The Late Hector Kipling (41 page)

WANDSWORTH PRISON, LONDON

I understand that it is customary, on occasions such as these, for the perpetrator of the atrocity to have the good grace to turn the gun upon himself. Apparently, in ninety-nine per cent of cases, the befuddled culprit is so discomfited by the severity of their gesture that they seek solace in the kiss of the very same bullet. Alas, in the event, it seems that I was found lacking with regards to this requirement. In the event, I’m afraid, the compulsion to play by the rules, and do the decent thing, evaded me. To be honest, I never even considered it.

I’d love to be able to tell you that I won, but I didn’t – I lost. I lost spectacularly; in fact I came in last. Still, not bad, to be last – which was in fact fifth – when I wasn’t even nominated. Archie March won, even though most of his idle gimmicks were ravaged in the fallout. You might think it a little indelicate that they should have even considered the question of winners and losers after such an abomination. But, at the end of the day, art is business, and that business is primarily show business, and the first principle of show business is that the show must go on. So the show went on. Archie March showed up on the night in a black tux with a black beret and a black sable armband and dedicated the accolade to the dead and the prize money to the families of the dead. As you might imagine there were a number of outspoken opportunists and diehard Breton enthusiasts, posturing in the pages of the broadsheets, saying that I should have won, but, as you might imagine, they were roasted and vilified as nihilistic ghouls, cut from the same cloth as the handful of diabolic reprobates who hailed 9/11 as a masterpiece
of postmodern deconstructionist installation. The red-tops indulged themselves in an orgy of punning with headlines which ranged from the obvious and asinine ‘Art Attack!’, ‘Artbreaker!’ and ‘Artless Swine!’ to the more sophisticated ‘A Turner For The Worst’, ‘A Brush With Death’ and, gloriously, my personal favourite, ‘I Don’t Know Much About Mass Murder, But I Know What I Like!’

Newsnight
cobbled together a nice little special on me and helicoptered in Damien and Tracey, who, on the whole, felt that I had taken things a little bit too far, and that the well-mined and ubiquitous motif of death had finally reached its zenith. Jake and Dinos put in an appearance on
Question Time
, stating that the ultimate role of art was to illuminate the eternal dilemma of mortality without actually ramming it down the spectator’s throat. They found my statement to lean too weightily, too indecently, on the literal, and would have found it more compelling if I had merely implied the notion of indiscriminate slaughter rather than actually slaughtered people indiscriminately. In a self-aggrandizing coda to their condescension, they took the opportunity to speculate that my barbarism represented an all-consuming final curtain to the theatre of the YBAs, and that they should henceforth be referred to as MABAs: Middle-Aged British Artists.

My ceiling is twenty feet lower than my old ceiling and there is no piano. But there is no grey so grey that the trained and cultured eye cannot throw out a good length of rope and heave up a thick tough fudge of blue. And often, therefore, these walls are far, far bluer than all those bleached and hoary skies of recent memory. Even the mice are a kind of lavender. Even the spiders.

I have finally stopped painting big heads. In fact, I have finally stopped painting altogether. Oh yes. You see, for the first two months they allowed me a few lousy brushes and a meagre selection of acrylics, but consequent to a psychiatric evaluation of my output it was decided that I shouldn’t even be in the same room as a pencil, which is a shame,
because I was right all along. Because death, you see, was the answer. I’ll say it again: Death was the answer.

When my life was starved of death it was not really what you would call a life. Since my life sought justification through representation, it was imperative that this representation should be consummate by way of being omniscient. As long as the ultimate desolation remained in the shadows then all my attempts to capture and illuminate the profound were damned to the shallows. Consequently, when my life was beset by, not one, but multiple bereavements, then the process blossomed in the glow of a glad and orgasmic ignition. What I’m trying to say is that one cannot interpret the curves and drops of existence until one has skidded a little on the ice and gravel of annihilation. Is that clear? Good. Then let us proceed.

Bianca comes to see me every fortnight, as a friend, free of charge; though our conversations are much the same as our conversations of old that used to retail at about a pound a minute, two syllables per second, or thereabouts. Of course my issues, if that’s what we must call them, are a little more complex; and whereas we used to look forward to a day when we might terminate the treatment, we now have a tacit understanding that any kind of conclusion lies far in the distance. (And that the word terminate has, of late, taken on a very different meaning.) She’s the one friend that I have left, since the remainder of my friends, who aren’t actually dead, now see fit to shun my company (which isn’t very difficult for them, obviously, since my company is rather easy to shun these days, and looks set to continue being the case for the next thirty years or so).

As to why I did what I did, Bianca is still working on it. I sometimes wonder if she regrets ever having met me. And then, other times, I believe she spends her evenings lining up her lucky stars and slipping them all a tenner. After all, I’m Hector Kipling. And what self-respecting Kleinian psychoanalyst could ask for anything more? She started off by grilling me as to whether or not, if at any point, I might have heard some sort of voice, or voices, in my head. Imperative
voices, she called them. I said no, and she took my hand in hers and told me that it was nothing to be ashamed of, and that I would, in fact, be in very good company should I concede this to be the case. She told me that Pythagoras had had them, Socrates had had them, St Augustine, Galileo and Hildegard of Bingen, whoever he was. I asked her if she meant Hildegard of Ogden and she scolded me for being flippant, and scorned my tendency to resort to infantile comedy in the face of mature tragedy. I asked her if there was such a thing as immature tragedy and she poked me in the middle of my third eye and said, ‘There you go again!’

Apparently Galileo heard the voice of his dead daughter, whereas Socrates was often advised as to the best way round to his mate’s house. We talked about Van Gogh, Rothko and Munch, and Bianca posited that my breakdown might very well date back to that day at Tate Modern with Lenny when I broke down and wept before the Munch painting. We talked about Breton and Manson, about Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark Chapman, and then about Jake and Dinos Chapman. Then I began to sneeze a lot and had to lie flat on my back and chant something in Tagalog or Urdu, I’m not sure which. We talked about God and which one, and what sort, and what we think he or she, them or it might be up to these days. I assured her that I’d made a few half-cocked attempts at praying in the prison chapel, begging Jesus and his dad to deliver me from evil, to forgive me my trespasses, and please not to make any rash decisions concerning the fate of my mortal soul, that kind of thing. Bianca disregarded such talk and told me not to dwell upon grim themes of retribution: tridents, fire and the eternal gnashing of teeth, and how the Church of England’s official line is, of late, that hell is just black nothing as opposed to the white wonderful something of heaven. Even the Vatican has recently seen fit to knock all that purgatory palaver on the head. She discouraged my visits to the chapel, opining that all organized religions are merely the fossils of enlightenment, and that any prolonged contemplation of the violent renderings
of Christ’s wounds could well set us back a few sessions. She went on to talk about Buddha, a short fat bald bloke, much like myself. Sedentary, contemplative and celibate, much like myself. The next week she brought in a small orange book and quoted from it at length: ‘Whatever joy there is in this world / All comes from desiring others to be happy / Whatever suffering there is in this world / All comes from desiring myself to be happy.’

‘But I didn’t gun down those critics out of any desire for my own happiness,’ I protested.

She leaned in and gazed deep into my eyes, ‘Really? Think about it, Hector, dear. Think about it.’

I thought about it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘look at me. Do I look happy?’

‘A little,’ she said. She smiled, raised up my hands, brought them up to her lips and kissed each one in turn. ‘Buddha said: “What you are is what you have been. What you will be, is what you do now.”’

But later that night I found myself masturbating over a vision of Bianca and Rosa getting off with each other in a spotlit bubble bath in the middle of the Sahara, so I think I still have some way to go before I can think about tucking into a nice bowl of pad thai in the splendid glades of Nirvana. The closest I’ll ever get to Nirvana is by putting a bullet into my haunted, unkempt head, if you get my drift. But there I go again with the jokes. But then again you can’t make a Hamlet without cracking a few gags. But, as I say, there I go again. Fuck, life drags. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I did hear voices in my head, rather than all this high-pitched silence. At least then I might have someone to talk to. At least then I might suffer a little conversation with someone other than Solomon Otto Sudweeks.

Solomon Otto Sudweeks is my terrifying cellmate. The first thing I can tell you about him is something that you already know: he has an idiotic name. He told me that if he had been born a girl then they were going to call him Trinity, which would have been even more idiotic. He bears a striking resemblance to Zero Mostel (who also had an idiotic
name), though he’s a deal fatter than Mostel and sports a kind of Tsar Nicholas moustache that went out of fashion sometime early in the last century, in a basement in Ekaterinburg. He sweats like a warm Emmental and is an habitual sleepwalker, though he never gets very far, obviously. Oh, and I should also mention that he hates me, which, given his proclivity for homicide is a bit of a worry, to say the least. He was dealt an unconditional life sentence about six years ago for butchering a clown who’d scared the wits out of his daughter at a party in Whitechapel. He then, a little confused and inconsistent, to say the least, proceeded to smother his daughter and dismember his wife with an antique Caribbean machete. He’s bounced my head off the walls of the cell two or three times, and, on one occasion tried to drown me in mouthwash, but on the whole the wardens don’t seem to be overly concerned about such trifles. I get the feeling that they think I deserve it. And perhaps I do. I say perhaps, because even though I can boast a bigger body count than Solomon, I’m not really what you would call a hardened criminal. Not really. I just had some kind of a conniption fit, as Bianca would say. Or a reet funny do, as Mum would say.

Er . . . would have said. As Mum would have said.

That’s right – poor old Mum is dead.

Oh, and Dad, by the way, I should mention – Dad is dead as well.

It was a terrible business. Really quite awful. As you can well imagine.

As the news broke the following morning, on the lurid bulletins of
GMTV
, Dad was apparently sufficiently conscious to absorb the shock and the shame, and within three brief minutes his heart broke. Really broke. I mean like a clock might break. And at twelve minutes past eight, it stopped. He didn’t even make it through the weather, which, just for the record, forecast high winds, thick cloud and heavy rain throughout the North-West and down into the Midlands.

Mum, meanwhile, slept on until noon, in a haze of Vicadin and Safeway’s gin, deaf to the endless ringing of the phone. It was a
journalist from the
Daily Telegraph
who first broke the news concerning the rumpus at the Tate. And then a Dr Dennis Bannister from the Victoria Hospital who delivered the final blow with a slow and whispered description of how, at the end, Dad had curled up into a trembling foetal ball and for the next half hour, uttered only one word, and one word alone, over and over: ‘Connie, Connie, Connie.’

It was about twenty past one, therefore, when Connie Mary Kipling, in nothing but her bra and a pair of her husband’s blue jockey shorts, climbed the sea wall, just north of Squire’s Gate, and screamed and screamed into the bluster of the building squall, before surrendering herself to the tea-brown, high-tide foam of the Irish Sea. A little after sundown her bloated cadaver was washed ashore about four hundred yards south of Lytham’s white windmill. Mum had always been rather partial to Lytham’s white windmill, and would often take me there as a child, to fly my Aristocat kite. Thomas O’Malley and a scrum of kittens, smiling on high, or swooping out towards the dunes.

Given my volatile state of mind in those first few days, I was offered no report of all this until the following Tuesday, when, for fear of me hearing it from some other source, an avuncular vicar named Boris Crossland ushered me into a small blue room and recounted the events with – to be honest – a very lilting turn of phrase and meticulous attention to the finer details. When pressed he revealed to me that he had once, many years ago, taken the role of Poggio in the Bispham Amateur Dramatic Society’s shoestring production of ’
Tis Pity She
’
s A Whore
. I thanked him for his well-modulated account and he took me in his arms and spoke of God’s mercy and his baffling proclivity for forgiveness, and then, pleased with how well all that had gone, launched into a hushed rendition of a few apposite lines from
The Tempest
:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve