Ménage Read online

  She backed away whispering into her headpiece, eyeing him up and down.

  He paused at the white-walled maze-like entrance to the artwork known as Name Game 3. He calmed himself and told himself to withhold judgement: this is Dot’s work but Dot is a fashionable media fabrication too – like Hirst in the pages of Vogue and Sam Taylor-Wood posing naked in Harpers & Queen. He must resist the temptation to write a review in his head. That is not the purpose of this exercise. No copy will be filed. He is here to erase.

  He entered and the projections were epic in scale: three faces on free-standing screens, two men and one woman; each face had a name on a piece of paper on their heads, each taking turns to guess what their head-names were. The bits of paper read: STALIN, JESUS, COBAIN. The faces asked questions of themselves – Am I still alive? Am I a woman? Am I a film star?

  It cannot but disappoint – this expensive remake of that stoner game they’d played many times, only Dot had filmed it and so it entered the canon of art history. The people in this remake are professional actors, their lines scripted. The lighting and production values, superb, almost Hollywood. Their faces, all different in ethnic mix, reflecting the pressure to be politically correct that Dot’s work in the last few years has succumbed to.

  It does not touch him as the original did. He walks out. There are many other walled enclosures to choose from. He wants to go to that room, the one that has his face. He returns to the front desk and asks the PR woman where it is, laughing to himself that she has probably seen that face a hundred times but does not know that it is his.

  She shows him the floor plan and offers the information pack. As she talks and smiles Saul’s voice returns again, scorning him, Jiminy Cricket-like.

  ‘Art critics are people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.’

  When Saul said it, it had been funny, but living it was no joke. Yet Dot must have been haunted by Saul too. Every artwork she’d ever made came from something Saul had said, even the titles. Some of them had been jokes he’d made that she’d taken seriously. Most of her speech on accepting the Lieder Prize in 2002 had been Saul’s words.

  Owen thanks the PR woman for her help and walks the long white corridors. He passes four other rooms with the newer works, all of it is, as he knows, as they said on Late Review, recreations/reinventions/re-explorations of the works from that one incredible year when Dot made the works that her career has since rested upon. As he turned the corner before entering Trust, Owen closed his eyes and laughed at himself over that little beat, that pause of reverence that was required, before stepping in and looking up at the screen.

  The face – the hair was long, grunge-like; he’d been told often that he looked like Cobain, like Jesus. Anorexic, anaemic. A blur round his chin, that first growth of a goatee. His face covered in lipstick kisses. The light was bright in his eyes while all in the background was black. Every fifteen, twenty or thirty seconds Saul or Dot entered to kiss or slap him. The face twitching in anticipation.

  What the other critics failed to notice was the smile. A smile you may have had to live through to understand. To be kissed and slapped by your secret lover and the man she said she loved, your best and only friend whom you had betrayed with her. To be at the heart of that love triangle, sitting in the dark, not knowing if it was she or he that would strike you, fearing violence. An hour the whole video had taken to make, the clip was thirty minutes long. The critics said the light-blinded man was a critique of consumerism, the stimulus-response model of taught televisual consumption. Pavlov’s Dog.

  But the face, twenty feet wide, contorting in expectation. This almost static portrait of the act of waiting. Some audiences wept, it was said. Others jumped when the kiss or slap hit.

  And your own face, Owen, if you could only see it now.

  The camera had been turned on, she said, they were recording. He had to keep a straight face, no giggling. He couldn’t, was laughing at how the whole thing was absurd and sorry for spoiling it all. A shot broke the silence. A sharp noise to his left. He turned to see but his eyes were branded by the glow of the bulb. Dot’s command to face the light. Then a hand, so gentle, stroking his cheek, and the brush of a kiss. Then nothing, only the waiting for another kiss, but it was a vicious slap.

  The noises echoed round the empty gallery. Owen guessed the tape had another five minutes to go. He’d stay for its repeat. He was trying to anticipate the next blow, but it did not come when expected and when the face was struck it was by a kiss. So out of sync. He edged closer towards the screen to see more clearly but got too close and the image broke into thousands of multicoloured pixels. He turned back and was blinded by the projector light, and then startled by a shadow on the projection screen. He apologised to the unseen person only to discover that the place was empty and the shadow was his own.

  As he hit the street it was not the video but what happened just after the camera had been turned off that lingered: flashes of flesh, the sharing of her body in the dark.

  Back on the Piccadilly Line at South Ken, he found himself staring at the reflection of his face upside down in the bevelled glass, between the shoulders of a man and a woman, above the empty seat between them. The skin was neon green, the features stretched, aged, ghostlike. He closed his eyes and waited, it would be another ten minutes till his stop. The Northern Line, the way it was really two lines that joined then split then joined then split. If you missed the change at Euston, you had to go to Camden then double back south to Angel before the long walk home.

  He shouldn’t be here, he knows this. The choice of exits: Old Street, City Road North, City Road South – he picks the old one, passes a beggar dressed in red like a Hare Krishna with a chalk drawing of spirals beneath his bare feet. ‘True beauty only survives in the gutter, where the guardians of high culture have overlooked it,’ Saul once said. The old familiar street signs: Ring Road A11, A13 and A2. Finn’s Court, Hackney Housing, sixties mosaics and graffiti, just as before. The old high-rises to his left. To his right – a trendy skater shop. City Best Kebab where it was, then all the new FOR LET signs. Old Street Moroccan and Mediterranean Cuisine. He laughs to himself thinking of Edna and Dot and the plaster-cast penises and smoking Moroccan black. Edna was dead now, four years back, maybe more. He passes the new blue recycling bins. There was an authentic Banksy somewhere near here. The locals had protested that his anarchic graffiti had pushed up property prices, forcing them out. The irony of it would have made Saul laugh, or puke over the original Banksy on the wall. Now they’d be welcoming as many Banksys as they could get.

  The warehouses have been mostly converted into studio flats. He passes the sex shop now called Sh! – devoted to women’s pleasure – gentlemen only welcome when accompanied by a woman. In this very same alleyway, he had gone down on his knees and begged Dot to let him eat her cunt. There had been a Chinese here, and a bin. She’d joked about the smell of sweet and sour.

  Hoxton Square. White Cube gallery. Blue Bar and Kitchen. Yelo. Ziegfried and Underbelly. Another gallery he has never been to. An exhibition called Through a Glass Darkly. He puts his face to the glass and sees that one of the artworks is a hole in the gallery floor and that had been another joke Saul had said, a dare to an artist – ‘Why not just dig yourself a fucking hole. Let’s form an escape committee and get the fuck out of here!’ He walks to the top of the square and hears the screams of children from St Monica’s. The faces as before, black, the laughter is as it always is with all children. He walks the hundred yards then to the dole office that is called a jobcenture now. As soon as he turns the corner onto Hoxton Street it will be two blocks to 102 Whitmore Road. Saul had always said that the thing the place was lacking was more wit.

  The old pie-and-mash place, then Bacchus – the franchised S&M chain. Hoxton Kicks – another new sex shop. The new Hoxton community garden, a pile of weeds and stones and broken bottles when he first saw it, before it became a community anything. The green
metal signs for Hoxton Market arching over the street. The FOR LEASE signs diminish as the council houses grow around him. Miles of state-subsidised housing, inescapable poverty, incorruptible and pure in its way. Untouchable by the wealth in the square behind, which is now receding again.

  The Queen’s Head is boarded up and a sign says under new management and he is thankful for that because he hopes now not to find what he was looking for as he is about to turn that corner and is searching for any excuse not to go there.

  She passes him in a miniskirt and he turns to look. She has a tattoo of a Manga character on her ankle. She’s eighteen, maybe twenty, Japanese-looking but Williamsburgesque, her arm in that of her androgynous beau. Just look at them. Their matching dyed green hair and deliberately slashed clothes. One earpiece in each of their ears sharing the iPod, the cable stretched taut pulling their faces closer to each other. And he feels for how they feel. Your angriest music in your ears and the world is only what you allow in and what you steal to give you enough hatred to laugh as you march through it. You see how much your games offend the order, and the eyes that stare with judgement only fuel you and tell you you are breaking nothing less than all the rules. They are all nothing and you are really something, you are really happening.

  They stop and take a photo of themselves, just before the sign for Hoxton Market and now they seem fake. Everything now is copies of copies of copies, just as Saul’s Baudrillard predicted. He watches them walk away, and now the disappointment turns to himself. Youth is wasted on the young, Saul said, but that line too had been copied.

  He has to stop for a cigarette. But he is on week three again on his eighth attempt at quitting. A pack of Marlboro Lights from the pub. But it is boarded up and smoking in pubs is now illegal. So it has to be the street and no smokes, just the smouldering need.

  Owen, look at you. By the time you are home and turn off the burglar alarm then all this will be lost again. Do something now, fight the need to run home, do something radical, stupid.

  The Asian shop is the answer. It takes so long to decide what it will be, this product he must slip into his pocket and walk out without paying for. It’s like he’s drunk. This responsible man of thirty-nine years who wrote what many see as the most probing reviews of the works of two former Turner Prize-winners.

  First it was the chocolate aisle, then bacon and poultry. Then anxiety over security cameras and being seen on some screen somewhere, going to the canned produce, touching a few, looking round then setting them back. The products before his eyes are surreal and enigmatic and their names are: Spaghetti Hoops in Tomato Sauce and Heinz Mushy Peas and Burga-mix. And Saul loved Warhol and he is thinking of cans and hands and pockets and he is for the first time in so long so alive and he has to do it now or he is nothing.

  The Asian man is staring at him. He made that mistake Saul taught him not to, which was to make eye contact, that other – to smile back. The can of Heinz Mushy Peas is staring back at him, telling him he is a coward and hypocrite. Shut up, shut up, he is telling them. And they reply that they contain only 22g of fat per 100g and that they are very tasty.

  Shut up! Silence them in pocket.

  Checkout counter. Running over Saul’s rules.

  Don’t walk out without buying something else – so chewing gum. He is telling the Asian guy that he just needs some gum because he’s giving up smoking. Keep your cool, wittering is a dead giveaway. Shut up. Make the guy feel he owes you something. Rule 5 had been Dot’s. Be rude to the shop assistant before you leave. If you placate it is abnormal. They are Asian. It’s normal to be rude. England is racist.

  He tries not to say thank you but can’t help himself.

  The adrenalin still coursing through him even after the tube ride home. He sets the mushy peas on the counter. He will never eat them and they seem to know it, staring blankly back at him, telling him there would be no escape from impulsive incidents until he had done the one thing he feared.

  The phone is in his hand and he is dialling. The gallery girl picks up and he gives his name. She is only a receptionist or intern, he has no time to be asked who he is again or to wait to be put through to some other nobody who can assist him after the same questions. He asks her to get a pen, to leave a message; he has to get her to repeat it to him when it is done.

  ‘OK, so, your name is Owen Morgan and you’d like to do an interview with Dorothy Shears, about her show, for her catalogue, is that right?’

  *

  It must have been around Halloween ’92. Saul despised conventional festivities but took Dot under his wing as the new student of his ways and taught her how to dress, and shoplift clothes for herself, giving her lessons on the arts of working in twos and threes in supermarkets to distract the checkout girl and in concealing foodstuffs under trench coats. In turn she started loaning him money, as much as he wanted and more. As for me, my first real bits of work were coming in from the Hoxton Advertiser and as the autumn leaves fell we all three marched hand in hand in hand through the crap-strewn streets.

  Dot had barely been to art school since she’d moved in with us, then one day she’d travelled to Goldsmiths to inform her tutor that she was giving up painting. Her announcement had created an uproar with her tutors who insisted she was throwing her life away on a whim as she had only six months to put together her graduation show – there had been much ‘painting is dead’ hysteria in the air at that time. On the way home Dot stopped off in Leicester Square and bought a super-cool video camera, a Panasonic. Striding in, she showed it to us.

  — I’m going to turn my life into an artwork!

  I worried then that it was unwise for her to have taken what Saul had said weeks before so literally. Did Saul even recall that he’d advised she record her life? My anxieties, however, were soon drowned by her enthusiasm, and I told myself that unfamiliar as I was to happiness, it was not to be feared.

  I plugged her new camera into the back of Saul’s TV and she set it on top facing the room and we spent most of the day reading the manual, taking turns pushing buttons, watching ourselves on the screen, moving in and out of shot. After an hour of her filming the pizza-coloured seventies vinyl carpet, Saul’s scattered records and the woodchip wallpaper, walking round eye to Panasonic, bumping into things then playing it back, her energy started flagging.

  — Filming life ‘as it is’ is banal old school socialist miserablism,’ Saul declared. — You must remain true to your beliefs [which were his] and record your own radical transformation, he said, invoking Nietzsche, although Nietzsche never had a video camera.

  We had a break for some pasta and Dot filmed that too. Saul declared it was like Eat by Warhol – a forty-five-minute single shot of one of the Factoryites eating a mushroom, so we put on the Velvet Underground in homage. Saul said we should nick lots of tinfoil to wallpaper the room with – à la the Factory circa ’64, and that Dot could, with a bit of a makeover, be the next Edie Sedgwick. A few books scattered and images of Edie later, Dot stood before Saul’s Victorian wardrobe as he, in the depths of the thing, threw out things for her to try on.

  — Could you film for me? she asked, a little nervously, handing me the camera.

  His camouflage military trousers; his SLUT T-shirt; his stolen Armani jacket with the holes in the elbows; his spray-on black PVC trousers; his Palestinian headscarf – all the time he ran back and forward to change the records – to create the optimum environment for the birth of a new self, he declared, explaining his philosophy of attire, — ‘Jeans are banned, they stink of James Dean and napalm’ — ‘One’s attire should be offensive’ — ‘We cannot transform the masses but we can at least have a revolution in our own wardrobes’ — ‘Every item should clash with every other as it was for the punks and surrealists’ — ‘A contemptuous semiotic montage’ — ‘One should endeavour to be a new person every day: three incompatible people every hour. To face a face one does not know in the mirror and destroy the bourgeois colonialist myth of the self’. And othe
r such Saulisms. I sat on his bed laughing to myself, recalling the first time I had stripped for him to dress me.

  Saul’s enthusiasm soon overwhelmed Dot’s shyness and in no time she was standing in bra and panties, then trying on his shoes, then motorcycle boots, army boots, his filthy ‘Kerouac’ plimsoll trainers. Then his T-shirts – his Elvis one, then the one that read ‘JESUS IS YOUR FRIEND’, his seventies stripy lady’s vinyl blouse, his goth winklepickers, his Black Watch tartan military trousers, his pinstriped Hugo Boss business shirt. — If two things go together then I know I’ve got it wrong. It’s the same with people! I despise monogamous clothing, he proclaimed.

  I filmed her laughing at herself in the mirror and Saul’s hands hovering around her, not touching, proffering ever more absurd changes as if he were Picasso conceiving a cubist masterpiece. Then army boots, bare legs and his long T-shirt, the one with the picture of Carlos the Jackal from Saul’s ultra-left terrorist period.

  — But it’s too short, she protested. — It’s like I’m wearing a nightie!

  — Ah yes, but you are putting the ass back into class! Besides, the pornographic effect is offset by the military boots and the terrorist chic: little Red-Army Faction slapper. You see, not a cliché in sight.

  She twirled around, almost falling in the outsized boots as Saul smoked, contemplating her image, dissatisfied with his Demoiselles d’Avignon.

  — I don’t know. Is it really . . . me? she asked.

  — My dreary dear, the essence is to have no essence, think of yourself as a work of surrealism. The Duchess once wore a birdcage as a corset, with a real bird inside!

  — The Duchess? she asked. Thankfully, he spared her the entire history of his favourite transgressor.

  Her giggles infected us all. The flashes of her skin between changes, soft flesh pulled tight by elastic, by leather belt. I chastened myself and tried to see beyond her feminine forms. Was that not Saul’s mantra – to eliminate all preconditioned desires? She turned to the camera, asked me what I thought, had we made art yet? We watched the playback, all huddled up together on his bed before the tiny screen. It looked like a home video, nothing more.