The Late Hector Kipling (39 page)

I love you, Eleni Marianos. I love you, my angel. I never loved her. Never. Nor him, come to that. Never. It means nothing to me. It means nothing to me that he is lying on top of her, naked, her hands across his buttocks and what’s left of her lips buried into what’s left of his shoulder. It touches me not at all. Her eyes never seduced me. Not really, my love. Her bright green eyes – one turned to mud and the other on the floor – or is that the small marble you rolled around beneath your pretty foot that night you received the call about your mother? I really don’t know, Eleni. It’s hard to tell from here. And look at Lenny. Just look at the old fool: the spit of Wallis’s
Chatterton
. Trust Lenny Snook to end up the spit of Wallis’s
Chatterton
. The sweet lanky fool. And do you remember, Eleni? Do you remember when we made love on my parents’
settee, and you bled and you bled? And in the morning I had to confess to my mother that there was blood on the settee. Funny the way things have turned out. Just look at all this blood, Eleni. Look at all this fucking blood, love. How am I gonna explain this one to Mum? Come to that, how am I gonna explain this one to anybody? Well, listen, Eleni, my one true love, my goddess, my sun, listen, it’s been nice talking to you again, but as I draw closer to this tableau I’m afraid that I’m overcome by the need to retch and faint. So goodnight, my sweet one, I must leave you now. I must purge what’s left of my guts and collapse, artlessly, to the floor. Sorry. So very, very sorry. Goodnight, and God bless.

I didn’t call the police. I covered up their bodies with an old tarpaulin. I sat in the dark and chatted to every face that floated in and out the door. There were many. I stared at my painting for hours. Somewhere around 4 a.m. I got it together to call Monger. No reply.

I lit a dozen joss sticks to veil the smell. I ran a bath and tried to drown myself, but panicked every time I ran out of breath; just like when I was little and Mum tried to rinse my hair.

I stared into space for a thousand years and tried to come up with at least one lucid thought. In the final months of the thousandth year I gave up and bathed my wounds, peeling off one nipple, only to find another one beneath.

I’m drunk on all this death. Drunk to the extinction of thought. Drunk to the point where there are only eyes and breath. I have no opinion. No feeling. My heart is dipped in chloroform. I cannot paint. I do not know how to paint. I never did.

I should call the police. But what is there to say to the police, really? ‘Yes, officer, why don’t you come on over and take a look at the mutilated bodies of my best friend and lover? I don’t mean, sir, that my best friend is my lover – far from it – I mean the dead bodies of my best friend and my lover . . . or rather my ex-lover, who is . . . or should I say was . . . his lover now, since . . . Oh, never mind. Anyway,
sir, whilst you’ve got your notebook out, mulling over that line of inquiry, do you recall when I screamed from my window and swore that I would kill them both? Remember that, officer? Did your constable get all that down? Yes? Good. Well, you’ll never guess what, but. . .’ No, it’s never going to work. Is all that ever going to work? No, it is not.

Lenny had such beautiful shoulders, and I can’t believe that Monger mistook them for mine. How many shots must he have fired to contort them into such a terrifying jelly of bone and tendon? Anyway, let us not dwell upon the gore. The gore is not important. The important thing is the extinction. The important thing is the new non-existence of Lenny Snook – my oldest friend. The important thing is the absence of . . . Well, never mind all that. I collapse down, and then, in the next moment, collapse up. I bare my teeth to the sky and stretch the flesh of my face till I think it might tear. Fuck it hurts, to stretch the flesh of my face till I think it might tear.

I open the fridge, assess Lenny’s stash, and proceed to make up a nice plate of boiled ham, pork pies, chicken wings, chorizo, Scotch egg and anchovies. Waving a cheery goodbye to nearly twenty years of vegetarianism, I wolf down the whole lot and wipe my mouth on a crusted pink tea towel. Then I’m sick. And then I’m sick again. I finish off a bottle of three-month-old Blue Nun and smoke whatever I manage to find in Rosa’s pockets, at the bottom of the bin, or on the floor beneath the bed. And then I’m sick again. I play Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’, over and over on the stereo, jacked up full blast, until I poke at my ears with the tip of my fat little finger and contemplate the spots of blood thereon. One of Rosa’s green eyes has rolled up against the leg of the piano stool, and I lie on my side for about three-quarters of an hour, gazing deep into its dead dark pupil, quoting Georges Bataille.

I take myself off to bed. If you can call it a bed any longer. The mattress is so torn, so rank and haunted, the pillows so perverted, the sheets so desperately forlorn, it makes Emin’s
Bed
look like the cradle of a newborn sylph. The little sleep I manage is peopled with hags and
vicious bees. I wake up every fifteen minutes, kick off the sheets and spit at the walls. At one point I awake to find the clock in my mouth.

In the morning the mattress is awash with turps, bleach and chocolate milk. My head has overnight been transformed into a shovel factory. I walk over to the full-length mirror and begin to scream the words, ‘Giraffe ink, giraffe ink,’ over and over, until, at last, it begins to mean something. It is about then that I hear the slamming of the door.

TATE BRITAIN, PIMLICO, LONDON

I’m not sure what Lenny had in mind when he came up with this
Hole in the Gallery Floor
business. Nor did I ever understand the rapture of the critics when they saw fit to hail it as seminal and significant. I mean, for the love of God, what does it signify? Right now, of course, ten feet down, it feels a lot like a grave. My grave – which is nice. But then the entire room, up above, feels like a grave. But then graves are nothing special. In fact, as we have witnessed from the rituals of the Neanderthal, there is little in life so simple as a grave. Any child with a bucket and spade and the carcass of a crab is more than capable of rising to the occasion.

At first I’d toyed with the idea of gathering up the corpses and squeezing them into the base of the hairy settee, lugging the whole lot down here and seeing what the critics made of that. But, alas, the practicalities of transporting the macabre package over to Pimlico and setting it out in a suitable manner proved to be beyond me. Then I had a better idea. And so here I am.

I made it over to the Tate just before it closed and, at the last minute, scrambled through the barriers that separated the Turner pieces from the other galleries. I’ve been here all night. At one point I made great sport with the beam of the security guard’s torch, concealing myself in one of the recesses of the hole. But after two or three tremulous calls of ‘Hello, is there anybody there?’ the guard gave up, and I snuggled in, rested my bald head into the crown of my soft homburg, and managed to pull off a few beautiful hours of uninterrupted sleep.

The lights were switched on about four hours ago and I’ve heard some mumbled discussions about the definitive composition and last-minute adjustments. At one point I discerned a few choice sentences concerning the difficulties they were having regarding their attempts to contact Lenny Snook and the deferred arrival of his promised piece. (Apparently it is not without precedent. In 1995 Damien Hirst was three weeks late with the installation of
Mother and Child Divided
. And that was the year Damien won. So the signs, or so it would seem, are propitious for old Lenny.) I particularly relished the perplexed tones when it came to a debate about the meaning of a brief French quotation that had appeared on the gallery walls overnight, apparently written in blood.

‘There’s no mention of this in the programme,’ announced a voice which I understood to belong to a rather shrill and bossy woman who everyone addressed as ‘Miss Cookham’. Miss Cookham went on to stress that it had never been agreed that Snook might be permitted to deface the gallery’s walls. After all, wasn’t it enough that he had gouged a ten-foot hole in the gallery floor? At one point I heard Miss Cookham calling out to ascertain if there was anyone nearby who spoke French, and then, since there was not, she ordered some lackey to unlock the bookshop and bring to her, with haste, a copy of André Breton’s
Second Manifesto of Surrealism
.

‘Strange,’ she said, and I think she lit a cigarette. ‘Very odd indeed.’

It’s becoming unbearably hot and noxious down here. All along the walls there are snaking lengths of coiled and colourful wires, stripped sockets, junction boxes, halogen lamps and a large pipe that runs, half buried, across the dust and rubble floor. I presumed it had all been put there, by Lenny, for effect, to lay bare the viscera of the gallery, or some such nonsense. But ever since the lights were switched on up in the gallery, the pipe has been getting hotter and hotter, and since I just scalded myself by leaning my wrist on it, I’m having to wedge myself up
in one corner. But then that only brings my head closer to the halogen lamps, which is causing my hat and scalp to boil and steam. Therefore I take off my coat and hat and struggle to cover up the pipe. The air has become increasingly difficult to breathe, and I feel stifled by the heat and the stink of iodine. Up above I hear a generator lurch into life, and then the first slow trickles of Kim Large’s paint baths, as they begin to fill and drain. Then it’s Archie March’s kinetic boxing-glove gadgets, beating the crap out of twenty-two Bakelite skulls. And then, if I’m not mistaken, the banal whirr and chug of a green coffin in pursuit of a black Victorian pram. And if I listen very carefully I’m sure I can make out the muffled clamour of two thousand British painters – everyone from Gainsborough to Hockney, from Constable to Bacon – not turning, but rather writhing in their respective graves. And so I salute them, and turn a little in mine. In fact I have to turn anyway, regardless of deference to my forebears, since I’m suffering the most agonizing fucking cramps of my stupid, cramp-ridden life.

Here’s what’s bothering me: is it legitimate to mourn the death of Sparky more than I mourn the death of Sofia? After all, I never loved Sofia. I may well have stated, somewhere back in time, that I loved Sofia. I may well have said that I loved Sofia, merely because she was the mother of the woman I loved. But, in truth, I never loved Sofia. And perhaps I never loved Eleni. And perhaps I never loved. But, you see, Sparky was family. I know that he was only a scabby, blistered, half-blind Yorkshire terrier, but he was the fourth Kipling, in the same way that George Martin was the fifth Beatle. Sparky was a rock. Sparky was the foundation stone of . . . Oh I don’t know, he was a dog! Just a dog, and half the time he made me want to kick him down the Promenade, but he also made me smile. And now all that panted enthusiasm has passed into another realm. Or perhaps it has just been curtailed. Perhaps it was only of the moment. No matter. Farewell, Sparky old fella. Farewell.

There was a tricky little moment just now when I heard footsteps up above, and as they grew closer and closer to the hole I had to remove
my hat and coat from the pipe and fold my fat bulk back into the recess. I understand that there was some concern regarding a smell of burning emanating from the hole. At the last minute I realized that my T-shirt and jeans which I had draped over the lamps were beginning to scorch and smoulder, and so just before the voices appeared at the top of the hole I managed to whip the clothes away and bundle them into my lap. I’m sat here now like a rare hirsute meatball in just my underpants and socks. My feet are sodden and choked and so the socks come off. And then, since my life is surely over, I decide that there is no point standing or rather crouching on ceremony and off come the pants. What a spectacle. As the great Breton also said, ‘Beauty must be convulsive, or not at all’ I think we would have got on, I really do.

Outside his immediate family and friends, the world will not really suffer the loss of Kirk Sidney Church. I’m sure that his mother and father are presently inconsolable, and will continue to be so for the next few months or so, but after that I’m sure that some form of consolation will be tolerated and even welcomed. After all, he only returned to his parental home twice a year, and phoned only once a month, so they can hardly really justify any profound feelings of loss. Not really. In my opinion – for what it’s worth. He had nothing of any true merit to offer the world, no particular talent. The two people who knew anything about him and kept regular and convivial company with him towards the end are now obsolete and defunct: one dead, the other barely alive. To think, since he will live on only in the memories of the nearly dead, or alternatively, live on only in the brain of a creature such as me, it is as though he might never have been born. So, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that was Kirk Sidney Church. What can I say? He was kind sometimes. Funny sometimes. Insightful and cynical. His paintings were truly awful and his flat stank of Pledge and egg. He was too shy and ugly ever to sustain the affection of a good woman. He spent his evenings in tears and, in his final days, was beset by the compulsion to
dwell upon these few small details. So perhaps there is this to be said for him: that he died happy – satisfied that it was not the way he had lived.

Rosa was a stranger. Rosa is still a stranger. Stranger now than ever. Rosa was the last woman I ever kissed. Rosa was the first woman I wanted to die in front of. Not for. I didn’t want to die for her, I just wanted to die in front of her, or behind, or just to the side of. What the fuck, the point is that I would gladly have died for Eleni, to save Eleni. Whereas with Rosa, I would gladly have died to stimulate her, to excite her, or merely to entertain her. I think there is a difference. Did I love her? No fucking idea. All questions of love are now buried in the earth. If only I . . . etc. It’s a pity that she had to leave so horribly: with a bullet, or three, smashing half her face into a bloody pulp. But let us not dwell upon this. The gore is not the point. The point is that she will never again call me ‘angel’, that is the point. The point is that she’s dead and in no position to love, or not love, me. And so I let it go. I let all that kind of thinking go. The tide’s coming in and rising, and I let all that kind of thing blow away in the wind.