57.

□ The next morning was wet and clear in Aberdeen. A pale multi-coloured dappling covered the granite. At the harbour-mouth one rudder slowed and the ferry keeled to face the north, and the feeling was magnificent, as if I were allowed to look at my hometown one last time, broadside.

I had slept the night in the car and it lay parked on Pocra Quay. I guess the car was the last thing I said goodbye to. Facing the turrets of the town and the plain rail of the horizon, just in that second, clarity popped up and the blessings of my sins filled me, as pungent as an armful of freshly cut grass.

No one’s espousing the values of naivety — it’s quite the opposite. The world I looked upon from the ferry was built by honest people, and who could deny them a right to the art on their walls? Not me, I thought, and that was why I had to go.

What were my sins?

Stealing Mr Sharma’s Mercedes had been a sin. Never steal an art patron’s Mercedes. Of the various paths taken by man, this is the one most likely to inspire damnation. Strike a bargain, come to a covenant, concede, accept and recognise your patron’s general argument, but never steal his Mercedes. Such a theft will upset the already tangled process of natural evolution as the art patron will never be able to say anything nice about your work again. Your average art patron (higher ratio of body volume to body surface — body parts and head of a gorilla — genitals of a whale) cannot adapt to any other vehicle than a Mercedes, and will feel trapped and helpless in the lower organism of a public bus.

What other sins did I commit?

I forsook — nice Biblical word that — I forsook the comfort of a paid job to be an artist, abandoning human ritual for the excesses of drawing and painting. I attempted to atone for this by carrying out Liska’s wishes, by staying around after she had died, to make sure her legacy was safely destroyed. Paid work is a thermal reservoir of comfort where the wretched relax while artists and writers do all the real work. In that reservoir of lunch, pension plans and free pens, I could not settle because — and I should be frank and plain — I could not take the boredom.

I stood on the deck of the Shetland ferry, amused that I had gone so far only to end up back there. I was glad I’d stayed around to see Liska’s paintings demolished and I maintain that she would have enjoyed it. She would have been delighted that some of her work had been reclaimed from the art-liking crowd and pleased that they hadn’t been allowed to go on the market.

Then, as ever, I wanted to be with Liska. From the front of the ferry I tried to work out where Liska had jumped, that one irrecoverable point that led to her new resting place, but the sea was eternal, a pale grey nothing. The air was marginally warmer than it had been the previous month, but its essential roughness was the same.

Inside the body of the boat, the bar was not the same. Around the walls of the bar and on the old banquettes, the islanders sat in a pucker of dark beards while their dogs worried like children beneath the chairs. Men and wives supported each other on the horizontal retail of the sea bar and the heavy musculature of Viking lorry-drivers blocked the fruit machines. Different bar staff, similar set up, so I began to drink and waited to see who would speak to me before I left for the bottom of the sea.

But nobody spoke to me — and so there was no redemption and no life-saving remedy. The barman wasn’t even friendly and so the unmistakable signature of the rum began to depress me, and I knew less of my surroundings and more of my intentions.

There were no notes nor final words, no insistent urge to shirk or lounge. I saw Liska in the radiant calm of her new home as if she were standing on the edge of some peaceful and world-ending wave. Human voices spoke in the bar and others sang country songs on the speakers — country feelings, country people, and I had nothing more to say than —

Any more sins?

None at all, I answered.

I may leave through the waters drunkly, I thought, but I’ll do so without sin.

In my pockets I had several scraps of painting ready for Liska as a present. The scraps I had taken had been of a flower and had been destroyed in Mr Sharma’s studio. Like the many flowers Liska had painted, this had been a succulent, one that had lived underground. The tops of the flower’s transparent leaves poked through the sand like pebbles, and light passed down their corpuscles and into the bulb. If you looked at that painting you could see that Liska had given the flower a facial expression and that a flower really has a face.

It was not a joke. Forget the modern menace and open the door to something that in rational terms is insecure and speculative. You would look at that painting and think to yourself: the flower is like I am. The roots reminded the viewer of a lung, or of the branches of a tree, the point being that these were dependable shapes, forms that protect everything. This ideal of equilibrium had existed in the studio, but the painting had been seen by several people and their eyes had broken it. I had destroyed the painting for this reason — but I’d kept several scraps for the sea — just in case Liska should wish a keepsake.