Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Read online

  I put the drawing up on my bedroom wall, where I could see it from my bed.

  After our third date (it was to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) I came back to school with bad news: Cassandra’s family was going to Canada (a place that sounded more convincing to my ears than America), something to do with her father’s job, and I would not see her for a long time. We hadn’t really broken up, but we were being practical: those were the days when transatlantic phone calls were too expensive for teenagers. It was over.

  I was sad. Everyone noticed how sad I was. They said they would have loved to have met her, and maybe when she comes back at Christmas? I was confident that by Christmas, she would be forgotten.

  She was. By Christmas I was going out with Nikki Blevins and the only evidence that Cassandra had ever been a part of my life was her name, written on a couple of my exercise books, and the pencil drawing of her on my bedroom wall, with “Cassandra, February 19th, 1985” written underneath it.

  When my mother sold the riding stable, the drawing was lost in the move. I was at art college at the time, considered my old pencil drawings as embarrassing as the fact that I had once invented a girlfriend, and did not care.

  I do not believe I had thought of Cassandra for twenty years.

  MY MOTHER SOLD THE stables, the attached house and the meadows to a property developer, who built a housing estate where we had once lived, and, as part of the deal, gave her a small, detached house at the end of Seton Close. I visit her at least once a fortnight, arriving on Friday night, leaving Sunday morning, a routine as regular as the grandmother clock in the hall.

  Mother is concerned that I am happy in life. She has started to mention that various of her friends have eligible daughters. This trip we had an extremely embarrassing conversation that began with her asking if I would like her to introduce me to the organist at her church, a very nice young man of about my age.

  “Mother. I’m not gay.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it, dear. All sorts of people do it. They even get married. Well, not proper marriage, but it’s the same thing.”

  “I’m still not gay.”

  “I just thought, still not married, and the painting and the modeling.”

  “I’ve had girlfriends, Mummy. You’ve even met some of them.”

  “Nothing that ever stuck, dear. I just thought there might be something you wanted to tell me.”

  “I’m not gay, Mother. I would tell you if I was.” And then I said, “I snogged Tim Carter at a party when I was at art college but we were drunk and it never went beyond that.”

  She pursed her lips. “That’s quite enough of that, young man.” And then, changing the subject, as if to get rid of an unpleasant taste in her mouth, she said, “You’ll never guess who I bumped into in Tesco’s last week.”

  “No, I won’t. Who?”

  “Your old girlfriend. Your first girlfriend, I should say.”

  “Nikki Blevins? Hang on, she’s married, isn’t she? Nikki Woodbridge?”

  “The one before her, dear. Cassandra. I was behind her, in the line. I would have been ahead of her, but I forgot that I needed cream for the berries today, so I went back to get it, and she was in front of me, and I knew her face was familiar. At first, I thought she was Joanie Simmond’s youngest, the one with the speech disorder, what we used to call a stammer but apparently you can’t say that anymore, but then I thought, I know where I know that face from, it was over your bed for five years, of course I said, ‘It’s not Cassandra, is it?’ and she said, ‘It is,’ and I said, ‘You’ll laugh when I say this, but I’m Stuart Innes’s mum.’ She says, ‘Stuart Innes?’ and her face lit up. Well, she hung around while I was putting my groceries in my shopping bag, and she said she’d already been in touch with your friend Jeremy Porter on Bookface, and they’d been talking about you—”

  “You mean Facebook? She was talking to Scallie on Facebook?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  I drank my tea and wondered who my mother had actually been talking to. I said, “You’re quite sure this was the Cassandra from over my bed?”

  “Oh yes, dear. She told me about how you took her to Leicester Square, and how sad she was when they had to move to Canada. They went to Vancouver. I asked her if she ever met my cousin Leslie, he went to Vancouver after the war, but she said she didn’t believe so, and it turns out it’s actually a big sort of a place. I told her about the pencil drawing you did, and she seemed very up-to-date on your activities. She was thrilled when I told her that you were having a gallery opening this week.”

  “You told her that?”

  “Yes, dear. I thought she’d like to know.” Then my mother said, almost wistfully, “She’s very pretty, dear. I think she’s doing something in community theater.” Then the conversation went over to the retirement of Dr. Dunnings, who had been our GP since before I was born, and how he was the only non-Indian doctor left in his practice and how my mother felt about this.

  I lay in bed that night in my small bedroom at my mother’s house and turned over the conversation in my head. I am no longer on Facebook and thought about rejoining to see who Scallie’s friends were, and if this pseudo-Cassandra was one of them, but there were too many people I was happy not to see again, and I let it be, certain that when there was an explanation, it would prove to be a simple one, and I slept.

  I HAVE BEEN SHOWING in the Little Gallery in Chelsea for over a decade now. In the old days, I had a quarter of a wall and nothing priced at more than three hundred pounds. Now I get my own show every October, for a month, and it would be fair to say that I only have to sell a dozen paintings to know that my needs, rent and life are covered for another year. The unsold paintings remain on the gallery walls until they are gone and they are always gone by Christmas.

  The couple who own the gallery, Paul and Barry, still call me “the beautiful boy” as they did twelve years ago, when I first exhibited with them, when it might actually have been true. Back then, they wore flowery, open-necked shirts and gold chains: now, in middle age, they wear expensive suits and talk too much for my liking about the stock exchange. Still, I enjoy their company. I see them three times a year: in September when they come to my studio to see what I’ve been working on, and select the paintings for the show; at the gallery, hanging and opening in October; and in February, when we settle up.

  Barry runs the gallery. Paul co-owns it, comes out for the parties, but also works in the wardrobe department of the Royal Opera House. The preview party for this year’s show was on a Friday evening. I had spent a nervous couple of days hanging the paintings. Now, my part was done, and there was nothing to do but wait, and hope people liked my art, and not to make a fool of myself. I did as I had done for the previous twelve years, on Barry’s instructions: “Nurse the champagne. Fill up on water. There’s nothing worse for the collector than encountering a drunken artist, unless he’s famous for being drunk, and you are not, dear. Be amiable but enigmatic, and when people ask for the story behind the painting, say, ‘My lips are sealed.’ But for god’s sake, imply there is one. It’s the story they’re buying.”

  I rarely invite people to the preview any longer: some artists do, regarding it as a social event. I do not. While I take my art seriously, as art, and am proud of my work (the latest exhibition was called “People in Landscapes,” which pretty much says it all about my work anyway), I understand that the party exists solely as a commercial event, a come-on for eventual buyers and those who might say the right thing to other eventual buyers. I tell you this so you will not be surprised that Barry and Paul manage the guest list to the preview, not I.

  The preview always begins at six thirty P.M. I had spent the afternoon hanging paintings, making sure everything looked as good as it could, as I have done every other year. The only thing that was different about the day of this particular event was how excited Paul looked, like a small boy struggling with the urge to tell you what he had bought you for a birthday present. That, and Barr
y, who said, while we were hanging, “I think tonight’s show will put you on the map.”

  I said, “I think there’s a typo on the Lake District one.” An oversized painting of Windermere at sunset, with two children staring lostly at the viewer from the banks. “It should say three thousand pounds. It says three hundred thousand.”

  “Does it?” said Barry, blandly. “My, my.” But he did nothing to change it.

  It was perplexing, but the first guests had arrived, a little early, and the mystery could wait. A young man invited me to eat a mushroom puff from a silver tray. I took my glass of nurse-this-slowly champagne from the table in the corner, and I prepared to mingle.

  All the prices were high, and I doubted that the Little Gallery would be able to sell the paintings at those prices, and I worried about the year ahead.

  Barry and Paul always take responsibility for moving me around the room, saying, “This is the artist, the beautiful boy who makes all these beautiful things, Stuart Innes,” and I shake hands, and smile. By the end of the evening I will have met everyone, and Paul and Barry are very good about saying, “Stuart, you remember David, he writes about art for the Telegraph . . . ,” and I for my part am good about saying, “Of course, how are you? So glad you could come.”

  The room was at its most crowded when a striking red-haired woman to whom I had not yet been introduced began shouting, “Representational bullshit!”

  I was in conversation with the Daily Telegraph art critic and we turned. He said, “Friend of yours?”

  I said, “I don’t think so.”

  She was still shouting, although the sounds of the party had now quieted. She shouted, “Nobody’s interested in this shit! Nobody!” Then she reached her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of ink, shouted, “Try selling this now!” and threw ink at Windermere Sunset. It was blue-black ink.

  Paul was by her side then, pulling the ink bottle away from her, saying, “That was a three-hundred-thousand-pound painting, young lady.” Barry took her arm, said, “I think the police will want a word with you,” and walked her back into his office. She shouted at us as she went, “I’m not afraid! I’m proud! Artists like him, just feeding off you gullible art buyers. You’re all sheep! Representational crap!”

  And then she was gone, and the party people were buzzing, and inspecting the ink-fouled painting and looking at me, and the Telegraph man was asking if I would like to comment and how I felt about seeing a three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed, and I mumbled about how I was proud to be a painter, and said something about the transient nature of art, and he said that he supposed that tonight’s event was an artistic happening in its own right, and we agreed that, artistic happening or not, the woman was not quite right in the head.

  Barry reappeared, moving from group to group, explaining that Paul was dealing with the young lady, and that her eventual disposition would be up to me. The guests were still buzzing excitedly as he ushered them out of the door. Barry apologized as he did so, agreed that we lived in exciting times, explained that he would be open at the regular time tomorrow.

  “That went well,” he said, when we were alone in the gallery.

  “Well? That was a disaster.”

  “Mm. ‘Stuart Innes, the one who had the three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed.’ I think you need to be forgiving, don’t you? She was a fellow artist, even one with different goals. Sometimes you need a little something to kick you up to the next level.”

  We went into the back room.

  I said, “Whose idea was this?”

  “Ours,” said Paul. He was drinking white wine in the back room with the red-haired woman. “Well, Barry’s mostly. But it needed a good little actress to pull it off, and I found her.” She grinned, modestly: managed to look both abashed and pleased with herself.

  “If this doesn’t get you the attention you deserve, beautiful boy,” said Barry, smiling at me, “nothing will. Now you’re important enough to be attacked.”

  “The Windermere painting’s ruined,” I pointed out.

  Barry glanced at Paul, and they giggled. “It’s already sold, ink-splatters and all, for seventy-five thousand pounds,” Barry said. “It’s like I always say, people think they are buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”

  Paul filled our glasses: “And we owe it all to you,” he said to the woman. “Stuart, Barry, I’d like to propose a toast. To Cassandra.”

  “Cassandra,” we repeated, and we drank. This time I did not nurse my drink. I needed it.

  Then, as the name was still sinking in, Paul said, “Cassandra, this ridiculously attractive and talented young man is, as I am sure you know, Stuart Innes.”

  “I know,” she said. “Actually, we’re very old friends.”

  “Do tell,” said Barry.

  “Well,” said Cassandra, “twenty years ago, Stuart wrote my name on his maths exercise notebook.”

  She looked like the girl in my drawing, yes. Or like the girl in the photographs, all grown-up. Sharp-faced. Intelligent. Assured.

  I had never seen her before in my life.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  WE WERE IN THE wine bar beneath my flat. They serve food there, too. It’s more than just a wine bar.

  I found myself talking to her as if she was someone I had known since childhood. And, I reminded myself, she wasn’t. I had only met her that evening. She still had ink stains on her hands.

  We had glanced at the menu, ordered the same thing—the vegetarian meze—and when it had arrived, both started with the dolmades, then moved on to the hummus.

  “I made you up,” I told her.

  It was not the first thing I had said: first we had talked about her community theater, how she had become friends with Paul, his offer to her—a thousand pounds for this evening’s show—and how she had needed the money but mostly said yes to him because it sounded like a fun adventure. Anyway, she said, she couldn’t say no when she heard my name mentioned. She thought it was fate.

  That was when I said it. I was scared she would think I was mad, but I said it. “I made you up.”

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t. I mean, obviously you didn’t. I’m really here.” Then she said, “Would you like to touch me?”

  I looked at her. At her face, and her posture, at her eyes. She was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Everything I had been missing in other women. “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

  “Let’s eat our dinner first,” she said. Then she said, “How long has it been since you were with a woman?”

  “I’m not gay,” I protested. “I have girlfriends.”

  “I know,” she said. “When was the last one?”

  I tried to remember. Was it Brigitte? Or the stylist the ad agency had sent me to Iceland with? I was not certain. “Two years,” I said. “Perhaps three. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”

  “You did once,” she said. She opened her handbag then, a big floppy purple thing, pulled out a cardboard folder, opened it, removed a piece of paper, tape-browned at the corners. “See?”

  I remembered it. How could I not? It had hung above my bed for years. She was looking around, as if talking to someone beyond the curtain. Cassandra, it said, February 19th, 1985. And it was signed, Stuart Innes. There is something at the same time both embarrassing and heartwarming about seeing your handwriting from when you were fifteen.

  “I came back from Canada in ’89,” she said. “My parents’ marriage fell apart out there, and Mum wanted to come home. I wondered about you, what you were doing, so I went to your old address. The house was empty. Windows were broken. It was obvious nobody lived there anymore. They’d knocked down the riding stables already—that made me so sad, I’d loved horses as a girl, obviously, but I walked through the house until I found your bedroom. It was obviously your bedroom, although all the furniture was gone. It still smelled like you. And this was still p
inned to the wall. I didn’t think anyone would miss it.”

  She smiled.

  “Who are you?”

  “Cassandra Carlisle. Aged thirty-four. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theater in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are you, Stuart?”

  “You know who I am.” Then, “You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?”

  She nodded. She said, “Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?”

  “Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.”

  “Let’s pay the bill, and go upstairs.”

  I reached out to touch the back of her hand. “Not yet,” she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. “We should talk first.”

  So we went upstairs.

  “I like your flat,” she said. “It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.”

  “It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,” I told her. “But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio—you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.”