She makes an entrance. Nouche. A skinny Parisian, in stockings and heels and a fluffy cardigan sitting around her pale shoulders like a lazy, longhaired cat. A hand with a pearl bracelet protectively on the suede pouch slung across her chest, its tassels dripping from her hip like deep, dark streaks of blood. The London East End gallery is a dump.
She turns heads, until she stops at the first large canvas, or, to be more precise, at Billie Jean, its painter. Billie Jean, who is slight herself in skinny jeans and a t-shirt, and vaguely glowering, shuffling from one sneakered foot to the other, is nevertheless positioned before it like a buttress, like a warhead.
Nouche stops. Instinctively, she clasps the bag, a vintage Saint-Laurent, to her chest, like a deep, dark heart, bleeding down her front. The bracelet snags on its chain, and before she knows it, pearls roll out from her, on the concrete floor, like some runaway cartoon Cinderella coach, pearls running away from her like minute, white mice, stopping only at Billie Jean's old school, sneakered feet.
Billie Jean. The canvas is huge, Willem de Kooning huge; oversized, deliberately fifties huge, like a great big painterly dildo. A large nude is depicted, her jutting breasts cut out of paint, De Kooning-style, with a knife.
It reads SHE SAYS/
I AM THE ONE.
Nouche is a painter, too. She is now forced to sink to her knees on the dirty concrete floor of a Tower Hamlets flat. The gallery. She scrambles after her pearls, scattered on the floor: her tiny mice resting now, rolled up in themselves, like infant corpses; little balls, sleeping the white sleep of death.
She gathers up the brood from between the dust and ancient blood stains, from between Billie Jean's black Converse high tops.
Ouch, she thinks, and stares at her fingernail, which glitters, a sliver of metal sticking out. What the..
She holds up the hand. Something has caught under her nail, straight into some nerve, causing her head to, momentarily, spin. She is crouched on the floor, probably cutting off the blood flow, in her knees or whatever, making her dizzier yet, making her, now, black out, an instant. She sees black.
She grasps for the floor, then, as her vision returns, without thinking, wipes her hands on a silk skirt. She brings up the aching nail, once more, and pulls out the metal, a spike, broken, a goddamn spike, she thinks, a goddamn needle.
She's sucking the finger, thinking, great. Magnifique, so here it is, at last, le goût de Sida.
The taste of Aids.
She looks up, where another hand is now descending, a small, unadorned hand, bare apart from a set of prison tattoos. Billie Jean. It grasps her under her armpit, and lifts her, like a doll, to her feet. Here she is, Nouche, suddenly upright, seven inches away from Billie's own chest, her small breasts and shoulders boxed into a faded black tee.
Nouche steps back, clutching her bag, and glances around, for a drink. A table in the corner is conspicuously stocked with bottled water and lemonade. Lemonade.
Right. Billie Jean is one of them, Omar's lot, she thinks. Omar is her boyfriend, an Ethiopian ex-crackhead poet, nine months clean and sober. Billie Jean has that same look, raw, open nerved, wearing her bruises, her battered heart on her skin, like armor.
Nouche searches the pouch, for a cigarette, lights it, and blows smoke, away from the woman before her and, accidentally, into the painting, then steps back further, still reeling on her heels. Someone appears to be handing her the pearls, and she has to clamp the cigarette between her lips, holding up both palms, and stuffing the lot into the Saint-Laurent. She looks up to find Billie Jean still standing, unruffled, before the painting, which seems to Nouche, on closer inspection, now mostly a big wet bush.
She smoothes down her cardigan, exhaling a long squirt of smoke, and straightens a pale skirt. Great, she thinks, again, staring down her front, where, before, she'd wiped her hands, and where now a bright red stain sits nested right at her cream silk crotch. Sida, she thinks. Magnifique.
Aids á la mode.
Omar. That morning, he had got up from the bed in her black walled flat, and descended her stairs, as usual, into the Brick Lane sun, his dark, nappy head appearing in the street under her window, among the white caps of the slippered men spilling from the mosque across the road. She watched from the window, as he drifted in the Sunday crowd, black sheep among the hajis. His shoulders somehow glowed, towering over the hipsters, the kids flocking down the street in silly spectacles and drainpipe jeans. He'd seemed to her to loom over the herd, elusive, a black, glowering buck leading down the lane.
He was fasting. Rammadhan. Refusing food, drink, water, refusing even to judge her, as she'd uncork a bottle at four--after staring at her own unfinished canvases through most of the afternoon. He'd read to her, instead, feeding her, with words, words she did not get, sentences, images which always, somehow failed, in her, to connect. She'd watch his face, that glow that also, always, left her sinking, feeling somehow wanting, left her guessing, for more, is that an expression, she thinks.
Guessing for more.
It's later, midnight. She's on the bed, alone, in her flat. Predictably, tonight's opening, powered by lemonade, was not of the hard partying kind. She's staring at the black wall across from the bed, staring still at her own canvas stacked against it, a painting of a tunnel with a bright blue square at the back, where the dead end wall should have been. It's the London Underground, or Hell, or whatever you would call it--Life, she thinks, tired, bored, fed up, suddenly with words altogether. She rolls down her stockings. She's on the bed, in an old french slip, the cardigan still purring around her shoulders. On the floor, her suede bag lies.
She stares at the blue square in the middle of the canvas, which is International Klein Blue, the transcendent blue of Yves Klein's Monochromes.
Yves Klein, the artist who could be seen leaping from a Paris window, swimming up in the sky smiling, like a hatchling, a baby bird, in a 1960 performance called Le Saut dans la Vide--The Leap into the Void.
Klein's blue squares, she broods, in her own painted tunnels, are La Vide--blue doorways, she thinks, to the hereafter, the afterlife, some place else--anywhere but here.
She sighs, turns from the canvas and opens a Macbook, gleaming on her black sheets. A YouTube playlist starts up in the room, eighties soul, rich and creamy like the vintage silk on her skin.
On Facebook, she skims through Omar's friends. There she is.
Trembling, Nouche goes through an album of profile pictures: photo's, paintings, snapshots.
SHE'S JUST A GIRL, a painting reads, WHO CLAIMS
There's pics of her in coveralls, before tonight's, huge canvas, the De Kooning nude, red paint streaked across the centre, the pubis, like labia lipstick.
Nouche glances back at her own bleak tunnel, the painted Underground. There must be some kind of way out of here, she thinks.
Said the joker to the thief.
There must be some way out of here, out of this life, whatever you call it, she thinks, swallowing the last dregs of claret; disgusted with words. There must be Some Place Else.
She stares at the painting, at the blue square in the center, then returns to the MacBook. Anita Baker sings, Caught up in the Rapture of Love.
Nouche flicks through the FaceBook album once more. There she is, in profile pictures, in red streaked coveralls, painting the words
SHE'S JUST A GIRL
The bell rings.
Omar trots up the stairs, carrying another book under his arm.
Rumi, he gestures, as Anita Baker's last notes die away in the room. The sufi master, he says, as she pours herself a glass.
She sits brooding on the bed, still gazing at the canvas, the tunnel, the pure blue heart in the middle, true blue, she thinks.
The blood in our bodies carries, Omar is reading.
A living luminous flow.
She remembers the profile pictures: Billie Jean in blood red coveralls, Billie Jean in shades.
I AM THE ONE
But watch when it spills out, Omar reads.
And soaks into the ground.
Nouche stares into her tunnel, across from the bed. The black walls converge in the blue heart, the true heart of the painting. There is nothing there, she thinks suddenly, staring at her own work, and panicking. There's nothing there. No god. No Savior. Nothing beside the room, the born-again, ranting boyfriend. This is it.
Omar lived in flats like that, like tonight's gallery, she thinks, half his life. Tower Hamlets apartments, eighth floor flats with nothing there. Bare rooms, stripped down to the concrete floors, black tunnels full of junkies, of people curled up in themselves like balls, like infant corpses, where you'd go from wall to wall and the the only sound would be the carpet of needles splintering under your soles.
That is how speech does, Omar reads.
Overflowing from silence.
Nouche is sick with dread. How can anyone live. How can anyone live this way. There cannot be a god.
Silk on one side, Omar is saying
Cheap, striped canvas on the other.
He lays down the book. This is it, she keeps thinking. There's nothing there. Just this room, and this gentle, born again buck, his black sheep's hair glowing, always just out of reach, leading where she doubts she'll follow.
Speech wells up in her mind, just words, out of nothing, leading nowhere. This is how he looked, they go. The Son of Man.
There's nothing there, she thinks, rebuking her own words, her speech. No Son, no Man, just this. The room, her ranting crackhead boyfriend. Her own failed canvas. Her pearls, stuffed into a Saint-Laurent pouch, crushed in a heap on the floor. She is suddenly weak with grief. She cannot love this man. May not, will not. She doesn't know him. He'll leave her behind. There's nothing there, she is alone, her heart, her loves, that lifeless brood, scattered around her on the floor, small corpses she never even managed to conceive.
She too will die.
She'll disappear, into the Void.
As always, this knowledge breaks her down. She lowers her gaze from the painting, lowers her knees, drops the glass, her legs splayed on the sheet. She says nothing. In many ways, she feels, her body is a corpse in rigor mortis, going through the motions. Void already.
Still she doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. All she did was point. Two bare feet, pointing out la Vide on the sheet. She feels so goddamn sad.
It's Omar, who takes the plunge. Omar, who, as it turns out, loves her, all of her, but most of all those pearly, pointing toes. He is the one. He leaps for the void, like a baby, like a newborn, swimming out into the sky.
