The Late Hector Kipling (2 page)

‘Sorry about that, Len,’ I say, appearing by his side. He moves on, and I follow him towards a Hockney. ‘Weird,’ I say, ‘very strange.’

‘Hockney?’ he says.

‘No, I mean what just happened.’

He glances at me out of the corner of his eye. Not at my face, at my chest. He gives a quick glance to my chest and then back to the Hockney, as though he’s got no idea what I’m talking about. He moves on to a Bacon, hesitates for about three seconds and then looks around for somewhere to sit.

‘Don’t know what all that was about,’ I say.

He slumps down onto one of the leather couches. ‘Stendhal,’ he says and begins to fiddle with his laces. He’s wearing a pair of wizened old Docs that he bought in Los Angeles. I know that they’re from Los Angeles cos he told me, one night in Quo Vadis. It seemed important to him that I should know that.

‘Stendhal?’ I say.

‘Stendhal syndrome,’ he says.

‘You’ve lost me,’ I say.

‘Prominent in Florence,’ he says, straightening up and waving his specs in the air. ‘People pass out in the presence of beauty.’

‘They pass out?’

‘People collapse,’ he says, ‘tourists are carried out of the museums on stretchers. The Stendhal syndrome,’ he says, ‘it’s called that.’

‘But I didn’t collapse,’ I say.

‘No, but you cried. Sometimes people just cry. Or it starts with crying, and later they pass out.’

I sit down beside him. ‘How much later?’

‘Sometimes hours later,’ says Lenny.

‘But it wasn’t beauty.’

‘It’s a psychiatric disorder. It’s a kind of—’

‘But I wasn’t crying about beauty.’

‘Who’s to say?’

‘It was a fucking Munch, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Who’s to say?’

‘I don’t give a shit about Munch. I couldn’t care less about him.’

‘Like I say,’ says Lenny, ‘who’s to say?’

I feel like pushing him off the couch, but I don’t, because that would be ridiculous.

‘Beauty’s not the point,’ I say. ‘If I thought that beauty was the point do you think I’d paint the way I paint?’

There’s a silence. Lenny looks at the floor. I close my eyes. Sick of it all. Sick of all this looking.

The silence digs its heels in. I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking what I’m thinking.

‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘perhaps you paint the way you paint because you know that beauty
is
the point.’

Well, maybe he isn’t thinking what I’m thinking after all, because he’s breaking it; he’s breaking the Agreement. He’s breaking the Douglas–Quinn Agreement. Ever since our early twenties we’ve always abided by the Douglas–Quinn Agreement. Kirk Douglas, Anthony
Quinn. Whenever we found ourselves talking seriously about what art should or should not be, one of us would be entitled to dance in Greek, like Zorba, though I don’t know why, cos that’s a different film and somewhere along the way we got confused between Anthony Quinn as Zorba and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin. But anyway, all that stopped when I fell in love with Eleni, who’s from Crete, and the whole thing became a bit distasteful. The point is that there was always the Agreement and right now all I can hear is the pulse of a santuri and the stamping of boots around a bonfire.

‘You paint against beauty,’ continues Lenny, oblivious, ‘because you know that beauty
is
the point. If you really thought that beauty wasn’t the point then you’d paint in favour of beauty, not in opposition to it.’

‘Fuck off, Lenny,’ I say.

He shrugs his shiny red shoulders and runs his hand across his scalp in a manner so reminiscent of Brando’s Mr Kurtz that it’s difficult not to take it as a reference. ‘Well...’ he says.

I’ve known Lenny since I was seventeen, and he was going bald even then. But Lenny being Lenny it’s never been a problem cos he’s got the head for it and it suits him cos he’s a handsome fucker. He was handsome back then and he’s handsome now. More handsome now than then. And he’ll carry on being handsome. The older he gets the more handsome he becomes. He’ll be handsome in middle age and he’ll be a handsome pensioner. An ’exquisite corpse’. Bald and handsome. All the more handsome for being bald. All the more bald for being handsome. Whatever that means. It’s a pain in the arse.

‘Sorry’

‘What?’ says Lenny.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘sorry for saying fuck off.’

He looks at me. And then he looks off to the side of me.

‘It’s OK.’ I’ve been in therapy for the past three months and so far she’s taught me to apologize.

‘And sorry for crying.’

‘You’ve always been very emotional,’ says Lenny and stands.

I stand too. ‘You say that like it’s a criticism.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘no I don’t,’ and wanders out through the door. We’re back in the lobby. He reaches into his pocket and drops a coin into the donations box. A gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls waddle over and beg him to sign their gallery maps. He pulls out a gold fountain pen and gets down to it. Twelve in all. I try to catch his eye so that we can smirk at each other, but he’s having none of it. Smirking, it seems, is a thing of the past. He’s got his head down and he’s asking them their names.

Outside the sky has darkened into a blurred and sooty purple. The river is salted with seagulls. I love seagulls. They remind me of home.

‘I love seagulls,’ I say, ‘they remind me of Blackpool.’

‘Being told not to pick up dirty feathers off the tram tracks, that’s what they remind me of,’ he says and lights a fag.

We’re almost at the bottom of the steps when this young French couple ask if they can have their photograph taken with Lenny. They ‘appreciated’ his show in Marseilles and would love to have their photograph taken with him. Lenny goes all bashful in his red leather coat-jacket, china-blue buttons, puts his arms around their shoulders and indicates that they should hand the camera to me.

I take it. That’s what I do.

It’s been raining all day and the river sits nicely with the puddled embankment. The couple embrace. Terrible teeth the two of them. And there’s Lenny peeping over the top. The girl’s gone mad and grabbed his hand.

I frame them out. That’s what I do. I crop the river and the top half of their bodies. I take them from the waist down, their silly French shoes on tiptoe and Lenny in his Californian Docs, and some scabby pigeon pecking at a bus ticket. That’s what they’ll get when they pick up their prints.

I pass them back their camera and smile. They return the smile and almost bow.

On we go. Lenny removes his specs and dries them on a scrap of pink velvet. He replaces them with august ceremony and stares out across the river.

‘St Paul’s,’ he whispers, ‘sublime.’

How come he needs these specs to look at paintings
and
to walk around the streets in? OK, so sometimes he takes them off to look at a painting, but most of the time he leaves them on, and he wears them to read, but then he drives in them and watches films in them. So what’s going on with these specs? What kind of specs are they?

He found them, he says, under some floorboards in the Chelsea Hotel. What he was doing lifting up floorboards in the Chelsea Hotel, fuck knows, but he found them there and took them into some optometrists (his word, not mine) and asked them to fit his prescription. They obliged, for a price, and he’s come home in them. Ludicrous things they are; little Crippen specs, bendy silver wire, creepy, like he’s got an insect strapped to his face. ‘They’ve really changed the way I see things,’ he said the night he came back from New York. ‘They must have belonged to someone who stayed there. They could be anybody’s. Pollock once stayed there. They might have belonged to Pollock.’

‘Statistically unlikely,’ said Kirk.

‘But they might have,’ said Lenny.

‘Or they might have belonged to some Belgian pornographer called Rene,’ I said. ‘Or Nancy Spungen.’

‘Fuck you talking about?’ said Lenny, and he went quiet for a bit. Me and Kirk winked at each other and he caught us. Then he started in about his night with Koons, and then we laughed, and then he fucked off.

‘So how’s your show going?’ he asks me now. It’s something to say.

‘Fine.’

‘Where’s the gallery?’

‘Bethnal Green.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘The Doodlebug.’

‘And it’s all ready?’

‘Yeah. Nearly. I’m just finishing the self-portrait.’

He stops in his tracks. ‘Self-portrait?’ he says. ‘You finally got round to a self-portrait? That’s amazing. How is it? Happy?’

‘Happy’s not the word,’ I say, and start reading my travelcard. ‘Happy’s not the word,’ and start folding it up, cos I really want to belt him in the mouth, give him a big healthy smack in his smug, handsome gob. ‘And how’s your work going,’ I ask, ‘how’s the piece?’ and the travelcard’s the size of a stamp.

‘It’s coming along,’ he says.

‘You’ve got it all worked out, have you?’

‘I think so. It’s hard to tell. It may be something, or it may be nothing at all. I don’t really want to talk about it. Not yet.’

‘Well, fine,’ I say, missing out the rest.

Well, fine, Lenny, then don’t talk about it. Don’t debase your shitty little self. I don’t want to know anyway. I only asked cos I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I only still know you cos I’ve known you for so long.

‘And how’s Eleni?’ he says.

‘Eleni’s beautiful,’ I say, cos she is, and cos he knows she is, and cos he’s stuck with Brenda. Comical-looking Brenda who had him strapped to the banister well before he was Mr Bobby fucking Dazzler. Mental Brenda who threatens she’ll stab herself in the neck if he ever attempts to leave her. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘Eleni’s beautiful.’

‘Great,’ he says. ‘And your mum and dad? Still trying to sell the house?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘they’ve given up. They can’t get rid of it.’

’That’s a drag.’

Fuck off, Lenny. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘it is. But they’re fine about it. They’ve decided to change things round a bit instead.’

A cab drives past and Lenny waves it down. ‘I think I’m gonna take this,’ he says.

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘where’re you going?’

‘I’m meeting Jopling in Soho.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m gonna show him some sketches I’ve made for the piece.’

‘Oh.’

‘Where’re you going?’

‘I’m going to Earl’s Court to see Bianca.’

‘Who’s Bianca?’

The taxi’s got the window down and Lenny’s shouted, ‘Soho,’ at the driver.

‘She’s my therapist,’ I say.

‘Since when?’

‘Since July’

‘You never told me that.’

‘Well, you haven’t really been around, Lenny.’

‘Well . . . great, good luck er . . .’ and he hovers in the doorway. He makes a move towards me, as though he might hug me, and then he makes a sort of sideways move, as though he might not hug me. He throws out his hand, but it’s sort of the wrong way up, and I try to shake it but he does something funny with his thumbs and his knuckles and I try to join in but it all goes to pot.

‘See ya,’ he shouts as he bends himself into the cab. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘Say hello to Jay.’

‘I will.’

The taxi pulls away. I watch it as it scuttles up the road like a shifty cockroach. I can see Lenny sitting forward, bossing the driver.

Bianca makes me a cup of tea and lights the candles. She puts a sheet over the parrot and settles herself on her sofa. There are two sofas. I
settle myself on my sofa. I stir my tea and take a look at myself in the back of the spoon. That wasn’t a very good idea, as it turns out.

‘So,’ she begins, ‘so how is everything? How are you and Eleni?’

‘I’ve just been walking round the Tate with Lenny,’ I say.

‘Aahhh,’ she says. Bianca is a sixty-year-old arthritic Austrian lady who smiles more than she should. ‘Aahhh,’ she says again and picks up her mug of algae, or whatever the fuck it is. ‘Lenny.’

‘Lenny,’ I repeat.

‘So he’s back from New York?’

‘Got back last week.’

‘Lenny,’ she says again, and drifts off into a reverie, taking small sips of her foul concoction.

‘Lenny Snook,’ I say, and fiddle with my lip.

‘I see, I see.’ She fixes me with her stare. ‘And you have been crying, have you not?’

57 NORRIS AVENUE, BLACKPOOL

‘Hector,’ yells my mum, ‘do you want some chicken?’

I’ve been vegetarian for years, she knows I have. Never slipped once, she knows that too. So what she thinks she’s doing offering me chicken I can’t tell you. She’s been offering me chicken for nearly twenty years and she’ll go on offering me chicken for another twenty, as though one day I might turn around and say oh go on then, and tuck in. I’m sick of it.

‘Did you hear me?’

Yes I heard you, Mum. ‘Mum, it’s meat. Chicken’s meat.’

‘But it’s not a cow,’ she says, appearing in the doorway of the lounge.

‘What kind of logic’s that?’ I say, pouring out the other half of my beer.

‘Ooh, you and your long words,’ she says, almost coquettishly, and flings her oven glove at me. ‘Mushrooms. You’ll eat mushrooms, won’t you?’

‘Yes, why wouldn’t I eat mushrooms?’

‘Well, I don’t know what you’re like,’ she says, and lets it hang in the air, like she means so much more. ’It’s always changing with you. One minute it’s “Yes I will have a biscuit” the next it’s “No, no, I don’t eat biscuits.” You’re drinking, and then you’re not. You’ll have sugar in your tea, next time you won’t. I don’t know if you eat mushrooms or not.’

‘Mushrooms are fine.’

‘What?’ says my dad, who’s sat in the corner watching the rugby.

‘Nothing, Dad. I just said that mushrooms are fine.’

‘Mushrooms are what?’

‘Fine, Dad,’ I say, and he frowns and tucks in his chin. He gets back to the game, turning up the volume.

‘Cos I can do you a mushroom risotto if you like.’

‘That sounds lovely, Mum.’

‘And will Eleni have that as well?’

‘Yeah, that’ll be nice.’

‘Does she not want chicken?’

‘No, Mum.’

‘But she’s not vegetarian,’ she says, scrunching up her eyes, ‘is she?’ She knows damn well she’s not, which, for some reason, she gets a kick out of.

‘No, Mum, she’s not. But she doesn’t eat much meat and she doesn’t like chicken.’