Keeping Bad Company (26 page)

I promised I’d look into it. By this time it was nearly one in the morning and I finally persuaded him to go home.

At least his visit had dealt with my overwrought wakefulness. I collapsed on the sofa. Oblivious of my bruises, I slept, as they say, like the dead.

Chapter Thirteen

I arrived early at the Community Hall the following morning, as requested. I’d spent some time and my theatrical make-up skills disguising the cut on my chin. I’d washed my hair and knew I looked fine, not like someone who’d been fleeing for her life only hours before. Despite this, I was feeling highly nervous. A persuasive little Mephisto in the corner of my mind kept whispering, ‘Hey! You’d rather be anywhere else than here! Why don’t you just turn and run?’

But I’m not one to break a promise. Angus was depending on me. If I let him down, I’d feel bad about it, and I’d never be able to eat at Jimmie’s again. Though the last thought was more an inducement to defect than to stay, I ordered the tempter to be silent and looked around.

At least I wasn’t alone. People were arriving from all directions. Beneath a banner proclaiming ‘Art for a Cleaner Safer World’, artists working in every medium were struggling through the doors with exhibits. As I watched, a thin man with a neatly trimmed beard, and a red neckerchief knotted fancily around his scraggy throat, staggered past. His arms clasped a scrap-metal sculpture to his bosom as if it were a dancing partner.

‘Fran! Fran, over here!’ I heard Angus’s voice as my eye caught a waving arm.

He was sitting between the open doors at the rear of an ancient rust-pitted Transit van, drinking milk from a carton. He put it down as I approached.

‘Just having my breakfast,’ he explained. ‘Thanks for being on time. You know, we’re really in with a chance. I’ve seen most of the other stuff. Talk about unimaginative, run-of-the-mill junk. We’ll knock ’em into next week!’

Trying hard to share his enthusiasm, I peered past him into the van. ‘Jimmie said something about vegetables,’ I mumbled.

The interior of the van, as far as I could see, was littered with foliage of various sorts. A pineapple poked its fronds from a Tesco bag.

‘Veg?’ Angus looked puzzled. ‘No, he’s got it wrong. Fruit.’

‘Oh.’ I supposed that was better. ‘Where’s the thing, you know, the frame.’

‘Already taken it in.’ He stood up. ‘Right, you take the bag there and this one . . .’ he thrust another plastic carrier at me, ‘I’ll bring the lianas.’

Inside the hall, chaos reigned. A shrill woman in a long purple skirt and a patchwork jacket was shouting instructions at anyone who cared to listen, though most people were ignoring her. She clasped a sheaf of cards to her flat bosom.

‘All the individual areas are marked in chalk on the floor!’ she shrieked. ‘Newcomers please get a number from me!’ She held the sheaf of cards up in the air but no one took the slightest bit of notice.

‘They’re not doing it properly, Reg!’ she wailed to a gloomy, middle-aged individual standing nearby.

‘Let ’em sort themselves out,’ advised Reg.

‘But it’ll be a dreadful mess. Do something, Reg!’

Two girls trotted past, bearing between them a lurid canvas splashed with lime green and red.

‘Come and get your number!’ begged the woman.

The girls, like everyone else, took no notice and carried straight on to the back of the hall.

The woman caught my eye. ‘Have you got your number?’ she asked dispiritedly.

I explained I was an exhibit, not an exhibitor.

‘You’ve still got to have a number,’ she said obstinately.

Reg edged over and peered into my Tesco bags. ‘Blimey, brought your lunch with you, love?’

Hearing I was going to wear it, not eat it, he chuckled. ‘Cor! Carmen bloomin’ Miranda! ’

I recalled that Angus had promised a couple of minders on the door to stop troublemakers disrupting our festival of culture. Apparently, all we had was Reg. He was in his fifties and overweight. He may once have been a fine figure of a man, but not since it had all settled round his midriff. I enquired tentatively about the door attendants.

‘They cost money, do professional bouncers,’ said Reg. ‘Shouldn’t need them. Not in broad daylight.’

‘It’s an arts festival,’ put in the purple-skirted woman. ‘One couldn’t have a couple of heavyweights on the door, scowling at people. It would put the visitors off.’

Well, we mustn’t frighten the horses. But the news did nothing for my already fragile nerves.

Angus appeared, his arms filled with strands of greenery. ‘We’re over on the right,’ he informed me.

‘Your number!’ shrilled the woman.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it,’ he told her.

‘Then you’re the only bloody one who has!’ she snapped. She pushed the sheaf of cards into Reg’s hand. ‘You carry on, I’m going to find a coffee. My head is splitting!’

Angus and I progressed to a chalked area on the floor where the frame stood waiting for us, looking more than ever like something from a castle dungeon. The thin man had set up his scrap-metal sculpture alongside us in the next chalked area.

Its creator stood back and squinted at it. ‘Does that look straight to you?’

Given the nature of the exhibit, it was hard to tell. I said it looked more or less straight to me.

‘We are reducing the world to a mountain of debris, the legacy of our life-style,’ he informed me. ‘And in doing so, we are reducing ourselves to mere accumulation of debris. Junk in. Junk out.’

Hence the scrap metal figure, I deduced. The thin man was staring fiercely at the frame created by Angus for my support. ‘I see your friend is a minimalist,’ he said. ‘The pure spiral, representing man’s spiritual search, guiding him to the heavens or dragging him inexorably earthwards, am I right?’

I was saved replying by one of the girls who had carried in the lurid canvas. She approached. ‘Oy!’ she hailed the thin man. ‘You’re in our square.’ She brandished a numbered card at him.

‘Find yourself another one,’ he retorted.

‘You find your own square!’

‘I can’t use my own square. Someone’s already in it!’

‘Reg!’ screeched the girl down the hall. ‘Come ’n’ tell this silly sod he’s in our square!’

Avoid other people’s fights is my motto. The bystander always gets hurt. I returned to Angus. ‘Where’s my costume?’

He handed me yet another plastic bag. I peered into it. It was the body stocking, dyed a fetching sludge green. It did, however, look reassuringly robust.

‘You’ll have to change in the women’s loo,’ he said. ‘But if you bring your clothes back here, I’ll lock ’em in the van till it’s over.’

A little later I emerged hesitantly from the washroom clad in the green body stocking. But I needn’t have worried that anyone would take any notice of me. They were all too busy arguing over floor space and setting up their exhibits. The woman with the purple skirt was running up and down in increasing hysteria. Her cries of, ‘No, no, you can’t
do
that!’ were alternated with appeals of, ‘Reg, do
something
!’ I had to admit there was a real air of excitement, just like the last minutes before a first night. I began to cheer up.

Nevertheless, things didn’t start too well, with Angus and I having a serious disagreement over the pineapple. To my horror, he intended this to go on my head, fixed with a wire crown. I flatly refused to consider it.

‘Look here,’ he said, getting truculent, ‘I’m the artist and you’re the model, right? We’ll get nowhere if you’re going to carp at everything. You agreed.’

‘I’ll model the rest, but not that thing, certainly not on top of my head! I’ve already heard one Carmen Miranda joke. I mean it. You’ll have no model at all if you insist.’

‘But it finishes the whole thing off,’ he protested.

‘Too right, it’ll finish it off. It’ll finish me off for a start. It’s naff, Angus. Forget it.’

He said crossly that it had cost a lot. I told him to take it over to Jimmie’s and sell it on to him. ‘He can chop it up, mix it with cottage cheese and stick it in the potatoes.’

He gave way with bad grace. Miraculously things sorted themselves out and we were all just about ready at ten thirty when the doors were opened to the public. The frame wasn’t that comfortable but it wasn’t actively uncomfortable. Angus, working from a diagram, had attached all the bits of greenery and some flowers, together with some large and beautifully painted paper butterflies and birds. Reg came along to watch. He looked impressed.

Angus positioned me facing the scrap-metal man next door and I felt it and I would be good friends by the end of the day.

The atmosphere, as Reg approached the doors, quivered with the vibrations from artistic nerves strung like violin strings. The first members of the public to drift in were clearly friends and supporters of the different artists. They clutched leaflets pressed on them by the organisers. In addition, they all had a private brief, which was to stand in front of their friend’s chalk square and express loud admiration, before moving on to the other squares and pronouncing all the other work rubbish.

Before our square they fell silent. I wasn’t sure whether this was because they were struck with awe or because, with Angus being brawny and wearing his Scottish football shirt, they didn’t feel it was wise to make the sort of sarcastic comments they were firing at other exhibits. They were rude about the scrap-metal man instead.

The thin man was soon pale with emotion. ‘Philistines!’ he howled. ‘Cultural cretins!’

After a while, genuine punters began to arrive – only a few at first, some carrying bags of Saturday shopping, but all of them seemed strangely attracted to our square. Angus had been right about the living sculpture. It – I – exerted a weird fascination over observers.

Word must have got around because a lot of people began to arrive and they all made for our corner where it became very congested. I concentrated on keeping still and soon realised how the Buckingham Palace guards must suffer.

Comments floated towards me. ‘She must be real, you can see her eyes blinking.’ ‘Poor girl, she’ll get terrible cramp.’ More mysteriously, I heard, ‘I expect she’s used to this sort of thing.’

Cameras began to flash. Angus was in seventh heaven and even the thin man brightened up, probably hoping that the photographers would include his sculpture in the picture.

The show closed for a lunch break between one and two. Angus helped me out of the frame and removed some of the less firmly fixed greenery and artwork.

‘You were right about the pineapple,’ he said generously.

‘Of course I was,’ I said.

I nipped along to the loo to struggle out of the rest and answer Nature’s call. There was a chair in the washroom. I sat on it in my bra and pants to drink a cup of coffee and eat a sandwich, which Angus had sent in care of the woman in the purple skirt.

‘It’s going awfully well,’ she enthused. ‘I do think you’re terribly brave.’ She hovered over me. ‘You won’t catch cold, will you? We have got the heating on.’

I promised her I wasn’t cold. In fact, inside the body stocking and all the attachments, it had been very warm in the hall. She told me again that I was brave and she wouldn’t have done it, not for the world.

I had to get back to my stand well before two so that Angus could reattach everything. The crowd was thinner after lunch. People had other ways of spending their Saturday afternoons. The exhibition was due to close at four thirty anyway, and by three fifteen I was beginning to think we might be able to knock off early. Even as I thought this, I became aware of fresh eyes staring at me.

I had quite got used to the gawpers, but this was a gaze so intent, it made my skin tingle. Worse than that, it sent out signals of recognition and of menace. It conjured up fear such as I’d felt in my underground bedroom. My night visitor – it had to be.

A bead of sweat trickled from my shoulders, down inside the clammy body stocking, running along my spine like the touch of a finger. I eased my head round just a little.

There were two of them, standing side by side: Merv and his mate. Merv, tall, pale and slab-like as ever, chewed gum impassively. I no longer cared about Merv. I was interested in the other. I was seeing him face to face for the first time. No smoky-visored biker’s helmet, no curtained window, no thick piece of opaque glass veiled him from my sight. I saw my ogre, fair and square.