the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, or one of those places.’
‘I am on the fringes of erotomania in a way,’ Walter volunteered. He was lifting his sweater and fumbling with the waistband of his trousers. He pouched out a couple of inches of peachsilk between the buttons of his braces. ‘It seemed natural to me that when my wife died last year I should wear her lovely silk knickers under my Y-fronts, summer and winter. I suppose it was intended as a tribute to her. I don’t know anyone else who would do this! I remember her every day because of it.’
I waited for Ashley to chip in with something about private memory becoming largely subsumed in public spectacle, one of his specialised subjects, but he was busy keying data into a palmtop PC. ‘Flong pages. Pie-ups. Moodies. Low-mist inks,’ it said on the liquid crystal display. A member of the bar staff brought Walter his dinner – a white plate brimming with off-white foodstuffs: boiled potatoes, white loose-skinned chicken, pale beans sitting in a pale cornflour gravy, which the barman looped a trail of as he put the plate down.
Walter unfurled the utensils and tucked the red brewery napkin into the neck of his shirt, and we all involuntarily stopped to watch him eating, all projecting him into the same unhappy future of rubber undersheets, plastic bibs, maggot-infested leg wounds caused by the long-term neglect of the profit-creamers in charge of the private death-with-dignity institution where he will linger until the day comes for them to pat him on the face with a shovel. (Walter is well over retirement age but, on a paper where the average age on the editorial side has dipped to thirty-four, having somebody with Walter’s road-miles around, as they expressed it to him, provides a bit of much-needed bottom. A few years earlier, they had worked out that it would cost them more to sack him and make a redundancy payment than to go on forking out for his salary.)
Guessing the tack our thoughts were taking (it couldn’t have been difficult), Walter said: ‘Being old doesn’t necessarily mean a life that is sick, senile, sexless, spent or sessile. Spare me the caregivers and the nurturers … Don’t mind me.’ Walter lifted the gravied chicken leg off the plate with the fingers of both hands. As he opened his mouth to receive it his face became simultaneously death-like and gruesomely vivid, aureoled in the white light of a motor-driven Nikon.
It was like time-to-go-time, when the house lights show up all the cigarette burns and smashed glasses, and the tide-lines of furtively discarded crap. There were islands of tough marsh grass on Walter’s cheekbones that hadn’t been discernible before; tundra in his nose; gristly knobs and plaques and bosses of flesh; deltic tangles of veins; white matter creaming in the corners of his curdled eyes. For a strobic second, he looked like a carbuncular, Arcimboldo portrait of himself, composed entirely of artichokes and radishes, celeriac and beets, plantains and ugly tubers. Chicken grease coursed through the clumps of whiskers he had missed while shaving, came together with saliva and tertiary rivulets of grease and drooled off the end of his chin.
Walter had become an exhibit in Heath Hawkins’s ongoing project which concentrates on media reptiles drinking and eating – ‘on the gargle and in the trough’ – and in general succeeds, as he had just succeeded with Walter, in making us look authentically reptilian: thickened skins; orbital protuberant eyes; flicking fly-catcher tongues. He believes the pictures symbolise the human appetite for the morbid, the salacious and the horrific which we are here to stoke up and feed.
‘The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things,’ Hawkins said. ‘Isn’t that what they say, Walter?’
‘Heath Hawkins.’ Ashley was excited. He had what appeared to be a rose-pink aura round his lanky frame. ‘Specialities: bird decapitators, puppy stranglers, woman
‘I am on the fringes of erotomania in a way,’ Walter volunteered. He was lifting his sweater and fumbling with the waistband of his trousers. He pouched out a couple of inches of peachsilk between the buttons of his braces. ‘It seemed natural to me that when my wife died last year I should wear her lovely silk knickers under my Y-fronts, summer and winter. I suppose it was intended as a tribute to her. I don’t know anyone else who would do this! I remember her every day because of it.’
I waited for Ashley to chip in with something about private memory becoming largely subsumed in public spectacle, one of his specialised subjects, but he was busy keying data into a palmtop PC. ‘Flong pages. Pie-ups. Moodies. Low-mist inks,’ it said on the liquid crystal display. A member of the bar staff brought Walter his dinner – a white plate brimming with off-white foodstuffs: boiled potatoes, white loose-skinned chicken, pale beans sitting in a pale cornflour gravy, which the barman looped a trail of as he put the plate down.
Walter unfurled the utensils and tucked the red brewery napkin into the neck of his shirt, and we all involuntarily stopped to watch him eating, all projecting him into the same unhappy future of rubber undersheets, plastic bibs, maggot-infested leg wounds caused by the long-term neglect of the profit-creamers in charge of the private death-with-dignity institution where he will linger until the day comes for them to pat him on the face with a shovel. (Walter is well over retirement age but, on a paper where the average age on the editorial side has dipped to thirty-four, having somebody with Walter’s road-miles around, as they expressed it to him, provides a bit of much-needed bottom. A few years earlier, they had worked out that it would cost them more to sack him and make a redundancy payment than to go on forking out for his salary.)
Guessing the tack our thoughts were taking (it couldn’t have been difficult), Walter said: ‘Being old doesn’t necessarily mean a life that is sick, senile, sexless, spent or sessile. Spare me the caregivers and the nurturers … Don’t mind me.’ Walter lifted the gravied chicken leg off the plate with the fingers of both hands. As he opened his mouth to receive it his face became simultaneously death-like and gruesomely vivid, aureoled in the white light of a motor-driven Nikon.
It was like time-to-go-time, when the house lights show up all the cigarette burns and smashed glasses, and the tide-lines of furtively discarded crap. There were islands of tough marsh grass on Walter’s cheekbones that hadn’t been discernible before; tundra in his nose; gristly knobs and plaques and bosses of flesh; deltic tangles of veins; white matter creaming in the corners of his curdled eyes. For a strobic second, he looked like a carbuncular, Arcimboldo portrait of himself, composed entirely of artichokes and radishes, celeriac and beets, plantains and ugly tubers. Chicken grease coursed through the clumps of whiskers he had missed while shaving, came together with saliva and tertiary rivulets of grease and drooled off the end of his chin.
Walter had become an exhibit in Heath Hawkins’s ongoing project which concentrates on media reptiles drinking and eating – ‘on the gargle and in the trough’ – and in general succeeds, as he had just succeeded with Walter, in making us look authentically reptilian: thickened skins; orbital protuberant eyes; flicking fly-catcher tongues. He believes the pictures symbolise the human appetite for the morbid, the salacious and the horrific which we are here to stoke up and feed.
‘The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things,’ Hawkins said. ‘Isn’t that what they say, Walter?’
‘Heath Hawkins.’ Ashley was excited. He had what appeared to be a rose-pink aura round his lanky frame. ‘Specialities: bird decapitators, puppy stranglers, woman
Similar Books
