Ivory (5 page)

She
kissed him again. “You’re a good kisser.” She ran her fingers
through his waves of hair and traced them down his neck, causing
him to flinch as they tickled their way down to his shoulder and
then his collar bone. “You’re a good lov-er,” she said huskily in a
mock-sexy voice.

“
Not now. For Christ’s sake.” Of all times. Not now. Feeling
like a loser

“
When is a good time?” She snapped.

She stood before him with her chestnut hair hanging untidily
about her face where it had slipped out of her crude ponytail, and
any suggestion of shape or form to her body was smothered by the
old baggy and tatty jumper that served as her housecoat when she
slouched over the ironing, cleaned the toilet or did the cooking.
She had hardly put much effort into a seduction attempt. A quick
fuck wasn’t going to make everything better. He didn’t want to have
to switch off his feelings to meet her needs.

“
Clearly not when I have fucked up twice in one
night!”

One of the boys called down with a whiny voice and Martin
swore at himself for shouting and waking him.

Jenny
held both thumbs up and flashed him a fake smile. “Score. Now you
have made it a hat trick.” She backed away to the door, heading to
the crying from upstairs. “You’re hardly ever here emotionally.”
She whispered. “I was just trying to find a way to
connect.”

“
Very opportunist of you.” He bit back.

“
Someone has to seize the moment and take the initiative. It
sure as hell won’t be you.”

“
Okay, next time your father has a heart attack I will give
you a quickie on top of the tumble fucking dryer.” He hissed at her
as quietly as his rising anger would allow.

She
stormed off up the stairs with tears in her eyes. He slammed the
breadbin lid against the wall, snatched another Yum Yum from the
packet and shoved it whole into his mouth and gnashed bitterly at
it, swallowing with self-loathing.

Phil McDonald
stood with one hand on his hip and the forefinger of his other hand
pressed to lips pursed in contemplation. He studied the large
canvas that dominated one end of Martin’s studio classroom that
held the picture that had failed to impress the judges the night
before. Martin rolled his wedding band around his ring finger. The
band had thinned after twenty years. Strangely it was symbolic of
how he and his marriage had both worn each other down over time.
Jenny re-plated hers every year, kept it flawless and in shape.

“
It
is
a
good piece,” Phil, or Donnie as everyone knew him, spoke his
conclusion from behind his finger.

Martin rested
against a desk with his arms folded and nodded. “Thank you. It was
a shame the judges didn’t think so though.”

“
Is it too challenging?” He grimaced and rubbed a hand over
his shiny scalp. Donnie’s dark hair had receded to the sides of his
head long before Martin had met him and befriended him on the
campus.

He shrugged.
“Isn’t art meant to challenge, Donnie? Whether it is to challenge
the imagination or the intellect.”

“
I can see what you have done. It’s a retake of Fildes’
Houseless and Hungry
isn’t it?” He cast a hand over the picture and circled the
line of youths in hooded tops and baseball caps propping themselves
up against the wall of a job centre, smoking cigarettes and texting
on mobile phones. “These Chav’s that dominate your picture are the
modern vision of the ‘destitute’ that Fildes portrayed. But you
aren’t forcing people to acknowledge the underclass as Fildes was,
are you?”

Martin
answered with a smirk, but that wasn’t enough for Donnie who hooked
his thumbs in his red braces and stared seriously at him over his
thick black rimmed glasses until Martin shook his head in
concession.

“
You have made the line-up of youths as a view from the window
of a Starbucks’ coffee shop, almost making them background to the
foreground characters in the café; children in school uniforms
consuming expensive drinks and cakes at a table, and they are
flanked by a couple of staff members at work. It could simply be a
snap shot of a high-street scene but through the way that you have
composed it you are making a commentary on society. One of the
workers is black and bringing the children drinks, the other has
olive skin and cleaning a table. Both are made to stand out as they
are clearly not Caucasian as all the other characters are. In the
mid-ground we have a youth carrying out a Starbuck’s coffee in the
direction of the job centre.

“
Your picture is asking its viewers to reconsider their
perspective of poverty – the unemployed of your picture all with
their luxury items and spoils, and despite the vacancy advertised
at the edge of our view on the coffee shop’s notice-board the
‘foreigners’ are the only ones willing to work, and they have ended
up serving ‘our’ unemployed youth. The children in the café are a
warning about breeding yet another generation of consumers
conditioned with capitalist expectations, who would rather claim
from the state than take on a job offering a minimum
wage.”

Martin
applauded and Donnie gave a brief mincing dance on the spot
followed by a flourished bow.

“
Well,
I
love it. It’s a brilliant capturing of a moment. Not just of
a scene in a high street but of a moment in history. However, you
are not content with that.” Donnie held up a cautioning finger
before a serious face. “The teenage girl in the coffee shop with
her back to us has an open compact. The looking glass is directed
out at us the viewer and you are directly challenging us to take a
good long look at our own hypocrisy. Whatever form that might
take.”

Martin nodded
again, but a little uncomfortably.

“
Splendid touch, however, only a few of us are modest enough
to admit our flaws with any serious contemplation. It is a
fantastic picture of the world that leaves us with an uncomfortable
view of ourselves. And in answer to your earlier question; yes, art
is intended to challenge us but is it too much of a challenge to
accuse an audience of hypocrisy and then ask for their
favour?”

Martin thrust
his hands into his trouser pockets. It had been the same point
Jenny had made when he had unveiled it to her. He knew to trust
Jenny’s opinion and had known he was going to lose out on the UDAC.
It had been the reason for not wanting Jenny there. She would have
been watching him all night waiting for his inevitable
disappointment and then been impotent in the face of it. “That’s a
fair point. Challenging works like this might hang in the Tate
today, but in their own time they struggled to get gallery
space.”

“
As one of our students might say it’s like you’re giving the
world the finger.”

Martin
laughed. “I suppose.”

“
I know we tend to keep our conversations strictly aesthetic
but it has been difficult not to be aware of your melancholy of the
last six months. I think a little of this irritation and
frustration with yourself and the world has crept into your
work.”

“
Good observations all round.” Martin didn’t want this to be
an opener onto his personal issues. “I’m also sorry your play
didn’t get the accolades it deserved. It was good
stuff.”

Donnie made dramatic jazz-hands in the air. “Ah yes,
‘Rom & Jools: a rom-tradg’
an imaginative re-working of one of the bard’s
greats by one of our creative writing students, some outstanding
acting, some fabulous direction on my part. Overall a faultless
performance…” his hands dropped and his voice soured. “spoiled by
the ugliest Juliet I have ever seen.”

“
I didn’t like to say, but she wouldn’t have been my first
choice.”

“
She wasn’t mine. Not with that nose; like a shark fin cutting
through the balcony scene. Faculty politics. Daughter of a major
sponsor.”

“
Was Bea disappointed?” Bea was Donnie’s wife, and she also
worked at the university, in the drama department. Bea was short
for Beatrice. Martin had suggested to Jenny that it was short for
‘beard’, for Donnie was the gayest straight man he had ever met.
Bea was the one and only thing that made people that met Donnie
suspend their belief about his sexuality. At one of Bea and
Donnie’s dinner parties, all the guests had drunk far too much and
had descended in creating porn star names for each other, someone
had suggested ‘Phil MacCafferty’ for Donnie and everyone had cried
with laughter – even Donnie and Bea, as if they knew why the name
was especially funny. Martin had joked with Jenny that if Donnie
ever did ‘come out’ Donnie would be the last person to realise
it.

“
She was a little disappointed. You know how she likes to
relive her glory days through her students and
productions.”

In her youth
Bea had made quite a name for herself on the west end circuit. That
was when Donnie and Bea had first met. Donnie had showed Martin a
photograph of her from those days, dressed in what little costume
there was amongst the plumes feathers and rhinestones she was all
legs and cleavage, quite something to behold. That was some time
ago now though and he had never known her as lithe and
proportioned. She had gained the weight of three other chorus girls
and attempted to disguise her broad frame rather flamboyantly with
floor length dresses and heavy poncho’s. With the end result being
that she looked like she had the body of a hippo draped in a stage
safety curtain. Martin thought it ironic that this straight man
trapped in a gay body had fallen in love with an actress and ended
up married to a theatre.

“
It was clear that the girl playing Juliet was more than
capable of acting her way out of a paper bag, so we didn’t have to
worry about her talent it’s just that we would have all preferred
she actually act from
within
a paper bag. All that money in her family and not
a touch of cosmetic surgery in sight.”

“
Maybe you should do a modern re-take of a Greek tragedy next
year.”

Donnie pointed
at Martin and squealed a laugh. “Yes! Masks all round. I could get
all the funding I need from investors with ugly offspring.” He
nearly lost the pastel orange sweater that had been draped over his
shoulders by its arms, and he quickly clawed it back into place.
“Bea and I wondered if you might like to join ourselves and a
select number of the other faculty members who didn’t get the
recognition of a UDAC, and commiserate in good company with some
fine food and wine this Saturday night?”

Jenny would
love the opportunity to get out and be normal, and Bea and Donnie’s
dinner parties were usually good fun, but Martin couldn’t stand the
thought of being around other people at the moment. It was draining
enough making the effort with Jenny and the boys let alone a whole
room full of people in a party mood. “We’re between babysitters at
the moment, and I’m not much fun at the moment.” Bit of a lie and a
bit of the truth, it was usually a good combination. Like art.

“‘
Pass me another babysitter I’ve torn this one’, eh?” Donnie
laughed and nudged Martin. “Well, if you change your mind about the
diner party let me know. It’s never the same without you kids
there. I’m off to the faculty ‘VIP lounge’ for a break.
Coming?”

Martin shook
his head and said he had some work to do. They both commiserated
each others losses again and with a wave Donnie minced out of the
room. Martin watched him leave then returned to the large room at
the back of the classroom that served as a storage area. He passed
between the metal storage units stacked with art equipment that
dissected the room into narrow walkways. He reached the back of the
room and dragged a stool out from between some boxes to a cupboard,
he unlocked and opened the doors wide, and sat before the easel set
up inside on the middle shelf. The shelves below were crammed with
his personal art materials. This was his space tucked away at work
where he could snatch moments to create. Both his one-to-one
tutorial students had cancelled and left him the whole afternoon to
work. He reached down to the shelves below and pulled out a large
sketch pad and some pencils.

He closed his
eyes and held the graphite to the page. Now he would wait for his
hand to move and see what it would create. This was what Jenny
called his ‘free associating’, where he would allow his mind to
wonder across a page and create lines and shapes free of his
conscious control. After a time he would allow himself to open his
eyes and frame and block sections of his work and search for
inspiration. His hand moved across the page.

Martin’s
thoughts scattered as a soft laughter broke the quiet. He sprung
from his stool and pretended to be checking the shelves for
something. He slid his small wire-framed spectacles down his nose
and peered over them as Richard Hadleigh stumbled backwards into
the store room, propelled by a youthful lad with peroxide yellowed
hair. Hadleigh slammed into one of the shelving units with his arms
pinned outstretched, and there was mischief in the boy’s eyes as he
stared into Hadleigh’s face. The blonde’s hands fell to the waist
of Hadleigh’s jeans and with a twist he popped the buttons of the
fly open. Hadleigh offered a faltering unconvincing protest which
the boy ignored and dropped promptly to his knees. He knelt there,
poised, daring Hadleigh.

“
We shouldn’t.
Not
here
,” Hadleigh breathed.