The Art School Dance Read online

  Teacher had, in fact, hidden himself away in Rose’s sensory deprivation centre once again, but this was know only to a few people.

  ‘Mr Goode, then,’ Walter suggested.

  ‘He’s still on paternity leave,’ the cleaner reminded him.

  Of course. Which was why there were so many paintings to be found in the studio, studies from the naked model and from still life.

  ‘Very well then, come on,’ Walter sighed, and led the way from his room, down the narrow staircase to the painting studio.

  They marched into the studio, Walter tall and thin and piping like a reed, Ron shuffling along at his side, coughing and wheezing as he struggled to keep up.

  ‘Down at the end, Mr Grundy,’ said Ron. ‘That’s where he is.’

  ‘Alright, Ron. Let’s see.’

  They hurried down the studio like a double act late for a show. Griff, working on his painting of Pam, was so intrigued by their urgency that he dropped his brush into a jar of turps, pulled a chair into the centre of the room and sat down to watch. Pam shared the seat with him, a gown wrapped around her for the sake of decency.

  Walter and Ron came to a halt outside my den.

  ‘McCready!’ cried Walter. ‘Come out of there!’

  ‘Cluck cluck,’ was the faint reply.

  ‘There you are!’ said Ron exultantly, and jumped up and down in delight, his brown overalls flapping excitedly. ‘I told you he had a chicken in there! I told you!’

  ‘Okay, Ron, calm down.’ Walter patted Ron on the shoulder, then shouted at the den. ‘McCready! You’ve got a chicken in there, haven’t you?’

  ‘No!’ McCready shouted back.

  ‘He has! He's a bloody liar!’

  Walter told Ron to be quiet, then shouted out his accusation a second time.

  A second time McCready professed his innocence.

  ‘So come out and let’s see!’ Walter challenged.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then I’m coming in!’

  There was a pause, a moment of deliberation, then McCready said, ‘Don’t! I’m coming out!’

  Walter and Ron smiled at each other as they listened to the rustlings from inside the den.

  ‘That’s a chicken if ever I heard one, Mr Grundy.’

  ‘No, Ron, that’s McCready.’

  McCready emerged, blinking in the daylight, grinning at Walter and scowling at Ron. ‘I can’t spare much time, Walter. I’m very busy.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Walter, thinking of young Karen waiting for him upstairs, and gestured to Ron beside him. ‘He reckons you’ve got a chicken in that den of yours.’

  ‘A chicken? That’s silly.’

  ‘So what’s clucking, then?’

  ‘Clucking, Walter?’

  Clucking. A crazy staccato chatter. ‘Cluckcluckcluckcluck.’

  There was a sudden flurry of activity behind McCready and the black polythene of the den was forced outwards, stretching first and then tearing. Ron yelled triumphantly as a chicken squeezed through the ever-growing hole.

  ‘Don’t just stand there! Grab the fucking thing!’ McCready yelled.

  Walter and Ron broke into a comical jig, trying to escape the hungry beak which pecked at the floor, and Griff and his model applauded as McCready threw himself to the ground, grabbing the chicken by a leg and fighting to get it under control while its screeches echoed about the studio.

  ‘There, there,’ he said, smoothing the bird’s ruffled feathers.

  ‘I said all along he had a chicken in there,’ Ron gloated.

  ‘Piss off!’ McCready cursed, thrusting the chicken towards Ron’s face, and the cleaner leapt back, away from the claws which lashed out.

  ‘Alright, Ron, you can go now,’ said Walter. ‘I’ll handle this.’

  Gratefully Ron moved away, muttering as he walked down the studio: ‘I knew he had a chicken in there. I bloody knew it.’

  McCready cursed him loudly, Griff congratulated him for ‘shopping’ McCready, but he was unaffected by either; he just tossed his head and continued on his way.

  ‘Right, McCready,’ said Walter.

  ‘Yes, Walter?’

  ‘The chicken. It can’t stay.’

  McCready hugged the bird to his chest. ‘But it has to. It’s my life model.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, McCready. It can’t be.’

  ‘Why not? It’s live, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be working from a life model, a naked homo erectus, not a live model, a chicken or whatever other creature might take your fancy.’

  ‘Now you’re just quibbling, Walter,’ McCready smiled. ‘Splitting hairs. Or feathers.’

  Walter patiently pointed out the impracticality of using a chicken as a life model, dwelt on the difficulties of keeping livestock in the painting studio, the cruelty done to the creature by confining it in the dark claustrophobic atmosphere of my black polythene den. McCready nodded, accepting the relevance of each point, apparently swayed by the tutor’s arguments.

  ‘So?’ said Walter hopefully.

  ‘So we need to make it more comfortable up here, give it a healthier environment.’

  ‘Bloody hell, McCready! Be reasonable!’ Walter pleaded, his hands clenched tightly at his side to contain his frustration.

  ‘No, Walter, you be reasonable. If you want me working from life then I will, but I choose the subject. The alternative is for me to go back to the old ways, Barney’s ways, painting is a redundant activity and all that guff. Which would you rather see, Walter, paintings around the studio or sheaves of notes arguing against them?’

  Walter needed his acolytes, he needed students working his way to justify the salary he received.

  ‘Paintings,’ he admitted. ‘Even paintings of chickens. You have to keep the thing under control, though,’ he warned, ‘if only to pacify Ron and keep him off my back.’

  ‘Right,’ McCready agreed, nuzzling the bird to his chest, assuring it that everything would be fine. ‘I could build a hutch for it, or whatever it is that chickens are kept in. What do you keep chickens in, Walter?’

  Walter shrugged, impatient to get back to his study. ‘Search me.’

  ‘I’ll need your help with it, of course,’ McCready added.

  ‘My help? I’m senior lecturer in fine art, McCready, not the bloody odd job man. Get the timber from sculpture and do it yourself.’

  ‘But Jim won’t give me any. You’ll have to persuade him for me.’

  ‘Come on,’ Walter sighed.

  McCready secured the chicken and the two of them took the lift downstairs to the basement, where they had to pinch their nostrils against the smoke and dust as they entered the sculpture studio. It was an inferno of a place when busy, noisy with saws and electric drills, dangerously bright with the sparks from welding torches. Stepping carefully over lengths of timber and scraps of metal, they went to Jim’s office.

  When they entered Jim was seated on his camp bed, pulling on a pair of socks.

  ‘Surely not just getting up?’ McCready joked. ‘It’s almost midday, Jim.’

  A nervous man, pale faced and timid because of the sheltered gloom of his chosen habitat, Jim was the type to blink anxiously when confronted by daylight or caught unawares. He started when McCready spoke.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, pushing his feet into a tattered pair of slippers. ‘And no, smart arse, I haven’t just got up. If you must know I’ve been over to the polytechnic’s sports centre for a shower.’ He hitched his trousers more comfortably about his waist, asked suspiciously, ‘What do you want?’

  McCready looked about the office, taking in the wardrobe, the prints which decorated the walls, the Calor Gas cooker in one corner. ‘I must say, Jim, you’ve got the place done up quite nicely now. It looks more like a home from home every time I come down here.’

  ‘Cut the bullshit, McCready. What do you want?’

  ‘He needs some timber,’ Walter intervened, wanting to be done with the affair and get bac
k upstairs to his painting.

  Jim shook his head. ‘No chance, Walter. He’s had enough off me already this term. The materials down here are for sculpture.’

  ‘They’re for fine art, they come from the common requisition,’ Walter pointed out.

  ‘It’s for my chicken hutch,’ McCready explained.

  ‘For a piece of sculpture,’ Walter corrected him.

  ‘Come on, Jim, just a little bit of wood,’ McCready begged.

  ‘And how much is a little, McCready?’

  ‘Oh, about a hundred and twenty five feet of timber.’

  ‘A hundred and-!’

  ‘And the chicken wire to cover it.’

  Walter gasped as Jim did, his as much an expression of exasperation as of surprise.

  ‘It must be a fucking big chicken,’ Jim blinked.

  ‘It’s for a piece of sculpture,’ Walter continued to insist.

  ‘Of a monumental kind,’ McCready smiled, and with all the ambition of a Frank Lloyd Wright explained that the construction will be seven feet high, seven feet wide and twelve feet long, large enough for everything to be moved in there; himself, his work, the chicken, everything.

  *

  Rose wondered if McCready might be leaving. ‘Passing on’ was the particular phrase she used, more dramatic than ‘moving on’, as if he might be suffering from something more terminal than a love for me or an innocent eccentricity.

  I understood her meaning, though.

  Rose was in the canteen, though the serving bay has closed, because Teacher had once again sought refuge in her black box; I was there having a late lunch of Joan’s congealed leftovers, late because I had been waiting for McCready to collect me. A cold lager and a sandwich were what he’d promised me; a lukewarm cup of tea and beans and toast what I got. He, of course, had been all the while in the sculpture studio with Jim, negotiating for materials for the construction of his new den. Rose had overheard his plans.

  ‘He says he’s moving everything in there, himself and his work.’

  ‘I'm sure he’ll come back to me in the evenings,’ I smiled. Looking around I noticed Joan staring hard at me from her post by the kitchen, didn’t know if this was to make sure I cleaned my plate or if she was simply impatient to see us gone. Rose and I were the last two in the canteen.

  ‘And he really does have a chicken up there in the studio,’ Rose added.

  ‘I guessed he had,’ I said, for though McCready and I kept no secrets from each other he had never openly admitted to the existence of the creature; pressed, he would tell no lies but leave much teasingly unsaid.

  ‘Weird,’ Rose remarked.

  ‘You can say that?’ I marvelled.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Rose lifted the veil from her face, peered at me through heavy mascara eyes which seemed deep and remote. We all had our eccentricities, I supposed, but they were so much a part of us that we took them for granted and failed to recognise them as such. McCready’s use of a chicken as a life model was no stranger than Rose’s predilection for the morbid and insensate; it was a ‘Scapegoat’ of the modern age, except that I doubted McCready would ever paint his subject with quite the same attention to detail as Holman Hunt.

  Rose wore an expression of earnest conviction, comfortable with her own version of sanity, and it was perhaps in order to question my sanity that she asked, not for the first time, what I saw in McCready.

  What could I say to someone who would seem to prefer her men as still and inert as cadavers? A passionate spirit and a vibrant mind would not recommend McCready to Rose. I remembered the sensitive art students I had pictured before I came to college, less coarse than the wham-bam boys I had known back home.

  ‘He’s sensitive,’ I said, though this was not quite accurate, for what I’d first taken to be sensitivity actually proved to be shyness.

  McCready sensitive? In some ways, I supposed, but as I worked through that afternoon I grew increasingly annoyed with him, casting frequent glances to the door in the expectation that he would arrive late for our lunch-date, come with his excuses if not an apology. By late afternoon my temper had me too distracted to continue, I packed away my things and went to search him out.

  My first thought on entering the painting studio was that Walter had made great strides in his move for the advancement of life-drawing. The clucking of McCready’s chicken apart, and the pungent perfume of Ceri’s two tramps, the profusion of naked breasts bore witness to the traditionalist’s success. They seemed to be flashing everywhere, some to be envied for the beauty of their form, others pitied for their scrawniness. But the dizzying blurs of flesh had me confused for a moment. Vorticism, was it? The Italian Futurists? Umberto Boccioni catching his models in motion? Then I saw that no one was attempting to catch the scene on canvas or paper, that those students who were present were all sitting back to be entertained, no more involved in events than a theatre audience.

  I ignored McCready for the moment -the way he cradled the chicken in his lap, I was prepared to let him cuddle the creature all the way to bed- skirted the naked melee to ask Griff what was happening.

  ‘It’s Pam and Karen-’

  Only the two of them, I saw that now, as the fuller woman caught the other by the hair and held her still.

  ‘-my model and Walter’s,’ he said wearily, the only one of the audience not enjoying the drama.

  ‘Steal my work, will you?’ Pam was snarling.

  ‘Mr Grundy asked for me,’ Karen protested. ‘He chose me.’

  ‘A question of job demarcation,’ Griff explained to me. ‘Is there a tribunal Pam can go to? Do life models have a union?’

  The thin girl wore a robe which hangs loose at the front, her flat breasts were like fried eggs topped with raspberries and one was smeared with paint. Pam was the more warlike of the two, though, her face was livid and her firm full breasts quivered with rage as she tightened her grip on her victim.

  ‘I’m the college model! I get paid for it and I’m not having a little slip like you cheat me out of work!’

  ‘But-!’ Karen began, then squealed with pain as her hair was twisted like a tourniquet at her throat.

  Walter entered the studio, drawn by the noise, hesitated just long enough for Pam to catch sight of him.

  ‘You!’ she growled, casting aside Karen and stalking slowly towards him like a cat.

  She had a magnificent body, there was no denying that, and I look on as open-mouthed as the rest. And all McCready could do is cuddle that stupid bloody bird in his lap!

  ‘I asked Karen to pose for me,’ Walter told Pam.

  ‘But I’m the model! It’s my living! My livelihood!’

  ‘I can’t use you, Pam, you’re too-’

  Walter looks at her breasts jutting towards him like weapons, barely containing a grimace, as if he was repulsed by them.

  ‘Yes?’ Pam demanded.

  ‘I-’

  ‘He can’t use you ‘cause you’re tits are too big,’ someone sang out.

  Pam turned and glared, rounded on Walter again shouting something about his perversions and her rights.

  Griff sidled up beside me. ‘Fancy coming for a drink?’ he asked, accepting that there would be no more work done that day.

  I nodded, looked over to McCready; he was too engrossed with his chicken to take much notice, so I left him to his own devices, knowing that he would find me when he wanted me. When he was in such a distracted mood -of course it wasn’t the chicken that had him preoccupied- it was generally best to let him be. On this occasion, though, I might have been wiser to speak to him, to draw him out of his mood before it became too deep.

  *

  It was more than an hour before McCready caught up with me, in the bar of the students’ union, and with the exception of Griff and I the party he found assembled were mainly graphics people, friends I had made in the design department. When he joined us there was a noisy discussion in progress about their latest brief, a make-believe piece of
advertising, and it was plain that the majority of them were dissatisfied with it. There were times when their work could be boring, and this particular project was especially tedious for them, it brings home to them the realisation that the situations they were faced with were so contrived, in no way relevant to the tasks which would face them after college.

  ‘Narrow, regimented and lacking imagination,’ was how one of the design students now described their course.

  ‘We’re given no chance to be creative,’ another lamented. ‘It’s design this, project that, promote the other.’

  ‘McCready’s the lucky one,’ said one of the group, seeing him approach, a voice rising above the discontented murmurs of the others, and by the envious look which was cast McCready’s way he knew -as did I and Griff- exactly what was coming next. ‘He’s got so much freedom to do what he wants.’

  ‘Right. We slog away to please others while McCready and his kind just please themselves.’

  The thumb jerked in the direction of ‘his kind’ was probably what annoyed McCready most of all; it was even more irritating than the naive complaints he heard. Still, there was no need for him to react the way he did. Griff, another of ‘his kind’, had the tact to remain silent, so why not McCready?

  ‘But that’s what you’re here for, for fuck’s sake!’ he says, showering them all with spittle. ‘You’re boring inconsequential people learning how to satisfy the boring inconsequential demands of other boring inconsequential people!’

  I shot him a quick glance, a scowl which told him that he would have done better to keep quiet, and the conversation died like a weak and tired old man.

  McCready sulked off to the bar.

  ‘Why did you say that?’ I asked, following close on his heels.

  ‘Because they’re acting like bloody primadonnas. I mean, surely they couldn’t have been so stupid that they didn’t know what graphic design is all about when they came here, so why are they getting so uptight?’

  ‘That’s still no reason to speak to them like that. They’re my friends.’

  He said nothing more when we rejoined the company, at least nothing which could be misconstrued or cause offence; he just sat and listened and kept his hand in mine. He never spoke up when the purpose of graphic design was applauded; he made no comment when fine art was said to be self-indulgent and its students described as gratuitous wankers; he didn’t even complain when I invited people back to the flat for a drink, merely came along dutifully, his hand still clasping mine.