Mural
by Pat Black
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A few strong ones.
Description: A trip back home to see his old school being demolished triggers a series of strange aftershocks in James. His partner, Kate, suspects that the real James is about to appear – and fights against it.
_____________________________________________________________________
They pulled up in what must have been a side-street, with rubbled squares where houses might once have stood.
James engaged the hand brake and waited, fingers tapping the wheel.
“We going to get out?” Kate asked.
“Just a minute. I’m trying to picture it.” He closed his eyes.
“For god’s sake,” she muttered.
Without opening his eyes, James pointed towards a piece of empty space over his right shoulder. “That’s where Tam Mullaney lived. Him and his six brothers, and a dog called Cecil.”
“Cecil,” Kate said, flattening the E. “You pronounce it Cecil.”
“And just over there was Tony Gibb, and his brother Rab. We all used to play football at the back green you can see. A couple of times, some guy took potshots with us with a sluggie.”
“Sluggie? What’s that when it’s at home?”
“A pellet gun. An air rifle.”
“Why not call it that then?”
“Because we called it a sluggie. And we also called Cecil the dog Cecil. With an acute, if you like. Not a grave. Cee-cil.”
“Well, there’s you, and there’s the rest of the planet, love.” Kate gestured towards the school, one of the few free-standing structures within view, directly downhill from the phantom street they were parked on. “I think they’re starting.”
A monster reared its head above the red brick structure. Unfurling a long, flailing tongue, it began to lap at the building. Part of the wall buckled in a great puff of smoke, but did not fall.
“Disappointing,” James said. “I kind of hoped it would collapse spectacularly. That they’d blow it up and have done with it. Like the Death Star.”
“There are still some houses at the other side of the school, love.” Kate yawned and checked her phone. “They have to think about other people, you know. Not just your appetite for destruction. How long do you want to watch this? I don’t want to be here all day watching a derelict building’s death throes.”
James drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I just want to watch the main building go.”
“And how long will that take?”
“I don’t know. Maybe as long it took you to dawdle round the garden centre on Sunday.”
She coughed in astonishment. “At least that was for a practical purpose.”
“You sure?”
They watched the wrecking ball dawdle in mid-air, collecting itself for another swing. Finally, an entire section of the structure fell down in an eruption of red brick and dust.
“I must admit,” Kate said, “I give that at least a seven out of ten. It was almost worth the trip.”
James sat forward in his seat. “There it is. Look. Up to the top right.”
“I can’t see anything past the mushroom cloud, love.”
“No… Actually inside the school itself. It’s been exposed. You see the blue? You see the wall?”
“Nope.”
“You must see it. You see the mural?”
“I can sort of see something…” She squinted. “Sort of a pale blue wall. Is that graffiti?”
“Not graffiti. That’s Mr Foulkes’ music room.”
“Music room?”
“He invited every boy in the class to draw something on the music room wall. Sort of like a community art project. Got them to make their mark, if they were going to study music and singing. Let them take ownership. He didn’t care what it was you drew. Naked women, your gang logo, hairy balls. Anything.”
“Music? I didn’t know you studied music. You can’t sing a line.”
“Clarinet, then bass guitar. It doesn’t matter. The point is, that’s Mr Foulkes’ music room. It’s coming down, now. That was a great place for me, as a kid.”
“Because he let you draw on the walls?”
“No. It was kind of a boy’s place, you know? I remember a picture of Bruce Lee on the wall, from 1974 or something. Scars down his face. Those weird muscles. And a frieze of some kind with cavemen and mammoths. Most of it from the seventies. And he had all these slogans dangling down from the ceiling, bits of card on strings. ‘Thought is freedom’. It was amazing… It was Aladdin’s Cave. It was a big inspiration to me.”
Kate smirked. “And what was your contribution?”
“I did a whole panel on the mural,” he said proudly. “I went for the riddle of the Sphinx, oddly enough. The three stages of a man’s life.”
“Which are?”
“You don’t know the story of the Sphinx?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters enough for lots of people to know it. Except you.”
She shrugged. “Well. Whatever it is. Your mural’s gone, now. Look.”
The old music room, with its hint of pale blue criss-crossed with thick black lines and splashes of colour, frowned, then fell.
“Well,” Kate said. “This was kind of a non-event, wasn’t it?”
He sighed. “You know…”
“What?” She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Never mind. That’s it. Let’s go.” He started the engine, and she smiled to herself, quietly.
“Thanks. The smell was beginning to get to me, love,” Kate said, tuning the radio to her favourite station.
“Oh – that smell. You know, it reminds me of the way the old building used to smell.”
“What is it?” She sniffed at the air, knifeblade nostrils flaring. “Damp?”
“Asbestos.” And he grinned, as she clapped a hand over mouth and nose.
*******
The house was a shell, barely even finished, whitewashed with hard floors that would look dated in photos in years to come, James knew. Everything had been pre-prepared and packaged prior to them moving in. Two bedrooms, a good long hallway, a nice south-facing kitchen with a green garden which Kate wanted to slab over.
After putting up some curtains, James began trailing his fingers over the wall.
“Stop that,” Kate said. “You’ll leave marks.”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Possibilities.”
When she saw his attention wandering again, she said: “How did you feel about watching your school get knocked down?”
He shrugged. “All sorts of things, I guess. Memories, plenty of them. Mum and dad were still around. You know, some people hate school. They have a terrible time. I was lucky, I guess. It was a rough place, but some of the happiest days of my life were spent inside those gates. I didn’t realise it at the time.”
“That’s nice.”
“How would you feel if your school was knocked down?”
“My school wasn’t a 1960s pre-fab. It won’t get knocked down any time soon.”
“I didn’t ask you what your school was made of. I asked you how you would feel if it was knocked down.”
She shrugged. “I’d move on.”
Not a 1960s pre-fab… He thought: how could you think to say something like that? How could you allow that to coil up, waiting to strike behind your lips?
Upstairs, they lingered in the bedrooms, going over their plans again. They’d had this area carpeted in wine-red, one of the few decisions she had compromised on. In the smaller of the two rooms, which she had decided would be the spare, he considered a shadow cage cast through loose-sheathed venetian blinds. The light was odd at that time of night, a mellow gold filtered through a sunset just beginning its final movement.
Kate crouched beneath the windowpane, sighting along angles, lines and gradients. “It’ll be a tight squeeze in here. We might get a bit of clearance if we squeeze a nice flat-pack bed tight by the cupboard.”
“You know, this room reminds me an awful lot of me and my brother Ally’s old room, back home.” James was still staring at the bars branding the wall in golden parallel lines.
“Not sure about storage, all the same. You wouldn’t get much in those cupboards. Maybe use it for linen?”
“He was an artist,” James said. “He went through a phase of drawing things when he was a teenager, getting serious about it. You know – band logos, mostly. Monsters. Iron Maiden album covers.”
Kate heard him for the first time, and glared. “Monsters? What?”
“My brother, Ally. He was a big contributor to Mr Foulkes’ classroom. One time, he begged my dad to let him strip the woodchip off one of the walls. He wanted to whitewash it and paint a mural. Just kept on and on at him. Finally the old boy gave in. And my dad wasn’t a man for backing down once he’d made a decision.”
“A mural? You mean he painted something on the wall? Of his room?”
“That’s right. We shared a room at first when he painted it, but our older brother Robbie moved out, Ally got his room, and I got our old one to myself.”
“So what was it? More monsters? Let me guess, were there dragons? Bruce Lee?”
“It started off kind of like that. It was bikers, except they had wolves’ heads.”
Kate burst out laughing.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Are you sure about that?”
James began to make patterns in the air, sweeping arcs, peaks and depressions. “No, he kind of made it into this scrolling thing… He had the earth, with the bikers, but then it got weirder. He made these cities in the sky, with great prehistoric birds… Then water, with sea serpents and mermaids. He drew boobs on the mermaids, you know? I giggled at it but Ally was deadly serious, straight-faced. Then he had a desert, and ice and snow. He had these fantasy warriors, lizard men, giant bears that were half-robot… It was like a Yes album cover or something.”
“Yes?”
“They’re a band.”
“So what happened to the mural?”
James sighed. “It got painted over. After Ally got married to Carol my mum got cracking with the paintbrush.”
“And how did he take that?”
“I think he was embarrassed about it by then. My dad was kind of sad about it, though. And he wasn’t a sentimentalist, I can tell you that. We took loads of photographs of it before it got painted up. Someone will have them somewhere. I’ll phone Carol, she might still have them.”
Kate frowned. “When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“A while. About a year ago. I don’t know.”
“Think she’ll want to speak to you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Just wondering.”
“I used to think about the mural still being there, you know. Underneath the layers of paint, or maybe under wallpaper put up by the family that moved in after us. When I heard the flats were coming down I seriously thought about getting access and stripping the paint off. Looking at it one last time.”
“It’s rubble now.”
“Maybe some bits of it still exist. In the ground. Landfill. Maybe they’ll dig it up in a thousand years.”
“I think you need to live in the real world.”
But he had drifted far away from her, from the white walls, from their home, from the real world. “Yeah, the mural. Shit. It got me started, you know. That’s where I got the inspiration to start drawing. I wanted to emulate Ally’s mural. I was about six years old.”
The light faded suddenly, blocked by clouds, sudden as flicking a switch. They were in gloom, and he blinked furiously. Now it was just a blank wall.
Kate put her arms around him. “Don’t be getting ideas now, sweetheart.”
*******
After the housewarming party, which had ended on a sour note when he’d told Alexander from her office to fuck off, it started. She had barely even thought about the spare room until she went into a cupboard to pull out some towels. Spare plastic bags littered the floor, and she noticed a till receipt for Garner’s, a shop name she did not recognise.
He had spent £32 on various things, recorded as a jumble of characters next to the prices. It might have been ancient Greek to her, but one legend tipped her off: “PAL BLU.”
When she caught him at it, she felt no anger, revulsion or bitterness. He did not even turn when she opened the door. Newspaper pages were strewn across the floor, covering the new red carpet. The foldable table her mum and dad had loaned them that lay on top of it had fared less well, spatters of paint from a number of opened tubes streaking the surface. James was in overalls, a new pair. Already the greyish material bore the scars of battle.
Upon the blank wall, where he had previously stood and watched the slats of fading sunlight, James had begun his mural.
She took a deep breath. “You know, most women come home early from work, and expect to catch their husbands doing something they shouldn’t. Wearing a bra and knickers… wearing a Star Trek uniform… Wearing peanut butter and jam… Wearing the next door neighbour, even. But you… You find new levels of weirdness. I come home, and you’re making a community fucking art project. I have to applaud you. This is a masterpiece. But not the one you think it is.”
James sighed in exasperation. He did not turn around, but placed his hand on his hips. A paintbrush perched in his hands, smeared knuckle-deep with Aegean blue paint. On the wall, he had created a seascape, a blue horizontal line cutting across the white. Here and there he had begun to fill in details, waves and rills, swells in the water, running to a very deep turquoise in some places. The greenish tint gave her a powerful impression of a real wall of water, and she blinked hard to clear it.
“James? Can I speak to you for a minute, when you aren’t busy?”
“Sure, hon.”
“Any time you like.”
“Yeah. Be right with you.”
*******
“So, James. How’s the interior decoration coming on?”
Kate’s dad liked to chew his words before spitting them out. He was an infrequent visitor to any home they’d lived in. Usually it was for rare occasions – excepting James’ mother’s funeral, which he had stayed away from – and it took James a while to cotton on to what his purpose was.
“Fine, Gordon. There hasn’t been too much to do, of course. Just the odd cosmetic thing, here and there.”
Kate took a long, slow, sip of her wine, eyes down.
“Ah. Nothing fancy to do, then? Nothing creative? No community art projects, anything like that?”
“Whatever can you mean, Gordon?”
“Your wee Turner Prize effort in the spare room, is what I mean.”
“Dad.” Kate’s voice was non-committal. Usually the old man was brusque, if not quite rude. His wife’s presence tended to blunt him, but she had opted to stay home for this visit.
“You say that’s what you mean, but it isn’t what you mean, is it? What do you really mean, Gordon?”
“You probably don’t want to know that.”
“Why don’t you come and take a look at it, Gordon?” James indicated the way upstairs. “I’d be really interested in your opinion.”
The old man was game enough for it, though, trotting a safe distance behind James. But he gasped aloud when the door was thrown open.
Oceans covered one wall, with a coral reef, dolphins, sharks, spouting whales and even a plesiosaur, skimming the bottom. On the surface, bobbing boats surged through the blue, cresting the foamy waves. The brush strokes were broad and abstract, the detail only appreciated when taken at a distance. On the other wall was jungle; green stalks, chocolate brown bark, looping vines, muzzle flashes of petals and eyes glittering among the treetops. And there were tigers, of course, threaded through the long grass.
“What in the name of Christ is this?”
James beamed. “Do you like it?”
“It’s like something a child would do. It’s… juvenile. I’ve got to say, son, I had half expected something weird and abstract. I credited you with a bit of subtlety. But this is like something out of a nursery.”
“I respect your opinion.”
“In the name of god. Are those people naked?” He indicated a group of dark figures, squatting around a fire.
“Yes. That’s a cock and balls, Gordon. There’s some tits. So you can safely assume they’re naked.”
“James.” Kate’s voice had an edge to it.
“And how do you expect to sell the house on with that on the walls?” Gordon asked.
“Sell the house on? We’ve just bloody got here, Gordon. We’re not moving anywhere.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be out of here in six months. Keep it clear, do it up, keep the profit. That’s how it works.”
“How what works? We’re here for somewhere to live. What are you talking about?”
“Perhaps Kate will tell you. I’m not here to educate you, son. I’m not sure what I might say.”
“Spill your guts, Gordon. Be frank, if you can. But while you’re at it, don’t call me ‘son’. Don’t ever call me that.” James was seized, absolutely riven, with the notion of grabbing the paint cans and dousing the old man with a rainbow. Absolutely drenching him, head to foot, with the only discernible parts of him to emerge from the kaleidoscope being his bulging eyes and his thick, fat mouth.
Gordon muttered something, then trotted back down the stairs, and Kate followed him. There was some shouting, and then a slammed door.
James took up his paintbrush and touched the end of a tiger’s nose with the smallest sliver of white.
*******
There were no visitors at all, and a few nights when Kate disappeared. Delighted, James carried on. A cityscape he had created for the wall nearest the door annoyed him, a concrete incongruence until it dawned on him what was missing: movement; action. Weather, then. Sheeting rain began to douse the buildings, striating the yellow lights at the windows, cutting across the half-drawn venetian blinds. Figures on the streets far below the skyscrapers developed hats and brollies; some crouched beneath the rain, fearful, while others fended off the drops with newspapers and briefcases. It was a storm, he knew, a terrible one. He resisted the temptation to crackle purple lightning across the sky as he shaded some of the clouds a terrible, pregnant grey, full to bursting, a frown from mother nature.
When she finally returned, he would not even turn to face her.
“What about when you finish, James? When is it going to be over? Are you going to move onto the hall? The stairway? What will we get in the kitchen – farmer’s fields? Nice crops? English woodland in autumn? Something appropriate, I’m sure.”
“Just this room will be fine,” he said.
“That’s a relief. What are you going to do to the ceiling, exactly?”
“The sky. Of course.”
“Nice. Seagulls, clouds, sun, that kind of thing? Will the sun be smiling? Will he have his hat on?”
“No, it’ll be the night sky. Constellations. Faint nebulae, pink and lapis lazuli. Meteors, green streaks across the sky. The Perseids. You ever seen those?”
“And lots of black?”
“Of course. Not totally black, obviously. Nothing ever is. Lots of blues and purples in there.”
“Obviously. Listen… It’s been difficult talking to you. You have to accept that.”
He scored a jet of water off the face of a shrieking gargoyle, crouched at the summit of an immense skyscraper.
“So I have to tell you that I want this stopped. I’ve indulged you. I’m not daft. I can see it’s turned into something important. I know that. But I want it stopped. Do you understand?”
“I understand you perfectly. All too well. I’ve understood you from the minute I met you; I just didn’t listen to my own instincts. And that is always a mistake. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know what this is. I’ve asked around. Jenny thinks it’s some sort of issue from what happened to your mum. Depression, lingering trauma. I mean… Bereavement’s tough for anyone. Jenny says you need help.”
He laughed. “Jenny! Jenny thinks EastEnders is real. She talks about the characters as if they exist. And she’s a psychiatric nurse! Fuckin’ EastEnders. If that’s not madness, I dunno what is.”
“If this is some kind of breakdown, I just want to let you know that there’s help available.”
“Not a breakdown, pet. The opposite. This is construction work. This is a building project. In fact, what it might actually be is a test. To see how you’ll react when, for once in my life, I do something. Something that’s just for me, not you. Something that isn’t ‘shared’ - shared meaning your special interpretation of the word, meaning ‘dictated by your friends and family’.”
“James – your mural is crap. You see your jungle, your sea and your mountains? They’re crap. Right? It has to be said. And I’ve said it. A kid could do better. My cousin Evelyn is doing her art exams at school and she is light years better than you. In every way.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“I took some pictures and showed the girls at the office. They burst out laughing.”
“So?”
“They were laughing at you – all day. A few of them begged me to put it up on the internet, but I refused. You were a laughing stock.”
“And I bet you joined right in, didn’t you? Sniggering behind your hands like a fishwife. Silly James! What is he like?”
“I was embarrassed!”
“Yes, you were so embarrassed, you just had to show everyone. God, you’re disgusting.”
“I’m embarrassed now. I’m embarrassed standing here, talking to your back. James, this has got to stop. I’m as serious as I’ve ever been in my life. You’ve one last chance to come back to me.”
“Why can’t you just let me get on with it? Why are you trying to stop me?”
“James, this isn’t like going out for a quick pint with your mates, or taking up badminton. This is weird. Right? I can’t live with weird.”
“Okay then.”
“Listen to me. If this doesn’t stop, we’ll have to make arrangements.”
The brush paused, mid-air. “Uh oh... ‘Arrangements.’ Here come the euphemisms. Ancient harbingers of trouble.”
“This is no time to be sarcastic. I spoke to a lawyer today, James. We went over one or two things.”
“That was sensible of you.”
“I’m warning you. I’ve got no hesitation in wrapping this up.”
Here at last, he cast the brush down. Grey splotches pattered across the sheet covering the carpet. “Well, you don’t get to wrap anything up, dear. I believe it’ll be a joint decision. Like everything else.”
“I think you might be surprised.” She smirked, delighted at the reaction, then turned on her heels and left.
*******
Coming home from work, he fell into routine, stripping off the suit and jacket. Normal clothes hung off him, now. Before he’d gone back to his home town, before he’d watched the wrecking ball come down on the school, his waistline had been too snug, uncomfortable. Now the clothes on his back blew in the wind, like his shoulder blades were a hanger on a rail.
He felt better in the overalls, enveloped in the stench of them, a mixture of paint and his own odour. He might have been camouflaged in these clothes, stalking his own savannah of scrunched-up newsprint and kinked carpet covers.
Usually he was attuned to presences in rooms, but for some reason James had not divined the activity of another man in overalls in the spare room until he opened the door. This man was spattered in exclusively white paint, a jolly man with a huge grey beard and still-curly hair. A pair of stepladders and a paint roller were his weapons, whitewash his ammunition. He had obliterated the sea and the jungle, and had made a start on the twinkling stars.
“Hullo,” the man said, smiling broadly. “I’ll be maybe a couple of hours, yet.” He nodded towards James’ overalls. “Been working today, yourself?”
James took several quick breaths like a pearl diver, working himself up to shout. It came out as a scream, a sonic boom. The workman’s eyes widened and he backed against the wall, smearing his shoulder with freshly laid creamy white paint.
Kate came through, shocked, and ushered the man out, consoling him while James paced the room, fingers curled through his hair, drool and tears mixing down his face. The workman’s paint pallet was hurled to the floor, a porridgy lump of emulsion slowly spreading across the newspapers, engulfing the red, blue, green and gold streaks.
Kate approached him cautiously, but still he flew for her. He seized her wrists in a terrifying grip, and for a time she fought back at him. Their feet slipped in the white slick, and he bellowed at her, foundation-shaking screams.
“You couldn’t have it! You couldn’t let me do it! You’ve failed! Bitch! Whore!”
Worse followed – threats, oaths, blood curses. She did not know the face that twisted and contorted inches from her own, the cords of ligament pulling his face into insectoid folds and junctures. When he finally let her go the finger marks on her arms became suffused with blood, stark against her pale skin, and they did not fade.
Staring at them later, poised above the steering wheel on the long drive back home, she began to feel the pain.
James lay back in the thickening lump of paint on the floor, letting it tickle his earlobes, and stared up at the sky, his sky: half stark white, half star-jewelled. “It’s never white forever,” he whispered.
Swearwords: A few strong ones.
Description: A trip back home to see his old school being demolished triggers a series of strange aftershocks in James. His partner, Kate, suspects that the real James is about to appear – and fights against it.
_____________________________________________________________________
They pulled up in what must have been a side-street, with rubbled squares where houses might once have stood.
James engaged the hand brake and waited, fingers tapping the wheel.
“We going to get out?” Kate asked.
“Just a minute. I’m trying to picture it.” He closed his eyes.
“For god’s sake,” she muttered.
Without opening his eyes, James pointed towards a piece of empty space over his right shoulder. “That’s where Tam Mullaney lived. Him and his six brothers, and a dog called Cecil.”
“Cecil,” Kate said, flattening the E. “You pronounce it Cecil.”
“And just over there was Tony Gibb, and his brother Rab. We all used to play football at the back green you can see. A couple of times, some guy took potshots with us with a sluggie.”
“Sluggie? What’s that when it’s at home?”
“A pellet gun. An air rifle.”
“Why not call it that then?”
“Because we called it a sluggie. And we also called Cecil the dog Cecil. With an acute, if you like. Not a grave. Cee-cil.”
“Well, there’s you, and there’s the rest of the planet, love.” Kate gestured towards the school, one of the few free-standing structures within view, directly downhill from the phantom street they were parked on. “I think they’re starting.”
A monster reared its head above the red brick structure. Unfurling a long, flailing tongue, it began to lap at the building. Part of the wall buckled in a great puff of smoke, but did not fall.
“Disappointing,” James said. “I kind of hoped it would collapse spectacularly. That they’d blow it up and have done with it. Like the Death Star.”
“There are still some houses at the other side of the school, love.” Kate yawned and checked her phone. “They have to think about other people, you know. Not just your appetite for destruction. How long do you want to watch this? I don’t want to be here all day watching a derelict building’s death throes.”
James drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I just want to watch the main building go.”
“And how long will that take?”
“I don’t know. Maybe as long it took you to dawdle round the garden centre on Sunday.”
She coughed in astonishment. “At least that was for a practical purpose.”
“You sure?”
They watched the wrecking ball dawdle in mid-air, collecting itself for another swing. Finally, an entire section of the structure fell down in an eruption of red brick and dust.
“I must admit,” Kate said, “I give that at least a seven out of ten. It was almost worth the trip.”
James sat forward in his seat. “There it is. Look. Up to the top right.”
“I can’t see anything past the mushroom cloud, love.”
“No… Actually inside the school itself. It’s been exposed. You see the blue? You see the wall?”
“Nope.”
“You must see it. You see the mural?”
“I can sort of see something…” She squinted. “Sort of a pale blue wall. Is that graffiti?”
“Not graffiti. That’s Mr Foulkes’ music room.”
“Music room?”
“He invited every boy in the class to draw something on the music room wall. Sort of like a community art project. Got them to make their mark, if they were going to study music and singing. Let them take ownership. He didn’t care what it was you drew. Naked women, your gang logo, hairy balls. Anything.”
“Music? I didn’t know you studied music. You can’t sing a line.”
“Clarinet, then bass guitar. It doesn’t matter. The point is, that’s Mr Foulkes’ music room. It’s coming down, now. That was a great place for me, as a kid.”
“Because he let you draw on the walls?”
“No. It was kind of a boy’s place, you know? I remember a picture of Bruce Lee on the wall, from 1974 or something. Scars down his face. Those weird muscles. And a frieze of some kind with cavemen and mammoths. Most of it from the seventies. And he had all these slogans dangling down from the ceiling, bits of card on strings. ‘Thought is freedom’. It was amazing… It was Aladdin’s Cave. It was a big inspiration to me.”
Kate smirked. “And what was your contribution?”
“I did a whole panel on the mural,” he said proudly. “I went for the riddle of the Sphinx, oddly enough. The three stages of a man’s life.”
“Which are?”
“You don’t know the story of the Sphinx?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters enough for lots of people to know it. Except you.”
She shrugged. “Well. Whatever it is. Your mural’s gone, now. Look.”
The old music room, with its hint of pale blue criss-crossed with thick black lines and splashes of colour, frowned, then fell.
“Well,” Kate said. “This was kind of a non-event, wasn’t it?”
He sighed. “You know…”
“What?” She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Never mind. That’s it. Let’s go.” He started the engine, and she smiled to herself, quietly.
“Thanks. The smell was beginning to get to me, love,” Kate said, tuning the radio to her favourite station.
“Oh – that smell. You know, it reminds me of the way the old building used to smell.”
“What is it?” She sniffed at the air, knifeblade nostrils flaring. “Damp?”
“Asbestos.” And he grinned, as she clapped a hand over mouth and nose.
*******
The house was a shell, barely even finished, whitewashed with hard floors that would look dated in photos in years to come, James knew. Everything had been pre-prepared and packaged prior to them moving in. Two bedrooms, a good long hallway, a nice south-facing kitchen with a green garden which Kate wanted to slab over.
After putting up some curtains, James began trailing his fingers over the wall.
“Stop that,” Kate said. “You’ll leave marks.”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Possibilities.”
When she saw his attention wandering again, she said: “How did you feel about watching your school get knocked down?”
He shrugged. “All sorts of things, I guess. Memories, plenty of them. Mum and dad were still around. You know, some people hate school. They have a terrible time. I was lucky, I guess. It was a rough place, but some of the happiest days of my life were spent inside those gates. I didn’t realise it at the time.”
“That’s nice.”
“How would you feel if your school was knocked down?”
“My school wasn’t a 1960s pre-fab. It won’t get knocked down any time soon.”
“I didn’t ask you what your school was made of. I asked you how you would feel if it was knocked down.”
She shrugged. “I’d move on.”
Not a 1960s pre-fab… He thought: how could you think to say something like that? How could you allow that to coil up, waiting to strike behind your lips?
Upstairs, they lingered in the bedrooms, going over their plans again. They’d had this area carpeted in wine-red, one of the few decisions she had compromised on. In the smaller of the two rooms, which she had decided would be the spare, he considered a shadow cage cast through loose-sheathed venetian blinds. The light was odd at that time of night, a mellow gold filtered through a sunset just beginning its final movement.
Kate crouched beneath the windowpane, sighting along angles, lines and gradients. “It’ll be a tight squeeze in here. We might get a bit of clearance if we squeeze a nice flat-pack bed tight by the cupboard.”
“You know, this room reminds me an awful lot of me and my brother Ally’s old room, back home.” James was still staring at the bars branding the wall in golden parallel lines.
“Not sure about storage, all the same. You wouldn’t get much in those cupboards. Maybe use it for linen?”
“He was an artist,” James said. “He went through a phase of drawing things when he was a teenager, getting serious about it. You know – band logos, mostly. Monsters. Iron Maiden album covers.”
Kate heard him for the first time, and glared. “Monsters? What?”
“My brother, Ally. He was a big contributor to Mr Foulkes’ classroom. One time, he begged my dad to let him strip the woodchip off one of the walls. He wanted to whitewash it and paint a mural. Just kept on and on at him. Finally the old boy gave in. And my dad wasn’t a man for backing down once he’d made a decision.”
“A mural? You mean he painted something on the wall? Of his room?”
“That’s right. We shared a room at first when he painted it, but our older brother Robbie moved out, Ally got his room, and I got our old one to myself.”
“So what was it? More monsters? Let me guess, were there dragons? Bruce Lee?”
“It started off kind of like that. It was bikers, except they had wolves’ heads.”
Kate burst out laughing.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Are you sure about that?”
James began to make patterns in the air, sweeping arcs, peaks and depressions. “No, he kind of made it into this scrolling thing… He had the earth, with the bikers, but then it got weirder. He made these cities in the sky, with great prehistoric birds… Then water, with sea serpents and mermaids. He drew boobs on the mermaids, you know? I giggled at it but Ally was deadly serious, straight-faced. Then he had a desert, and ice and snow. He had these fantasy warriors, lizard men, giant bears that were half-robot… It was like a Yes album cover or something.”
“Yes?”
“They’re a band.”
“So what happened to the mural?”
James sighed. “It got painted over. After Ally got married to Carol my mum got cracking with the paintbrush.”
“And how did he take that?”
“I think he was embarrassed about it by then. My dad was kind of sad about it, though. And he wasn’t a sentimentalist, I can tell you that. We took loads of photographs of it before it got painted up. Someone will have them somewhere. I’ll phone Carol, she might still have them.”
Kate frowned. “When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“A while. About a year ago. I don’t know.”
“Think she’ll want to speak to you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Just wondering.”
“I used to think about the mural still being there, you know. Underneath the layers of paint, or maybe under wallpaper put up by the family that moved in after us. When I heard the flats were coming down I seriously thought about getting access and stripping the paint off. Looking at it one last time.”
“It’s rubble now.”
“Maybe some bits of it still exist. In the ground. Landfill. Maybe they’ll dig it up in a thousand years.”
“I think you need to live in the real world.”
But he had drifted far away from her, from the white walls, from their home, from the real world. “Yeah, the mural. Shit. It got me started, you know. That’s where I got the inspiration to start drawing. I wanted to emulate Ally’s mural. I was about six years old.”
The light faded suddenly, blocked by clouds, sudden as flicking a switch. They were in gloom, and he blinked furiously. Now it was just a blank wall.
Kate put her arms around him. “Don’t be getting ideas now, sweetheart.”
*******
After the housewarming party, which had ended on a sour note when he’d told Alexander from her office to fuck off, it started. She had barely even thought about the spare room until she went into a cupboard to pull out some towels. Spare plastic bags littered the floor, and she noticed a till receipt for Garner’s, a shop name she did not recognise.
He had spent £32 on various things, recorded as a jumble of characters next to the prices. It might have been ancient Greek to her, but one legend tipped her off: “PAL BLU.”
When she caught him at it, she felt no anger, revulsion or bitterness. He did not even turn when she opened the door. Newspaper pages were strewn across the floor, covering the new red carpet. The foldable table her mum and dad had loaned them that lay on top of it had fared less well, spatters of paint from a number of opened tubes streaking the surface. James was in overalls, a new pair. Already the greyish material bore the scars of battle.
Upon the blank wall, where he had previously stood and watched the slats of fading sunlight, James had begun his mural.
She took a deep breath. “You know, most women come home early from work, and expect to catch their husbands doing something they shouldn’t. Wearing a bra and knickers… wearing a Star Trek uniform… Wearing peanut butter and jam… Wearing the next door neighbour, even. But you… You find new levels of weirdness. I come home, and you’re making a community fucking art project. I have to applaud you. This is a masterpiece. But not the one you think it is.”
James sighed in exasperation. He did not turn around, but placed his hand on his hips. A paintbrush perched in his hands, smeared knuckle-deep with Aegean blue paint. On the wall, he had created a seascape, a blue horizontal line cutting across the white. Here and there he had begun to fill in details, waves and rills, swells in the water, running to a very deep turquoise in some places. The greenish tint gave her a powerful impression of a real wall of water, and she blinked hard to clear it.
“James? Can I speak to you for a minute, when you aren’t busy?”
“Sure, hon.”
“Any time you like.”
“Yeah. Be right with you.”
*******
“So, James. How’s the interior decoration coming on?”
Kate’s dad liked to chew his words before spitting them out. He was an infrequent visitor to any home they’d lived in. Usually it was for rare occasions – excepting James’ mother’s funeral, which he had stayed away from – and it took James a while to cotton on to what his purpose was.
“Fine, Gordon. There hasn’t been too much to do, of course. Just the odd cosmetic thing, here and there.”
Kate took a long, slow, sip of her wine, eyes down.
“Ah. Nothing fancy to do, then? Nothing creative? No community art projects, anything like that?”
“Whatever can you mean, Gordon?”
“Your wee Turner Prize effort in the spare room, is what I mean.”
“Dad.” Kate’s voice was non-committal. Usually the old man was brusque, if not quite rude. His wife’s presence tended to blunt him, but she had opted to stay home for this visit.
“You say that’s what you mean, but it isn’t what you mean, is it? What do you really mean, Gordon?”
“You probably don’t want to know that.”
“Why don’t you come and take a look at it, Gordon?” James indicated the way upstairs. “I’d be really interested in your opinion.”
The old man was game enough for it, though, trotting a safe distance behind James. But he gasped aloud when the door was thrown open.
Oceans covered one wall, with a coral reef, dolphins, sharks, spouting whales and even a plesiosaur, skimming the bottom. On the surface, bobbing boats surged through the blue, cresting the foamy waves. The brush strokes were broad and abstract, the detail only appreciated when taken at a distance. On the other wall was jungle; green stalks, chocolate brown bark, looping vines, muzzle flashes of petals and eyes glittering among the treetops. And there were tigers, of course, threaded through the long grass.
“What in the name of Christ is this?”
James beamed. “Do you like it?”
“It’s like something a child would do. It’s… juvenile. I’ve got to say, son, I had half expected something weird and abstract. I credited you with a bit of subtlety. But this is like something out of a nursery.”
“I respect your opinion.”
“In the name of god. Are those people naked?” He indicated a group of dark figures, squatting around a fire.
“Yes. That’s a cock and balls, Gordon. There’s some tits. So you can safely assume they’re naked.”
“James.” Kate’s voice had an edge to it.
“And how do you expect to sell the house on with that on the walls?” Gordon asked.
“Sell the house on? We’ve just bloody got here, Gordon. We’re not moving anywhere.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be out of here in six months. Keep it clear, do it up, keep the profit. That’s how it works.”
“How what works? We’re here for somewhere to live. What are you talking about?”
“Perhaps Kate will tell you. I’m not here to educate you, son. I’m not sure what I might say.”
“Spill your guts, Gordon. Be frank, if you can. But while you’re at it, don’t call me ‘son’. Don’t ever call me that.” James was seized, absolutely riven, with the notion of grabbing the paint cans and dousing the old man with a rainbow. Absolutely drenching him, head to foot, with the only discernible parts of him to emerge from the kaleidoscope being his bulging eyes and his thick, fat mouth.
Gordon muttered something, then trotted back down the stairs, and Kate followed him. There was some shouting, and then a slammed door.
James took up his paintbrush and touched the end of a tiger’s nose with the smallest sliver of white.
*******
There were no visitors at all, and a few nights when Kate disappeared. Delighted, James carried on. A cityscape he had created for the wall nearest the door annoyed him, a concrete incongruence until it dawned on him what was missing: movement; action. Weather, then. Sheeting rain began to douse the buildings, striating the yellow lights at the windows, cutting across the half-drawn venetian blinds. Figures on the streets far below the skyscrapers developed hats and brollies; some crouched beneath the rain, fearful, while others fended off the drops with newspapers and briefcases. It was a storm, he knew, a terrible one. He resisted the temptation to crackle purple lightning across the sky as he shaded some of the clouds a terrible, pregnant grey, full to bursting, a frown from mother nature.
When she finally returned, he would not even turn to face her.
“What about when you finish, James? When is it going to be over? Are you going to move onto the hall? The stairway? What will we get in the kitchen – farmer’s fields? Nice crops? English woodland in autumn? Something appropriate, I’m sure.”
“Just this room will be fine,” he said.
“That’s a relief. What are you going to do to the ceiling, exactly?”
“The sky. Of course.”
“Nice. Seagulls, clouds, sun, that kind of thing? Will the sun be smiling? Will he have his hat on?”
“No, it’ll be the night sky. Constellations. Faint nebulae, pink and lapis lazuli. Meteors, green streaks across the sky. The Perseids. You ever seen those?”
“And lots of black?”
“Of course. Not totally black, obviously. Nothing ever is. Lots of blues and purples in there.”
“Obviously. Listen… It’s been difficult talking to you. You have to accept that.”
He scored a jet of water off the face of a shrieking gargoyle, crouched at the summit of an immense skyscraper.
“So I have to tell you that I want this stopped. I’ve indulged you. I’m not daft. I can see it’s turned into something important. I know that. But I want it stopped. Do you understand?”
“I understand you perfectly. All too well. I’ve understood you from the minute I met you; I just didn’t listen to my own instincts. And that is always a mistake. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know what this is. I’ve asked around. Jenny thinks it’s some sort of issue from what happened to your mum. Depression, lingering trauma. I mean… Bereavement’s tough for anyone. Jenny says you need help.”
He laughed. “Jenny! Jenny thinks EastEnders is real. She talks about the characters as if they exist. And she’s a psychiatric nurse! Fuckin’ EastEnders. If that’s not madness, I dunno what is.”
“If this is some kind of breakdown, I just want to let you know that there’s help available.”
“Not a breakdown, pet. The opposite. This is construction work. This is a building project. In fact, what it might actually be is a test. To see how you’ll react when, for once in my life, I do something. Something that’s just for me, not you. Something that isn’t ‘shared’ - shared meaning your special interpretation of the word, meaning ‘dictated by your friends and family’.”
“James – your mural is crap. You see your jungle, your sea and your mountains? They’re crap. Right? It has to be said. And I’ve said it. A kid could do better. My cousin Evelyn is doing her art exams at school and she is light years better than you. In every way.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“I took some pictures and showed the girls at the office. They burst out laughing.”
“So?”
“They were laughing at you – all day. A few of them begged me to put it up on the internet, but I refused. You were a laughing stock.”
“And I bet you joined right in, didn’t you? Sniggering behind your hands like a fishwife. Silly James! What is he like?”
“I was embarrassed!”
“Yes, you were so embarrassed, you just had to show everyone. God, you’re disgusting.”
“I’m embarrassed now. I’m embarrassed standing here, talking to your back. James, this has got to stop. I’m as serious as I’ve ever been in my life. You’ve one last chance to come back to me.”
“Why can’t you just let me get on with it? Why are you trying to stop me?”
“James, this isn’t like going out for a quick pint with your mates, or taking up badminton. This is weird. Right? I can’t live with weird.”
“Okay then.”
“Listen to me. If this doesn’t stop, we’ll have to make arrangements.”
The brush paused, mid-air. “Uh oh... ‘Arrangements.’ Here come the euphemisms. Ancient harbingers of trouble.”
“This is no time to be sarcastic. I spoke to a lawyer today, James. We went over one or two things.”
“That was sensible of you.”
“I’m warning you. I’ve got no hesitation in wrapping this up.”
Here at last, he cast the brush down. Grey splotches pattered across the sheet covering the carpet. “Well, you don’t get to wrap anything up, dear. I believe it’ll be a joint decision. Like everything else.”
“I think you might be surprised.” She smirked, delighted at the reaction, then turned on her heels and left.
*******
Coming home from work, he fell into routine, stripping off the suit and jacket. Normal clothes hung off him, now. Before he’d gone back to his home town, before he’d watched the wrecking ball come down on the school, his waistline had been too snug, uncomfortable. Now the clothes on his back blew in the wind, like his shoulder blades were a hanger on a rail.
He felt better in the overalls, enveloped in the stench of them, a mixture of paint and his own odour. He might have been camouflaged in these clothes, stalking his own savannah of scrunched-up newsprint and kinked carpet covers.
Usually he was attuned to presences in rooms, but for some reason James had not divined the activity of another man in overalls in the spare room until he opened the door. This man was spattered in exclusively white paint, a jolly man with a huge grey beard and still-curly hair. A pair of stepladders and a paint roller were his weapons, whitewash his ammunition. He had obliterated the sea and the jungle, and had made a start on the twinkling stars.
“Hullo,” the man said, smiling broadly. “I’ll be maybe a couple of hours, yet.” He nodded towards James’ overalls. “Been working today, yourself?”
James took several quick breaths like a pearl diver, working himself up to shout. It came out as a scream, a sonic boom. The workman’s eyes widened and he backed against the wall, smearing his shoulder with freshly laid creamy white paint.
Kate came through, shocked, and ushered the man out, consoling him while James paced the room, fingers curled through his hair, drool and tears mixing down his face. The workman’s paint pallet was hurled to the floor, a porridgy lump of emulsion slowly spreading across the newspapers, engulfing the red, blue, green and gold streaks.
Kate approached him cautiously, but still he flew for her. He seized her wrists in a terrifying grip, and for a time she fought back at him. Their feet slipped in the white slick, and he bellowed at her, foundation-shaking screams.
“You couldn’t have it! You couldn’t let me do it! You’ve failed! Bitch! Whore!”
Worse followed – threats, oaths, blood curses. She did not know the face that twisted and contorted inches from her own, the cords of ligament pulling his face into insectoid folds and junctures. When he finally let her go the finger marks on her arms became suffused with blood, stark against her pale skin, and they did not fade.
Staring at them later, poised above the steering wheel on the long drive back home, she began to feel the pain.
James lay back in the thickening lump of paint on the floor, letting it tickle his earlobes, and stared up at the sky, his sky: half stark white, half star-jewelled. “It’s never white forever,” he whispered.
About the Author
Pat Black is a thirtysomething writer, journalist and bletherer, born and raised in Glasgow, now living in Yorkshire. He says he has made that difficult transition from aspiring novelist to failed novelist, although he has had a couple of short stories published. He’s the author of Snarl, a completed novel about a monster that tries to mount the Houses of Parliament. Holyrood emerges unscathed, for now.
If you enjoy Pat’s short stories, you’ll find a whole compendium of them – three dozen, in fact – in his Kindle collection, Suckerpunch, which can be downloaded at these links on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
If you enjoy Pat’s short stories, you’ll find a whole compendium of them – three dozen, in fact – in his Kindle collection, Suckerpunch, which can be downloaded at these links on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.