Flock of Shadows Read online

  She wasn’t in the second or first room either – the woman, not the gargoyle. Where had she gone? I retraced my steps to Thursday. Through the exit to the left to the vivid red of Friday. She wasn’t there, nor did she hang around for the weekend.

  At the far end the revolving door slowly moved round of its own empty volition, the glass panels glittering and flashing as each one in turn caught the light and reflected back upon me.

  The museum seemed, and certainly sounded, empty. Why hadn’t I spoken to her when I had the chance? And now you’ll never see her again. A moment of eternal, existential angst. Ah well. It’s your own fault, for being a murderer. Perhaps if I hadn’t brutally killed someone in a moment of sudden, scarlet insanity, you’d have been able to speak to her; able to be casual. Like normal people. You just needed to gird your lions – your loins – too late now.

  I looked at a skeleton welcoming an eagle into its home with exaggerated formality. Next to him, a bowler-hatted fox in a railway carriage looked surprised to have just pulled up next to the Sphinx. Time to go.

  The walk home, the nostalgia for earlier decades, stripping themselves like bark from each tree I passed. The beautiful women I knew and courted in my 20s, the velvet-trousered artist, the potential in front of me, and a sexual life opening up like a glittering bowl of fruit. Get a grip, Stef. That phrase, ‘empty volition’, revolved in my head. It doesn’t mean anything, and yet it makes perfect sense.

  Perhaps I should go back to exhibition openings again – is it more suspicious to disappear, than to carry on as normal? Does it make the knock at the door more likely, or less? On the way through the gates and onto the Reeperbahn, I seriously contemplated it. But on balance – a firework shot across the road in front of me, skimmed by a high teenager – it would only lead to trouble. People would ask, why did you stop painting – it wouldn’t take long to crack.

  The firework exploded with a clang on a steel bin. A police truck ambled past, seeing nothing. I glanced back to the park and saw the squirrel again, a streak of red through trees like paint bleeding in from someone else’s picture. A red squirrel in the heart of the city; who would believe it?

  On the way up to the flat I paused to pick up one of the stale brünchens the baker gives me if I come in after 6, and ate it on the second floor, pausing to watch a mist descend across the wasteland. Half an hour later I realised I was cold and looked for my key.

  He thought he saw the woman several times. Twice on the street, she was standing in the mid-distance, or on the other side of the road. He saw her in the corner of his eye, almost illuminated, but when he turned to look, there was nothing but passers-by and street hoardings. Everyone seemed to have purpose: collars turned up, newspapers rolled, steam streaming from nostrils like ponies hurrying.

  He saw her once more by the entrance to the S-bahn before deciding with some irritation to rid her from his imagination. He was disoriented, as if unsure where he was on the familiar street, even though he’d lived on various roads leading away from it for much of his life. He was as far as the police station before noticing he’d gone a block too far, and retraced his steps.

  He thought about her again on Monday when, trying to reinvigorate interest in work, he unlocked the studio and pulled the dustsheet from his current restoration. When Stefan claimed to have left painting behind, perhaps he was being a little melodramatic with you. He does that; it’s like his coat with the upturned collar, it’s like reminiscing about velvet trousers. It’s true that he isn’t currently painting, but he hasn’t even put his painting equipment away; it still litters his studio, which is still called a studio, and he now restores paintings for a living. Quite a good living, it has to be said.

  Today he’s working on a vast, long Venice landscape, a Canaletto wannabe, and the most interesting thing about it is its frame. Ornate, detailed and humorous, Stefan often finds his attention straying to its curlicues when he is supposed to be working on a flat gondola or a bendy barber’s pole. He feels, and this is his artist’s posturing again, that he’s worthy of better. But his clients recognise his skills, and because of his minor local fame, he’s well-known and gets the work.

  The tiny figures are the only parts of Reflection by the Doge’s Palace that interest him; their faces pinkly vague and sketched with two or three brushstrokes, the amorphous features giving space for interpretation, for curiosity. A gondolier stares indulgently, or perhaps patronisingly, or maybe lecherously, at his passengers. A tourist looks with interest at the buildings, or in confusion at where he is, or disapprovingly at the excessive display of wealth. Women on the quay, hands on hips; bored, or curious, or disgusted by the sewers. Or are they flirting with the gilded men opposite?

  Whatever they’re doing, they’ve all been coated in a thick sticky varnish, sometime in the late nineteenth century and removing this is the bulk of Stefan’s task. Everyone was at it at the time, protecting the paintings for future generations, they thought; but the varnish evolves from transparent to sepia over the decades. The result is countless paintings that now squint on the world through a brown, toffee-wrapping filter. And despite knowing how much difference the restoration process can make, Stefan is still frequently surprised by what emerges from his work. Indiscriminate greys on dresses become bright viridian greens. Dark swarthy gypsies transform into fresh porcelain beauties. Occasionally, brand new figures appear from the murk – a black dog, or a shadowy companion.

  There are different techniques for certain colours, because the pigments respond to the cleaning chemicals in different ways; so Stefan addresses a particular block of colour at a time. One process to lift the varnish, another to clean the colour, and only then does he take the opportunity to repair cracks or damage where appropriate. He saves these ‘fun bits’. It breaks the day up, keeps him going, and the job briefly becomes more art than science. How much is too much? When does conservation become re-making, when is an invisible line crossed where he’s imposing his own creativity on the artist’s?

  Sometimes the owners of the paintings (it’s usually museums, but there are a surprising number of private owners hidden away behind ordinary facades) ask him to do everything he can to improve them; particularly if the artist isn’t well-known, or the painting badly damaged. The public-owned galleries, on the other hand, only want the barest minimum done. Remove the varnish; detach dirt; err on the side of caution.

  The work is slow, tedious. Punishment for being an unpunished murderer. And by embracing the boredom rather than resisting it, he can reach a level of serenity and calm that might be described as happiness; were it not for the nagging sense that he’s not doing what he should be doing in life. You were a highly regarded painter, he tells himself; you could have become a great one. Well tough; being a murderer has changed things. And restoration is a more nurturing career for someone still recovering from trauma. This serenity can last hours, before the searing red images flash on his skull again and the head-in-hands screaming leads his neighbours, above below and sideways, to conclude a maniac lives next door, and/or someone with a very colourful sex life.

  A coded knock on the door – always knock with a pattern, Stefan has told his friends, although he hasn’t told them why (they just think he’s eccentric) – and he is glad of the excuse to pull the dustsheet over the painting and send the harbour into night-time.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Jan asked.

  Stefan shrugged. ‘Like the boring bits on a jigsaw. Too much sky. Water. Too much caramel wedding cake.’

  Jan raised his eyebrows at the brown, painty dustsheet. ‘Eh?’

  ‘I mean Doge’s Palace.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Jan munched on a brünchen. ‘Someone’s just given me this, can you believe it?’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Bit stale. Still, it’s free.’ He ate it valiantly. They went to a bar o
n the Silbersack.

  In the morning he accepted two offers of work and spent a further five or six hours beside the Venice harbour. Around lunchtime an unexpected burst of sun broke through the rain and lit the eagles on pillars, their gold suddenly restored to brightness. Stefan adjusted the blinds and returned to a particularly wonky boat, which when he looked at it kept a figure on the quayside just in the corner of his eye.

  Each time he focused on the gondola, the figure resolved itself into the woman from the museum. She smiled quizzically, beckoning him forward. Glancing towards her, however, she assumed her former faceless, plastic gawp. Back to the gondola and there she was again, half-smiling, almost insolent. Look at me, she seemed to say. Look at me.

  Just forget about her, he told himself. But she remained, indisputably her, as long as she was on the edge of his vision, resuming her anonymity whenever he looked towards her. Eventually he gave up and went out.

  She was in the street too. I pulled my coat collar up and zig-zagged, but she was still there. Everywhere I go, she follows me. She appeared between the eaves of a building and this time I was sure of it; but when I looked there was no one there. Just men in grey coats, walking stiffly and holding umbrellas, despite the fact it was sunny and relatively warm. It’s November, so we behave for November, and we shiver in our coats.

  I went back to the museum via St. Pauli station, one of the two guarding ogres of the Reeperbahn, the other being the S-bahn at the far end of the long street. All stations are ogres, aren’t they? They squat and loom and charge a toll if you want to pass. They roar. They echo. In the lost mists of time, there’s even a legend that they puffed smoke.

  Ornate lobby. Late deco pillars, the narrow strips of stone piercing the roof as much as holding it up. This time I hung around in the 20th century, hoping to see her between the Beatles buying leather jackets and high-buttoned coats. Air-raid sirens swept me past Hitler’s glass stare and then back, back, tumbling towards the other great fire that destroyed much of Hamburg the first time round, centuries ago.

  Souvenirs that were a commercial success at the time: remains of wine glasses seared together by the immense heat, looking as though they’d bubbled from the lip of a volcano. Coins fused into each other, their colours green and peacock and violet. Amorphous jet objects. Strangely ominous jagged lumps of matter, the product of a diseased imagination or a late-morning nightmare.

  She wasn’t there. But I saw her twice on the way home. And she was still in the painting. A gondolier grinned leeringly. I tried to sleep, and I stepped through her dreams.

  I finished the painting with less than my usual perfectionism. I just wanted to see the back of it; I hope they still pay me. I made my way to Jan’s shop to see if he fancied a few drinks. He looked up from an engraving he was cataloguing and nodded.

  ‘Of course. What’s brought this on?’ (Usually it’s Jan who has to persuade me out.)

  ‘I’ve got to tell someone,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me about what?’

  I told him. He laughed. ‘Ghosts now, is it?’

  ‘I think so. I see her everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere?’ You can always rely on Jan’s precise mind. He laid a ruler on the catalogue, leant back on his stool and winced.

  ‘Street corners. Up and down the Reeperbahn. It’s as if she knows me. I’ve only met her once, but she smiled as if she recognised me. She knew me.’

  ‘I see. You’re working too hard, is all it is. It’s happened before.’ Jan heard his bell – he must be psychic, I never hear it – and went through the curtain to an overcoated punter browsing through the racks. Pudgy, 50s, grizzly grey, tobacco fingers. His glasses steamed up as the warm air made itself at home on his face.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Well…’ said the man, indicating a 17th century engraving of Priapus. Slight American accent, that he tried to disguise. Why? We like Americans here. Assumed guilt on his ample shoulders?

  ‘I guess I was wondering where the… good stuff is.’

  ‘This is the good stuff,’ said Jan.

  Ah well. No customers all day, and then the usual. He walked to the counter, enjoying the pitch even though he knew nothing would come of it. ‘Many of these come from – you know… the secret museum under the Vatican.’ He made his voice inaudible on the last word and just mouthed it. The punter looked at him Americanly.

  ‘And over there – that’s the secret wartime stash of you-know-who.’

  ‘No, I don’t know who,’ said the customer. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I want tits and cunts.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jan said, affecting sadness. ‘Well this,’ he spread a hand at his empire, ‘is much better than tits and… things. This,’ he paused grandly, ‘is a pornotheka.’

  ‘A whatica?’

  ‘An antique one.’

  Silence. The silence of a traveller, at sea in a land of strangeness.

  ‘Erotica,’ Jan explained. ‘You saw the sign?’

  ‘Sign? They said any of these shops would sort me out.’

  ‘Try the shops on either side. Or opposite. Any of them, really.’

  ‘Right. Thanks very much.’ The man tipped a finger salute to his head and turned. ‘No offence,’ he said as he reached the door.

  ‘Not here, no.’

  Jan as he came back through the curtain: ‘They have money, don’t they, Americans.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘A shame really.’ We reminisced about how things weren’t as good as they were in the old days, as the rain drummed on the skylight.

  ‘Of course, the internet has screwed everything up.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Where’s the excitement, if you’ve got it on a plate? You need to go and look for it, that’s what makes it exciting.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘No suppose about it. I mean if a woman just stands in front of you on the bus and takes all her clothes off, there and then… it’s not exciting, is it?’

  ‘I think I’d find it exciting.’

  ‘No, but you know what I mean.’

  I nodded and commiserated. You have to support a friend in his hour of need. The rain rattled more fiercely, joining Jan in his annoyance.

  ‘I don’t understand why you gave up painting in the first place,’ he said.

  Being a murderer, I couldn’t answer. I just made more sympathetic noises.

  The rain drummed erratically, like Ringo. ‘Shall we go out then?’

  We had a few rums, but neither of us was really in the mood. I drifted back to the 90s, or was it even the 80s. I was in my old studio six stops out; larger, but not much vibe, no sense of being where the action is. Commissions at one end and what I wanted to do at the other. If I did four hours of commission in the morning, I allowed myself the afternoon to paint what I liked. The discipline; I am nostalgic for it.

  But what does it matter now, being a murderer and all that. I had long hair and a moustache; we all thought it was still the 60s, we looked bloody ridiculous actually. I destroyed most of the photos, but apparently people put them up on something called Facebook. I dare not go near it; I couldn’t face the horror.

  And I can see, as I walk round the flat in my mind, the portraits of Clara that adorn – the word is a cliché now but with Clara they really did adorn, she was adornable – every wall. I painted her from every angle, and stuck the pictures in every available space. Portraits; full-length, clothed, nude, a bit nude, a bit clothed. Full-length; in a hallway, on a beach, in a hammock, on a boat, jumping from a bed, mirrored. Dancing, joking, laughing, drinking. Kissing her own arms, her legs. I shake now to think of it. Obsession would not do it justice. She overwhelmed. She could construct and destroy me in an evening. Seeing her talk to someone else; it was like being ripped open. Smiling, and it wasn’t at me; I couldn’t cope.

  Not t
hat any of this is an excuse. As a murderer, I can’t defend myself. (How would that go? I’m sorry, I won’t murder her again.) No – there is no starting point; only endless finishing points, all of them the same.

  And as Jan got us another rum (why am I drinking this? Why am I even here? Because I’m a murderer and I can’t go home) fast-forward, as one does in one’s mind on rum, to the last six months, the giant unfinished canvas of Clara’s unbelievable face, dominating the studio. Floor to ceiling, a square of beauty to rival Krakow’s Rynek, Trafalgar, that square in Vienna. Two hundred, three hundred hours I spent on it. I never finished it, I even thought at the time perhaps I would never finish it. I would keep reaching for perfection until one or the other of us died. As, indeed, turned out to be the case.

  And she came round, that Wednesday afternoon, it snowed, it hailed, and said she hated it. No sign of encouragement; no forgiveness for it being incomplete. Just, ‘I hate it.’ Well, you know what happened. I don’t need to illustrate – ha ha! Sorry. I gave up my career as a result. No excuses. But those hundreds of hours, circling perfection, trying to land on it like a gnat dizzied by a garden; you can understand, perhaps, even if you can’t forgive?

  Palette knives everywhere; knives from dinner; even the carving knife was to hand. The perils of the open plan kitchen/diner/studio. Artists should never be allowed artists’ flats. They don’t think about this in Ikea. But there you go, I’m making excuses again.

  There was fumbling, I remember that, the brushes dancing and rattling like snare sticks, the pots of turps bouncing and falling to the floor, the sickly smell enveloping the room. Something about a Stanley knife. Something about Clara saying she didn’t want to see me again. Something about the giganticness of the painting. The metallic yellow of the knife contrasting with the purples and whey tones of the portrait, and me lunging towards her, sidestepping the painting. It was a stressful week, I’ll admit that, as I go over and over those thirty seconds and probably will do for the rest of my life, or for as long as my mind holds out, whichever is longer. I spent so long on that damned painting that at the moment when the knife ripped into flesh and skin gushed blood, I no longer knew which was the real Clara and which was the portrait.