Jackdaw, page 7
‘No, not Hatfield,’ she corrected when this first came up.
Her father did something to do with tourism in the Peak District. She called him a lot and had long collusive conversations that I could not follow. Her mother did some admin work now, but before that managed five care homes. She suffered a massive stroke and it took a while for her to regain certain functions.
‘Ten years of hard physiotherapy and speech therapy and coloured crystals got her back to secretarial duties. She’s not who she was.’
Destroyer came to London to be an actor. She made some minor noise in Manchester doing theatre work and ran afoul of some local drug dealer.
‘He wanted me to pay him in kind. I had money to pay in cash. We disagreed.’
London did not accept her as an actor. It was always close, always the next audition, always paying to attend this talk by that famous person. Bit parts and commercials and… shit, really.
‘My closest brush with fame was when I heard Ridley Scott was looking for a Northern lass to play a Northern lass in a film. He was delayed by that volcanic ash thing that stopped flights and I was never invited back. Oh, and I saw Madonna once for about three seconds before a wall of bodyguard flesh blocked me from her.’
London did accept her as a manual worker.
With blond guy she was soft and gentle. He stared at me while she took him in her mouth.
Lots of actors do cleaning gigs and waiting gigs and eye-candy gigs. They also do parties. Standing around as the decorative flesh so that the successful can have an image that includes beauty and youth. Glittering lights, music. Some drugs, but not so much; Destroyer and her kin hoping the pixie dust of stardom would rub off on them.
It didn’t. These events sucked out the little life force Destroyer had. There was nothing left in the tank for her to shine in her roles. Even less in the bank.
Hadfield was not an option.
She did some escort work to start with, to make rent.
‘There was always more to spend your money on, more clothes, more acting classes, more travel to meet such and such director or to put you in a hotel lobby where one of the Hemsworths might just walk past.’
She couldn’t tell me how old she was when she realised it wasn’t going to happen for her. She did become depressed. She cried gallons, and when she ran out of tears she inflicted pain on others.
‘It was already my preferred… activity. I just made others pay for it.’
She and blond guy finished. The room was thick with the smell of their exertions, the slime of human passing like a snail, as Bacon once said. But for the first time I had the beginnings of an idea of what to write. Portraits. Disturbing portraits that evoked the same feelings one got from Bacon’s paintings. Distortions. Capturing human suffering. Or capturing my suffering. Disgust and horror.
Slime, slime, slime.
Destroyer made me stay long enough to be late enough to need an explanation for Elise. I had no marks to hide, and I had not had sex. But I was distracted with my project, and that was normal for me. Normal normal, not new normal.
I went home, shot straight up to my study, picked up a notebook and wrote for two hours straight without stopping. I got a cramp in my lower back and my neck from all the stooping Destroyer had me doing, but this was worth it. The first new pages of material since this assignment began.
I didn’t read it over that night. I just basked in the glow of creation and deep down, in the place where I admitted hidden things, I was proud of myself.
10
I was so excited, I didn’t touch the lunch that the Francis Bacon people were so generously paying for. I wasn’t hungry, or maybe I just couldn’t think about food at that time. I couldn’t think about food at all. I was full of a manic energy that wouldn’t go anywhere. Even when I slept my thoughts raced through options and dreams and not-quite fantasies.
I realised I was out of breath and stopped. They stared at me in silence. How long had I been talking? I reached for a glass of water. Sparkling, but it would have to do.
I talked about Lucian Freud and speculated about the rift between him and Bacon. Could they get me in with Freud’s people? Could they? They had resources, didn’t they? Could they? I drank more water as punctuation rather than to quench thirst. Could they? What did they think?
There were two of them, a woman and a man. Tarquin had been here, but only for introductions. He left for a meeting with some hot new talent. Those were his words and they drove spikes into me. I wasn’t new, and I wasn’t hot. Even when I was new I was old. Tade Thompson was never going to be on the 30-under-30 lists, or even 40-under-40. I was busy making one career and building my writing craft on the side. That doesn’t make for a blazing, blistering debut novel complemented by my youthful good looks and the unending optimism of the young. My time was always going to be middle age; admission to medical school guaranteed that.
Wait. They were speaking.
‘What?’ I asked. I sprayed some water over the table because my mouth was full. I noticed that the woman ate nothing from that point onwards and I missed what the man said again.
‘I’m sorry, you were saying?’
The man looked to the woman, then to me. ‘I said we like it. You seem… excited about it and we hope that energy passes to the text.’
Hope?
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m sorry?’ asked the man.
‘I asked what you meant.’
‘That we like your proposal.’
‘No, the other thing.’
‘What other thing?’
‘The thing with the energy. And the hoping.’
‘…’
The man looked to the woman again, for help.
‘Just that we’re excited to see what you do with this, with the literary portraits.’
‘Or do you hope to be excited? Which is it?’ I had to restrain myself from brushing Lightfoot away. She kept bobbing in and out.
‘I seem to have… that is, I don’t know what I’ve said wrong, but perhaps we can start again.’
‘We can start again,’ I said. ‘As soon as you tell me what you meant.’
‘I—’
‘Do you think I can’t pull it off? That my ability is sub-par?’
Horrified smiles. ‘Oh, no, no. We wouldn’t be here if—’
‘Then why do you hope?’
‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman. She had a wonderful mouth. In concern, it shrunk, and the lipstick made it seem like an improperly healed surgical wound. The kind that gets infected with pseudomonas aeruginosa. If it did, that perfect skin would bubble and distend, and when it cracked open the air would be full of ichor and the sweet smell of gas gangrene. Each time the muscles flexed gas would be forced out in a fart of putrefaction. I wanted to kiss the mouth, the wound.
I had missed what they were saying again. I needed to get back in the moment, in the now. Mindfulness. Breathe.
The man was on the phone and the woman was clearly leaning away from the table. The waiter floated towards us like a moth, but bounced off when she saw the curt head shake the woman gave him.
The ambient music had the bassline from that Iron Butterfly song, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, but not quite. It was only the bass, none of the keyboard. It bugged me that I couldn’t figure it out, this bastard version of a song I loved.
People were talking at me, but I just wanted them to shut the fuck up so I could work out why this damn song wasn’t what I expected it to be.
I looked up and I had an audience.
The hell was going on?
‘You all right, mate?’ Someone in uniform now.
‘Why wouldn’t I be all right?’ I asked.
‘D’you want to come with us to the ambulance?’
Ambulance? Wait, where were the Bacon people? We were in a meeting, weren’t we?
Lightfoot followed us out of the restaurant. She was laughing for the first time.
Study for portrait of a psychiatrist as a psychiatric patient.
‘They said you were rambling,’ said Elise. ‘You just sat there and didn’t make any sense.’
The ambulance took me to the emergency department and while they didn’t feel the need to admit me, they didn’t feel comfortable sending me back into the wild, so I had to call someone to pick me up. Elise cut short her working day just to bring me home. She wasn’t amused.
‘I had a meeting,’ I said. ‘I was excited about the concept. It got out of hand, is all. I’m fine.’
‘What meeting?’
‘With Francis Bacon’s people. We had a noon thing. I have to explain what I’m writing.’
‘There wasn’t any meeting, Tade.’
‘Yes, there was. We had a reservation and everything.’
Elise shook her head. ‘You turned up at this place, walked past the podium, and sat at a table that was being bussed. The place was in the weeds because it was lunch hour. The hostess tried to ask if you had a reservation but you kept waving her off. You were talking to yourself. You had no guests, Tade.’
‘That’s preposterous,’ I said. I had never used that word in my life. I did yank out my phone to call Tarquin, my agent.
‘Hey, Double-Tee!’
God, I hated how this man spoke. ‘Tarquin, how did your meeting go?’
‘What meeting?’
‘You know, the hot new next-big-thing you were going to meet this morning?’
Nervous laugh. ‘You know you’re my only hot big thing, Tade!’
‘No, seriously, when you left, you said—’
‘Left where?’
‘Lunch.’
‘What lunch?’
I took a deep breath because my lungs wouldn’t fill up. ‘I’ll call you later.’
Elise cocked her head. ‘You need a holiday.’
“‘Thief’s Theme’”! That’s the song. Ugh, it was driving me crazy!’
Elise raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s a Nas song. The restaurant was playing an instrumental version.’ I realised this probably sounded mad. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Shall we go home?’
I sat in a bath with water that cooled from hot to lukewarm in record time. When you’ve been to the emergency department or hospital there’s a smell, industrial disinfectant or some shit, that you get maybe from the waiting room. It lingers on the body and in the mind. A bath is required.
My phone beeped with notifications. Poker. I called. I raised. I folded. Then I let the app use my playing pattern to decide what moves to make.
Lightfoot looked on.
‘You could make yourself useful and scrub my back, you know,’ I said.
The door swung open. ‘Who are you talking to?’ said Elise.
Study for portrait of writer’s wife.
Elise is from Sierra Leone, or at least her parents are.
One day, when she was eleven, her mother arranged for her to visit their home country so that she could imbibe some culture. Ostensibly. At Heathrow, her older cousin Ruth saw her off and said she’d been on a similar trip a few years before, that it would be fun.
They landed at the airport and she was to join seven other girls of similar age, chaperoned by an older woman, in a village for some gentle enculturation.
They told tales, they sang songs, they slept on mats and mattresses, they learnt cooking. Maybe they got taught about boys and men, about penises and semen, about what to avoid, about illicit touching, about pregnancy.
But none of this was the true reason for the trip.
One evening the girls were joined by several older women, some of them quite robust.
‘It’s time for you to become women,’ said the original chaperone. ‘You must not speak of this, especially not to anyone younger than you.’
They split off into groups.
Elise went into one room with two women.
They told her to take off her underwear. She told me she felt some disquiet at this point, but they were aunties, and she trusted them, so she did. They gave her a wrapper to tie loosely around her waist. They asked her to lie down and spread her legs.
‘No,’ she said.
Every instinct in her told her to flee. Her spirit was already straining for the door, although her feet were rooted to the spot. The flickering of the kerosene lamp towards the air current seemed to match what her heart wanted.
The bigger woman grabbed both her arms from behind and flung her to the raffia mat. She sat down on Elise with her gigantic arse. Under the woman, flailing ineffectually, she became a pinned bug, trapped by physics and implacable tradition.
The other woman dragged a wooden stool between Elise’s thrashing legs. She had something sharp that glinted, but Elise didn’t know if it was a knife or a razor blade.
‘Easy, girl. Easy. It’ll be over soon.’
Elise could not breathe under Big Arse because her chest was compressed. She heard cries from far away and she realised that what was happening to her was happening to every girl in the group.
The woman’s hand flashed forward like a scorpion’s tail. Elise felt white heat in her crotch and a jolt of rocket fuel in her veins. She threw the fat woman off her, flashed out of the door and ran into the night, warmth streaming down her legs.
She fled into the bush, barefoot, bleeding, with only her top on. Behind her, shouts, screams, footfalls as people gave chase.
Fear and pain still powered her, and she scrambled up a palm tree, though till this day she cannot remember how she did it without breaking her neck in the middle of the fucking night. She held on to that tree trunk for dear life.
‘I actually thought they meant to murder me,’ she said.
Her memories are no doubt distorted, but she said she stayed up that tree for what seemed like an entire day. They found her and asked her to come down, but she didn’t, calling for her father, yelling the whole time for him to come and save her.
The women discussed ways of getting her safely down.
Blood loss, hunger, tiredness, those things brought Elise down.
Weakened, she could no longer resist effectively. It was supposedly taboo for any male to be in the vicinity of the ceremony but they made an exception because they were scared Elise was going to fall and die. They got a ladder and a wiry youth monkeyed up and carried Elise down.
They took her straight back to the hut, spread her legs and cut her pudenda. They cut off the labia majora and some of the labia minora. They sliced away the clitoris. They sang joyful songs while they did it. Elise passed out and became delirious.
She was in hospital for twenty-one days. She got septicaemia and on day seven her blood stopped clotting. She had numerous packed cell transfusions and her entire blood volume had to be replaced. She got hepatitis. She had an HIV scare, but it was a false positive.
She got urinary retention because the urethra closed up, which contributed to kidney failure, although septicaemic shock didn’t help.
She somehow survived all of this, but six months later, when her periods began, she had haematocolpos, blood stuck in her vagina, because her vaginal opening was too scarred and had healed over. She got a pelvic infection because why not and bacteria love static blood.
‘I lost that entire year because it was too traumatic and I was delirious a lot of the time.’
But she survived.
Ruth turned up at their house for Elise’s birthday the following year.
‘I punched her in the fucking face and kicked her in the boobs,’ said Elise. Her parents had to drag them apart.
‘It happened to me too,’ said Ruth, wiping blood from her nose.
‘And because you kept quiet, it happened to me,’ said Elise.
Fucking hell.
The life of an African girl.
When I met Elise she wouldn’t let me go down on her. ‘Because of the smell,’ she would say.
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. What? I didn’t.
‘I do.’
She wouldn’t even let us fuck with the light on. We’d been together two years before I ever saw her fully naked, and even that was an accident of showering schedules.
Elise could only climax in specific circumstances. It took a lot of cajoling to find out why, and to hear the story.
‘Want to come in here?’ I asked. ‘With me?’
She touched the water and withdrew her hand. ‘Tade, this water is freezing. Get out of there, now.’
So it was. I hadn’t noticed.
But I successfully avoided the topic of my hallucinatory lunch.
11
Standing up in my study, staring at photos of 7 Reece Mews, of the mess within. It wasn’t a mess, though, was it? It was more of a focus for artistic play, where fragments of ideas could collide with each other and produce the kind of accidental meaning Bacon talked about. Sort of. Bacon couldn’t be trusted on the matter of his intentions or process. There is what he said, and what he did, and what he wanted to be seen. Brand control, innit?
I wasn’t a painter, so there was no point hoarding a bunch of images, but my equivalent was books. I remember that the first book I touched was Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil. I stroked the spine. I loved books, not just the words or pictures within, but the objects themselves. I loved cover art, back copy, the copyright page, the acknowledgements, the backmatter. I loved that smell old yellowed books had, but not so much the faintly chemical smell of newer paper.
I threw the Smil down in the middle of my study.
I stared at it.
I bent, picked it up again.
I tore off the cover. Surprisingly I didn’t feel any frisson of fear, which I would usually feel when I mistakenly damage a book. I tore the preface out, crumpled it and dropped it to the floor. I was learning new things with each page I ripped. God doesn’t strike you down with thunder just because you damage a book.
Growing up, my mother wasn’t a big one for books. Which is an understatement. She taught me how to read and how to write, but after that I was left to my own devices when it came to procuring books.
