Ménage Read online

  He agreed on two conditions: that we lie about the price, and that she paid us, not the council, so we could skim a couple of hundred off the top. Six-fifty a month was ridiculous (as we both paid two hundred) and it was humiliating to have to call her back but he hung over my shoulder the whole time whispering the price. Money was not a problem, she said. She liked us and would move in the next day.

  Why the hell she would want to live with us? It was an hour or so’s commute to Goldsmiths. She had mentioned that her father had bought her a flat in Golders Green but she felt lonely there and she needed the company of ‘real artists’. Were we? Con artists more like. I felt guilty about bleeding those extra hundreds out of her, and Saul was despicable, yet his deceit had saved us from eviction. I couldn’t help but marvel at what the promise of a few hundred quid had done to him as he dived into the spare room and started carrying out the remaining rancid bin bags and stacked them out the front. Slime was dripping stinking trails across the floor, as he declared: — I suppose wealth is preferable to poverty, if only for financial reasons!

  Of course he had disclaimers – we weren’t to speak to her – she was a capitalist cash crop – women were a distraction, nothing more. He made me swear I would not succumb to the temptations of the flesh, that if I slept with her he would leave without discussion. I made my vow of abstinence as we stood there with twenty reeking bin bags between us.

  We made a shoplifting trip to Pricecutter for Neutradol – the world’s number-one room spray odour destroyer – and some cheese because he was peckish. All we bought was a copy of the Sun, because it was the cheapest thing in the shop. As soon as we were outside he threw the paper to the ground. He had no ethical issues over stealing from Pakistanis or subsidising Rupert Murdoch to the value of twenty pence, now that we had real toilet paper.

  As I tidied her room for her arrival, I wondered what Dot would make of Saul on actually meeting him: an obnoxious character, no doubt. Beneath his hundred ironic veils, the clashes of cultures he played with daily, was there an essence to the man, an essential Saul? There were some basic facts. Saul was by no means tall. Five foot seven was my guess, although he was rarely barefoot and his Cuban heels added three inches and his cowboy boots perhaps two. (They looked vaguely orthopaedic and may have had a few hidden inches inside.) His feet were extraordinarily large, a size twelve, and the rumour about feet and their correlation with male endowment, I gathered, from glimpses through his ever-shifting kimono, was in fact the case. On the few occasions I saw him almost naked I determined that there seemed not an inch of him that was not covered in thick black hair. In two days he could grow a moustache that would have taken me three weeks, and when he wore foundation his five o’clock shadow spiked its way through at around 3 p.m. He had a Kirk Douglas chin, and his nose was large and long and slightly crooked, which gave him the appearance, on his days in a trench coat, of being some modern-day Fagin (although he denied Judaic origins). His eyebrows added to the effect, being heavy and almost meeting in the middle, although I recalled that time – he was going through his Dolly Parton stage – when he shaved them off entirely and wore eyeliner instead. He was prematurely greying, although that would be a premature judgement as he carefully concealed his age. I’d guessed somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two. The hair came and went in length too, some days a ‘yuppie ponytail’, others shoulder-length, once he wore it in two pigtails – one on either side of his head – like a schoolgirl (an effect he called pornographic), most days it was matted, but never dread-locked, as he despaired at the Rastafarians. His chest, beneath the hairs, was as sunken as his arm muscles were shrunken, lending validation to the impression that he’d never done a day’s exercise in his life.

  This – the man naked, pieced together from fragments I was maybe not supposed to have seen – still did not answer the question.

  Any time I got close to some truth about where he had come from I got the same riposte. ‘I am who I am today, nothing more.’ I gathered that he had spent his twenties studying the arts and political sciences but whether at university or in his bed, I did not know. He liked the word ‘autodidact’.

  His accent should have given me clues, but it was a hybrid of many things – some Americanisms from the adverts he quoted, but largely the nineteenth-century affectations he’d pinched from Nietzsche. It was only when he quoted in French that I detected the tiniest trace of something that may have been from the north of England. (Had he a Brummy French teacher in school?) He despised rave culture – the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses and even before that the Smiths. The sensitive socialist Morrissey was maybe his public enemy number one, which may have been more evidence to prove that he was born within a mile of the man’s home. As he would not discuss his parents or childhood, disclaiming it all as ‘just so much Freudian nonsense’, I was left none the wiser. Perhaps his quest to be a new person was the product of some deeply embarrassing truth about himself, a childhood of squalor in Manchester perhaps, a single mother, a working-class background (which may have explained his hatred of the proletariat; maybe his father had been one of the miners that Thatcher crushed?). He did after all frequently say, ‘Art saves us from the prison of history.’ But as soon as I started examining I would hear him incanting: ‘The truth of oneself is not hidden inside, it has yet to be invented!’

  As I waited for her arrival Saul declared that he had changed his mind and did not want to meet the ‘incumbent’. I was to handle all the practicalities of her move as he would be gathering his thoughts and was not to be disturbed. He went to his room and put on a record. As the cheesy synths jangled through the flat I knew it was the dreaded one. ‘Disparu’ by the Duchamps. They were some long-disbanded failed eighties band a bit like Spandau Ballet meets Stockhausen meets a karaoke singer doing Pavarotti. It had audio samples of animals played backwards and the keyboards sounded like a kiddie’s home computer. As I tried to shield my ears from it, the vocals came on. The notes were flat and the voice was of a sick androgyne singing falsetto and mispronouncing French lyrics with a trace of a Yorkshire accent.

  ‘J’ai disparu, nous avons disparooo, vooo disparooo.’

  It was possibly the worst and definitely the most pretentious album of all time. An album so up its own bottom that no one perhaps other than Saul could have ever found it; that symbolised Saul’s ethos of rebellion against the forces of mass culture, the elevation of obscurity to a virtue and his belief in worshipping failure in a world based on the cult of success.

  He had played it to me that first time I met him, as a test, and somehow maybe in a kind of fucked-up way I had gone from fearing, to loathing, to kind of loving it. I had to laugh at what the girl called Dot’s first reaction would be upon hearing the sounds of ‘Disparu’.

  It was surreal, this company she’d hired, three men in matching overalls, carrying in her possessions in identical boxes: a music stand for, maybe, a violin; eight or so boxes of books or CDs; a large television. She apologised profusely for her many things: a cappuccino machine; easel; surround-sound stereo; teak bookshelf; one of those new Apple Macintoshes and a printer.

  Saul’s door was locked throughout, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ blaring from within. The council clone came again to the door and the scene was impossible but beautiful. Him demanding the back rent and Dot extending her hand to shake.

  — Hello, my name is Dorothy. Who are you?

  Her posh voice must have freaked him — and the Wagner and the wad in her wallet. He called her ‘ma’am’ then, said thank you again and again as she gave him the dosh, then backed away, his lowered shoulders and posture that of a subservient dog. She had paid our arrears. I chatted to her after, helping her plug in things and apologising for the lingering smells and Saul’s absence and his Valkyries.

  — He’ll maybe say hello in a few days.

  As if hearing me he strode past us both as if on a catwalk, wearing his bare-bottomed leather cowboy chaps, a Winnie-the-Pooh pyjama top and ballet pump
s, without even casting a glance at Dot.

  — Hello . . . she tried to say: — Saul?

  But he slammed the toilet door and within seconds we heard him retching. His stomach was sensitive to any changes in routine and he’d asked me for two quid earlier which I was sure had gone on a box of Don Quixote.

  — Is he OK? she asked anxiously.

  — Oh, yes, this is perfectly normal. He just takes a while to get used to.

  I committed to spending the evening with her, chatting. To not come across as mercenary as Saul. To find the real person, not the chequebook. In her room I saw her paintings stacked against the bed – abstract and brightly coloured – and I worried then, because Saul despised paintings and colour in all its manifestations. Furthermore, she was a trust-fund kid and somewhat hippy-ish and on a daily basis he screamed for the genocide of both. She put on her favourite record for me: Joni Mitchell – and if there was one thing Saul despised more than anything it was the ‘heart-felt mewings of that menstrual monster’. I tried to smile as the acoustic guitar started up.

  All week it had been coming, this scene of the most crushing despair. From her locked door I heard her sobbing and it took me back to two years before, when, having just moved in and filled with enthusiasm, I attempted to show Saul my latest writings.

  She’d talked to me for hours that morning about how much her art studies meant to her, when Saul wandered through in his kimono, curious, no doubt, to find out what he was being excluded from. He said very little, but was judging, I could tell. He returned to his room and in excitement she followed, carrying two small canvases. I could not stop her, so sat, peering round the door, as she set the canvases by his wall and asked what he thought.

  They were too far away for me to hear clearly, I only heard bits when Saul raised his voice . . . Bourgeois . . . reactionary . . . obsolete! You may as well destroy them! The eraser says more about you than any mark you wilfully make. If you must paint, then paint your face, or your room, tattoo your tits, or graffiti a flyover. Do it like Warhol if you must – car crashes in lilac, electric chairs in pastel peach – a hundred a day. There is more art in my ashtray than in a hundred thousand paintings. Why not exhibit my soiled bed sheets, a more damning indictment of our time you will not find! Fuck art and turn yourself into an artwork. Steal a video camera and record yourself eating, sleeping, taking a shit!

  As she wept in her room, he played Bach’s cello solos in his, the ones in the minor keys, as if the necessary destruction of egos caused him some subtle pain. The same record he played after my ego-death.

  I worried for her then, with her fragile ways. The quiet way she carried herself, the look on her face, of fear at the simplest of things. Her inability to finish her sentences, the waiting when you had to guess and then she said, ‘Yes,’ as if it was easier for her to let you speak for her. She was in her last year at art school and had to have something to show for her graduation. Perhaps he had already destroyed her education. I had to go through and see if she was OK, apologise on his behalf. Confess that I too had been thwarted by him, how her fear of the empty canvas was the same as mine of the empty page.

  But yet, as I paused at her door, I told myself that, perhaps, she would come in time to see that he had done her a great favour as he did for me. His critique of Western civilisation was correct. What was the point of adding more art, more reproduction of the same to the stinking stockpile of crap that was our culture? Why give the wealthy the opportunity to buy status objects that told them how sophisticated they are when their wealth was made on the suffering of millions? Stop being creative and embrace the beauty of destruction. And in that moment of suicidal despair, reach for your first breath as a truly free soul. That was what Saul believed, or did the last time I’d asked.

  In the days that followed she hid herself away and went for long walks alone. I took the liberty of peeking into her room. The things she’d moved in: packs of bedlinen, towels from Marks & Spencer, unopened, three Sainsbury’s ready meals; a stack of notepads, books on psychotherapy, self-help, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and one by the Dalai Lama. Her canvases lay by her bed, torn from their frames.

  I imagined her then walking aimlessly through streets in tears, remeasuring the world. Disillusionment with all is the first stage in the conversions of Saul. The Road to Damascus is long and very few survive the revelation that the figure at the end is a man on the dole. I told myself not to worry, she would come back, as I did.

  After she had returned and tiptoed past my room, I decided to confront Saul. To ask him please, try to be nice, give her some appreciation for the rent situation. What did he actually want to achieve by this war of attrition? For her to give us money and then leave?

  — That would be ideal! he said, as he put on a track by Rapeman. — Women, he said, — pah, they leave smells and cosmetics in the bathroom. Have you ever witnessed a bloody tampon in a toilet bowl?

  Could he at least stop scaring her, sit down and talk with her? I asked.

  — Talk, talk, talk, Freud was an imbecile, talking cures nothing.

  I knew there was no possibility of an apology as he closed his door on me. I waited, fearing the worst and it came. Japanese avant-garde industrial noise music. Recordings of buildings exploding and women wailing. Hiroshima on a twelve-inch. Nagasaki on the B-side. That was it, I couldn’t stand it, I had to at least apologise to her for his conduct.

  I heard not a ‘come in’ or a ‘hi’, just a noise, affirmative, telling me it was OK to enter. She was sitting by the window on that office chair Saul and I found in the street, hands upturned on her lap, as if meditating. There was no view from that window, just the wall and ten years of accumulated crap that could be a garden if anyone cared. I sensed I was intruding on something horribly private and I was embarrassed, no longer sure why I’d come in. But she gestured towards the bed for me to sit.

  — Sorry, I’ve just taken a Valium.

  — Really? I asked her. She nodded slowly. The silence between us was violated by his music. I apologised.

  — He can play it rather loud at times, he’s just probably a little freaked out about having another person here. He’s eccentric, but he means well. The fact that he’s ignoring you and so rude means he’s scared, that’s all. He considers fear the basis of devotion, if that’s any help.

  — There’s a little tree out there. I have to find positives, my shrink says. She’s a cognitive behaviourist.

  She pointed and I was grateful then for the excuse to get closer, to touch her shoulder as I leaned to see. And yes, there was a tree, growing from the rubble. She allowed my hand to linger on her shoulder. Saul couldn’t stand my touchy-feelyness. I sat back and tried to recall what it had been like in that time before Saul’s voice had sat in judgement of my every action. She stared at her upturned hands.

  — Lithium for breakfast, Prozac for lunch, Valium before bed.

  It was like a little song to herself. I told her it was quite a cocktail, that Saul and I believed medication was a form of oppression, even though we did hash and speed when we could blag it.

  — My mum’s on antidepressants and Valium too. I’m not supposed to do hash because it can set me off – I’m manic-depressive, she said as if she’d just introduced herself. I got the impression that this was a rite for her, something she told everyone or was told to tell everyone. She was staring at her hands again. The strangest thing, this kind of honesty would have usually had me running for the door, but something told me that my presence was not a problem. Time was different for her. Valium time.

  — Well, that was the last diagnosis. I dunno. My dad thinks I might have an obsessive personality disorder too.

  All of this made me feel quite awkward, but morbidly curious.

  I searched for something to talk about and saw a little folder on the floor.

  — Are those more of your paintings?

  — Just old photos, I was just looking through, you know, trying to remember why I started in t
he first place.

  I thought if I expressed an interest it might repair some of the damage Saul had done.

  — Can I see?

  She motioned for me to sit next to her as she picked it up. I calmed to her pace and listened as she flicked through the pictures. We weren’t flirting: there was just this incredible candidness. The photos were of her many paintings from maybe since pre-puberty. At first figurative and amateurish; people’s faces, then many self-portraits, the face gaunt, teenage, skull-like, the details growing as the skill developed as the face aged.

  — I did these ones in art therapy – after my episode.

  — Your episode?

  — Yeah, my mum had one too after Josh died – he was my brother. They say it’s hereditary but I don’t believe it – the episodes, I mean.

  A dead brother. I didn’t want to pry. I asked to see more. In every self-portrait that followed the style changed: one was like Munch, then Rembrandt, then Picasso, the lines thinner, then bolder, harsher, black and white, then cubist, then torn and collaged, as if exhausting every art movement, looking for the one true face.

  — These are really good, I said. — So who started you on art therapy?

  — My dad. He prescribes my medication too. He’s a –

  — Your dad’s a shrink?

  — Yes, Harley Street, stinking rich.

  That was weird. Very controlling. I was developing a theory about her art being an attempt to escape a sick mother and tyrannical drug-administering father.

  — It was kind of handy when I went nuts, she said.

  — I’m sure you weren’t crazy at all. Maybe you were just rebelling against some people who were trying to control you.

  — How very sweet you are, she said and gave my hand a little squeeze.

  — Can I see the rest?

  — They’re really crap, she said. But I insisted. As the paintings became more abstract and the faces vanished from the surfaces, I could feel Dot relax beside me. Swathes of colour, imaginary fields and planes, bright and luminous. I sensed how much her art meant to her, how painful a voyage it had been from those first tentative scratched pencil portraits to the bright bold washes of pure primary colour.