Ménage Read online

  But today, Owen was doing his penance. The PR woman from the Lieder had called back to let him know that Dorothy Shears had agreed to meet for an interview. They were excited to ‘potentially’ have him on board and he was on their list of potential candidates for the ‘big job’ – an essay on the nine works in the show for the catalogue for the international tour, starting in Zurich, in two months’ time. None of this could be leaked to any newspapers and he could not reuse any of the material in other formats or countries; if he did it would be a case for litigation, as per item 5 in the contract which they would email, that should be signed by his lawyer and returned as per soonest possible date.

  He had only wanted to see her again, but already it was getting convoluted and legal and too late to back out of and anxiety crept over him – that Dot had agreed so easily; that these fifteen years fearing her had been his own invention; that their reunion could have taken place long before and saved him the angst that had become a way of life.

  And what the hell would he even write about her art? He’d noticed recently that the adjectives around her work had changed from ‘radical’ and ‘challenging’ to ‘compelling’. ‘Compelling’ was a variation on ‘interesting’ and betrayed a lack of confidence in the artist’s brand name and a downturn in investment. The video-art bubble was bursting because of YouTube – some teenager in Pakistan had recently committed suicide online after getting viewers to vote on whether she should see it through. A guy in Germany had cut off his dick in front of half a million global viewers. Hundreds of thousands of barely legal-age girls the world over had twenty-four-hour webcams recording their every living moment for cash. It was rumoured that Saatchi was looking to buy online Islamic web porn as art. The truth was Dot’s work was an interesting footnote in the onward destructive march of the moving image.

  If he had the integrity of Saul he would have called it all off, but the PR woman made it very clear that, even after the interview and their analysis of his essay, they reserved the right to give the job to another writer. And that galled him, to still be the whore, fighting for a cheque counted at pence per word.

  The time, date and location of the interview had been picked – her studio between London Bridge and Southwark. He was actually going to meet Dot again. Today. In two hours, forty-six minutes. He would first of all apologise for not keeping in touch, then, ice broken, apologise for all that had happened. Those would be the words – ‘Sorry for all that happened.’ Two beta blockers were all he’d managed by way of breakfast.

  But then his clothes had caused him grief. The linen suit or jeans and one of his remaining ironic-sloganed T-shirts? ‘Today I’m wearing mostly black’ or ‘Your band sucks’. He caught himself, after a third change, standing in front of the mirror in grey socks and paisley-patterned boxers, staring at his paunchy, hairy belly button, wondering who the hell he was trying to be. Had Dot mapped a story of his fifteen years in her head? Thought him a coward yellow-belly for hiding from her? Or worse, had she barely thought of him at all? Only on opening a newspaper, and seeing his face, maybe once a year. His twenty Xmas-present tips for Time Out five years back that he should never have agreed to put his name to. They must not talk about the past when they met. If they did, she would learn very quickly that he knew too much, that he did in fact have a press-clipping box, two in fact, filled with her many faces.

  The clothes he finally picked were designer grunge.

  Images wouldn’t leave him alone on the walk to Angel. A whole street of FOR SALE signs, newspapers with Wall Street traders, heads in hands; 27% fall on the FTSE index. Meltdown Monday they’d called it, just a month back, but still the economy was smouldering into nothing. It struck him that he’d first met Dot just after Black Wednesday, that his career had been a tenuous thread stretched between two troughs of depression. There was something reassuring about being in a recession again, the comfort of being just another failure among millions, of not having to try to be someone any more.

  He fought his way through the morning crowds, swiped his Oyster card and headed to the Northern Line. There were video adverts on the down escalator, all showing images of sexy young things, eyeing each other on a virtual escalator, all the video monitors in sync. Match.com. ‘Has your future partner just passed you by?’ Would he actually recognise her when he saw her? The latest promo photo showed her thin-boned with short white hair. Warholesque. A little Paula Yates circa late eighties, but without make-up. White not to shock but maybe to hide grey.

  He waited on the platform and caught himself looking at the waiting women: a tall Swedish-looker in designer leathers, a shaved-headed dyke with denims. Strange, to be checking the faces as if looking for her.

  No, he had not followed her slavishly; there were at least three years of almost total denial. Freelance work, travelling, building a reputation, jobbing it for anyone that would take him, lifestyle columns on fashion, pop, hairstyles, cover bands, photographers, community workshops, children with disabilities making murals in Bradford, music rehab projects for junkies in Birmingham. The time of attempted domesticity. Telling himself that Dot’s world was fake. That a quiet life, with a wife, planning a child would be the antidote to the hype.

  What the hell would he say to her after the words of hello?

  The anxiety grew as the train arrived and he climbed on board and found a seat. Across from him a young emo couple shared an iPod between them, just as the Hoxton couple had done, one earpiece apiece. He looked up and there above them was an advert for iPod showing a silhouette of a young couple doing exactly the same thing. ‘Consumers are manufactured now, not products,’ Saul had said.

  He would not tell her of the years of exhaustion and of his wife’s creeping disappointment in him. Her desire for a child and his constant attempts to reassure her that they should wait till things were more ‘secure’. But being freelance, every job was a struggle to tie down, and he came to dread the confining limits of the marriage he’d bought into. After another year of it she screamed that he was always postponing, running up and down the country and for what? Just another couple of hundred quid. ‘There’s never a right time to have a kid,’ she’d said. ‘We have to believe in ourselves, take a risk.’

  Moorgate. A peroxide blonde was suddenly beside him and he jumped. He watched the way she held the metal pole as if she was a lap dancer. Her breasts in a low-cut top were on display. A short man in a business suit kept staring, trying to edge closer. As the train jumped Owen was sure he saw the man rub his crotch against her and she did not flinch. Her face – steel.

  He recalled the time Dot had been nominated for the Turner Prize, 2001. The embarrassment he’d felt as he sat beside Becky and watched the award ceremony. She’d pointed at the TV saying: ‘Didn’t you know her?’ And he’d lied. The time of lies. For the next few months, Becky had bullied him into trying to make babies, and each time he’d faked ejaculation. After that it was the secret drinking, the secret porn habit, and, most bizarre of all, his secret search for that old album of Saul’s – The Duchamps – for weeks on end, in all the retro shops and online, everywhere, an obsession. When she found out, it was the last straw. She left him to chase her image of a partner more fit to be father, a man with a future, with money.

  The first stop was Old Street. A group of trendy twenty-somethings got on, with retro hippy hair, talking excitedly. He was feeling light-headed and took a Rennie to calm his churning gut. At the end of the carriage there was a mother and child, poor-looking, olive-skinned, possibly immigrant. He wondered how old this child Dot had was, this Molly. A hot flush rose up his neck and he tasted salt. He took a second beta blocker and contemplated another antacid.

  One more stop till London Bridge. If he’d just had a drink to calm his nerves. But it was only 11 a.m. and he had rules about hours and times and quantities. As the human surge left at Bank – it was as if the world was giving him secret coded messages – he glimpsed that image of his face smeared in lipstick and the words writ l
arge: Nine Works – before it vanished into the multitudes of other advert faces accelerating into tunnel darkness. Then it was a woman, with huge fake gold earrings reading Dazed & Confused and on her page was the image of the sculpture of Kate Moss cast in gold. ‘Gold and art are the only two safe investments in a global recession,’ Saul had once said, ‘because neither can be mass-produced.’ As the tube sped by and the stench of sweating tourists filled his nostrils and anonymous bodies dug their elbows into his ribs, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the images.

  Dazed, nine years back. She was long-haired, dyed blonde and wearing sunglasses on the arm of a hunky punk guy on the centre pages; then she was in a Ghost dress at a gallery opening in the society pages of Tatler in 2002; in Vogue in a bikini on a beach with her lover and the father of her child, gallery owner Hans Gershoon. Every time it had been the fury that these men were beneath her, that she could let herself stoop so low. No, he’d not been jealous – all of it was contemptible and if she had fallen for it then she was a hypocrite and whore. The relationship with the gallery owner Gershoon had been despicably calculating, made even more so by the fact that other artists had done similar things. If he had just acted differently, on that one day in May 1993 – stayed with her till she woke, then he could have saved her from this. They could have been together, maybe with a child of their own. It would have been almost sixteen now, old enough to leave home. He opened his eyes and the iPod couple were whispering together, as if about him.

  Out and up the tube steps. London Bridge and factories and warehouses converted into apartments and artists’ studios. Three streets of towering sand-blasted brick and fifty TO LET signs and more adverts and the number was hard to find: 752. There was graffiti on the walls but it didn’t look real, more like some artist’s project, some pseudo Banksy. He was at 684, his gut tightening. As he walked the numbers, up the cobblestoned streets that once ran with industrial and human waste, he passed a sign for an estate agent that, beside it, had an advert for Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. The words of Saul: ‘I fear irony is dead. We shall be laughing ourselves into mass graves.’

  Finally, it was 752. He took a deep breath as he entered and found the old cast-iron lift as the gallery email told him he would and pushed the button for the fifth floor.

  The vast metal doors opened and, of course, the place was immense and she was nowhere to be seen. But even given the great deal he knew of the workings of contemporary artists, he was surprised to find that her studio was basically no more than a storeroom for artworks. Several hundred packing crates covered in Post-it notes. Polystyrene packing, plastic wrapping, FedEx boxes. Not an artwork in sight and no sight of her.

  On rounding a stack of crates he found only a woman, middle-aged, scrawny-looking in jogging pants and T-shirt on a phone, Dot’s assistant, no doubt. He walked past her into the space when her voice called out.

  ‘Hi, there.’ He turned and found himself once again in those big open eyes. She motioned to her phone, waved her hands around in a frenzy that he took to mean have a look around I’ll be a minute. He had been wrong, not scrawny, just slender, and the jogging clothes were more hip or hip hop. He did not want to be caught looking. If he could just find an excuse to delay, to leave.

  He heard her hang up but no sooner had she done so and he turned back nervously to speak, than her mobile rang. She threw her hand in the air in some mime of sorry and picked it up. As he watched her she seemed like a Wall Street broker or PR girl for some transient product that was basically herself. Minutes more he fidgeted by her packing cases, increasingly embarrassed as her every moment was taken up with admin. A woman entered and started asking her questions. To Owen’s horror she turned out to be that deadly serious Israeli artist who made quaint watercolour landscapes with her own urine, whom he’d panned in Time Out a few years back.

  He was hiding himself behind a crate that read ‘Barcelona’ when the hand touched his shoulder. She smiled at him, was trying to talk on her mobile and kiss his cheek all at once, her mobile about to fall from her hand. Her eyes had tiny crow’s feet but glowed still in that way he knew.

  ‘See how crazy it is?’ And before she had time to explain she was talking to the other voice in her ear.

  ‘No, the screens have to be Panavision Presentation, twelve by eight. Wait, I have the number for the hire company here somewhere.’ Then she was flicking through laptop screens. ‘Fucking formats!’

  No animosity or vengeance, no sit down and let’s face the past. He was making hand signs that he should just go, another time maybe, but she indicated to stay, sit, but there was nowhere to sit. As he stood there awkward, she undid a blouse button, fanned the air as if it was too hot. From where he was standing he could see the lacy outline of her bra. So casually then, as she phone-talked, rubbing her neck, her collarbone, as if inviting him to stare at her increasingly visible cleavage, as if he was an executive toy she was idly playing with.

  ‘I could resend it on PAL? DVD. And the projector is six thousand LM, luminance? . . . It has to be because it’s quite a dark image, can you confirm that for me? No, that’s great, yes, send my regards to Ed, tell him I love him to bits and I’ll be there for the opening.’

  He was looking round to see if excretions-woman was anywhere to be seen, if he could find a way to leave, discreetly.

  ‘Bitte,’ she said to the phone. ‘Vielen Dank.’

  As she hung up she suddenly stopped touching herself. He was stuck, struck speechless.

  ‘God, but you know the thing is . . .’

  ‘What?’ And ‘hello’ and ‘sorry’ he wanted to say. But this was so Dot, so old Dot – the way she’d start mid-sentence, even after an argument, after an absence of hours, even days, and say: ‘And another thing . . .’ He waited for the next fragment.

  ‘ . . . what the fuck am I even doing here?’ He was about to reply that yes, he felt somewhat the same and if she wanted they could call the whole thing off.

  ‘Sorry, I should have . . .’ she said. And there was no moment when they stood apart and took time to assess what time had taken from them or hopefully healed, or even said hello as two total strangers might, only this weird familiarity in fragments. She had not even said his name.

  ‘ . . . I mean, my sugar level. I’m about to go hypoglycaemic, we have to eat NOW!’

  ‘Oh, I see, OK. Yeah, sure.’

  Over the chichi sushi lunch, in the fusion place a block away, which she wolfed down – some indication perhaps of the damage she’d done to her system in the year of near anorexia with him and Saul – he tried to keep it business. They had been talking art, not past, just art.

  ‘So . . . how do you find time to make any new work?’

  She stuffed raw tuna into her mouth with her second Diet Coke.

  ‘Truth is I haven’t really made anything, not since . . .’

  He thought she meant like the neo-conceptualists, Douglas Gordon et al. He’d witnessed Gordon at work before. At his laptop, he didn’t even have a studio; his work had almost become pure concept. Like, say a wall in the Schwartz Gallery covered in the names of everyone he could remember in a day. Around two thousand. One version was in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. He wrote down the names on the plane and in arrivals emailed it off to the gallery with a list of dimensions, font size and number of hours it would take a team of a certain number to stencil the names on the wall, then turned up for the opening.

  ‘No, no, God, I wish I was that smart,’ she mumbled as she stuffed down his hardly touched Thai noodles. ‘I mean, nothing at all, for years, I’m serious, nothing new . . . I’m like a photocopy machine or a –’

  ‘But surely, you must want to . . . again.’

  ‘No, I’m just glad it’s a day job, you know, making sure they’ve got the DVD players in Barcelona, and the layout maps and the PR’s up to date. I haven’t had a creative thought in years.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘Seriously, I’m done with art, I me
an, what’s the point, I’ve made all this money and now I’m probably gonna lose it all with the banks going down anyway.’

  ‘But I thought the government was protecting savings over, well, a certain amount.’ His voice sounded banal in his ears.

  She looked at him as if to say, Silly man, I’ve lost millions, already.

  He wanted to say, Isn’t it funny, we met after Black Wednesday and now we’re on Meltdown Monday. He wanted to say he’d rather write off the fifteen years between and go back to total poverty as there was at least some comfort in it.

  ‘I dunno . . . I just want to grow vegetables or knit socks or . . .’ she said. ‘Cos since Molly, she’s my . . . she’s four, you’d love her, all this travel, God! New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, this was just in the last . . . I mean the flights, Tracey says the same thing.’

  ‘Sorry, this is Tracey Emin?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, and this subversive thing, they always say she’s so subversive, I’m so subversive, blah de blah. But we’re so totally square. I mean, what’s left to subvert anyway? What do they want us to do, kill ourselves?’

  He could have said that indeed it was not a joke. Her premature death would probably quadruple her market value as it had done for Basquiat, that there had been conspiracy theories about possible murder, but he considered it in poor taste.

  ‘Where was I anyway?’

  ‘Uh, you were talking about your daughter, flights . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, they keep asking me to make new work, and I try and try . . . Did you see it, that one at the Lieder, with Molly in it? It’s shit, I mean . . .’

  He had not seen it and apologised.

  ‘I pulled it from the show, last week, so there’s only eight now. Fucking thing’s called Nine and everyone’s embarrassed cos I’ve got to take the Nine to Zurich. I was kind of hoping you could maybe . . .’

  ‘Hoping I could?’

  ‘Well, give me some ideas. I know, sorry, it’s a dumb idea, I should never have asked, sorry you’re . . .’