Art is Long, Life is Short AUDIO
Read by Carrie Cohen
Tell you what. Another reporter come to see me. I talk to them through perspex bars. I been talking through perspex bars forever. She’s writing a piece about installation art, no less. She wants my story.
‘Ain’t you heard it all before?’ I says. ‘I spoke to a hundred reporters.’
‘Not to me,’ she says. ‘I want it from the horse’s mouth.’
She’s watching me, face warped by perspex.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ I says, though I can see she ain’t. ‘Then I’ll begin.’
I was out of a job. That was the trouble. And this card goes up in the window of Sal’s Caff. The card says:
Easy work – Three meals a day
Minimum wage
Accommodation provided – All bills paid
Minimum 12-month contract
My jaw hits the floor. Sounds a blinder, don’t it? Well, I pinch the card from the window before another body happens on it. There’s an address on the back. I turn up to a right posh house, and there’s four or five people like me, down on their luck, all kicking about a waiting room. No-one talks. One at a time, they get summonsed into a room, and one at a time, they troop out, looking glum. Then it’s my turn.
It’s a grand room. There’s a big old desk, and behind it sits a bloke, scribbling things. Bald head, thick glasses. You know the sort. He sees me and stops scribbling. He stares and stares. He stands up, not blinking, and approaches me proper close.
‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘oh yes, yes. You’re perfect.’
‘Perfect for what?’ I says, thinking he might be after something I ain’t prepared to give.
‘This might sound peculiar to you,’ he beams, and then leans in close, and I can smell his bald head. ‘But I rather think I want to turn you into art.’
Turns out he’s some big shot artist. Living art this, postmodern that, redefining aesthetic and intellectual boundaries the next thing. Tell you what, he don’t half like the sound of his own voice. He shows me pictures of a huge glass box, the size of a shipping crate. It’s a glass room, suspended on cables, glass all round. The front is bars like a prison cell, only they’re made of perspex.
‘I’ll pay you,’ says the artist, ‘to live in this box. To live in it every day for one entire year.’
Everything is see-through. The floors, the ceiling, everything. There’s a perspex bed, a perspex chair, a perspex table. One corner has a perspex toilet and a glass shower, with see-through pipes running to the floor.
‘It’s a masterpiece,’ he says. ‘We’ll make history.’
This is the deal: three meals a day, tea and coffee, papers, books, magazines, TV with all the satellite channels. Whatever I want, he says.
‘It’s glorious,’ he says, going a bit glazed.
Firstly, I muse upon the inherent ethical issues of personal privacy. And then I muse upon the cash. Well, of course I says I’ll bloody do it, don’t I? The contract is the size of a book. I sign where he tells me, here and here and here and here.
‘Keep the pen,’ he grins. ‘I had them specially made.’
The pen is made of perspex.
*
There’s a proper big party on the preview night. The artist drapes a sheet across the whole box, so I can’t see out, but there’s that many people talking all I can hear is a roar. The hubbub dies down so the great artist can talk about his great achievement. Then the curtain gets pulled away from the box with a whoosh, and hundreds of faces stare up at me, silent, then the chatter starts up even louder. There’s applause, growing in waves, and photographers going ballistic, all these cameras going flash flash flash flash flash flash.
The great artist takes a bow.
I’m hanging maybe three storeys up, bang in the middle of this huge hall, cables stretching way out to the ceiling. Everything smells new. They had to lift me in with a cherry picker. To start off, I stick to the corners, thinking the whole thing was about to fall apart around me. Then I start taking little steps towards the centre, the box swaying underfoot. Weird feeling, having glass below me, glass above. Just hanging there, stuck between two places, and feeling like I’m sure to fall.
There’s a slogan carved onto the brick wall across from me. It says ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’. I find out this means ‘Art is long, life is short’. Tell you what I think about that. I don’t quite get it. I look at my watch. The biggest hand turns a full circle. The little hand shifts so slow I don’t see it move, but I hear it. Tick tock, tick tock.
364 days to go.
*
Well, it actually weren’t all that bad. They brung food on the cherry picker, three times a day. I watched a lot of telly. Sometimes I was on the news. I took showers and went toilet right where everyone could see. With so many people taking pictures, it was like living in a mirror.
361 days to go.
Days was exactly the same, like they’d been stamped from a mould. Journalists come from all across the world, to stand on the cherry picker and interview me.
355 days. Tourists taking photos, standing underneath the box.
342 days. The gallery man says I’m the most popular installation for years. Takings is through the roof. I think about my paycheque.
331 days to go. I notice that if you take in a sketchpad, you can stay all day for free, and nobody stops you.
328 days. Through the glass, all colours look the same.
311 days. I walk in circles, pacing exactly sixty steps around my box.
300 days. There’s always cameras, always tourists, always students doing charcoal pictures in their sketchbooks. I nod hello to them ones I recognise.
278 days to go, and my watch says tick tock.
259 days. Tick, tock. I can always hear it.
232. 220, 194. 187. 163, 122. I add them up, subtract them, working out the hours, the minutes, counting out chunks of time. Multiplied by the hours. I get hold of a calculator. That money makes me toes curl.
99 days. Working out what to do with my paycheque at the end of it all.
89 days. Tell you what. I’ll get drunk.
76 days. I’ll get my teeth done.
72 days. I’ll go for a long, long walk.
67 days. I dream about that walk.
63 days. I dream about crooked paving slabs underfoot.
51 days. And trees. I dream about trees.
34 days. I dream about the Thames through Greenwich, flowing from the Cutty Sark down to the Dome, hundred-year-old clay pipe stems on the beach, the meat smell from the brewery.
21 days. Three weeks to go. I dream about sitting in a park. Sun on my face.
20 days, I dream of going back to Sal’s Caff, spinning coppers on the tabletops.
15 days. I dream about shiny glasses. Glasses that’re so shiny, they’re see-through.
13 days. I dream. I just dream.
*
There’s a week to go. One week. A year down, and only a week to go. There’s more journalists than ever, up and down on the cherry picker, chatting to me through the perspex bars. I don’t mind. Makes the time fly, don’t it? And then, sudden-like, the time has flown. One day to go. One day. It’s the eve of my release. Tomorrow, I can leave. I’ll be free.
Then it happens.
The great artist comes back to see me. First time in a year. It’s after hours, the place all dark and hushed. Through the glass floor of my box, I see him on the cherry picker, slowly rising upwards, the whine of it growing louder, more frayed at the edges.
‘Perfect,’ he says, ‘perfect. How are you?’
‘Itching to get out,’ I says. ‘Can’t wait.’
‘Yeeees,’ he replies. ‘Well, there might be something of a problem with that.’
For half a moment, I see everything in perspex.
‘You what?’
‘You’ve been wonderful,’ he says, smiling white and wide. ‘You really have. The gallery is delighted. You’ve broken records. Everyone wants a piece of you, you know. And the thing is, you’ve been sold to Barcelona.’
It don’t quite sink in. The hall is filled with that noise, tick, tock, tick tock.
‘You … you what?’
‘Barcelona,’ he says, ‘in Spain. Won’t that be nice?’
‘No,’ I says. ‘No way. I ain’t doing it. Not for all the tea in China, mate. Tomorrow, I’m leaving. I’m free. I’m taking my money, and I’m off.’
‘Well,’ says the great artist, ‘that is a shame.’
He pulls a great sheaf of paper from his bag. It’s my contract.
‘You agreed to tour if the installation was a success,’ he says. ‘It’s right here, you see. And here, and here, and here. You’re part of it, now. You’re part of history, look.’
My signature. My own signature, black and white. There’s a rushing feeling in my head. He starts speaking, but I barely hear it.
'You’ll be well looked-after over there,' he says. 'Plenty of sun. It’ll be nice,' he says. Oranges and lemons. I can hear St Paul’s. I’m feeling faint. I’m feeling dizzy. I don’t know exactly what happens next. There’s a ticking noise, a tick tock noise, tick tock. One day to go. I look at my hands. They’re holding onto perspex bars, clenched white around the knuckle. The artist smiles at me. His teeth gleam in the dark.
‘I said I’d make you famous,’ he says.
Tick … tock.
I reach through the bars, and I push him off the cherry picker. I push him right off. It happens in slow-motion, and it takes forever, and it takes a split-second. My contract spills everywhere, hundreds of pages seesawing to the floor, three storeys down. The artist makes a pretty pattern on the ground. I got all night to look at him, to watch him through the glass. Tell you what. Feels like the first splash of colour I seen in a year.
From down there, he grins at me, a perspex pen glinting in his hand.
*
The reporter’s dictaphone stops whizzing. Battery’s dead. It’s all dead.
‘What happened then?’ she whispers. I shrug.
‘You know the story,’ I says. ‘It were all on CCTV. The judge don’t have any choice.’
The reporter looks around her.
‘It’s better than prison,’ she says.
I looks right back at her. ‘What’s the difference?’ I says.
I’m still in the perspex box. The day I signed the contract, I became part of the art. Whatever rights I had is in that piece of paper. When the artist died, the price went through the roof. We’ve been through the courts, all the rest of it. Technically I ain’t a person any more. I’m art. And even I was out of the box, I’d go to jail. Instead, I been to Barcelona. I been to Moscow, to New York, to Berlin.
And I’ll tell you something else. I worked it out. ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’. Finally found out what it really means. Now he’s dead, everyone reckons he’s a genius. They say I’m his masterpiece. He goes down in history, and I’m stuck in a glass box like a butterfly on a pin. Life imitating art, ain’t it?
You got to laugh.
Tick. Tock.
(c) Simon Sylvester, 2014
Simon Sylvester is a writer, teacher and occasional filmmaker. He has written more than a thousand very short stories on Twitter, and his debut novel The Visitors is published by Quercus Books. He lives in Cumbria with the painter Monica Metsers and their daughter Isadora. He blogs at www.simonsylvester.wordpress.com
Carrie Cohen’s 2014 work includes playing Mrs Tarleton in Misalliance (Tabard Theatre), Hetty, in Gelt (Etcetera Theatre), voicing characters for films The Wake and Bad Advice, reading stories for Arachne Press and continuing to be seen struttingher stuff in the Specsavers’ advert. Show and voice reels at www.CarrieCohen.co.uk
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