The Art School Dance (27 page)

‘
Is that
enough?’ I wondered, flicking a fingernail against the rim of each
cup as I named the people being catered for. ‘You, me, Mac, Rose,
Ceri. Is there anyone else?’

‘
That’s
enough,’ Griff said. ‘Any more and it would read like a wedding
list.’

I laughed,
asked if this was a proposal in disguise, turned from him to pour
boiling water onto the coffee.

‘
Take
those through, will you?’ I said to him, pointing to two
mugs.

He took them,
paused a moment to juggle them both into the same hand before
moving towards the curtain; the murmur which came from the other
side, though indistinct, was heavily accented, a threatening Celtic
monotone.

‘
I think
we might need something stronger than coffee if Ceri carries on,’
he remarked.

I shook my
head, stifling a yawn as I did so. ‘No, not a good idea. I think
we’ve all had enough for one night.’

And some had
had more than others, this was obvious. Ceri’s cheeks were shining
like a scarlet lake when Griff placed a cup of coffee at his feet;
or perhaps a rose madder.

‘
This is
Earlsdon, not Montparnasse!’ he was saying. ‘The West Midlands, not
Paris!’

As I followed
through from the kitchen and distributed the rest of the coffee
Griff shrugged in answer to my questioning glance; he, too, had
lost track of the conversation, had no idea what Ceri was talking
about. We took up the places we had recently occupied, me on the
floor at McCready’s feet, Griff in an armchair opposite. By
McCready’s side Rose sat as if mummified, silently transfixed by
the Welshman’s scowl.

‘
Well?
Isn’t it?’ Ceri demanded, first of Rose and then of the rest of us.
‘Am I right?’

Heads were
turned and nods exchanged, acknowledging the accuracy of his
geography but not too sure about the relevance of the
statement.

‘
Exactly! The Midlands! It’s work, industry, making cars for
God knows how many years!’

‘
Not
quite so much work as there used to be,’ said Rose sleepily.
‘Industry is dead.’

I agreed with
her, excusing her emphasis on death, said, ‘They’re not making as
many cars as they used to, either.’

‘
It’s
the Midlands and it’s real!’ Ceri insisted, and flashed a warning
glance at Griff, the one he blamed for starting the argument. ‘You
just stuff the metaphysics and admit I’m right!’

‘
It’s
the real world my father would like me to prepare for,’ Griff
conceded, but this wasn’t enough for Ceri; the very tone in which
it was said suggested that the term needed qualifying. So the
argument continued, not exactly one-sided, since there were two
voices at odds with each other, but not representative of the
opinions which there had to be when it was remembered that there
were five of us present in all. No further opinions were
forthcoming, however, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour
and the wine we had drunk. Beside McCready on the settee Rose had
relaxed and was sprawled this way and that, her long legs splayed
apart, one arm thrown out along the back of the settee and the
other crossed over her breast, like an amputee crucified. McCready
himself had leant forward, as if to escape her embrace, and was
resting his chin on my head. It was a weary somnolent scene
disturbed only by the exchanges between Ceri and Griff.

‘
Balls!’
said Ceri, in answer to one particular statement I had missed, and
I took McCready’s hand in mine to trace a finger across his palm,
drawing two cubes.

‘
What’s
that?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘
Balls
to Braque,’ I told him, and we both burst into fits of
laughter.

‘
Go on!
Laugh!’ Ceri complained. ‘You can sit there so serious and
poker-faced, listening to Griff’s crackpot philosophies, but when I
ask for a little common sense that’s all you can do! Laugh!’ He
waited a moment, in case we wanted to apologise or explain
ourselves; then, when it became apparent that he was to be afforded
neither courtesy, he turned on me. ‘You haven’t had much to say for
yourself tonight,’ he observed.

Other than the
comment about Braque’s balls.

‘
I made
the coffee,’ I smiled good naturedly, as if this excused me from
taking part in the discussion.

‘
But
you’re supposed to have some common sense.’

‘
Is that
because I’m a woman?’ I asked, guessing at one of Ceri’s particular
prejudices, for while the men of his world could be eccentric at
any age it seemed that it was only women in their dotage who were
permitted to be anything other than level headed. I was damned if I
would wait until I was carrier-bagged and wrinkle-stockinged before
I was allowed my moments of impulse.

The impulse I
then followed drove me to take McCready's face in my hands and give
him a long deep kiss. When I returned my smile to Ceri it was even
more delighted than before.

‘
See?’ I
challenged him. ‘The woman as artist can be romantic,
too.’

The fine
distinction which was in my use of the word escaped Ceri, though,
who could only think of ‘romantic’ in terms of sex.

‘
Who the
fuck brought romance into the argument?’ he wanted to
know.

*

‘Griff’s
in love with you. You know that, don’t you?’

A fine thing
for McCready to say, when the two of us had only just finished our
nightly bout of copulation -once a night, as if to a prescription,
to help him sleep- and I wondered why he felt the need to mention
it. Was he contemplating some kinky three-in-a-bed session?

Well not in
that bed, not in that room. The bedroom was mine and I had put a
great deal of effort into making it so; I had painted over the
flowered wallpaper with white emulsion; sanded the furniture of its
chipped gloss to leave the lighter cleaner wood beneath, ripped up
the cracked linoleum and stained the floorboards; I had even taken
a saw to the legs of the bed, which had been too much like a
vaulting horse in its original state, a monument to Victorian
values.

The room and
the bed were mine, and McCready’s, in the low slung hammock of
sheets I held him close, said, ‘You’re the only one I want.’

I guess this
was what he wanted to hear, it was nonsense to think anything else,
but still he continued: ‘The way he looks at you sometimes-’

‘
I can’t
say that I’ve noticed.’

‘
-almost
undressing you with his eyes.’

‘
That’s
the artist in him. Close observation.’

‘
That's
the lecher in him. Lust.’

McCready
seemed to derive almost as much pleasure from the conversation as
he had from our lovemaking and I suspected that his own fertile
mind had excited him as much as my ministrations had. I drew him
closer still, held his head to my breast which was how he best
liked to sleep.

‘
Poor
Griff,’ he sighed. And: ‘Lucky me.’

*

Griff woke to
motes of dust etching intricate spirals in the air, rose groggily,
perching on the edge of the bed to look around and fix objects with
an effort, staring hard to stop his world shifting and quivering.
The room was in a mess, not a pleasant sight once it settled,
clothes littering the floor, tracing the routes he and Ceri had
taken to their beds, underpants and socks and shirts with their
arms outstretched like limp crucifixions. More clothes piled on top
of the bed in the far corner of the room, a formidable heap, still
and sombre like a burial mound, would hide the form of Ceri.

Griff hurled a
pillow across the room at the softly breathing heap of clothes.

‘
Is that
you?’ Ceri asked in a low grumble, no part of him seen and his
words barely heard.

‘
It
might be,’ Griff pondered. ‘We don’t know for sure, do we? Nothing
is ever certain.’

‘
It’s
you alright. Piss off and let me sleep.’

Sweaty
flatulent sounds followed, then a series of belches, and Griff
moved before the bedclothes could shift and let the evils smells
beneath seep out, gathered up his trousers and sweater and went
through to the next room.

This, too, was
in a state of disarray, drawings and notebooks strewn across the
table in the centre of the room; other sketches, sheets of notes
and half realised ideas were tacked to the walls, with comments and
elaborations pencilled onto the wallpaper around them. Griff
stepped carefully between the debris which covered the floor and
gathered the dust, went up and down a shallow staircase of books to
the gas ring on the far side of the room. He struck a damp match
against a sodden matchbox, once, twice, then jumped back cursing, a
hand to his naked groin as the match disintegrated and sent
dangerous phosphorescent flares shooting in every direction. He
pulled on his trousers and sweater before trying again, finally lit
the gas and settled the kettle on top of it. It had been his
intention to make a cup of coffee, black, but now he found that
there was none; the jars which leant precariously from the shelf
above the sink, though labelled Nescafe, were all full of powdered
pigments. Tea, then, with a slice of lemon, that would refresh him.
He took a teabag from the box, dropped it into the cleanest cup he
could find, then curled his fingers around the lemon which sat in
the middle of the breadboard. When he picked up the lemon, however,
the breadboard came with it.

‘
What
the-?’

He shook the
lemon but the board stayed fast, turned it this way and that and
saw that the two had been super-glued together. He threw the lemon
to the floor, noting that the board still clung obstinately to it,
then turned to that portion of the wall which was devoted to work
in progress. There, low down near the floor, next to Ceri’s
ink-blot improvisations, he saw ‘Still Life with Lemon’, a not too
accurate pencil sketch of what should have been his hangover
cure.

‘
Fuck
it! I’m going into college!’ he announced, and stamped
ill-humouredly down the resonant wooden staircase, slamming the
front door behind him.

It was some
minutes later that he sees the first ‘silly tree’.

He had walked
down the High Street, so neat and ordered in the early morning that
it looked like an illustration from a children's book or the
backdrop to a pantomime. Shops of varied architectural styles
glowed rich red and burnt brown in the sun and though the sky was
cold, a faded denim colour, the buildings made the most of the
light, amplifying what warmth there was and reflecting it to calm
the mood and clear the senses.

After walking
no more than a hundred yards he had left the High Street behind,
had passed the shops and crossed the roundabout by the library;
sweeping avenues of semi-detached houses now took him downhill,
towards the park which sloped gently to the railway and the city
beyond. Here he took a diagonal line across, from corner to corner,
aiming for the narrow footbridge which crossed the railway line,
following a path worn in the grass where none had been intended, a
short cut which many people used. A little to his right but still
some distance away was a squat brick building, quite small, with no
windows, only one door and no clue as to its purpose. He had always
assumed that it was some kind of shed or store to house the tools
which the gardeners used around the park, but he could never be
certain, he had never seen the door open. Now, as he approached the
structure, he saw that vandals had been at work, that someone had
sprayed on one wall, in green aerosol paint, the words ‘a silly
tree’.

Steps on the
far side of the bridge took him down to a tree-lined row of estate
agents at the end of which, just before the shopping precinct, was
a telephone kiosk. This, like the building in the park, had sprayed
on its side 'a silly tree'. And there were others...

An electricity
sub-station, squat and solid like a strange sentinel, humming out a
caution as he approaches... a silly tree.

A post box,
standing at the edge of the road as if waiting to cross... a silly
tree.

A parking
meter... a silly tree.

And many more,
each the same, each bearing the emerald green legend... a silly
tree.

McCready came
to mind.

*

The
relationship between Griff and McCready was an awkward one, there
was a competitiveness in their friendship which was so subtle that,
while one party wasn’t even aware of it, the other could be driven
by an envy which at times bordered on hatred. At the root of this
envy was desire and the suspicion that while he, Griff, knew full
well what desire was, McCready never did, never had and never
would.

Desire of
what?

Of
anything!

Desire, in the
mind of Griff, was being unable to sleep because there was an
object of that desire; desire was frustration, because the object
of that desire was elusive, and desire was cunning, because the
person tempted by that desire would stop at nothing to satisfy it;
desire was many things, none of which he believed occurred to
McCready, but most of all it was wanting. McCready would never
admit to wanting anything, though there were surely many things
that his life lacked he never seemed to make them objects of desire
and never expended any energy in trying to attain them; things came
to him or they didn’t and he was happy enough to accept this, just
energetic enough to reach out for anything which came within his
grasp but too lazy to stretch.