“Just Gouger. I swear.”
“Huh,” I said, peering over his shoulder. The picture was classic Gouger, a thick layer of black paint with two savagely grappling boys sgraffitoed into it, through them a wall of minutely penciled balconies with a tiny vivid scene unfolding on each one. It must have taken forever. “How long have you been planning this?”
“A while, I don’t—” Tiernan blinked at me. He was very agitated. “What are you going to do? Are you . . . ?”
Presumably I should have gone straight to Richard and told him the whole story, or at least found an excuse to pull Gouger’s work from the show (his enemies were on his trail, something like that—giving him an OD would just have made him even more of a draw). To be honest, I didn’t even consider it. Everything was going beautifully, everyone involved was happy as a clam; pulling the plug would have ruined a lot of people’s day for, as far as I could see, no good reason at all. Even if you wanted to get into the ethics of it, I was basically on Tiernan’s side: I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real. As far as I was concerned, the exhibition was exactly the same as it had been ten minutes ago; if people wanted to ignore the perfectly good pictures right in front of their eyes and focus instead on the gratifying illusion somewhere behind them, that was their problem, not mine.
“Relax,” I said—Tiernan was in such a state that leaving him there any longer would have been cruelty. “I’m not going to do anything.”
“You’re not?”
“Cross my heart.”
Tiernan blew out a long, shaky breath. “OK. OK. Wow. Got a fright there.” He straightened up and surveyed the painting, patting the top edge of it as if he were soothing a spooked animal. “They are good,” he said. “They are, aren’t they?”
“You know what you should do,” I said. “Do more of the bonfire ones. Make it a series.”
Tiernan’s eyes lit up. “I could,” he said. “That’s not a bad idea, you know, from the building of the bonfire right up to the, when it’s going down to ashes, dawn—” and he turned to his desk, fumbling for paper and pencil, his mind already brushing the whole episode away. I left him to it.
After that little wobble, the show went back to rolling smoothly towards its opening. Tiernan worked flat out on Gouger’s bonfire series, to the point where I was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping more than a couple of hours a night, but if anyone noticed his dazed, grimy look and constant yawning, they had no reason to connect them with the pictures that he lugged in with triumphant regularity. I spun Gouger’s anonymity into a sub-Banksy enigma, with plenty of fake Twitter accounts arguing in semiliterate textspeak over whether he was your man from down the flats who had stabbed Mixie that time, because if so Mixie was looking for him; the media dived on it and our followers skyrocketed. Tiernan and I did discuss, semi-seriously, getting an authentic skanger to be the face of the product, in exchange for enough cash to support his habit (obviously we would need one with a habit, for maximum gritty authenticity), but we decided against it on the grounds that a junkie skanger would be too shortsighted for reliability: sooner or later he would either start blackmailing us or start wanting creative control, and things would get messy.
I suppose I should have been worrying about what if it all went wrong—there were so many ways it could have, a journalist getting all investigative, me screwing up the slang on Gouger’s Twitter account—but I wasn’t. Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t. So it caught me completely off guard when, a month before the exhibition was scheduled to open and just four days before that night, Richard found out.
I’m still not sure how, exactly. Something about a phone call, from what little I could gather (pressed against my office door, staring at the dinged-up white paint, heart rate building slowly to an uncomfortable thump at the base of my throat), but Richard threw Tiernan out so fast and on such a searing gust of fury that we didn’t get a chance to talk. Then he came into my office—I jumped back just in time to avoid a door to the face—and told me to get out and not come back till Friday, when he would have decided what to do about me.
One look at him—white-faced, collar rucked up, jaw tight as a fist—and I had more sense than to say anything, even if I had had a chance to come up with anything coherent before the door slammed behind him with a bang that spun papers off my desk. I packed up my stuff and left, avoiding Aideen the accountant’s round avid eyes through her door-crack, trying to keep my footsteps easy and jaunty on my way down the stairs.
I spent the next three days being bored, mainly. Telling anyone what had happened would have been idiotic, when there was a good chance that the whole thing would blow over. I had been startled by just how angry Richard was—I would have expected him to be annoyed, of course, but the depth of his fury seemed totally out of proportion, and I was pretty sure he had just been having a bad day and would have settled down by the time I went back to work. So I was stuck at home all day, in case anyone spotted me out and about when I shouldn’t have been. I couldn’t even ring anyone. I couldn’t spend the night at Melissa’s place or ask her over to mine, in case she wanted to walk in to work together in the morning—her shop was only five minutes beyond the gallery, so we mostly did walk in after a night together, holding hands and chattering like a pair of teenagers. I told her I had a cold, convinced her not to come over and look after me in case she caught it, and thanked God she wasn’t the type to decide I was cheating on her. I played an awful lot of Xbox, and put on work clothes when I went to the shops, just in case.