The Whole Story and Other Stories (14 page)

They played the same tune over and over out to Heathrow then back and after that they followed Chelsea off the tube and up the road still playing it.

Would any of you like a cup of coffee or tea yet? Chelsea said again some hours later.

The pipers were standing playing in a circle round the coffee table in the lounge. This was where they’d been standing since they’d battered their way through the front door. The door was still flung open. Their chests rose and fell as they took in breath and expended it. They breathed their different rhythms, all playing the same tune. The tartan-webbed bits of the pipes, resting against their shoulders, stuck out like branches. It was as if a copse of lopsided breathing trees had grown from nowhere out of the floor of her mother’s flat. Talking to them was as pointless as talking to trees. Can I get you anything? Chelsea had asked. Are you planning on staying long? Where else have you played? Have any of you been travelling? Have any of you been to Australia? I was there recently, I spent some time in Melbourne, do any of you know Melbourne?

The men had ignored her like they were ignoring her now. Oh for fuck sake, Chelsea thought. She was mildly fearful that they might all do something unpleasant that would foul the carpet and the walls and she’d have to clean up after them. But she was a polite person so what she said out loud was: I also have several kinds of herbal tea. Or I could open a bottle of wine. Can I get anyone anything to eat?

They looked anywhere but at her. They looked, if anything, contemptuous. Their cheeks filled with air and gradually emptied and filled again. Every breath went into the pipes which more and more resembled something alive, long-snouted and implacable with three legs in the air as if in a butcher’s shed strung up for slaughter; if left to sit by themselves on the floor, she knew, they would scuttle about blind and panicking, horrifyingly uneven, asphyxiating like sea creatures in the wrong element.

She pushed the front door shut; its hinges were warped from the forced entry. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She poked at the sushi, still in its box. She had no appetite. Outside it was raining and the dark came early. She stood in the kitchen, leaned on the breakfast bar and tried to read a book. But she couldn’t concentrate; the noise they were making was monstrous. She switched the radio on but the noise was too loud for it. She switched it off again. She switched the television on and used text to get subtitles, but subtitles were only available on channels she didn’t want to watch. She switched it off again.

She went through to the lounge.

Please stop, she said.

The pipers carried on breathing hard.

You bastards, she said. Get out of my mother’s house.

They puffed. They blew. They avoided her eye. Their avoidance of it was scornful.

She thought about phoning social services and asking them what to do when a lot of poor-looking people from another country took up residence in your property. She didn’t know which department to ask for. Instead she phoned her mother who was staying in a hotel in Helsinki.

What? her mother said.

I can hardly hear you, Chelsea said.

You woke me, her mother said. Time, for God’s sake. What do you want?

What? Chelsea said.

What? her mother said. Poor connection. I can hardly hear you.

You’ll have to speak up, Chelsea said.

Was there anything? her mother said.

Chelsea held the phone away from her in the air, angled towards the lounge where the noise was. She held it there for ten seconds then she put the phone to her ear again.

Hello? her mother said. Hello hello hello hello?

Hello? Chelsea said into the receiver.

I said, was there anything you actually wanted? her mother said.

Never mind, Chelsea said.

What? her mother said.

It’s okay, Chelsea said.

Things are fine here, her mother said. I’ll let you know if I need anything. Make sure you pay the floor-polisher bill, it’s £163, take it out of the cash. And your father’s suits need to be picked up from Arcadia and so do my things, there are seven different things altogether of mine there and could you check with him how many of his suits? And could you ask Maria to clear out the guttering?

Okay, Chelsea said. She had no real idea what her mother was saying. It was probably about the dry cleaning, which she had already collected. Lots of love, her mother said inaudibly from her hotel in Finland. Bye, Chelsea said from the flat in London. She hung up. She lifted the receiver and dialled and pushed the phone as close to her ear as she could and put her finger hard into the hole of her other ear and she could hear that thousands of miles away the phone was ringing then the voice was on the answerphone, no distance away. The message was merry. It made Chelsea feel worse. She listened to it all the way to its end, listened to the nothing she was leaving in the space allotted for her own message and then hung up the phone again.

She went through and sat on the couch. The tune they were playing grew on you. It was angry but it was loving. It was boisterous and gentle. It was full of loss and hope.

Chelsea noticed that their naked knees beneath their kilts were massive. Their hands were red-raw from playing. The one nearest her had perspiration running down his face. They all did. It must be hard work, putting every breath into playing those things and playing them endlessly, wearing those great fur hats and heavy-looking jackets in a centrally-heated room.

When the pipers reached the end again, Chelsea gave in. She applauded.

Bravo, she said.

The man nearest Chelsea almost smiled. The pipers signalled to each other over her head with nods and winks. They began the noise again at the beginning.

In the middle of the night they were sitting all round her on the couch, on the arms of the couch, on the coffee table, on the chairs, on the floor. The working day was over. One of them was singing. Though it was harder to tell now that they had their bearskin hats off, she thought he might be the one who had seemed most disdainful earlier. If my true love she’ll not come, he sang. Then I’ll surely find another.

It was a sad song about a wild time on a mountain. They all joined in at the chorus. At the end they cheered and clapped and clinked their glasses. The man with the beard, sitting next to Chelsea, started to sing. His face was deep red from working and drinking. He sang about how his sweetheart had promised him true, how he would lie down and die for her, so pretty she was, with her dark blue eyes and her face the fairest the sun had ever shone on.

The small dark wounded-looking one sang about a man meeting a girl by chance on a road. She asks him how far to the city it is and which road to take and out of courtesy, and because the girl is so lovely, he goes out of his way and accompanies her. When they can see the spires of the city in the distance she thanks him. He gives her a gold pin from his coat and kisses her, and she’s gone. She appeared like an angel in feature and form as she walked by my side, he sang.

Chelsea was broken by the song. At last she wept. At last the men looked pleased. They looked grave. They looked loyal. The one with the beard put his arm round Chelsea and gave her a wet kiss on the mouth. He smelt and tasted of whisky, or blood.

Later, near dawn, she walked out to the park to get some air. The pipers followed her, two by two. She sat on a bench by the deserted autumn water and watched the birds rising and landing. The pipe band stood a little way off and played ceremoniously, one last time, as the morning came up round London.

He was a Scottish boy and was working on a farm in Ontario. He’d signed up for the army underage at the end of the war and ended up in Canada after it and just stayed. I was nineteen. It was the land of opportunity and my mother, she saved the fare for me, she was half-Scottish herself, she had family out in Banff, her little sister, it was supposed to be a better life. But the whole time I was there I wanted my home. I was on my way home when I met him. He was sat across from me on the bus to the east, I liked the look of him, we got talking. When we got to the city we went to a picture, it was Affair With A Stranger, then he said he’d take me the next day to see a wonder of the world. We got there and you couldn’t hear a thing! The water of it was that loud. The spray was in the air, we were covered in it from just standing there, it was all in my hair. He wanted me to stay and we would have our own farm, the farms were huge over there, much bigger than here. But I was on my way home, I had my ticket and I didn’t know anything about farms, I had grown up in the city and anyway I wasn’t for marrying yet. The year after I got back home my mother died and the year after that I married a man I met at a Railways dance, he was a salesman, he sold glass.

the shortlist season

It was the turn of the century, and the turn of the season again. I had been to the bank and now I was at a loss, so I crossed the park to get to the contemporary art gallery where an exhibition which had been written up in all the papers as culturally important was still showing.

The city was blowing about that day in the dregs of a storm which was happening (or had maybe already happened) thousands of miles away across the Atlantic; in the far distance over the park a tractor was spreading fertilizer on its lawns against the damage that winter would do. I walked under the trees. Leaves, fast and hardened, scuffed against my head and grazed my face. In front of me on the path a man was collecting fallen leaves; he looked ridiculous, large for the machine he sat on which was whirring at the too-high pitch of a full domestic vacuum cleaner as he sucked leaves up through its nozzle, and more were falling behind him, in front of me, on the paths he’d already cleared. Leaves blew round us like birds, or painted snow. When I reached the gallery I had to brush smaller leaves off my shoulders.

Outside the front door a man was talking to some younger men. The wind blew his hair the wrong way and he held it in place with one hand, waving his other hand about. The younger men’s deference to him and the angle of his back, the bend of his head on his neck, all meant the man was an authority on something.
Of course, it has its own
inherent narrative
, he was saying,
but its narrative is
.

Its narrative is. But I don’t know what. I couldn’t make out the rest, and if I’d walked any more slowly or turned to stand and listen then the three men would have sensed me and I would have made them uneasy. Someone, a mad person maybe, or at least a slightly dangerously incalculable person (the city being full of them) would have been listening in to their private conversation in an uncalled-for way. Wind-charred now in the warm gallery foyer I pulled my sweater over my head, and it was a little irritating to me, the fact that I could so easily have seemed mad or like one of those incalculable people to them. Mostly though, I thought with my mouth full of wool, I was irritated because I wouldn’t, because I won’t – ever – know what came after that man’s
is
, or what exactly it was he was talking about, what he meant by saying the words he did, what he knew the inside story to be.

There were leaves caught in the hood of my sweater. Something fell out. When it hit the floor it bounced quite high and made a surprisingly sharp noise for such a small thing, and I picked it up. It was a sycamore seed, its single propeller was veined like a kind of skin and made the seed surreal: a small flying hazelnut, a wing with a shrunken head attached, a fish almost all fin. But the gallery assistant behind the postcard counter was watching me with a kind of interest so I put the seed back inside my sweater with the leaves, folded it over my arm and listened politely as he told me that entry was free, handouts about the exhibition were also free and illustrated catalogues were £16.50.

Usually the people who work behind the counters of galleries like this one are supercilious about the people who come to see the art, but this assistant was new, still unjaded, keen. I let him tell me all of it, the price of the smaller postcards, the price of the larger ones and the ones with three-dimensional effects, and the fact that the posters were sold out but the reorder would be in any day. I opened a display catalogue at a photograph of two cups of coffee on a coffee table; I flicked through it, closed it and put it back on the pile of other catalogues sealed inside cellophane. The assistant was holding out a piece of paper. It was a competition leaflet with a picture of a car on it, organized, it said, in tandem with the exhibition. If I filled in my name and address, allowed a car company to put my name on a mailing list for junk mail and could say in no more than ten words why I thought modern art mattered, I might win a car. You can fill it in later, the assistant told me, and leave it here on your way out. Or you could fill it in now if you like. You could borrow my pen.

He was beginning to annoy me. He was smiling a great deal. He was acting as if he knew me. I put the leaflet in my pocket, thanked him and took a handout.

Or maybe if I
had
stopped to listen to those three men talking outside, I was thinking as I pushed through the swing doors to the exhibition, maybe they wouldn’t have been uneasy at all, maybe they’d have been secretly pleased, because it is always nice, one way or another, to think that someone somewhere is listening. Maybe they’d have smirked self-consciously and nodded to me to join their group, made space for me. The man holding forth might even have conceded to explain.
What I’m talking about is
. Or:
I’m referring to the manner in which the
. Who knew? I went round the gallery and looked at the pictures, the sculptures and the installations.

They had been created by male twins now in their forties, who’d been born siamese but separated soon after birth. The twins and their art were very fashionable; this exhibition, it announced on a board on the wall, had placed them on the prestigious shortlist of a current art award. Broadsheet newspapers were full of authoritative lists and shortlists just now; the best films and pop songs and historical moments of the century, the best music of the year, best novel, best poetry collection, best art. Papers had been running pictures of these twins taken just after they’d been separated and of them as they were now, beside pictures of their sculptures or paintings and stills from their videos. The odds on them winning the art award were short, something like 3/1. I walked around the rooms in the too-hot gallery; though there were several people walking and stopping like me we were all respectful, subdued, like people generally are at a gallery, as if in a church or a bookshop. But I was sweating. Sweat was running down my back; I could feel it the length of my spine. I put my hand behind my neck just under my hairline and it came away wet. I stood in the middle of the gallery and looked at the sweat on my fingers.

It was because of the change in temperature between outside and in, or the larger temperature changes that happen in the change of a season. Or maybe, I thought as I laughed at myself inside my head and wiped my hand on my shirt, the reason I was sweating was because I would never know how the man at the door had finished his sentence. I felt a little dizzy. I felt weak. I began to wonder whether I’d caught some horrible flu virus, or something worse, something with no name which was right now multiplying itself through the inside of me. I glanced at a man who was going past me looking at the art in the wrong direction, the other way round from the way suggested by the arrows stencilled at the front door. For instance, he looked fine. He didn’t seem to be sweating. He didn’t even look hot. Nobody else in the room looked hot.

I stopped beside a sculpture of a coffee table with cups on it which were half-full of something rust-coloured, a folded newspaper placed next to them. The cups had what looked like perspex fixed over their tops and the newspaper’s pages were stapled together with thin metal staples all the way round it. I walked on. I could feel my legs beneath me. I kept walking at the right art gallery pace; I didn’t want to seem unusual to anyone. The only sound in the rooms was occasional and came from the video installations; it was an intermittent grinding noise, like teeth in the mouth of a sleeping person recorded very close-up, or something industrial. The video screens took up three walls of a darkened room; I watched for a while but couldn’t tell what it was I was looking at. On all three walls there was something red and dark and its surface shifted, shone dully; perhaps it was the massive inside of a mouth, a tongue laid flat on a palate bone. Now I could feel my mouth, cavernous, and the way my jaw raised its bone up and became the bottom row of my teeth. I came out of the dark. I concentrated on the paintings instead.

They were uniformly huge and square, each reaching from the skirting board up to the edge of the ceiling and each pair filling a wall as if this gallery, designed at the turn of the last century, had been planned especially to fit these paintings. They were all in pairs. The first of the pairs was of something recognizable and domestic, say a teapot or a dog. The second was a near-empty canvas, cleanish, always smudged at the centre like the painter had touched it there by chance with a hand not clean enough. The images together would be titled: Teapot, 1 & 2 or: Dog, 1 & 2.

I got it. It didn’t exactly take long to get. It was all about alienation and distance, wasn’t it? I had only had to walk once round the gallery, which is pretty small, to get it, but I walked round a couple more times just to prove to myself that in this sweating state I could. After the third time I stopped and sat breathing on a stool in the corner, the kind that the art gallery attendants usually sit on.

The two paintings opposite me now were called Road, 1 & 2. The one on the left was of an empty tarmacked road leading into middle distance with plain grass verges on either side of it. The one on the right was another canvas left almost completely empty behind its glass, just the clay-coloured smudge at its centre resembling grime or a mistaken touch. On the front of the free handout it told me that the twins liked to
paint two identical works then
slowly, painstakingly, to remove all paint from one of the
paired canvases except for a scant trace at the centre of the
gone image
, and as soon as I read this I remembered I’d already known that this was what the twins did, that I had read about this process in a Sunday newspaper or somewhere similar.

I felt shopsoiled, cheated on by my own memory. I sat back on the stool, leaned my weight into the wall behind me and closed my eyes. Then I remembered: the last time I had visited an art exhibition, several months back, I had also felt so unwell that I had had to sit down. It had been at a bigger, grander gallery in the middle of the city. At the very top of the building, up several flights of stairs and along a corridor lined in marble so glassy you could see yourself reflected from the feet up as you walked along it, there were three rooms filled with the small, relentless, brightly coloured pictures a painter had used to record the various stories of her life and her family’s lives in Berlin in the thirties and forties before her death, inevitable, pregnant and statistical. That day, I recalled now, I had been able to look closely at only three of the hundreds of her paintings before feeling the floor under my feet start to shift and creak like the whole of the gallery beneath us – beneath all these people wandering round the rooms and listening to the story of the paintings on the hired gallery CD machines hung at their waists, the CDs whirring in small circles unimaginable to anyone when the pictures were painted – was a ship on a pitching ocean and us in its crow’s-nest swaying and dipping.

I had rocked in one place on my heels and toes to keep myself upright, my face disinterested, until someone, a lady, pushed herself up off the padded seat in the middle of the floor, and her getting up made room for me. Then I had sat in the same room and counted the strips of wood in the floor, examining the varnished dust and stuff trapped in the spaces between them, the paintings still there, raucous colour hovering above my eye-line, until the bell for closing rang and a man in a uniform came round telling everybody to leave, and I could go.

Perhaps it was art that made me sweat. Perhaps sculptures and pictures were inherently bad for me. I suppressed a laugh. It was funny. Earlier that morning I had been to the bank which gave me my mortgage; for some reason the woman behind the counter there is always telling me stories of infirmities and deaths. She is always having inconclusive tests, usually for something frightening. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I could have tests for art intolerance, like patch tests.
We have the results
, the doctor would say.
You are sensitive to dust-mites, the hairs of cats
and horses, shellfish, metals related to nickel, and several
forms of cultural expression
. I would breathe a sigh of relief. I would discover, not too late, that my life could have been symptom-free and simple all along, a matter of deep, healthy, fluid-free breaths if only I’d known to not go near art. After that I would visit theatres and galleries and cinemas and bookshops drowsily, in the haze of antihistamines, my senses so blunt that I wouldn’t care in the slightest what the inherent narrative was or might be.

I always seem to get that woman serving me at the bank. Canadian, dark and thin, she has frail unsunned skin; her face through the saliva-specked double-reinforced glass is always pale. That morning, before I had felt so suddenly at a loss and had decided to take the day off work and spend some time at the contemporary art gallery, she told me a sad story while she added up my cheques. A bank colleague, only thirty-three, in fact only thirty-three last week. Year and a half ago a lump in her arm size of a small satsuma. Size of a clementine. Operated on. Given the all-clear. Six weeks ago terrible headaches. Went back to hospital. Riddled all through. Died yesterday. Only thirty-three. Imagine. Divorced. Daughter aged four who had said to other bank colleague called Mary who was visiting, Mummy is in the hospital and might not be coming back.

I nodded from the other side, said things, signed the paying-in slip, put it in the hollow space banks have for passing things through. My heart had grown bulky inside me one more time; one more time I was resolving behind my sympathetic face to change my branch. The woman was pressing something up against the inside glass layer at me, a grainy photograph, faxed or photocopied, of some people smiling at a party or in a pub. That’s the woman who died on the right, she was saying; did I recognize her? The faces were inky and shadowed and the picture bleeding to white in the several folds and creases in the copy; it had been through many hands.
So do something frivolous
, the woman had shouted after me through the glass as I left the bank.
Be
sure and do something frivolous today
.