fifty

Jack brought out a hammer from one of his jacket pockets.

‘What’s this for?’ I asked.

‘For hammering a nail into the wall. I thought I’d help you hang the painting.’ He placed the hammer on the window sill. He then sat down cross-legged on the carpet beneath the painting and I sat down beside him. He poured me a glass of malt whisky from the bottle that he had brought. His nails had puce red paint beneath them, the exact same shade of red that Juliette had had on her cheek, the day I first met her at the National Gallery. But she had told me she had not seen Jack again since he had left her for Justine. So how could it be the same red? It had to be a different red.

‘You remind me of myself,’ Jack said, ‘when I first met Justine – besotted. She was like a blank canvas on which I could paint my desires. I ended up with that.’ He pointed to his painting of her.

I looked at the painting again. The picture was confirmation that he had to die. I had to kill him to save her image from his superficial vision. This man had turned her beauty into a misshapen monster. He, in that representation of her, had systematically mutilated, murdered her beauty. He was indifferent to the single truth of Justine. That was why his hands were bloody with red paint. He did not need, as I did, the image of her beauty to breathe.

A smile had crept over Jack’s mischievous face – he had the charm of the devil. The stench of the painting was starting to emanate from its creator. I watched aghast, as his hands began to grow long and thin, the skin of his body translucent. His features started to concave before my unwilling eyes. The sides of his eyes ran down his face, dipping into the upward sardonic curve of his mouth which was rising impossibly high up the side of his face. The shadows of his features hardened into black lines as the skin grew paler. He now looked like a two-dimensional sketch of a pattern of black ink on a white page, unreadable but with its own internal logic.

At that point it became clear what I had to do. I had to return the incoherence of his face to a pattern that made sense. But just by looking, I couldn’t restore the symmetry back to Jack’s face. The lines shifted around, became even more unintelligible, the harder I stared. I turned round to look at the portrait of Justine for help.

Someone somewhere said my name.

From where I was sitting on the carpet I looked up at the window sill. The hammer was lying on it. The hammer was of standard design: an oak handle, dark metal. It only took a second to reach up and take it down. It seemed unnaturally light. I had the sensation that the hammer might float out of my hands unless I held onto it tightly. I clutched at the handle tightly, trying to feel it. The tool now seemed like a phantom limb. A necessary part of me that I had lost and now didn’t really exist: an instrument of let’s-pretend.

It was heavy enough. Jack watched me, silently, taking a sip of his whisky. He looked at me in amusement as I stood up, raising the hammer above my head. He looked as if he were about to ask me a question.