Her voice, his, this Bashir’s words,
they floated in and out of understanding because I was floating in and out of
concentration. The sound of Alba’s voice was far more interesting than the
meaning hidden in the text she was reciting. She obviously thought the message
vital and was therefore reading with an exaggerated vitality. It sounded like
poetry, but it was really music and the instant I thought “music” was the
instant the sounds became words and the words became sentences and the spell
was broken and syntax translated the dream into literacy, then literature. The
scents of ancient libraries full of volumes that talk to the old and arthritic
of ages past and of ages to come, not in languages long forgotten, but in dust
and cobwebs, the dark and dark secret odours promptly evaporate….
At that very instant she waved her hand
in front of my face. She had an irritated look on hers. “You aren’t listening,
are you?” “Oh yes I am, with pleasure, but I’ve not understood a word. The
music, the incense, it is pure bliss!” “The music?” “Incense! Don’t worry about
it, go on, go on! Pretty Girl, come and sit with us!” And I patted the sheets
and Jone Johnson sank into the bedding leaving Alba between the two of us,
clothbound book in hand. “Concentrate, both of you, okay? Peter, please!” I was
making faces across Alba’s chest to Jone. “Mummy, tell us a story….Once upon a
time….” Jone grinned at me but Alba didn’t see because she was searching for
the spot in the paragraph where she had interrupted her narration. “Are you all
sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin!” Sang Alba, with an innocent childlike
intonation, and begin she did.
‘Look at it like this, can there be anything for her quite as pathetic as the inane grin on her lover’s face the morning after the girl has once again managed to satisfy herself first and foremost? Perhaps the paintings on the wall would suffice as a niggling well of insatisfaction too. She told me there was, in effect, no difference between either, except that in the latter case the foreplay had lasted just a little longer. She said that there was a degree of masochism in both activities, the sharing inevitably unsatisfactory.
‘Imagine,’ she stated quite nonchalantly, ‘the colours are mixed on the palette and my nose is between someone’s legs. The vacuum is tugging at me. My finger is red, it’s paint. I lick the tip of my brush to bring it to a point. Red, it could be paint. I tongue her brush, fine light brown and downy. I suck her straight into my mouth and I’m just like a baby desperate for taste, desperate for sensations, desperate to explore, to explore what? The Void! My paint, her blood, your blood, what does it matter, to whom does it really matter? It matters to me! I’m a devil of a child exploring myself and I’m working on myself, on her, on you. I’m looking for myself in the blood and in the paint. I’m looking for myself in the dark, in umbra and penumbra. The void is shadowy. The bedroom light is unquestionably switched off. It’s on in the studio.’
I can quote this conversation word for word because I don’t have to rely on pure memory. ‘Memory only allows you to remember what memory sanctions you to remember.’ That was one of the lines she would often pepper her conversations with. To her, it was a given fact. This was one of the very few monologues she actually allowed me to record, or, to be more accurate, one of the few monologues she did not insist on erasing. ‘Microphones force me to exaggerate, to invent situations. They give me a reason to make a mundane life of over sixty years more palatable, people too. It interests me how often I shit and how often I can’t be bothered to wash my hands, but only momentarily, then I need to do a bit of reinvention! Turn that off and invent a different angle for your readers to see me from. Do me, and your readers a favour, exaggerate from faulty memory. The real me only exists in the dark, in the vacuum. So, the real me doesn’t exist! Isn’t that exciting? That’s why lovers tend to turn off the lights. Intuition! They don’t desire an existence under the light of scrutiny! Neither do I!’ She would deliver a version of this after every interview, but, on this occasion finished with, ‘Let them see what they need to see! It’s not for me to correct. It’s for an artist to see further into umbra and penumbra.’
This was back in the winter, a white December. Her words were falling apart, into disuse, but her images were ever more powerful. She told my recorder, (because I happened to see that she was looking straight through me). ‘You know, doctors and nurses, we’ve all played at it one way or another, at one time or another. You’re doctoring me for a public who pretend to be avaricious for answers to “Why?” You’re prettying me up. I’m The Pretty Girl. I’m doctoring myself in secret secretions, me and my girlfriend, in primers, oil paints, spirits of turpentine, spirits and sundry varnishes, both matt and shiny, but all of it rousingly slippery. It’s dirty. It’s nasty. It’s terribly hard work. It hurts. Why? I do it because there’s nothing else to be done, it’s terribly exciting….to me. My art is my only power beyond myself, beyond this corpse you observe twitch every now and again.
I only ever asked her about the future once and she said, ‘We live in the past tense, but long to project something, if only one solitary meme, into the future. Every projection into the future dies in the past. Dead conversations bury the listener. It’s up to future archaeologists to choose what to put flesh on. Human interest is fickle, it’s nothing. Me? I am only the art I have created, it’s nothing. That’s what there is to discover, nothing.’
But Jone Johnson had discovered
something. She had discovered where her nickname had sprung from, for I too had
read the book long, long ago. In fact, I had written it.
I smiled over the bed at her but uttered
not a word. Dead conversations bury the listener.
