Paper Wraps Stone

Born on All Saints’ Day in All Saints’ Hospital… you were proud of that.  You outlived the building where you first came into the world and you didn’t know where it had stood.  I was just getting to know you when you told me, so I did the research.  You were curious… why had I bothered?  Because I’m curious too, I replied.

It was something we shared, that feline line of enquiry.  Always wanting to know why… why the pool table was L-shaped, why post-modernism was such bollocks, why the shop that never opened was still a shop.  Were we of enquiring mind, or did we simply not understand the everyday rules that many took for granted?

Our acquaintance was an accident, neither of us looking for the other.  Instantly comfortable, after a hesitant stop-start we simply got on with it.  A friendship lived in the present tense.  One day we’d figure out the back story, I assumed.  I always expected you to be there to guide me through that cardboard box.

***

“Ahhhh!  Look at this one!” your friend says.  It’s a picture of you and him, much younger.  Boys, almost.  He hands it to me and I stare.  It’s unmistakably you, yet a harder, more angular version.  I grope for an emotion.  I try grief (too stark), jealousy (simply impossible), a resigned kind of sadness (ridiculous)… nothing fits.

We rummage through your box.  I suspect you’d have liked that: both the attention and the innuendo.  I learn more about the facts of your life in this single hour than I did in the two years of knowing you.  It fills in the half-stories and rumours that I’ve heard.  I see you at college and in India.  I see colours and shades.  I smile.

Your dad takes me into your room.  ”They’re all here… whenever you want to catalogue them.”  A task I never wanted alone.  I wanted us to do it together, partners in grime.   I wanted the world to see your brilliance. The canvases are stuck together.  Too much fucking paint.  I prise them apart tenderly, but with force.

They’re different.  You’ve painted over many of them.  This doesn’t come as a surprise, because I watched you do it.  I watched you obliterate the images that I loved, because you were there and it didn’t matter.  I watched you take your talent for granted, because we both knew you could do better.  I never realised that you wouldn’t.

***

We play by Britannia rules.  It’s another somewhen night at somepoint in Medway… the evening frays at the edges.  You slump against the bar.  I don’t know quite what I’m remembering.  Is Crook outside and we’re trying to acquire more beer, or are he and I outside and you’re playing the lone fool indoors?

The Britannia was special.  We could walk in like gentlemen and leave like tramps, the slate wiped clean the next time we crossed the threshold.  We drank there for breakfast and we stumbled out at midnight.  Home from home.  On the day we heard your news, they kept us safe and sane until we became too much for them.

***

Your painting clings to the wall in front of me, nailed there nearly two years ago.  Searching For Spirit… an instant connection.  I’m glad I bought it.  Money’s such a crude tool, but I’m glad I put mine where my mouth is.  Anyone can say “Yeah, I like it”, but at the time it was a shortcut… I get it.  I get you.  Sold.

Searching For Spirit… one of your “self-documentation” paintings, a phantasmagorical collection of images both real and imagined, with you at their centre.  Funny and disturbing in equal parts, a brilliant mixture of documentary and self-mythology.  The expression on that teddy bear’s face still makes me howl with laughter.

You were, without question, one of the funniest people I’ve known.  A sense of humour that was wicked, in all senses… sharp, irreverent, frequently self-directed, occasionally brutal, though tempered by an essentially generous nature.  Both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious, always quick to laugh at your own eccentricities.

***

I spot you for the first time at the Tap ‘n’ Tin… curly black hair, pencil stub in pierced ear, a part but apart.  We won’t talk for another three months, but I note you, I mark you down.  Someone else who stands on the sidelines, looking quizzical and sceptical.  A kindred spirit?  Unswerving stare, butterfly lips.  Beautiful.

A quarter year later, by the river…  ”I’ve brought a friend,” he says.  Where, I ask?  ”Think he’s gone for a piss.”  We chat on the concrete steps until I become aware of a third presence.  Ah… you!  You draw on your sketch pad and barely speak until we’re inside.  Then, “Have you heard of Throbbing Gristle?”

Another two months later, we sit and watch him play to a noisy audience in a slightly too-trendy tavern.  You lean forward and murmur in my ear.  ”He stole that line from me.”  Wordplay, of course; one of your characteristic reversals.  Bending language as a way of re-shaping the world.  I think we could be friends.

***

Much later, four different nights…

We’re in the Half Moon.  It used to be a theatre, but now it’s a pub.  This seems a fitting metaphor for both of us.  We’ve had… what?   Three… four… five pints?  Whiskey chasers seem like a good idea.  You instigate a “short walk”… a whiskey in each pub down the road, for as long as we can stand.  I wake on a bus in Essex.

We’re in the Half Moon.  It all seems so simple… your unfocused ambition, my planning skills… we’ll make it happen.  I bully you in an affectionate, well-meaning way.  What do you want?  Love, creativity and security, it turns out.  Not an unreasonable requirement.  I make words, you sign.  Job done.  Sorted.

We’re in the Half Moon.  He freaks you out.  I try to reason with you… it’s just a place.  He’s just a person.  You can’t handle it.  I wish you were stronger.  I wish you saw yourself as the person I see.  I wish you could freak him out.  Maybe you could have done, once.  I wish I’d known you then.  I wish so many things.

We’re in the Half Moon.  We’re good for each other.  We’re no good for each other.  You buy.  I buy.  You buy.  I buy.  We’re furious with the world.  Neck it down.  We want.  We hate.  Why always?  Isn’t it?  Piss.  Drink.  Up the road?  Yeah, wha’ever.  We should stop this, maybe.  Yeah, maybe.  Later.  There’s always later.

***

Scroll back…  It’s the first time we’ve got together on our own.  Seven days before Christmas, in darkness and SADness, the very fact of us standing opposite each other is an achievement.  We walk down the road, both talking far too quickly.  Nerves.  Is this going to work without our kill-catalyst?

The Cricketers is warm and buzzy, a little too brightly lit.  One minute we’re discussing EastEnders, the next we’ve switched to a breathless and enjoyable collision of existentialism and Western materialism.  Even despite high hopes, we surprise each other at the strength of our agreement.  Swift pints and vodka chasers.

We stagger back down the street.  I’ve heard so much about the farmhouse.  Your dad nearly didn’t let me in, so convinced was he by my ex-policeman’s coat.  Now I’m welcomed with a carving knife and handshake.  I’m about to leave.  ”Let me show you the house,” you say.  It’s lovely.  You hug me, which I’m not expecting.

***

We were going to do so much.  That’s what we had in common: our potential, rather than our achievements.  That road-trip to Scotland.  Stations of The Cross, Platforms Of The Livid.  The house by the sea.  The art of painting that you were going to teach me.  The plans… the ideas.  Dreamers, too cosy under the blanket of inertia.

Frustration nips at my heels like an annoyingly persistent terrier.  We never completed anything together.  Nor, frankly, started much either.  This regret has taunted me, but it’s time to give that dog a kick.  Productivity wasn’t our thing.  We gravitated towards each other for reasons entirely unrelated to “doing”.

We were mindfulness and mindlessness.  We came together to push a pause button on life and to watch the world slide by.  Lost afternoons in Soho pubs and East End kebab houses.  Perfunctory trawls round galleries; always a prelude to two seats, a table and one form of brown liquid or another.  Questions.  Endless questions.

We wondered and we wandered.  The casual observer might conclude that we achieved little.  But it was active, not passive.  We “did” nothing… our speciality.  We slipped into cracks and corners, forgotten spaces, side-streets, anonymous cafés.  We claimed it as our genre, this Art Of Nothing.  It became our trade.

All the while, we fought against it.  ”What shall we do?”  Dunno, what do you fancy?  ”Dunno.”  Indecisive, despite our considerable imaginations.  Maybe it was our greatest achievement together, this ability to do absolutely fuck-all for hours on end and then to text “Brilliant day” to each other at the end of it.

Over and over, purpose makers making a purpose of no purpose whatsoever.

Nothing.

***

Back twelve months.  We travel up in the lift and we unload the paintings at the top.  Tom and I do the manual labour to and fro, while you stand there on the walkway.  ”This is a great spot to throw yourself off!” you announce.  ”Oooh, shut up, you, ” your nan says.  I love the fact that your nan is here with us.

We travel back down to ground in the lift.  You add to its graffiti.  It gets painted over the following day, but the words are still visible for weeks afterwards.  ”ARGUE OK?”  That phrase is one of your recurring motifs.  It sums you up entirely… the provocation, the wordplay, the question, the concern.

A week or two later, I’m pushing you to get out and make yourself visible.  I have an ill-formed plan.  We go to a private view in Shoreditch.  We sell one of your paintings, based on little more than my gift of the gab, your disarming charisma and some liquid courage.  This is easy, I joke, we’ll be rich in no time.

***

A phone call.  ”I’m panicking.”  I’m barely awake.  What’s up?  He tells me.  The adrenaline kicks in.  I consider the feasibility, with split-second timing.  Sounds weird to me, might be a misunderstanding, I say.  I’m lying.  I now know him better than you, but I still know you better than him.  Of course it’s true.  I feel it.

I smoke.  Alice might know.  I call her, but she has no news.  I wait for the inevitable.  The phone rings again.  ”You might want to sit down,” he says.  I think I’ll stand.  I think I know what to expect.  I’m shaken but not shocked.  I think I understand.  I think I’ll never understand.  I call Alice back, numb.  Sadness commences.

I’m coming down, I say.  It’s mid-morning and we’re the type of people who know only one way to deal with the situation.  Driver, Crook and I meet in the Vines but soon end up in a beer garden, drinking cheaply and quickly.  Alice joins us… how appropriate.  We’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into a world that makes little sense.

We sit on Sun Pier.  Beer and poppers are passed around.  We quaff and snort.  The afternoon is brutally cold for June.  Our heads thump, the metallic taste of the here and now in our mouths.  Bob’s half an hour away but we’re too dysorganised.  ”Why?” he asks on the phone.  I don’t know, I reply.  Another lie, maybe.

***

Tattoos, a spike through your hand and an uncanny birthmark.  A theatre ticket.  Martin from Tesco.  Silver foil.  Paint pots and plant pots.  Talking too loudly at the poetry recital.  Spoons.  Scrabble.  Endless bus journeys.  A curry under a portrait of The People’s Princess.  The deck of a boat.  Voyagers and voyeurs.

After you were gone, there was a brief period when I remembered everything we did together in intense, hyper-real detail.  Then we said goodbye to you and confusion set in.  I could recall little, only brief fragments that were jumbled and random.  Slowly, over the past few weeks, I’ve been piecing you together again.

Today is your birthday.  I stare at the painting on the wall and realise that through these words, I too am searching for spirit… one spirit in particular.  This morning I drink in your memories and tonight we’ll drink to your memory.  Glasses raised high, sadness laid low.  After all, All Saints was never a day for half-measures.