‘It’s right here on the end of the pencil,’ he once sassed.
Evenings, pretending he needed to finish an assignment, he would lock his bedroom door, put on a record or a cassette tape and lose himself in Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and in the endless lines that followed his pencil around the white pages of his sketch pad. First he copied, relentlessly. Cartoons, photographs, lettering from magazines – anything. Copied until the lines went their own way and made new forms of their own. Oh, how he loved that: the first mark, like the first footprint in snow. The mystery of what would take shape.
Knock knock. ‘Benjamin, can you hear me?’ Dorothy at the door. He could tell by the way her voice projected sideways that her ear was pressed to the wood. ‘I don’t know how you can concentrate on history with that noise going on the whole time.’
‘It’s OK, Dorothy – I got it. Don’t worry about it.’ He turned the music up, just a little, whispering, ‘History of soul, sister, history of soul.’ Blowing smoke out of his bedroom window by this time, spraying his room with Blue Stratos, feeling the groove of the pencil across the page. ‘Rock Steady’, ‘Hit the Road Jack’, ‘Superstition’… until evening stole the sun from outside his window and he felt his stomach hollow as a cave. After supper, more drawing, collage, paint – until it was time to shin down the outside wall and meet his friends and smoke fat joints in the park. His bedroom was a wardrobe that led to Narnia, he often thought. You opened the door, made your way through the coats and behind lay a whole secret world.
The years passed. Dorothy and George tried to stop him from drawing and so forth and make him concentrate on something worthwhile. These attempts failed: when he was four, he drew with the soap bar on the bathroom tiles the time they took his coloured pencils away. At fourteen, pocket money withdrawn for the quintillionth time, he jumped the barriers so he could take the train into DC – to the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, the Renwick. When his folks said no to art school, he stood on George’s stepladder and poured three different colours of emulsion paint onto the concrete garage floor. By then, he was seventeen. The bud of his early sass had bloomed into the full flower of frank and open rebellion.
‘Damn,’ he said, admiring the results in front of a horrified Dorothy. ‘It’s like Pollock or some shit.’
Speechless on the steps that led into the garage from the main house, his mother returned to the kitchen and pressed her lips directly to the bottle neck of the Smirnoff.
At last, his parents conceded that, if he wasn’t going to follow his father into law, then a career in graphic design would be the least shameful option.
‘Graphics,’ said his father at his farewell dinner, served by the help, Constance. ‘At least that’s one up from art, for Chrissakes. What do I know anyway? I can’t even draw a goddam stick man! And you can’t draw either, can you, Dotty?’ He shook his head, seemed about to say more but was silenced by a look from his wife. While they had been open about Ben’s origins, it was not a matter to be discussed, least of all at the table.
‘I guess I’m just a genetic blip,’ Ben said, smiling through his meatloaf and thinking about how awesome it would be at California School of the Arts – how much weed he would smoke, how many times he would get laid (already a respectable number). How much distance he would put between himself and these people, and how fucking relieved all of them would be.
Chapter Seven
They were trying to persuade me to take a shower just now. What a laugh. What a farce. What’s the point? I’ll never feel clean again. I don’t even care about them seeing me naked. My body is a separate thing. I observe it from the outside with a detachment that is almost interesting. It is thinner. My shoulder bones protrude at the top like knots, my eyes look bigger, darker – all iris and no whites. Meds, exercise in the courtyard, food. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?
They helped me into my jogging bottoms and a loose white T-shirt.
‘OK, my darling,’ Nurse said as she left. ‘You’ll get on with that book of yours now. There’ll be someone right outside.’
And here I sit. Not quite alone, because that is not allowed. Shower, meds, food. And this: as pointless as all the rest, I’m sure, this merry exercise I’ve got going for myself. But with no sharp objects to hand and a nurse outside the door, there’s nothing else to do.
* * *
I’m glad Christopher had Adam. It was Adam who sorted out his appearance, who took him into Leeds town centre to buy clothes – Those trousers are a bloody disgrace, man, who bought them, your mum? (She had.) Under Adam’s benign duress, Christopher bought flared jeans, an Afghan coat, T-shirts and two shirts with long collars.
‘That’s better,’ said Adam. ‘You’ll be fighting off the birds with a shitty stick in that get-up.’
Adam persuaded him to do the Otley Run with a bunch of lads from electronic engineering. Christopher vomited into the gutter outside the Three Horse Shoes, a fact that, rather than singling him out as a weakling, appeared to bestow hero status upon him for days after. With Adam, he went to see The Damned at Leeds Union, to a club called Le Phonographique in the Merrion Centre. Whenever Adam proposed a night out, he never seemed to mind Christopher’s initial reticence, seemed to understand that he needed a harder push than most but that, once cajoled, he would come along and he would be glad. Christopher worried he was a charity case, that Adam would tire of him sooner rather than later. Having no one to share these worries with, he kept them to himself.
‘I tell you what,’ Adam said one night. They were in their room at the halls, about to go down to the Union for a drink. Having dressed in one of his new shirts, a tie and his flared jeans, Christopher was sitting on his bed, waiting while Adam tried on different shirts, turning this way and that in the full-length mirror he had brought from home. ‘All’s you need is a bit of chutzpah and you’ll be flying.’
‘Chutzpah?’
Adam turned from his reflection, apparently satisfied with this, his fifth choice of shirt: a brown and beige stripe, tight around the body, the collars long, the neck open lower than Christopher would have dared. ‘I mean, look at you. You’ve got the looks, the height; you’ve got the smarts. You’ve even got the big brown peepers the chicks love, you bastard. If I had half what you had, I tell you what, there’d be no stone left unturned.’
‘You want to unturn more stones?’
Adam laughed. ‘Good point. I can’t complain, and Sophie is a peach.’
A peach, not a stone, although peaches contained stones, Christopher supposed. ‘Sophie? I thought you were with Alison?’
‘I am. She’s a peach too. But I’ve sort of got a casual thing going with Sophie. Nothing major, but that’s not the point I’m making. It’s you, my bashful, bespectacled friend. How short-sighted are you?’