39.

□ In one respect the trip to the gallery had been a success, and I settled at the window of Parry’s flat to reflect. Rosemount was dark. On the opposite building, I had the red-lighted spike of a mobile phone mast for a view and the sound of a police siren completed the scene. Parry’s stock of alcohol was available and I assumed that I had rights and helped myself.

I looked across the city from Parry’s window — the end of the story, I might have thought. I drank a bottle of wine and fell asleep for several hours, waking up at the very moment I heard Liska’s name mentioned on the television. Awake and focussed, I knew what was going on.

I was not disappointed.

Liska was now a minor item on the news — and there had been a day of it.

Above the spectre of the newsreader there was a picture of Liska on the television. I listened as the newsreader said that, in all, four people were in custody.

A weakness took over. My stomach revolted and imaginary spikes dug in. The resulting pain was sudden. It wasn’t the picture of Liska that did it, but the police gravely announcing that a total of ten paintings had been destroyed by combinations of acid, fire and swords.

They came organised for the destruction, said the deep, feeling voice of the reporter, and police have linked this attack with similar attacks elsewhere. We now know that paintings by Liska were vandalised both north and south of the border, and that guards have been placed on all surviving works.

The pictures flashed up in Omnicolor. I recognised Liska’s work, but when I saw the state of it I was surprised. One person had even put his painting by Liska in a cage, which seemed tantamount to putting her in a cage.

Estimates say that up to a third of Liska’s work may have been destroyed. In the most serious of these attacks, art collector Frank Capt was beaten in his house last night while he attempted to halt the destruction of the piece known as No. 3.

No. 3 was displayed. I wiped my face and prepared for the strange fright of revisiting my past. The image returned — Liska painting this very picture, using our neighbour’s tomato plant as a model. Brief moments of colours (she said), a part of a leaf, not a whole leaf, (she said).

As No. 3 faded into the background, an art critic with putty for arms appeared on the television screen and explained that Liska had wanted all her works to be exhibited in one place, but that they’d been split up in the days after her death.

I can only assume art purists have carried out these attacks, said the critic. Given that most work by Liska is either not on display or held by private collectors such a plan is certainly going to fail. It’s very interesting though, he said, to see an artist’s wishes being carried out like this. I’d warn people who own any of Liska’s work to remove them to somewhere safe.

I placed a fresh bottle of wine to my lips. The news told of Liska and how she had worked. It mentioned the North Sea where she had disappeared and there was a flash of a North Sea ferry, and the gallery where I had been.

I wondered if Anna Lunken’s house had been attacked?

When the news returned to the usual mendacity of war and economic growth, I lay down and waited for Parry to come in. When he did return, he was very excited. He’d been in the bar with his crowd and they’d all been talking about Liska too.

“Dead artists are correct in pointing out that what is said in favour of their work does not relativise the fact of their works having being bought and sold constantly after their lives have finished,” he said, seemingly sober despite being plastered drunk. “The monetary value of paintings by dead artists is not intended to apply a value but places the quality of the work in a far sharper light,” he said. “Academia’s bondage to the dead has never helped — merely destroyed the absolute distinction between art and the possibility of it becoming money.”

I nodded.

“It’s sad,” he said. “Liska’s paintings are going to be indefinitely transferred from room to room in exchange for money for the rest of their lives. It’s not what she wanted. I can see that now.”

cf. Deborah Shophet : Chapter 19 of My Poor Life (1985) Mannequin split into 12 pieces, polyester, wood, paint.

Parry was correct but what was so exciting was that people had taken Liska’s notions far enough to attack galleries. I didn’t complain. It’s not enough that an artist should make art. They’ve got to be bent over in a gallery with their pants down before they’re properly called an artist these days. Destroying Liska’s work struck me as a positive action in a world that seemed far too tied to one general tendency. Interest in art was either commercial or snobbish and neither were satisfactory. Parry and I shared the wine, and I listened as he told me how a new impasse had been reached in the decadent society. Smokey-faced gallery owners, silver-suited investors, and all the shit and smack of the media — everyone was horsing loudly about how awful it was, while anticipating what was going to happen next, all in an effort to ramp up interest, prices and reputations.

“Liska was different,” he said, and I told Parry about the two young art-breakers and how they had been dressed as caricatures of the class they were criticising — and I wondered if I would recognise them again if I saw them.

“You’re a hero,” said Parry — and that made me sit up and take notice. In the absence of Liska I might be the next target.

Like the peaking of a sickness, Liska was returning to me. Although she’d been long washed to the mud of the Baltic, I felt better knowing that at any time, there was going to be another reminder of Liska, and that I was going to be getting a coarse kick in the throat, if not from her, then from somebody nearer to home. I felt ready for it.