33.

□ As Parry left for his day on the streets of Aberdeen, I got to my feet. “Can I stay again tonight?” I said. “You mightn’t know it but you saved my soul. I haven’t anywhere else to go.”

“Yeah,” said Parry. “That’s OK. I gotta pump the pavements for some more hours. Then I’ll see you.” Parry was weary beyond expression and played with his fake tie.

cf. Conrad Treger : Für Schweine und Menschen (1999 - 2001) Treger dressed over 40 animals in custom-made business suits and had them attend policy meetings for his future projects.

“I’ll be here at five o’clock,” he said. “I’m gonna lock you out, so do what you can. I gotta book some traffic.”

Parry left me on the step and I waited there and closed my eyes, perhaps still asleep, perhaps still drunk. I heard Liska bubbling from that vague porch of gloom from where she watched me, and when I peeped through my hands I saw her jaw spring open behind a screen of black weeds.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” said Liska — and she snapped off one of her fingers and pointed it at me.

“Not now,” I said.

When Liska let go of the finger it floated towards me, magnified by the deep. The finger lingered in the waters — an accusation. Liska looked everlastingingly at me.

“This is hopeless,” she said.

Liska’s bone-white face was close. There were no eyes and no skin. She was dead but I still found her attractive. I swallowed and stared at her. It wasn’t the easiest thing to interpret the empty skull of a dead woman.

“Don’t you understand that I’m missing you?” said Liska.

I pressed my hands to my head while Liska spoke from the tongue of the ocean, strange dead requests that I could not stop my ears against.

“Go and get some clean trousers for my funeral,” she said, and I snapped awake. It was most unlike Liska to talk about my clothes so I felt I had to respond, or at least make a pretense of action.

“I haven’t any money left,” I said, and at that moment realised I was talking to nobody but myself.

When I arrived in the city centre shortly afterwards, I found a department store and started towards the menswear as if I were a traditional shopper. One plastified face after another passed me as I walked through the tender colours of the furniture department. Slow moving purchasers turned as if hypnotised, unable to differentiate between themselves and the mirrors. Besides the great operations of ritual magic contained in this store, there were numerous processes of a minor and vulgar order that brought me back to life. In a second, with a bruised stare from Liska’s eyeless sockets, I had woken to another opportunity. Between underwear and menswear, Liska aimed my attention at the security guard following me.

“The exits of hell are the entrances of paradise,” she said.

“That’s meaningless,” I answered.

“No it’s not,” she said. “Think of the inevitability of what you’re doing.”

“I can’t join you down there,” I told her.

“And you’re all very boring up there,” she said. “Are you going to steal those trousers or not?”

Liska stared from the water and I retreated from the security guard and snuck free of that shop, and began to think of how better to get warm clothes. Later, I arrived at a charity shop and chose some pennyweight items — the trousers of an older man and a pair of rainbow-laced shoes that were puffy like two suede bladders.

Once I had changed my clothes I walked in no direction. At one point I caught sight of my face in a window, and I saw that my features were darker and longer than they had been when I had last seen my face in Parry’s bathroom the night before.

In a handy shop I located English cider with an easy-to-open-lid. Waiting to cross the road again I aimed for a pigeon-bedecked public statue where my hostilities would take on a different light. Union Street lay before me and I sat down and waited. The noise of the day had become nothing more than a chiding murmur nearby. Beyond the roofs I could see the rusted green teacup of Cowdray Hall. A cat approached from nowhere and I enticed it over for a stroke. I recalled the list of names that Liska and I had for the day when we would get a cat, and I drank for them all:

Our shortlist of cat names : Sholto, Rees, Zonabend, Monkswell, Batto, Bekko, Scatto, Tatto, Bernico, Chip, Baddeley, Relictus, Hubler, Dorcas, Clonfert, Chester, Ab, Osgot, Domingo, Chesapeake, Ace, Belvin, Dolphus, Cluke, Kennis, Mord, Jarveena, Poke, Noyce, Athers, Shehleypea, Langton, Earl, Pads and Biscuit.

I drank slowly and felt good. The cat sniffed at the cider bottle and went on its way, and I waited there as the morning ended, and the people started lunch.

Would I have liked to have seen myself at the bottom of the sea? The answer was no — I still preferred the world above. Tallowy pieces of food sat in wet newspaper beneath the bench. I looked down my trouser leg to a puddle and mulled on the amusing consequences of my escape from death. The centre of the puddle was a dark patch where the truth of the world was side-tracked into a mysterious swirl. In the puddle I saw the reflection of an aeroplane passing until someone walked through and disturbed the water. The image of the sky was shattered and a skateboarder crashed in the wave and whooped with glee. When the skateboarder had gone something of the same old absolute settled on the puddle. My second-hand shoes were fat and comic. They were not even comfortable. Liska was a shade of bone held in check by the material of her dress. She raised an arm and turned on her side. A current moved her until she was standing upright, a mild undulation in the flow. Afternoon depressed the city so much that for a minute its entire sound was reduced to one train horn. Liska would like me in these shoes, I thought. She would like the fat brown Saharan leather and the rainbow-coloured laces.

I looked at the statue above me — a man on horse. A newspaper blew up and wiped the horse’s leg, threatening to fly before the traffic. Cars leeched along Union Street — across the seabed and through the pockets at the bottom of the lagoon. The newspaper blew into the air, geed up by the lacustrian bubbles of a row of piled up litter. As the paper landed before me its message became obvious. A flick of sunshine illuminated a picture of Liska. Another piece of paper showed the charred remains of what I guessed were Liska’s paintings, and the text informed me that her works were under attack. I felt a sickening desire to laugh. The exhalation of righteousness, like a burp from the throat, made me dizzy as I took the paper in my hand and unfolded it, shaking off the water.

According to the newspaper Liska’s works had been separated the day after I had left our flat and, most fatefully of all, two out of the 58 had already been spotted by other artists and destroyed. Several of the remaining paintings had changed hands following Liska’s death, and other works of hers had surfaced both in Aberdeen and in London. The puddle quivered and I read the newspaper closely until a second later, the cathode ray tube on the end of my eye-stalk printed the following words in my mind — the words of Joseph Gram — quoted after these posthumous attacks on Liska’s work:

WE CALL ON ALL ARTISTS NEVER TO SHOW YOUR WORK! he had said.

I sat on a bench and people came and went. The picture of Liska in the paper was the dearest thing I had ever seen and I couldn’t help returning to it. The revolution continued profitably around me. Every working man and woman in Aberdeen stammered forth and I walked repeatedly around the statue, drinking until the cider was done. Finally, a hand clapped my shoulder, a human touch. The exceeding happiness of my situation was brought to life when I saw that it was Parry in his traffic warden costume.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

Parry had crossed the road — a brave man in this day and age. He eyed me up and down but his outthought was stopped at the gate of his mouth and he eventually spluttered, “Those clothes are daft!”

I agreed and stared at him, planet-struck drifter that I now was.

“I have to get back now,” he said.

“Do you?” I said and Parry stepped away.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve got to go back to work.”

In my new clothes I had a trampy feeling. One morning on the streets and I had developed disruptive tendencies. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said. “But it would be good to stay again.”

Parry cocked his head. “It’s OK,” he said. “I’ll give your regards to the others. They’ve been asking all about you.”

“Shit those others,” I said. “And don’t tell them that you saw me.”

Parry looked surprised as he walked away but I waved to let him know that I was just drunk.

“See you later,” said Parry from a safe distance.

I bowed my head as Parry drifted towards the traffic where he would lose himself again. The artistic validity of this parish is not helped by people having to go to work, I thought, just as they once had to go to school — and so I shall not follow him — instead I shall go and browse the gallerias.