The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

He. So Abberton was a man. ‘Do you ever make prints from your originals?’ I asked ‘Sometimes artists…’

‘Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘You cannot buy this picture, Ruth Bussey.’ Her skin looked like paper that someone had screwed up, then flattened out to find all the creases still there. I didn’t like the way she’d said my name, particularly since she hadn’t told me hers. ‘Get over it. Buy another picture.’

I thought she’d given me a glimmer of hope. ‘Have you got others I could look at, ones that are for sale?’

Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from me,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work-it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist…

She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.

She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That’s someone else’s picture!’

‘It’s someone else’s appalling picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’

She’d done it deliberately. I read her words, the ones she planned to leave for Saul to find. Most of them were obscenities. If he didn’t take one look at that note and decide never to frame anything for this awful woman again, there was something wrong with him. I looked at the bottom of the scrap of paper for a signature, but there wasn’t one-I’d interrupted her before she’d had a chance to sign her letter.

I decided I didn’t want to buy Abberton after all. It would have spoiled it for me, knowing the person who had painted it thought nothing of vandalising another artist’s work.

I felt more upset than I could justify to myself. The picture I loved, even though I’d only seen it for the first time five minutes ago, had been ruined for me. More than that: it was as if art had been ruined, the thing that had started to cure the ache in my soul. Now it felt tainted. ‘Why do you want to destroy other people’s work?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. ‘Can’t you bear the idea of anyone having talent apart from you?’

I turned round and walked back to the gallery area, shaking. A few seconds later my hair was yanked back, as if my ponytail had caught on something. I cried out in pain. It was her. She spun me round and pushed me against a wall, knocking me into a picture. It crashed to the floor and the glass broke, falling in pieces around my feet. She’s going to wreck the gallery, I thought-all our paintings, and it would be my fault. It’s always my fault. What would I tell Saul?

One of her hands was flat against my chest, the other behind her back. That was when I started to get frightened. What was she holding? She’d been in Saul’s workshop, where there were knives. Saws. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Nothing. I just… I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me. Let me go!’ A storm began to rage in my mind. The same words again, the ones I’d said over and over to Her when she yanked the tape off my mouth: don’t hurt me, please, let me go. I was no longer aware of the woman with the grey-black hair, or the gallery. The present dissolved into the past; there could never be anything but Him and Her; that one attack would last for ever, in one guise or another.

The wild-haired woman’s hand emerged from behind her back. I saw a canister: paint. Red. My body felt formless, as if it was breaking up. She held her weapon close to my face and sprayed. I screamed. It went in my mouth and eyes, and when I closed them, she carried on spraying. I felt a heavy wetness all over my face and neck, stinging, hardening. I tried to move, but I couldn’t.

‘What on earth…?’ Saul’s voice.

I heard a splash, then something rolling, a metallic sound. I tried to open my eyes, saw thin red ropes in front of them where my lashes had been glued together. Her hand released me. I mumbled, ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Saul and the woman were shouting over one another, saying things I didn’t want to hear. I had to get to the door. I had to get out of there. I didn’t pick up my handbag or my jacket. I was free to move, so I ran.

I didn’t stop running until I got home. I didn’t have my keys with me-they were in my bag-so I sat on the grass outside Blantyre Lodge in the rain, shaking, for what felt like hours. I could have sat in the porch but I wanted to get soaked, to wash everything away. At some point Saul appeared. He’d brought my things. He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I put my hands over my ears, hysterical, my face still covered in red paint that made my skin feel tight, like a mask. The downpour hadn’t shifted it. The paint that framers use to spray mouldings is thick, greasy; it doesn’t wash off easily. People hurrying out of the park, on their way to shelter from the sudden bad weather, stared at me, then turned away quickly. One little boy pointed and laughed, before his mother stopped him. I didn’t care. No one could get me here-the crazy artist couldn’t, Him and Her couldn’t. Not in the middle of a public park.

Eventually Saul went away. I haven’t spoken to him since, though for weeks after that awful day he left me regular phone messages. He said he understood that I didn’t want to go back to the gallery, and why I didn’t want to speak to him or talk about what had happened, but he needed to phone me from time to time, he explained, even if I never answered. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t forgotten about me, that he still cared.

The last message he left, early last August, was different. I heard that his voice had changed; he didn’t sound sad any more-he sounded determined. He gave me Aidan’s name and address, told me Aidan needed someone to work for him. ‘My loss will be his gain,’ he said. ‘And yours, I hope. Please, Ruth. Do this for my sake as well as yours. I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past-I’m not a fool, I know something must have. Maybe I should have asked… Anyway. I won’t let you ruin the rest of your life. Go and see Aidan. He’ll look after you.’

I remember I laughed at this, sitting in the dark in my house, smoking yet another cigarette. Look after me, with so many people intent on doing me harm? Him and Her, the crazy artist with the silver-black hair whose name I didn’t know, with her can of red paint… Everyone knew I wasn’t worth looking after, because I was too pathetic and helpless to look after myself. Aidan Seed, I was certain, would be no exception.

6

3/3/08

Simon was on the phone to Sam Kombothekra when he saw Aidan Seed’s car turn the corner from Demesne Avenue on to the Rawndesley Road. Seed was driving it, and he seemed to be alone. ‘Gotta go,’ Simon said curtly, tossing his mobile on to the passenger seat. He hadn’t been sure if Seed would make his trip on foot or in the dusty black Volvo estate that had been parked at a forty-five degree angle to the side of the workshop.

‘You’re not planning to wait, are you?’ Charlie had said. ‘He’s going nowhere. He lied to get rid of us.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’ll see,’ she’d corrected him. ‘I’ve got to get back to my enthralling questionnaire. Give me a ring if something happens.’

Simon was pleased Seed had opted to drive wherever he was going. It was easier to follow a person in a car. Behind the wheel, encased in his own private space, Seed would be less likely to look at anything but the road ahead.

As he followed the Volvo along the Rawndesley Road, Simon thought about the lies he’d told Kombothekra, and felt something he didn’t often feel: proud of himself. His story had been a medley of all the things the sergeant wanted to hear: two hundred and seventy-six addresses divided into handy regional groups, a travel schedule, a brand new road atlas courtesy of the Snowman. Not a word of it true. Simon had thrown Proust’s tenner in the bin-