Read by Jim Cogan
What kind of a name was Meredith, anyway? Meredith. You couldn’t be a famous painter with a name like that, could you? Meredith Walker. He shook his head a little. He wondered why he was here. Her little front garden was full of what his father would no doubt call crap, but which Meredith called Art. Michael was still undecided, but he knew why he was here: he had to say goodbye. But of course it wasn’t goodbye. He’d still be coming home for things like Christmas and holidays and things like that. Right? Right.
He rang the bell. He heard footsteps. Meredith’s voice said, ‘Yes?’
Feeling very grown up all of a sudden, he said, ‘It’s me.’
She opened the door and now he was in her house and it smelled of tea and candles and paint and clay, Plasticine and glue, like the art room in school. It was a tiny house. Upstairs there was the toilet and bathroom and, he assumed, Meredith’s bedroom. Downstairs you had the little kitchen and a little hallway and then this big room facing out to the valley, through big windows on three sides. All or some of these windows were often obscured by the paintings leaning against them, and this was the case tonight, Michael noticed. Looking between the paintings, Michael could see a scrum of dark blue clouds pushing and shoving its way across a darker blue sky. He wanted to remember all this exactly, so that, years later (not too many years later) he could tell the music journalist all about it. The guy from NME, the guy from Melody Maker, maybe even the guy from Rolling Stone.
There was a low, smoked-glass table in the middle of the room, and a red glass bowl on it, and lighted candles floating in water in the bowl, with some petals or something. Not much other furniture. An easel. No chairs.
Meredith, the great artist, was barefoot in a sleeveless black dress that went down just above her ankles. She always wore black, like it was Halloween every day.
She said, ‘Make yourself comfortable. Look at some art. If you can stand it.’ Then she half-ran-half-tip-toed off to the kitchen.
Silence. He looked at some art. He could stand it. There was a large painting, leaning on its side. It was maybe six feet by nine, and it was entirely white, apart from these words in big black letters, carefully painted to look typed:
Flowers No.6
Meredith Walker
6cm by 8cm. Oil on canvas.
- Courtesy of the artist.
Next to it, on the floor, and in a neat dark brown frame, was this tiny painting of some blue and red and yellow flowers. This second picture was about the size (roughly six centimetres by eight) of the little information panel you’d have next to a picture in a gallery.
Meredith came back in, holding a tray on which stood two steaming little glasses with metal handles, and two oranges, one of them peeled. Meredith had long crinkly blonde hair and eyes that looked closed even when they were open. He didn’t know how else to describe them. Her eyelids were always lowered, maybe that sounded better, even when she was giving you her full attention, her eyes were little thin slits that made Michael think of Japanese people, Kung Fu, even though she didn’t look Japanese at all. She put the tray down on the table, picked up both glasses and handed one to him.
She said, ‘And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from Asda.’
Michael always felt daunted and over-awed by her: she was older than him by
almost five years, and at least as tall as him, which really freaked him out sometimes, as did her habit of saying things which she seemed to understand, but which he definitely did not. She had very thin lips, and now she smiled one of her best thin-lipped smiles at him, showing none of her teeth, and then she sipped her tea, holding the cup with both hands. She didn’t have a proper job, as far as he knew, so she just lived in this house, painting her paintings and drinking tea and saying strange things. How had she and Michael ever met in the first place, ever got to know each other at all?
Well, there had been that weird evening in that weird art gallery in Leeds, this tiny weird place full of weird people. Bill had dragged Michael along and introduced him to Meredith. One of their teachers from Sixth form had been there, too, Mister Kerrigan, a bit of a hippy, and not really a great teacher, but a cool guy.
Michael could remember very well the way Mister Kerrigan watched from the other side of the room as Bill and Michael talked to Meredith. At one point Bill fucked off to get some more drinks and Mister Kerrigan walked over and tried to make a joke about how the boys weren't old enough to be drinking.
Mister Kerrigan and Meredith had then had this weird whispered conversation, while Michael stood close by, pretending he was much further away. He only caught a few words, such as last time, and you don’t know what you want, and for God’s sake. They stopped talking when Bill showed up again with two cans, and said, ‘Oh, hello, sir. Fancy a light ale?’
Now Meredith said, ‘So, you’ve seen my latest masterpiece, then? I finally realised that all anyone does in an art gallery, instead of looking at the actual paintings, they just look at the little things on the wall next to the paintings. You know, the little card with the information on it, that tells you who painted it, what medium it’s in, how big it is, what year they did it... so I thought – make that the art. And then, underneath it, really small, have the actual painting. See?’
Michael had a feeling he’d seen someone else do something similar, or read about it in a newspaper or in a book. He wondered if Meredith had read about it somewhere else, too, and had stolen the idea.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Brilliant.’
But now he had this feeling that he hadn’t said this quite soon enough after Meredith had finished speaking. He felt like she knew what he was thinking. A thick silver bracelet gripped her upper arm, between her shoulder and her elbow. He’d never seen anyone wear a bracelet up there before. She was tilting her head sideways at him, just a little.
‘Listen to that,’ she said.
‘What?’ And he thought she was going to say – listen to that, the sound of a young man lying.
But she just said, ‘Listen.’
There it was: a distant, but definitely audible and actually quite annoying buzz, a hum. It stopped for a second or two or three seconds, or even four, and then it started again.
She said, ‘He is mowing the lawn. In the middle of the night.’ The sound stopped. She held her finger up again, paused, and the noise began again.
Michael was about to say, ‘What a loser,’ but Meredith saved him by saying, in that
affected, arch sort of way of hers, like she thought she was a filmstar, ‘I think it’s terribly, terribly sad.’
‘When are you going to be famous, Meredith?’ He felt newly certain that she would never be famous for her paintings, but that she ought to be famous for something.
‘Not until you are, my dear. I heard that you sang a little song at Lesley’s birthday party. Spotty teenagers vomiting cider and smoking and lapsing into unconsciousness. God, I wish I could have been there.’
A flower-shaped candle, floating in the bowl, went out, and the wick drew a thin grey line which hung in the air, and folded in on itself, and collapsed. Michael looked at one of Meredith’s crazy sculptures on the floor, a metal mish-mash as big as a beach-ball: all twisted wire coat hangers, foil, drawing-pins, drill bits, coins, needles, toy cars.
He said, ‘It wasn’t a little song.’
She looked at him with that smile that drove him insane. She said, ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Then she changed the subject: ‘You’re leaving tomorrow?’
‘Yep.’
‘Flying into the future.’
‘I’m going on the train.’
Still smiling, she said, ‘So, on your last night in this crazy old town, you came to see me. I am truly honoured. What shall we do? Did you have anything planned?’
‘Have you ever seen him?’
‘Who? Oh, him. The lawn-mower man.’ She shook her head, and silently bent down to the metal sculpture. She looked at it for a moment, and then, using the thumb and forefinger of her right hand she plucked something off it, some little metal fragment of something, which she let drop to the floor.
‘There,’ she said, standing up. ‘Now it’s perfect.’
Then she put both hands into the low pockets of her dress. She tiptoed quickly around the room and blew out all the candles. She pulled off her dress over her head, and stood there in the dark, lit only by the night-sky glow from the three big windows.
Michael had seen so many naked women, in videos and in magazines, that he was surprised that this naked woman was just standing there, not posing in any way, or dancing, or gyrating, or cavorting, or ‘romping’, or wearing nipple tassels, or holding a gun. She was just standing there.
He took her in his arms and she said he was shivering. It was perfect. He would tell the music journalists all about this night, all about how he lost his virginity to this interesting, strange woman who could have been a great artist but somehow, along the way, something went wrong, and she never quite got to be what Michael had imagined her becoming, what she was supposed to be. And outside, somewhere, not far away, someone was mowing his lawn in the middle of the night (that was the most important detail, he felt, and even though the noise had stopped, he would tell the story with the noise still going).
*
Now it’s twenty five years later, and he’s on his way to yet another doomed audition, hurrying through drizzle down a little shortcut he knows near Waterloo Station. He’s given up the singing: now he’s acting. Trying to act. Two streets away, on the street that you would go down if you didn’t know about this shortcut, there’s a small but apparently important little art gallery. In this gallery’s window there’s a large poster advertising an upcoming show by Meredith Walker.
He rams his hands further into the pockets of his inadequate coat. Fuck me, it’s fucking freezing.
(c) Peter Higgins, 2016
Peter Higgins has had stories and poems published in various magazines, anthologies and blogs, including Open Pen, Tales of the Decongested, Litro, Penpusher, and Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Two of his prize-winning short plays were produced at the Leicester Square Theatre as part of the world-famous Sitcom Trials.
Jim Cogan (right) is a scriptwriter, documentary maker and occasional voiceover artist based in Oxford. After far too much acting at university, he studied Creative Writing at Birkbeck and jointly won the Liars’ League Most Valuable Player writers’ award 2015.
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