The Exhibitionist, page 14
‘Mmm? Don’t be silly. Yes, yes do, with this spoon. I’ll . . . hang on,’ she says, but Jess can see she’s looking at the clock, counting on her fingers.
Something’s up. No doubt about it. She looks almost good, like she’s remade.
No, that’s not it. The change is in her face.
Jess, who can’t stop wanting excitement, choosing rather than being chosen, a deep new equal love, feels the beating of her heart and thinks: why not me too?
Lucia untucks her phone from her jumper armpit without even meaning to, because why would there be a message?
But there is one, from Priya.
The lamb should have rested. It sizzles and pops in its slick of fat; she doesn’t take care. She wants to be burned.
22
This time eight weeks ago, they were outside the Chinese restaurant, breathless in the cold and not sober. The air was so icy that her nostrils felt scorched. Priya was laughing like a seagull, so loudly that anyone in the flats above them might look out, but Lucia didn’t care. Urgency made her bold. ‘I need to know, how you, why you . . . how did you guess about me? That it was OK. To tell me. About Hellie.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Priya.
‘Then why did you . . . I mean, it’s such a risk. You must have known. Subconsciously. About me, my former . . .’
‘Nope.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I do now,’ Priya said, and she smiled.
Buffered by Szechuan peppercorns and cognac, tucked into the alleyway, there seemed no rush to catch the night bus. When Priya produced a fag (‘another vice I don’t admit to’), Lucia decided she wanted one too. Or, at least, to share it.
‘Seriously?’ said Priya. ‘You seem too wholesome for that.’
Lucia swallowed and leant towards Priya, whose chin was illuminated by the lighter-flame, watched her take a puff.
‘Aren’t these about a pound each nowadays?’
‘Minimum.’
‘I really am quite drunk,’ Lucia said. ‘I mean, properly.’ She was trying to balance on a mansion-block doorstep, a cave in a thicket of laurel. The soles of her boots would not hold the edge. ‘And I’m so square this’ll give me a head-rush.’
‘We are old people.’
‘I’m much older than you. What are you, forty-f—?’
‘Forty-six,’ says Priya.
Lucia frowned.
‘Hurry up, woman,’ said Priya and Lucia put it to her lips.
‘Those brown glazed tiles look like chocolate. Burnt caramel,’ and Priya made a wry face, all eyebrows and cheekbones. ‘What?’
‘Get you, all artistic. They do look lickable. Do you feel . . . thirsty?’
‘Desiccated,’ said Lucia, and Priya smirked.
Lucia pretended not to notice. ‘Is this some kind of, you know. Peabody Estate? I could live here,’ she said wildly. ‘By myself, I mean.’
‘Yes, early social housing; loads of it round St Pancras. I am ratted.’ Then she was quiet.
‘What? OK, drunk. You don’t seem it.’
‘Well,’ said Priya, ‘I am. It’s very bad.’
Her hand was outstretched. It neared Lucia’s coat, her collar. Lucia thought: ‘Oh, she wants the fag back’, but it wasn’t that, not at all.
Part Three
Saturday morning
23
A stream of water twists like a drill-bit from the tap. It is thick with limescale. Only yesterday morning Lucia had tried to scrape it off, as if Priya would enter her kitchen, notice the minor leavings of minerals, and end it.
She has wondered, in the past, about compressing the powder into stone for a small piece; something to do with reverse aqueducts. She’d put the idea aside, because it would enrage Ray.
She could do it for Venice, but of course that isn’t going to happen.
Priya has done this before, let her down so casually.
Hearts are elastic, but only to a point.
Jess steps, waits, listens. She has crept down the loft ladder, clothes draped over her arms, shoes clutched like castanets, and then past the bedrooms to the hall. No one has called out. No time for a bath; barely tooth-brushing, because she needs to escape before Martyn wakes and the house fills again. She pees, flushes, dresses, heart in mouth; nothing. Amazing that, today of all days, no one’s about.
But, just before she can slip out of the front door, she hears someone in the kitchen. She peers down; her mother is at the sink, hands pressed to her face. Oh, thank God.
Jess has been bred in silence, but mothers and daughters should dare to be honest.
Last night, when Jess returned to the living room, her father was tellingly bright. Dr Mac, his GP, accompanied him proudly, like a jockey leading in his winning horse. Leah seemed fixated on the least important detail of tomorrow, the catering; it’s like she had mentionitis, constantly dropping Larry Nathaniel’s son Pablo into the conversation, as if they all should be honoured that he’s being paid to feed them stupid-sounding tapas. Who could she tell that her mother seemed, even by her usual vague standards, off-balance?
‘Mum?’
It’s like a moment in a play, when intimacies can be swapped and foundations strengthened. She wants to know about being pregnant, hear her mother’s liberating confession of art-school lost love, ask if she thinks Martyn is her best chance. Do families have a tipping-point? But Jess loves her mother. She never sees her. This is not the time.
Or is it? Fuck it. She opens her mouth to confess. But her mother looks different, sad and tired. Something’s wrong. Wronger than usual: fire down below.
‘Will it be a success?’ she’d asked last night, in the kitchen. ‘Have you actually seen what Dad’s done?’
‘No,’ said Lucia. ‘Have you?’
‘He wouldn’t show me.’
Her mother rose above it. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she said distractedly. ‘You look lovely. Very pink.’
Jess pretended to pick a feather off her mother’s shoulder. Lucia gave her a crinkly eye smile.
‘It’s so lovely that you’re here,’ she said, rubbing tiredly at her cheek, which was lightly garnished with thyme leaves, and Jess forgot to ask her who’d been on the phone.
‘Mum?’ she says now. Should she go to her? ‘Is everything . . . OK?’
An odd expression crosses Lucia’s face: fear, or excitement, swiftly checked, like an Etch-a-Sketch twiddled clean. ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘Absolutely normal. Nothing special. You?’
She smiles at Jess. Jess looks back, into the sad, soft eyes which shone right through her childhood, the truest love she knows. Here, at the end of something, a spark of self-salvation flickers. Do what you need to save yourself, it whispers to her.
‘Perfectly fine,’ she says and picks up her bag, and goes.
‘So,’ says Uncle David, ‘what delights do we have in store?’
Gillian, his wife, puts down her laptop case, looks through her purse. Her kids, the Gillians, are trailing back and forth from their Peugeot with pillows, cool-bags, dangling iPods, falling textbooks. They’re both medical students; ‘More socially inadequate swots,’ Ray says. ‘Exactly what this country needs.’
‘If anyone has a minute,’ Lucia begins, ‘I’d love a hand w—’ but Uncle David walks straight past her. Ray’s family, after three decades, are still waiting for his young wife to settle down. Uncle David, a famously good husband who encourages Gillian’s success, enjoys asking Lucia about Balzac, Grieg, and marvelling at her ignorance. Ray joins in; it bonds them, despite David having been to university. It’s a fine line, which only Ray can navigate.
The Gillians mill about complaining: the bread, the height of the stair-treads, the boiler, long overdue the service which Ray’s friend Norris said he’d do on the cheap. The daughter, Becca, twenty-ish but seems younger, looks about to cry.
‘Oh sweetheart, what do you need?’ asks Lucia.
‘She’s absolutely fine,’ says Gillian firmly, as Becca wanders off. ‘Just give her a task.’ Lucia can’t quite meet her eye. ‘Unless everything’s already in hand. You don’t seem,’ she says, looking Lucia up and down, ‘terribly relaxed.’ Her arthritis must be bad; she’s using a stick. ‘It is today, isn’t it? What time is kick-off?’
‘Six. Well, five for us. The welcoming committee.’
‘So it’s all ready? Just waiting for the hordes?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Hmm.’
‘Hello, yeah, morning,’ says Leah, heading straight for the kettle. ‘Everything’s under control.’
‘Good. Good,’ says Gillian. ‘So, presumably, he’s doing well, for them to want a show? We’re all agog. Will Ray be raking it in?’ and she gives David a very obvious nudge.
‘It’s not actually like that,’ Leah begins.
‘Because,’ says Gillian. ‘In terms of—’
Becca plucks at her mother’s garment. ‘Mum? Mum?’
‘All OK, love?’ says Gillian, not looking up.
Becca wavers like an anxious toddler; her pasty Sheffield forehead shines. She looks stricken. ‘Where’s Jess?’
Aunt Gillian is famous, apparently, in giant-tortoise circles. She shows no clemency; once, in a casual conversation, she corrected Martyn’s grammar. I bet, he thinks, she’d flout the Geneva Convention.
Ray would enjoy that. But he’s bickering with his brother, David the scientist. There’s an unease Martyn recognizes from class; someone will trespass on their neighbour’s leg-space, or lightly insult their pet, and it all kicks off.
‘This is nice. Who’s it by?’ Gillian says, as she wanders around the house.
By ten, everyone is up to something. Leah takes Ray to the exhibition space, with a celebratory bacon sandwich in double foil. Martyn comes too, with an enormous picnicky breakfast to share with Patrick; ‘The meat’s obviously for me,’ he says, tucking another sausage roll into his pocket. Leah is wrapped up like a sanatorium nurse, arm in arm with Ray the brave soldier. They are being secretive.
Gillian’s on a step ladder changing the light bulbs in the sitting room. She seems restless, wanting to chat; Lucia is keeping clear. Uncle David’s taken their medical children to the Wellcome, like Mormons paying homage to the Golden Plates, and Eric Nakamura is on the way to the White Cube, which hasn’t gone down well.
But the main problem is Lucia’s face. Marie-Claude has left another message; Priya has not. It makes her body hurt. It’s like being drunk: the desperation, the thrill. Her arm skin looks like seawater brushed by a fast wind. You are old, she tells herself. Wanted, but old. All your joy should be over.
Last night, lying beside Ray, small tears pooling in what she thinks of as her ‘nostrilatrium’, she tried to accept her future life: Venice refused, Priya surrendered, maybe a new commission from Germany or more teaching, whatever would keep them afloat and Ray unenraged. She should be able to live on the fact that Venice wanted her, at least. It ought to be enough.
Jess is striding through waves of anger, slower and slower. Her face seems doughy, as if she could fall asleep mid-step. By the time she’s reached the chemist’s, she’s almost let herself forget why she’s here.
A bell dings operatically when she steps on the doormat and everyone turns, like crows disturbed. There are three grannies waiting on fold-out chairs, a right-angled old man by the retractable walking-sticks. She inspects the cuticle-slicers, the 99p bubble bath, waiting for the queue to recede, but the assistant is slow and her rivals are patient as cattle. The sitters watch with interest as she edges towards the till, behind a shivery person who discusses in detail their need for fig syrup. Then every pendulous ear strains to listen; they see the packet she pays for, shoves deep in her bag. One of them will be the aunt of a Ray-friend. There is no private life here.
With the valour of ten young women, she walks back towards the doormat, staring defiantly in the direction of what may be trusses. She is almost crushing the narrow box, trying to remember suitable toilets. In twenty-four hours she can leave London, knowing whatever it is she will know.
Gillian has her own troubles. She has been cultivating David, making sure the dinner table looks welcoming every single evening, seven o’clock on the dot, all his favourite snacks permanently on hand; in bed too, if necessary. And all so that, this weekend, he’ll confront his brother about the house.
Given David’s recent news, they need to be strategic.
It isn’t rightfully Ray’s; the Hanrahans know this. The fact that Ray is irrational, dubiously medicated, that his children are too weird for tertiary education (did the elder two even finish A levels?), shouldn’t mean that Gillian’s own offspring must go without. This rotting house: Ray and Lucia should downsize and release a fortune. Besides, most of the art and china was left to all three brothers by their father, nasty old Gordon Hanrahan, and some of it looks quite valuable. Graeme is a write-off; their mother used to say he’s never got over being an only surviving twin. Gillian suspects the truth is more psychiatric.
Perhaps she should raise it herself with Lucia, not that Lucia notices anything. Besides, knowing Ray’s family’s weird code of honour, poor old Lucia will feel she should inform him and there will be hell to pay.
And, because David cannot bear the thought of Ray knowing, she can’t tell Lucia that, on Thursday, he’s having a stent put in.
So she’s protected him, so far. When Leah rang about this special weekend of Ray-celebration, which she needs like a hole in the head, David had been at a gestational diabetes conference in Windsor.
‘We can’t stay with you, though,’ Gillian said quickly, visualizing her brother-in-law’s unwholesome habitat, versus a hygienic suburban bed and breakfast. Could she allege her arthritis is too bad for stairs? ‘There’s no room, surely, you still there, and now your poor brother’s moved back in . . .’
Leah interrupted: ‘Dad needs me. Anyway, Patch’s not in the actual house, remember? He’s in the caravan.’
‘That grotty caravan? I thought it was abandoned by some friend of your f—’
‘Yup,’ said Leah.
‘It’ll be too much for you, though, surely,’ Gillian pressed. ‘All four of us. Your mother has no time to feed ext—’
‘She loves it,’ Leah said. ‘Anyway, Dad’s the real cook. She’s more, you know, basics.’
Ray is one of the great bad cooks; on this, David and Gillian are united. His patchy reheating, DEFRA-level overconfidence about sell-by dates, heavy hand with seasoning, mean that, while everyone makes an enormous fuss about his roasts and stews, she’ll have to bring cereal bars, apples, oatcakes. David likes to know what he’s eating. Gillian’s life is a battleground in which greed and not letting herself go, ever, ceaselessly skirmish.
Her mind began filling with the difficulties of the weekend: how to obtain salad, civilized baths, all the details that make life semi-bearable.
‘Is,’ she asked, wondering how to get on to the subject of bedding, ‘the exhibition only him? Or with another artist? Your mother, isn’t she—?’
‘No,’ Leah replied, sounding as if she was swallowing an ice cube. ‘It’s . . . well, it isn’t huge. But a big deal, in . . . in art terms. Whatever anyone thinks, he’s still a major figure,’ and Gillian began to wonder.
Patrick hides.
First he dodges into the shadowed phone booth at the back of the hallway, with its metal shelf and hanging pencil string. The thought of Ray roaring at him, which he can usually endure, sends his blood racing around his body, too quick to let oxygen in. What if someone else is here, hears Patrick’s humiliation? If Ray publicly says something horrible, final, it would be the end of him.
Ray and Leah complain loudly; they know he’s in the building, which makes it harder to undo. Indecision coagulates in his stomach. He slips past the bleachy toilet and through the door of the dark main room. His lungs are roaring but he’s managing to be silent, almost; only the occasional squeak of fear. Sweat is pouring off his neck; his hands shake. He hears their footsteps, distant as they cross the Gallery, then louder, coming out into the open and downstairs to the ground floor. Don’t let them find me.
But he needs to tell Ray about the job; he has never wanted anything so much. His dread is pulling Ray closer. He has to make him say yes.
There’s a glint by his foot: a big staple, nearly new. Something brutal is required; more serious blood-letting to make change begin. He presses his fingertip to lift it, begins to drive the sharp end into the callused skin of his palm.
There’s a point, with Leah’s father, where you just have to have faith.
He won’t talk about the work. The upstairs space is all set up, looking quite good, quite professional, if you ignore the many non-RSVPs and the selfish refusal of Larry Nathaniel to allow smoking indoors, which obviously they’ll ignore, and Patrick not here when they need him, and Pablo not answering his phone.
When Ray agreed that Pablo’s guys could do the catering, she’d been fine to communicate only by text, to accept ‘yass’ or ‘k’ in response. Pablo is too busy and creative for chat. But then some stupid woman complained that his restaurant’s organic chicken pie was Morrison’s, and a different council department kicked off about immigrants, or was it hygiene, so he’s been stressed. He hasn’t always answered. She heard something about site visits, then that the full Mediterrfusion tasting menu might be tricky, but nothing for a day. Or two. It should be all right; she’s waited for him so many times before, hanging about opposite the pub for an accidental bumping-into, lurking near the newsagent’s on Junction Road where she once spotted him buying Rizlas. It definitely isn’t that he’s avoiding her.
She gives her father an encouraging hug, hoping he hasn’t noticed the splintery floorboards, how cheap the printed biog looks, the crappy fabric draped over the trestles. No one is helping; she’s done all this for him. He just needs to let the pictures out of his studio. Patrick swears the car’s full of petrol, the tyres are pumped; she wants to believe there’s enough time to hang them, but she’s starting to feel furious at everyone who doesn’t believe in him. There’s no more she can do, except keep ringing Pablo.
