any of her friends dropped by.

Perhaps, she thought, as she waddled down the hall, brushing her tent-like dress, smoothing down her tied-back hair, and assuming her haughtiest expression, it was one of the old ladies who lived upstairs; coming to complain about the noise …

However, it wasn’t a lady at all she saw when she opened the door. It was a man. A man in a well-cut suit, a white shirt, and a tie. A good-looking man in his mid-fifties, with grey hair. It was a man who gave a slight bow as he saw her, and said in a low voice, with hardly a trace of a Spanish accent, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but could you tell me if a Mrs Vidozza lives here?’

Her haughty expression had begun to collapse when she had seen the man; now it flared up again, and indeed blazed from her face as she had rarely let it blaze before in her life. And if she had been prepared to meet with contempt the prying complaints of her neighbours, it was nothing to the scornful outrage with which she met the man’s enquiry. She took a step back, raised her chin, lowered her lids, and withered him with her eyes. She crushed him, beat him, broke him; she threw him out to the wolves and wild dogs. She did everything possible to smash him with her stare; and then, as he gazed at her courteously and calmly,
seemingly
unaware of the disdain she was pouring on him, she gave a slight smile, said in her most exaggerated Polish accent, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Vidozza’s dead,’ and closed the door quite gently, but firmly, in his face.

Then, with the slight smile fixed on her lips, she waddled back to her over-stuffed living room and sat down again.

Mirko still lay on the floor; and she murmured to him, softly, ‘You’d better go and put something on your finger. You’ve cut it.’

She didn’t expect a reply; yet perhaps because there was some appeal in her voice, perhaps because he was tired and not ready for the inevitable epilogue to their fight yet, or perhaps simply because he was curious, Mirko looked up at her—his face still stormy, though beginning to clear—and said, with only enough petulance to make sure there was no doubt he was still the aggrieved party: ‘Who was it?’

Oh, how she smiled now! A great wistful sigh of a smile that appeared to be prompted by the sight, across the wide Polish plains, of the empty steppes that lay beyond. It was a smile she had used sometimes in the past because people, especially men, had found it attractive; and a smile she rarely used any longer because Mirko said it was affected—and it was. Only just at this moment she thought a little affectation was in order. She held it for perhaps ten seconds—long enough to interest Mirko, but not long enough to annoy him—and then shrugged her shoulders.

‘It was your father,’ she laughed.

She had timed it beautifully; for that really made him sit up, and his face cleared completely.

‘What did he want?’

‘He looked at me and asked me if I—if Mrs Vidozza—lived here.’

Mirko’s eyes grew huge, and gazed further over the empty steppes than ever hers had. He got onto his knees beside her, took one of her hands, and started, tenderly, to separate her fingers.

‘Poor Mamma,’ he whispered eventually. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘What could I tell him?’ She paused. ‘I told him she was dead and closed the door in his face.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t give him a chance to.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Go and see if you want to. I’m sure he’s still standing outside, wondering whether to ring again and ask how and when and where. Or if not he’ll be going down the stairs, or in the street.’

Mirko shrugged.

His mother went on: ‘He looks like his photographs. Only older.’

Then the boy frowned. ‘How
could
he?’ he whispered.

‘Quite easily, obviously. I mean—look at me.’

‘I know. But your voice, your accent, your
face.
That hasn’t changed very much.’

He was right; it hadn’t. The lake that had engulfed and become her body had never, for some reason, submerged her head; which still, on a strangely slim neck, thrust up through the surface and was still, with its high Slavic
cheekbones
and grey eyes—and in spite of its lines—really quite beautiful.

BOOK: The Beast
13.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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