Ivory (2 page)

A route-master bus lurched out in front of him, belligerently
ignorant of Martin’s existence and right of way, causing him to
suddenly punch his brakes, leaving him with his heart in his throat
from the narrowly avoided collision. Scantily clad girls hung out
of the rear door, one of them waved a bottle of champagne at him. A
hen-night hiring. That meant the bus that was now ahead of him on
Tottenham Court Road would be a fixture in his view and an obstacle
until their paths diverged.

Martin was an artist. A painter. A
traditional
artist. He didn’t understand
sculpture – especially metal work. He could become one with the
paint and command it with a subtlety or a passion most canvases
were not fortunate enough to be graced with. In the past he had
created portraits with a photographic realism that had captured
life and emotion, and landscapes swept in bold strokes that
emphasised their drama. Sculpture could compliment its subject and
be both beautiful and inspiring of emotion, but its tangible
reality in the three-dimensional world had a brutality and force
that Martin struggled with. Hadleigh’s work in metal sheeting and
salvaged machine parts was not what Martin considered being
sculpture, it heralded from a school of art that Martin could not
reconcile himself with: where a stack of bricks or some frozen
animal halved and suspended in formaldehyde could be regarded as
art. It was the Emperor’s new clothes of the art
world.

The lights were out at Euston Road and he pushed the nose of
his car hesitantly forward trying to measure the approaching gaps
in traffic to see if he could risk pulling out onto the road. The
sudden loss of the flattering draw on Martin’s knowledge and
Martin’s talent being the focus for another’s inspiration, and the
sense that his opinion and approval were needed to validate
Hadleigh’s success, had caused the smouldering embers of Martin’s
creativity to cool, and his talent had gone into remission. He
found himself in a state of impotence. He had tried his best to
resurrect his muse, working all year in his loft studio, mixing
subtle hues and vibrantly skilful strokes to create life like some
gothic necromancer. Yet what he had created had been a
Frankentein’s bastardisation of his previous works. An imitation of
his past glory that wasn’t strong enough to sustain a soul of its
own. He could, and would, blame Hadleigh but it was a demise that
had only been delayed by his brief work with his student. Martin
was losing his art. For that reason, Martin hadn’t deserved to win
the award.

Martin slammed his foot on the accelerator and lurched into a
gap on a spray of surf. He held his breath as the headlights of the
Mini Cooper he had cut across filled the car and blazed angrily in
his rear view mirror. When there was no shunt from a collision he
puffed out a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding. He
needed to calm down, although he was definitely not going to put
the Tweenies back on to help him.

He was a son, a head of department, a teacher, a husband and
a father, and each of these roles conspired against him with their
own conflicting demands and responsibilities and drained his
creativity. With the lack of his art, he was increasingly believing
that he was an intellectual hypocrite in his role as art lecturer
and head of the art department since he was teaching to create from
the soul and from the passion within when his own were so
diminished he barely had enough to sustain him his wife and his
children. As hard as he found it difficult to accept he found that
his family were equally as unsatisfying to him. His life was not
how he had expected his life to be, although if he were asked to
imagine the details of what he had wanted his life to be like he
wouldn’t have been able to answer, all he had ever wanted was his
art and to be a master of it. He often struggled to understand how
this life had even come about.

At the corner of the British Library the traffic lights amber
winked out and a red light burned in its place. He cursed and
slammed his foot on the brake. The stream of traffic on the Euston
Road tauntingly left him behind. Life, which for Martin was family
and love, was meant to influence his art, and his job was meant to
fund his life. Stripped back to basics they were relationships of
necessity; symbiotic. Yet his family and his job were also
distractions that drained his resources, creatively and
financially, and without his art they seemed without
function.

A green light allowed him to resume his journey, but the
resentment generated from his reflection caused him to lose
patience with the main roads, his thick fingers, whitened by their
grip, yanked the wheel to one side and turned the car sharply off
the Euston Road and into a side road. He hadn’t travelled these
roads for some time and he was sure their layout may have changed
since the St Pancras developments but he hoped to weave through the
streets more as the crow might fly rather than the intended express
of the main roads. He took road after road and was as uncertain of
the direction he was taking on these back roads as he was in life
generally. At the age of forty-three he expected to be settled and
taking life in comfortable strides, not stumbling and looking back
unsure what had tripped him.

The car continued its journey into a residential area
and on a whim he pulled into a narrow street. Most of its
streetlights were out and the shadowy houses crowded in on him.
Some had the odd light on behind curtains, but most of them were
dark. The occupants asleep or judging by the houses rundown
condition the houses were abandoned.
The light from
his headlights hollowed the road out of the night and the constant
fall of rain was a dizzying glitter in the beams.
Suddenly his lights pulled something stark white from the
dark road ahead like a ghost suddenly made manifest. There was a
sharp noise, the sound of a thousand voices screaming out before
being cut short by the crunch of metal and splintering glass.
Martin lost sight of the road as he was thrown forward from braking
and yanked back in place by the tension of his seat belt. The white
shape had gone and the light from his headlights had returned to
picking raindrops out of the dark before the now stationary
car.

Martin found an uncomfortable rigidness in his leg and
relaxed his foot from pressing the brake-peddle to the floor. He
still held the wheel, but the anger that had crushed his fingers to
it had gone. His hands fell trembling into his lap and he sank back
into the seat. With a faltering hand he clicked the stereo off and
thanked fuck that the kids hadn’t been in the car.

He didn’t know what had happened. A man in an alley-way
parallel to the car seemed caught mid motion, poised in a pose of
running, before he turned on his heels and disappeared into the
alley. Without the stereo the only sounds were the idle of the
engine, the squeak of his windscreen wipers swiping mechanically
back and forth shunting the rain from his vision, and the drum of a
thousand fingers on his roof and buckled bonnet as the rain rattled
down.

The bonnet was crumpled. He had hit something, yet there was
no car, no motorbike, there was nothing before him that could have
caused the collision. A bollard? One of those wrought iron posts
made to look like a cannon. That would easily have caused the
damage, but it wouldn’t have been in the middle of the
road.

His heartbeat was drumming to the tempo of the falling
rain, each quivering beat launched an unbearable shiver of anxiety
through his nerves.
He remembered that his headlights
had caught something. The bonnet was buckled. He had hit
some-
thing
. The bonnet was
buckled.

The rain
drummed.

The
wipers swayed.

His
heart pounded.

He
remembered the blur in his headlights.

It had hands that had risen up in defence. It had had a white
face.

He had hit some-
one
.

The perceptions of headlights, the rain, the wipers, the tick
of the cooling engine, the tremble of his hands, the echo of his
heart all clambered around his head, then scattered away from a
pale hand that reached up from before the car and slammed onto the
bonnet.

The slender feminine hand spread palm-flat, the fingers
working and probing to gain some purchase. His tongue trembled in
his slack mouth. His heart’s uncertain beat in his throat. The hand
tensed, as if bracing against dragging its body upright and back to
its feet, then slid on the slick surface and abruptly disappeared
back over the edge out of sight.

Chapter Two

The light from
his headlights reflected from the narrow corridor of parked cars
and picked out the overbearing walls of the canyon of houses that
reached up into the night around him. The shifting silver grain of
the rain gave the world beyond the windscreen the quality of a
scratchy black and white film playing out. The dark shape of a man
ran and stopped in the mouth of an alley in the terrace, but Martin
was distracted from registering his details by the girl that fled
from that direction. The girl darted into the road so suddenly that
by the time Martin had turned his head to catch sight of her again
she was framed in his headlights. It was strange that he could see
it so clearly in his memory, yet hadn’t had time to realise what
had happened when it had actually occurred. He had hit the girl at
forty-miles an hour in a thirty-zone with a hulking Volvo
estate.

The tyres had
gripped at the road and surfed the rain wash before biting the
tarmac in a screeching slide that had joined another sound. A
choral sound of infantile voices wailed then abruptly ceased as his
bonnet crumpled with a cacophonous crunch and the car slammed to a
halt. The howl had been unnatural, but then all the noises that
played back to him from that moment frightened him with their
intensity and their unexpectedness.

Martin sat in
his car for what seemed like an eternity. The man that had been in
the alley, who in Martin’s memory had been part of the same body of
movement as the girl, was gone and had not returned. A weight
suddenly lifted from him and all the detail of his world came
flooding back around him as the cloying treacle movement of shock
time dissipated into the vividness and urgency of real time. Martin
prayed it hadn’t taken him the length of time it seemed to have
taken for him to react. He wanted to think that if someone’s life
hung in the balance, after the shock and the consideration of
driving off, he would make every second of that time count.

He popped his
seatbelt, flung his door open and hauled his considerable weight
out of the seat. After the stuffiness of the car the rain was like
needles of ice on his face and neck and soaked his white dress
shirt to his sweat clammy body with the shock of a cold compress.
He rounded the broad front of the vehicle and crouched at his
victim’s side with a sickening nausea in his belly. The girl was
sprawled before the car on the gritty tarmac that had been washed
into a textured glass by the fall of rain. He whined a noise that
he had never heard himself make and swore at the world.

Her pose
looked painfully uncomfortable. Her arms and legs had been thrown
into unnatural disarray from the impact. The front of the car stood
poised over her fragile form, the bumper buckled in, the bonnet
curled up like a lip snarled to bare the ragged teeth of its
shattered radiator grille. The car was just a foot away from being
parked on top of her body. The headlights poured over her
dispassionately with their glaring white eyes, lighting her white
skin and clothes into an overexposed whiteness.

She was
luminous in the light except for the dark marks where she had been
dirtied from her rag-doll roll along the road, and the blood that
was lit into brilliant scarlet against the white of her flesh. It
was like blood on snow. Martin dialled for an ambulance on his
mobile phone and crouched between her and the lights to shield her
from their glare. In the shade of his bulk the colour of her blood
lost its vividness, yet her hair and skin maintained its unnatural
whiteness.

Her eyelids
twitched the smallest of movements.

Speaking on
the phone, panting against his fear, he reached out a hand that
trembled with shock and the bitter cold of being soaked on a
November evening, and shielded her face from the rain. It could
easily have been the fall of the rain drops that had given the
impression of her eyelids moving, but he preyed to a God he didn’t
believe in that they had moved by themselves. That she was indeed
still alive. That he hadn’t killed her.

Her eyes
flicked open with the suddenness of a trap being sprung.

He fell onto
his rear in shock but was instantly sobered by the soaking chill of
the ground. He repeated himself on the phone to the operator after
a cry had made his last statement unintelligible and he returned to
his haunches. The movement of her eyelids had startled him but it
was the sight of her eyes that had toppled him.

The rain had
driven the lids shut again and he questioned what he had seen.
Giving a shaken approximation of his location to the robotic
sounding operator he knelt forward, not caring that the slurry of
rain water on the road was soaking him. He shielded her eyes again
and they reopened.

Her eyes were
as black as jet and made more striking by the white eyelids that
framed them. There was no coloured iris, no white of sclera,
seemingly just yawning ciliary muscles leaving only pupils with the
draw of black holes contained behind each lid.