a real city came close to grief.
But then, as she watched from the hallway and plumbed her son’s daydreaming, Alice had been astounded to find him seeding the Canterbury Plains with glass towers and shopping malls, buildings with crested eagles on top, lifts that ran up tower blocks like lit glass balls, and atriums filled with silver trees and tame Amazon parrots.Alice steps back from the canvas and only now, years later, is it clear to her the space her son’s phantom city has occupied. She leans forward, and with her forefinger touches the paint of a tree doubled over from the wind. She finds it hard and dry.
Now, reaching for her paintbrush, Alice begins to reconstruct the tree into something tall and straight and the colour of silver. Now Alice drifts across the city and paints over the empty Theosophical Society building a modern office tower of granite and black glass. Where George Burt delivered her mother, Alice creates a large hospital. A block away, she paints a skyscraper that rises majestically and competitively with the Alps. Between this point on the canvas and the old theosophists’ meeting place, Alice sets about laying down a mesh of shadowed streets and corner pavements splashed with sunlight and lunchtime crowds. She adds in theatres, restaurants, taverns, and in the midst of this city, this phantom city of Mark’s longing, Alice allows for a pocket handkerchief of a park where frisbees float over meadows and young couples lie stapled together. She allows the funny old Colonial replica of the Globe to remain, but over the Harry Wills Theatre she paints the words ‘Restaurant and Museum’—outside its doors, a daub of black for the busker, gold for the trombone.
At the port end of town, quite near the stone steps cut into the wharf where Richard once hoisted up his boatloads of cray, Alice places an opera house and, near it, a fish restaurant and an aquarium filled with performing dolphins and seals for the tourists. Milling among the crowd over the ‘historic’flagstone area are hotdog vendors, jugglers, pickpockets, thieves of all descriptions. There are yellow cabs, policemen on horseback, a flotilla carrying a beauty-pageant queen. There are marching girls, all with their heads tilted in the same direction. A gunman draws back a curtain in a high-up window masked by a blaze of reflected sunlight. Along another darker canyon there is a candle-lit procession. Over the church hovers Alice’s paintbrush. She hesitates to demolish it because the city will need a soup kitchen for the lives stranded short of the promised land.
Among a cluster of city buildings, she sees one particular striving tower and is about to add a spire when, to her surprise, Alice recognises the Empire State Building. And here, too, is the Chrysler Building with its distinctive gold-chromed capital. And those tenement buildings—from where did they spring? Now she notices the maple trees in what can only be Central Park. When the paintbrush slides from her fingers she does not bother to pick it up. It can wait. She stares at her painting—not quite able to believe what she has done. Up until now she believed this place to be her own sovereign territory. She realises something else as well. Something equally disheartening. She has found out her son. She has located his dreams. Now she picks up her paintbrush and returns to her plagiarised city. This time her eye is drawn to a small inconclusive feature. She can just see a couple of flecks of black and gold outside the old Harry Wills Theatre—and if she squeezes her eyes tight she can make out the beginnings of something quite new and vital … She will give the canvasanother hour to dry, by which time she will have worked up her base, and then she will start on the no-name rose. She wonders if her son will remember.
the simpsons in russia
Sometimes they held hands, but not very often. As far as Mr Simpson was concerned holding hands was ridiculous, and his wife
But then, as she watched from the hallway and plumbed her son’s daydreaming, Alice had been astounded to find him seeding the Canterbury Plains with glass towers and shopping malls, buildings with crested eagles on top, lifts that ran up tower blocks like lit glass balls, and atriums filled with silver trees and tame Amazon parrots.Alice steps back from the canvas and only now, years later, is it clear to her the space her son’s phantom city has occupied. She leans forward, and with her forefinger touches the paint of a tree doubled over from the wind. She finds it hard and dry.
Now, reaching for her paintbrush, Alice begins to reconstruct the tree into something tall and straight and the colour of silver. Now Alice drifts across the city and paints over the empty Theosophical Society building a modern office tower of granite and black glass. Where George Burt delivered her mother, Alice creates a large hospital. A block away, she paints a skyscraper that rises majestically and competitively with the Alps. Between this point on the canvas and the old theosophists’ meeting place, Alice sets about laying down a mesh of shadowed streets and corner pavements splashed with sunlight and lunchtime crowds. She adds in theatres, restaurants, taverns, and in the midst of this city, this phantom city of Mark’s longing, Alice allows for a pocket handkerchief of a park where frisbees float over meadows and young couples lie stapled together. She allows the funny old Colonial replica of the Globe to remain, but over the Harry Wills Theatre she paints the words ‘Restaurant and Museum’—outside its doors, a daub of black for the busker, gold for the trombone.
At the port end of town, quite near the stone steps cut into the wharf where Richard once hoisted up his boatloads of cray, Alice places an opera house and, near it, a fish restaurant and an aquarium filled with performing dolphins and seals for the tourists. Milling among the crowd over the ‘historic’flagstone area are hotdog vendors, jugglers, pickpockets, thieves of all descriptions. There are yellow cabs, policemen on horseback, a flotilla carrying a beauty-pageant queen. There are marching girls, all with their heads tilted in the same direction. A gunman draws back a curtain in a high-up window masked by a blaze of reflected sunlight. Along another darker canyon there is a candle-lit procession. Over the church hovers Alice’s paintbrush. She hesitates to demolish it because the city will need a soup kitchen for the lives stranded short of the promised land.
Among a cluster of city buildings, she sees one particular striving tower and is about to add a spire when, to her surprise, Alice recognises the Empire State Building. And here, too, is the Chrysler Building with its distinctive gold-chromed capital. And those tenement buildings—from where did they spring? Now she notices the maple trees in what can only be Central Park. When the paintbrush slides from her fingers she does not bother to pick it up. It can wait. She stares at her painting—not quite able to believe what she has done. Up until now she believed this place to be her own sovereign territory. She realises something else as well. Something equally disheartening. She has found out her son. She has located his dreams. Now she picks up her paintbrush and returns to her plagiarised city. This time her eye is drawn to a small inconclusive feature. She can just see a couple of flecks of black and gold outside the old Harry Wills Theatre—and if she squeezes her eyes tight she can make out the beginnings of something quite new and vital … She will give the canvasanother hour to dry, by which time she will have worked up her base, and then she will start on the no-name rose. She wonders if her son will remember.
the simpsons in russia
Sometimes they held hands, but not very often. As far as Mr Simpson was concerned holding hands was ridiculous, and his wife
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