The Art School Dance Read online

  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.

  This is how McCready had found himself with me, not by wanting to be with me and straining to make it so but simply by chancing to be in the right place at the right time. What was especially annoying, to Griff, was that there had not even been any cleverness involved, no question of playing hard to get; McCready had simply been unconcerned, prepared to let things happen, and I had been drawn to him.

  Lucky dog!

  *

  Ahead of Griff the art school loomed. Mounting the first flight of steps, then a second, he turned towards the main entrance and saw McCready at the balcony which jutted out from the second floor common room.

  He was waving.

  ‘Pillock,’ Griff grumbled, and refused to return the greeting. Hurrying into the building, signing his name in the register which was at the office counter, he took the stairs two at a time to confront McCready as he was stepping from the balcony into the common room.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What was me?’ asked McCready, walking over to the coffee machine and dropping a coin into the slot.

  As Griff glowered he wondered what anyone could find attractive in McCready. He was so skinny, he had wrists as brittle as parched twigs and knees like knots in pieces of string; his nose was too big, he had a wispy beard which ran along a narrow fertile line around his jaw and his hair was already beginning to thin at the front.

  ‘You’re the stupid bugger who's been spraying ‘silly tree’ all over town, aren’t you? Admit it.’

  McCready turned with a smile, a cup of coffee in his hand. ‘But I’m an artist, Griff, not a vandal. What you’re accusing me of would be criminal, not allowed, an up-before-the-magistrates job.’

  ‘It didn’t stop you, though, did it?’ Griff sat, slumping heavily into one of the common room chairs. From his manner it might have been thought that they were all his, the post boxes and lamp standards and telephone kiosks he had seen sprayed with green paint, but it wasn’t the vandalism which had him annoyed, but the idea, the fact that it was McCready’s idea and the possibility -the very great possibility- that it might be greeted favourably in some quarters of the college. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he asked again.

  Still grinning, McCready walked over to the window. ‘You go back a thousand years or so, Griff, and there’d be nothing out there but trees, silly things if you’re innocent enough to see them that way, all fluffy at the top and gnarled at the bottom, but nonetheless tress as we know them. Now we’ve got all those other things springing up out of our concrete oasis and they're even sillier things.’ He turned. ‘You see my point?’

  The point was further emphasised by the ‘trees’ which McCready had recently erected on the college lawn, not trees at all but three foot high fibreglass cones, painted brown at the pointed and green at the blunt end, only trees in as much that McCready had said they were, his assertion given confirmation by his quote from Magritte that ‘any shape whatever may replace the image of an object’.

  ‘You’re out of your bloody mind,’ said Griff. ‘Off your trolley. Insane.’

  McCready gave a shrug of the shoulders. ‘But who’s to say who’s sane and who isn't? There’s always that to consider, isn’t there?’

  Griff scowled and stamped off, takes the lift to the fifth floor, had barely begun working when McCready appeared again. He disappeared into the den which he had presently commandeered from me, came out again within seconds lugging a large canvas sack after him.

  ‘Give us a hand, Griff, help me lower this down to the lawn,’ he asked, dragging the sack to an open window and tying a length of nylon climbing rope to its neck.

  ‘Can’t you just carry it down?’ said Griff, impatient to get on with his work.

  ‘It weighs a ton. Come on, it won’t take us a minute.’

  Griff went over, took hold of the rope with McCready and helped lower the bag out of the window.

  ‘What’s inside?’ he asked.

  ‘Letters.’

  ‘Post office letters?’ Griff wondered, for like me he had come across such faded red sacks before, had felt their weight bite into his shoulder on cold early mornings before Christmas.

  ‘No. Hardboard letters.’

  ‘Ah,’ Griff nodded, as if he understood.

  They lowered the rope foot by foot until it suddenly went slack.

  McCready swore. ‘Shit. The bloody thing must be caught on a ledge.’

  Apparently. Judging by the amount of rope that remained coiled at their feet the sack was still some way from the ground. They pulled in two or three feet of rope, straining again against the weight of the sack.

  ‘Right. Now drop it,’ said McCready.

  ‘Drop it?’

  ‘Drop it. It can’t have far to fall.’

  The rope was released and they watched it snake swiftly out of the window, then heard the faint tinkle of glass, not very loud, perhaps three floors below.

  ‘Shit! A window!’

  ‘Probably,’ Griff agreed. ‘I don’t recall there ever being a greenhouse down there on the front lawn.’

  McCready cursed Griff, not appreciating the humour of the situation, and hurriedly bundled the rest of the rope out of the window. He moved away, more worried about the loss of the letters than he was about any damage which might have been done. Griff, for his part, was secretly quite pleased by the turn of events and returned to his own work with renewed enthusiasm; whatever the idea might have been behind the letters in the sack, it was one which would not now come to fruition, one at least which would not be met with the crackpot approval of anyone in college.

  *

  That evening in the canteen McCready was too anxious to eat the food before him, so Ceri and Griff shared it between them.

  ‘It’s still not there,’ he said, ducking his head in from the window. ‘The bag still isn’t there.’

  ‘Well it won’t be, will it?’ said Ceri, thoughtfully sucking on a chicken bone. ‘No, I think we can safely assume that it’s going to be held until someone claims it and accepts responsibility for the damage.’ He laughed. ‘A tidy little sum that’s going to be, too, the cost of replacing the window.’

  McCready found little comfort in hi
s words; he turned to me, but I could offer him none.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Griff, enjoying his agitation. ‘You can always cut out some more letters, can’t you?’

  ‘Of course he can’t,’ Ceri pointed out. ‘If he does then they’ll know who broke the window.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  McCready sighed and swore, asked if none of us could come up with a sensible answer to his predicament. Though fingers scratched chins and stroked jaws the obvious gestures did nothing to appease him. Griff stared out at the sunset, as if the answer might be written out by the semaphore clouds or the birds on the telephone wires; Ceri faced the other way, looking in the direction of the canteen entrance; I held McCready’s hand in mine, patting it as I would that of a sick child or an ageing parent.

  It was Ceri who finally offered a solution of sorts.

  ‘Why don't you just walk up to him, apologise profusely and take the bag from him?’

  ‘Walk up to him? Walk up to who?’

  Ceri grinned. ‘Teacher. He’s just stepped through the door, looking like Santa Claus with a big red sack slung over his shoulder.’

  Groaning, McCready covered his face and through his interlaced fingers saw the bulky figure of the Principal make its laboured way across the room, the sack swaying as he struggled with it and bruising the shoulders of the diners he passed. Coming to rest at last his sweating face was almost the colour of the ginger shock of hair which covered his head, cheeks and chin. His mouth could barely be seen to move behind the whiskers as he spoke.

  ‘Bonjour, mes enfants,’ he beamed.

  ‘Afternoon, Teach.’

  ‘How goes it, boss?’

  I said ‘hello’, too, and there was just one greeting missing; McCready could sense Teacher’s eyes on him.

  ‘Et voila, McCready. Votre lettres.’

  ‘Huh?’ said McCready, taking his hands from his eyes.

  ‘Votre lettres, Mac. French letters!’

  Laughing, dropping the sack noisily to the floor, Teacher sat down, mopping sweat from his brow and flicking it away to land in someone’s soup.

  ‘Letters, Teach?’

  ‘And bloody heavy they are, too,’ Teacher complained, not taken in by the wide-eyed look of innocence. ‘I must say, they scared the shit out of poor Edith Billington when they plummeted through her window.’

  ‘Not hurt, was she?’ I asked, faking concern to try to shift the Principal’s attention from McCready.

  ‘No. Just shaken a bit. Bloody hell it’s rich, though! She was preparing a lecture on Jean Tinguely and auto-destructive sculpture at the time!’

  We laughed when he laughed, then accepted his offer of coffee.

  ‘Joan!’ he bellowed. ‘Let's have five coffees, there’s a love!’

  ‘Righto!’ came the reply from the kitchen, and while we waited Teacher professed an interest in what McCready intended to do with the letters.

  ‘I’d rather not say just yet, Teach.’

  The Principal nodded. ‘And quite right, too. There are too many bloody plagiarists in this place.’

  Joan came from the kitchen and crossed to our table. As she was about to set down the five cups of coffee, though, smiling at Teacher, she saw Ceri and her face turned to thunder.

  ‘You-!’

  The canteen was Joan’s life, the object of such pride that when all was well with it she would sit back, her bosom supported on her folded arms and her chins resting one on top of the other, and smile in appreciation of the polished surfaces of the ordered tables, in admiration of the glistening cutlery and the unblemished stainless steel of the serving area which gave such perfect reflections. If all was not well, though, if there was the slightest stain to tarnish the clinical neatness of her realm, then those parts of her body which relied on each other for support became flashing pendulous things, swinging dangerously as she scrubbed and scoured at every offensive mark.

  Those pendulous parts now trembled with anger and disgust as she set eyes on Ceri.

  ‘You were sick in my refectory!’ she reminded him. ‘Mr Teacher, this boy threw up in my kitchen!’

  Ceri shrugged; he didn’t remember, he was quite pissed at the time.

  ‘Really, Joan?’ said Teacher. ‘Well I’m sure he doesn’t blame you.’

  This was not the response the canteen manageress had expected. ‘But-’

  ‘It could have been anything, a pint of milk gone off, a tainted tin of meat. Don’t you fret about it.’

  ‘But he-’ Joan began again, but then thought better of pursuing the subject, walked away muttering to herself.

  ‘Poor woman. Far too worrying. Now, does anyone care for some of Teacher’s ‘Teachers’ to perk up this slop she calls coffee?’

  We held out our chipped white cups and Teacher took his flask from his pocket, splashed a generous measure in each.

  ‘Cheers,’ we saluted, as he downed his in one gulp. The coffee was lukewarm, as usual, but he smacked his lips around the taste of the whisky, then seemed to smile -the twitching of the whiskers suggested as much- as he got to his feet.

  ‘Anyway, McCready, when the bill for the window comes along do your best to pay it, there’s a good lad,’ he said, and went off chuckling, slapping backs and stealing chips as he passed, sauntering along like everyone’s best friend.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Please, Mr Grundy, not so hard!’ the young girl Karen protested, as the tutor scrubbed vigorously at her nipple with a coarse hog-hair brush which flashed like a sword, a titanium white blur. It might have been her actual breast that was being assaulted, rather than its image on canvas, as she begged, ‘Please, not so rough!’

  Elongated like an El Greco saint, hunched over the painting and peering at it closely with sunken eyes, Walter heard nothing other than the excited thumping of his own heart. The girl is one of those sweet young creatures from the foundation course, the sort he always preferred, fresh from a convent or boarding school and so easily impressed, so totally accommodating. She had been flattered at being asked to pose, and an ideal model for Walter, with hardly any breasts at all. He paused to consider his progress, hollowed out his cheeks as he sucked on the end of the brush then tickled the moist strawberry nipple of the flat-chested girl with the tip of a sable. The soft give of the canvas fired him and he switched again to the larger coarser brush, struck out so wildly that the painting shook on its easel.

  The girl spoke his name softly, almost with intimacy, in awe of his creative fervour. When he failed to respond she slipped from her stool and padded naked towards him. Her bare feet on the tiled floor were quiet, he was unaware that his subject had moved until the next broad sweep of his arm brought the brush slashing across her breast, the genuine article this time.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ she said, like a mother scolding a child, and standing beside him, her hip against the rough tweed of his shoulder, she leaned across him to pick up a cloth. She rubbed it against her body, smearing the paint around to give a chiaroscuro shadow which made her breast seem larger than it was.

  ‘It’s McCready who’s got you so worked up, isn’t it?’ she said, hoping to be contradicted, hoping to be told that it was the sight of her naked body which had him inspired to fever pitch.

  He admitted nothing, but she was right, it was McCready who had him rattled. She sighed and rested against him, fighting an impulse to curl a comforting arm around his shoulder.

  ‘Those letters he’s got scattered across the front lawn,’ she said. ‘What are they all about? I mean, I know what they say, but what do they mean?’

  What they said was ‘This was green, this is yellow’, in twelve inch hardboard type. What they actually meant was another matter altogether and open to interpretation. McCready claimed that the simple sentence constituted a complex art work, conceived and begun by him but left to nature to complete and bring to fruition. The sun would shine down, weather permitting, and the grass beneath the hardboard letters would lose its colour, fade. Then, when
McCready made a triumphant reappearance and removed the letters the message would be there on the lawn itself for all to see: This was green, this is yellow.

  But what did it mean? What did it say?

  That nature imitated art?

  And was it? Art?

  Walter seethed at the effrontery of it all and his hand shook visibly as he clenched his paintbrush.

  Karen tutted and gave a soft laugh, said, ‘Just look at me. I’m a painted lady.’

  Walter looked, was aware for the first time of the paint he had smeared across her body and took the cloth from her to help clean it away.

  ‘And I’ll stink of oil,’ she added, moving her pancake breast a little closer to his face. Who knew what was in the child’s mind, what her next move might have been if Ron hadn’t come barging into the room.

  ‘Mr Grundy! Mr Grundy!’ the cleaner cried, caught his breath momentarily at the sight of the naked girl who was almost in the lap of the tutor but was too excited by other matters to hold his silence for long. ‘Mr Grundy! He has got a chicken down there in the studio! I’ve heard it just now!’

  ‘Then go tell the Principal,’ said Walter, bundling Karen away from him.

  ‘I can’t find him, Mr Grundy. He’s nowhere to be seen.’