The Late Hector Kipling (4 page)

I remember when this fireplace was built, sometime back in the seventies, back when Mum and Dad were still aware of trends and still supple enough to follow them. Irregular slabs of purbeck stone and polished grey slate. I remember the plans laid out on the dining-room table and this bloated Italian bloke who stank of pork pointing at them with a translucent yellow screwdriver. Mum and Dad nodding and asking questions. Mum wanted a trapezium over the flue, Dad wasn’t so keen. And now here he is: rid of it at last. He’s spread a dustsheet out over the carpet and he’s up to his ankles in broken rock and plaster. He puts down the hammer, wipes his hands on a towel and slumps into his chair. Jiggered, as he would say.

‘Bloody hell, Dad. What you doing that for?’

‘We’ve decided it’s to come down,’ says Dad, nodding at Mum, who’s sat in the conservatory scanning the colour supplements.

‘Bloody hell,’ I say again. ‘Fucking hell’ is what I’m thinking, but ‘Bloody hell’ is what I’m saying cos I don’t swear at home. It’s not what we do. The air’s gone mad with dust. Sparky’s spasms are making the windows rattle.

Mum looks up and smiles. ’Well, look who’s here,’ she says, puts down her magazine and pushes herself up out of her little wicker chair.
‘What do you think, then?’ she says, putting her hand over her mouth, like a schoolgirl who’s just sprayed something rude on the wall. She’s chuckling.

‘You’re knocking down the fireplace?’

‘We’ve decided it’s old fashioned.’

Dad’s got his head down and he’s preoccupied with breathing.

‘Shouldn’t you be getting someone in to do this?’ I say.

‘Oh, your dad’s strong,’ she says, ‘he’s knocking on but he’s still got some energy left. Haven’t you, Derek?’

And Dad looks up, all red in the face, mouth open, fist to his chest. ‘Eh?’

‘I was just saying to Hector, you might be seventy-eight but you’ve still got it in you.’

‘Oh aye,’ he says, ‘I’m not beat yet.’

I worry about this.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’

‘In a minute.’

‘Bacon?’

‘Don’t start, Mum.’

’Is Eleni getting up?’ and she’s all frisky, like she’s excited just to say her name.

‘I think so, yes. The hammering woke us both up.’

Mum scampers over and takes me in her arms. She smells all clean. I return the embrace. ‘Oh, and I do love you, Hector. I’m so glad you’ve come up to see us. I do love you.’ She’s got me in a clinch and I can barely move. ‘Don’t we, Derek? Don’t we love him?’

‘Oh aye,’ Dad says, and grips onto his sweating purple head, staring at the floor. Always did.’

‘I love you too, Mum,’ I say, ‘I love you both.’

‘And we love Eleni. She’s smashing, is Eleni. You can have right nice natural conversations with Eleni.’

Right nice natural conversations are important to Mum. She never
had right nice natural conversations with Sheba. I had right nice natural conversations with Sheba, at first. And then ...

‘What do you think?’ says Mum, nodding towards Dad’s demolition. ‘Do you think we’re mad?’ She hugs me again and I hold my breath cos I don’t want her to smell last night’s beer on me.

Eleni’s put on her best clothes and we eat our toast and beans in the conservatory. That’s what Mum calls it: The Conservatory. Basically it’s a little extension built onto the back of the house overlooking the small lawn and rockery. Mum’s filled it up with plants. They’re everywhere, climbing up the walls, twisted around the brass light fittings. Mum’s good with plants. And whenever she mentions me and my painting and says, ‘Eee, I don’t know where you get it all from,’ I always credit it to her and how she’s so good with plants and how that’s a sort of art in itself. I don’t say this as a platitude. I mean it. I’m useless with plants. Eleni’s useless with plants as well. They die. Perhaps it’s the fumes. Or perhaps it’s just that we’re useless.

‘I was just reading this, Eleni,’ says Mum, pointing with her big bitten finger to the newspaper.

‘What’s that, Connie?’ says Eleni.

‘About some woman called Frida Kahlo,’ says Mum, rhyming it with callow.

‘Ah yes,’ says Eleni, smiling, beautiful, uncomplicated in her enthusiasm for whatever Mum is about to profess.

‘Madonna’s got a lot of her paintings, it says here.’

‘Ah yes,’ says Eleni, awaiting Mum’s point.

‘It says here that she was Mexican.’

‘Yes,’ says Eleni, realizing that there may not be a point after all. Or perhaps it’s just me who realizes this.

‘She was knocked over by a bus,’ says Mum, stroking her chin like she’s a man with whiskers, ‘like Beryl next door.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘Beryl Short next door.’

‘What about her?’

‘Beryl was knocked over by a bus. She’d gone all giddy on medication and just stepped out. She told me she thought she was stepping out to take a little paddle.’

‘Eh?’

‘A little paddle in the sea. But she wasn’t. She was in the middle of Waterloo Road.’

Eleni and me look at each other and smile. I take a sip of my tea. Mum takes a sip of hers. And she’s off again ...

‘Now you see she was very personal with what she painted.’ Oh, so she has got a point after all. ‘She believed in honesty ...’ here it comes, ‘but the difference with her and that lass last night, that Tracey... what’s she called, Hector?’

‘Tracey Emin.’

‘Aye, Tracey Emin. The difference between her and this Mexican lass is that with her – Frida Kahlo – you might want to hang some of this on your walls. I mean, I wouldn’t, but some folk do. Madonna does,’ and then, ’for example,’ and she looks up and lowers her specs and she’s finished. Eleni’s on the spot.

‘Well, Connie,’ says Eleni, mopping up her bean juice with her last triangle of toast, ‘all art does not have to be hanging on walls.’

‘Well, I know that,’ says Mum, ‘I know that you can have statues and . . . and er . . .’ She’s stuck on statues and she’s taken off her specs and she’s searching her brain for something else that you don’t have to hang on walls, finally relaxing and digging up ‘. . .sculptures.’ I take another sip of my tea. ‘Sculptures and all that. I know that.’ Eleni’s nodding, Mum’s kicked off her slippers at the heel and she’s waggling them on her toes. ‘But when it comes to the likes of that lass last night, that Tracey Emin, well, you can’t put what she does on a wall, can you?’

‘Well, some of it you can,’ says Eleni, ‘her drawings, whatever. But if you don’t want to, then that’s fine. Art is whatever you want it to be.’

‘Well, I don’t want it to be that.’

‘And that’s OK,’ says Eleni, and bites down on her toast. She sniffs the air. ‘It smells so beautiful in here, Connie.’

‘Thank you,’ says Mum, and looks back down at the paper. She’s not finished with us yet. Dad’s in the lounge watching the build-up to the Belgian Grand Prix, which is doing nothing to abate Sparky’s wretched convulsions. Mum clears her throat. I suspect she’s just getting started.

‘There’s a painting of hers here called – ’ and she straightens her specs and leans in ‘
The Suicide of Dorothy Hale,
painted by Frida Kahlo in 1938.’ Mum’s sounding a bit academic now, which is weird. She carries on: ‘Shows a young lass who’s flung herself from a building.’ She holds the paper up to her face. ‘The Hampshire House building. Shows her falling and shows her fallen. There’s blood on the frame, it says here. Ex-Ziegfeld showgirl ... Dorothy Hale.’ Mum looks up and pulls off a pantomime shiver. She lowers her specs, frowns, looks at us both. ‘Ooh, imagine that: throwing yourself off a building. Can you imagine throwing yourself off a building, Eleni?’

‘No,’ says Eleni.

‘Can you, Hector?’ says Mum.

‘No, Mum,’ I say.

‘Ooh, neither can I. I can imagine taking a lot of pills, or sticking your head in an oven, but I can’t see throwing myself off some big building.’

All this is a bit of a revelation. I’m a bit shocked. I don’t know why she just came out with such a thing. I steal a glance at Eleni. She’s just looking at the floor. We sit in silence for a while. I mean it’s not really silence cos Dad’s got the telly up loud and there’s a lot of cars screaming around Spa-Francorchamps, but it feels like silence, and given what’s just been announced, it is.

And next thing you know ... ‘I mean it’d be like me throwing myself off Blackpool Tower. Imagine that. I mean I’ve never been up the Tower.
Lived here forty-five years and never been up the Tower. I mean I can imagine taking pills and all that, but throwing myself off the Tower? Give over.’ She smoothes out the paper on her lap and cranes her neck to read more. Eleni bites into her toast and suddenly I’m irritated by the sound of her chewing. What’s going on? Why’s Mum talking about throwing herself off the Tower? And why am I irritated by the sound of Eleni chewing her toast?

I look at Mum. She’s scanning the article like it’s a big fancy puzzle but she’s not giving up. Her lips are moving a bit and I see her make an ‘F’ and then I see her make a ‘K’. And then ‘Frida Kahlo’, silently, to herself.

It won’t have gone over her head, all this. Next time it comes up she’ll remember exactly who Frida Kahlo is. She’s sat there now reading about her, and you can be sure it’s all going in. Ever since I started to do well in the art world, ever since they started writing about me in whatever magazines she could get her hands on in Preston, then she’s taken an interest. She’s never once said, ‘Get yourself a proper job,’ or ‘I think you should be careful’ No, she’s just enjoyed my fame and made an effort to understand. She’s got an opinion about it all, has Mum. She thinks Jake and Dinos are really seriously poorly, and possibly dangerous. Not dangerous in the way a critic might call them dangerous but like Mum calls them dangerous. Like maybe the police should get involved. Sarah Lucas is butch and rude. Damien Hirst’s dirty and cruel. Rachel Whiteread’s got some good ideas but it’s all a bit dull once you’ve got the gist of it. She likes Gillian Wearing cos she’s pretty and looks a bit like Eleni, but she didn’t like that transsexual caper. And all them policemen idling about would have been put to better use out on the streets catching folk. Catching Jake and Dinos for a start. And as for Gilbert and George, well ... now they
should
get a proper job.

I clear away the plates and carry them through to the kitchen. I hear Mum and Eleni start up again and I think Mum’s asking her whether or not she thinks Madonna is a slag. She doesn’t say slag of course,
but that’s what she’s getting at. I can hear Eleni smiling and shifting position, getting comfortable, ‘Well...’ she begins, ‘well...’ I love Eleni. She seems immune to those parts of my mum that drive me off my nut. Good luck to her. I’m off to take a bath.

‘Is the immersion heater on, Dad?’

He shouts ‘What?’ and I repeat myself and he says that it is, but to turn it off cos it’s burning money, and I climb the stairs, wishing I could smoke a cigarette.

Above the bath, pride of place, is a small drawing of a budgerigar on old yellowed paper. It sits in an ornate gilded frame behind well-dusted glass. It’s lying on its back, dead. But it doesn’t look dead cos it’s been hung the wrong way, so it looks like it’s all right. I did it when I was eight. It used to hang on my Aunty Pat’s parlour wall until Pat went mad and died five years back. By then I hadn’t seen Pat for twelve years and Mum didn’t think to tell me until after she was buried. I’d liked to have attended her funeral. I’ve never been to a funeral. Oh yes, little dead Bob used to hang on big dead Aunty Pat’s parlour wall. I say hang, but in those days it was just tacked to the lilac wallpaper with a couple of drawing pins, curling up at the edges. It was the wrong way up then as well. It means everything. As I lie back in the glittering suds, I look at it for the fifty thousandth time. It’s still good. It really is. I was only eight and it was done with one of those fat multicoloured biros, but somehow, somewhere in that aching eight-year-old brain, I’d managed to look at Pat’s budgie, little Bob, and somehow comprehend a way of scratching him onto the paper so that you could tell that it was Bob, and not just any old dead budgie. It was this drawing that set me off. The attendant awe that it evoked amongst my elders galvanized my confidence, and supplied the necessary fillip to propel me towards a life of art. ‘A life of art’. That’s what I have. And all these visits home seem like some sort of gentle archaeological dig. And there is my Troy, behind
that well-dusted glass, in that ornate gilded frame. Little Bob. Who’d have thought.

Aunty Pat used to do up her hair in a tall yellow beehive. It looked like ice cream. One dull day when I was six we were all on the beach having a picnic and she got a bee in it, a fat black bee in her tall yellow beehive, burrowing towards her scalp, smashed on lacquer, and Aunty Pat shrieking and shaking, standing up and falling over, Mum pinning her down and Dad going in there with a lolly stick. I was sucking on a Mivvy, not sure what to think, cos it was exciting and funny, but at the same time, awful and frightening, and she might get stung on the head, and what will that do? Will it kill her? Will it make her hair fall off? Will she turn into a bee? She’s screaming like she’s having unanaesthetized surgery as Dad coaxes it out on the end of the stick, the bee lapping up the vanilla.

All that happened right here, in the shadow of the Gaiety Bar, and I ask Mum if she remembers and she smiles and says she does and we tell Eleni the story. Eleni smiles and holds onto my hand. Her hand feels warm and I can feel her pulse on the pad of her thumb. In my other hand I’m carrying the video camera, just in case. Just in case something happens. Just in case the Tower topples over, or a clown goes mental and runs amok amongst the seaweed and seagull feathers. For there are seagulls. And, let me say it now, I remain passionate about the seagulls. I love the sound and the white, and the whole seagull thing. There are kids swinging from a musty rope beneath the pier. Folk out, walking their dogs. Old men with metal detectors looking for Atlantis and old threepenny bits. Drunken screams from the Pleasure Beach. It’s dusk and the sun’s going down. Mid-September. We talk a little about the sea and Mum asks Eleni if it’s as nice as the sea in Crete. Eleni says that it is, and she means it. If Mum had asked me, I would have said that it is, and I would have meant it, cos I love Eleni and we agree about these things. And we mean it. Mum starts telling more stories about when I
was little: falling off donkeys, swallowing sand, poking at dead seagulls. Mum looks out towards Central Pier, feasting on her cardboard dish of whelks, seeing ghosts. The tide’s going out, the sun’s going down and Blackpool’s lighting up. I love Blackpool when it’s lighting up. I love it when it’s lit up and I love it when it’s dark. All the times in between. I love Blackpool. I love the way it makes an effort.