The Picture

Music:

Honegger: Pastorale d'ete

Honegger: from Symphony No. 3 "Liturgique" 

Transcript

The Picture

On a Wednesday evening in early March, Christopher’s mother, Stella, discovered an intriguing picture inside his satchel. The image was a portrait, a portrait of her twenty-year-old son. She had been the one to pick him up from the special (Adult) education centre though she had asked her eldest son, Stanley, to do it for her. As to why Stanley could not do her this favour, his protest had been that he was far too busy. 

As to the picture, the rendering was in pencil and felt-tip, and was evidence of an artist of considerable ability. Not breathtaking ability but certainly above what one would expect of an anonymous amateur. The outline of the face and the upper quadrant of the body in its blue cardigan had been first sketched in pencil. From there, various features had been added, also in pencil. And from there each and every pencilled line, form, and detail had been gone over in felt tip pen and this lent to the eerie, sullen face a presence and an emphasis it would have lacked otherwise. Every hair on the depicted head was denoted in a felt-tip streak, every mark on the squarish face and every blemish on the cardigan had been carefully signified, and the week’s growth of ginger beard around the slightly chubby cheeks was aptly suggested by an irreal yet strangely accurate congregation of black dots. The slightly weary, not fully open eyes carried an especially uncanny resemblance to those of the real Christopher; in general, an irrefutable spark burned within the picture, the spark- so essential to portraiture- that facilitates recognition, instant and unignorable recognition. The picture’s adherences to reality were a quiet thrill to behold and its divergences from reality, whether intentional or not, were equally arresting- certain colour decisions, certain textural strategies which betrayed the instincts and subjectivity of the artist. The background of the A5 sheet on which the image had been produced had not been left blank but had been tinged a beautifully unsettling red, a light and general crayon red which suggested a gently simmering anger or perhaps discontent in the subject. The main areas of colour- the blue of the cardigan, the ginger of the beard, the blonde of the hair- had been realised in felt-tip pen. All the subject’s visible flesh appeared to have been left the colour of the paper and very nearly had in fact. But a closer inspection revealed that the neck, cheeks, and forehead had all been caressed in a very subtle layer of pale pencil.

            Stella discovered the picture when she was readying to give Christopher’s lunch box an inside clean. She took out the lunchbox and noticed the picture at the bottom of the bag. There it lay, staring up at her from the darkness. She took out the picture and laid it on the kitchen table. She looked at it at length, impressed and touched by it. She picked it up in both her hands and stared at it, at close proximity. Then she replaced it on the tabletop and stood back from it, enjoying it from a slight distance.

She asked Christopher about it, where it had come from, but he was typically reticent and noncommittal. Stella realised that her question had been puzzlingly phrased. Who drew and coloured in the picture, she asked Christopher, rephrasing, Who did it? Christopher didn’t seem to know. He was already settling in front of the television and finding what he wanted to watch with the remote, jumping restlessly from item to item. Stella stared at the image for a while longer, still impressed, still touched. Then she put it on the mantlepiece where it could be easily admired, in between a framed family photograph and a vase of wilting flowers. The piece of portrait paper rested, at a slight angle, against the back wall behind the mantlepiece. She put on her apron and made chilli con carne for supper, listening to the radio as she prepared and cooked the ingredients. 

Upstairs, in a spare room which Stella considered her private study and Stanley considered an annexe best suited to his particular needs, Stanley was listening to a Honegger symphony on his turntable. He bit his nails as he listened, cutting them with his teeth. He flicked each excised bit of nail onto the floor. 

The music on the turntable was bombastic and alarming. It demanded that the listener suffer before any reward or relief could be granted. Stanley, accordingly, suffered, in the white rocking chair. The rocking chair was a hybrid armchair-rocker, a plump white armchair, draped in a tartan blanket, with curved wooden rails beneath it. The double-glazed windows of the spare room were a little blurry, the outside panes thickly bordered in condensation. Stanley looked out at the nude trees in the garden, at the neighbours’ tree house, unconcealed, because of the leaflessness of the host-tree. 

Stanley was waiting for the world to get dark. He liked the dark. The days were lengthening; there were the first suggestions of spring in the air. As yet, the afternoon light remained undimmed, the sombre, blue-grey twilight was not yet in evidence but would be soon. Stanley, rocking with eerie, repetitious calm, timing his rock to the rock of the music, had a grim expression on his face. His soul seemed to be in darkness. He was annoyed because his mother had entered his room, and opened a window to air the second storey of the house. She had then shut the window without being caught in the act but Stanley had been able to spot the telltale signs of disturbance that so particularly agitated him. Rather than appearing the way he had left them, the curtains were drawn together. Stanley always made a point of only partially drawing the curtains, always leaving a small gap between them. Stella’s efforts to cover her tracks had been insufficient. 

When he came downstairs for dinner at his mother’s call, he immediately noticed the picture on the mantelpiece- (he was eagle-eyed, and was always swift to notice any such change to the house environment). He instantly recognised the subject depicted and he was quick to take issue with various aspects of the small, gloomily accurate image of his younger brother:

“Where is Chris’s smile? Where on earth is his smile?” Stanley said crossly, taking his place at the dinner table, Christopher taking his. 

There was no smile on the face of the real Christopher. Christopher sat there, before his daintily portioned dinner plate, in a half-comprehending silence. 

Stella didn’t agree that there was anything hostile or unsettling in the image. She saw only kindness and care and attention.

It got dark outside. 

The next day, a rainy day, having driven Christopher to college, Stella followed him through the automatic double doors into the special educational needs building. A friendly teaching assistant, Poppy, who seemed never without her clipboard and whose smile revealed just a little too much of her gums, greeted Stella in the foyer. She greeted Christopher, too. He didn’t react to her greeting and swept past her, making for the corridor which led to the main classroom with robotic enthusiasm: (Poppy was quite used to this- what someone who didn’t know Christopher would characterise as rudeness).    

            “Christopher came home yesterday with a rather intriguing piece of artwork in his satchel,” Stella began. “It was a portrait of Christopher, in pencil and felt-tip pen. I was rather curious as to who the artist was.”

            “A picture of Christopher?” Poppy replied, clearly baffled. 

            “Yes, a portrait on an A5 piece of paper. I liked it a lot. Do you know who did it?”

            “I have no idea.”

            Stella was puzzled by this. She had not expected this response from Poppy. She had expected her to explain that it was part of some class project; or to name an artistically gifted student who liked to produce portraits in their spare time.

            That the little portrait had been produced under a kind of secrecy concerned Stella a little. That her son might have some kind of private admirer was something she found difficult to emotionally categorise. Some free agent had clearly identified Christopher for a subject, a worthy subject, and drawn his portrait. They had done it for their own obscure reasons, they had not done it under the watchful eyes of the teaching staff.

            “I’m quite keen to found out who made it,” Stella said. On the plate-glass of outer doors and windows, the rain made a high, quiet pattering; on the domed roof of the education centre it produced a low, rattling sibilance. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, who in the class might’ve done it?”

            “I absolutely haven’t a clue, Stella. Do you have a copy of the picture?” 

            “Not with me,” Stella said. (Stupid, she self-admonished, she should have brought it with her). “I can bring it in with me tomorrow,” she continued. 

            “Yes, do,” Poppy said. “I’ll solve the mystery for you.”

            “I’m not concerned or angry about it,” Stella cut in, “Quite the opposite. It’s a very good picture. I’m just keen to know where it came from, who it came from.”

            Poppy was needed elsewhere. She bade Stella goodbye and went off. Stella remained in the reception area. She eyed the raincoated stragglers with interest: a boy with downs, a girl with a limp.

            The carpark was loud with the rain’s endless sibilance. Stella walked out into it, and winced at the wet weight of the downpour. The automatic doors to the special needs building slid shut behind her.

Back home, in the living room, she sat, quite still, not drinking the cup of weak tea at her feet. The mysterious portrait held her in a kind of trance. The blue cardigan, the dotted stubble, the red background. Christopher. Her son. 

            The rain continued ceaselessly, pattering on pavements and drumming on rooves. Within the house, it was deadly silent. Stella had thought herself well used to her husband’s absence but perhaps she wasn’t. She felt, that day, the infrequent ache of spouselessness. 

Stanley was out somewhere, she had little idea where. He wasn’t working, she knew that. She thought of what he had said at dinner, the evening before: where is his smile? Or something like that. What a curious thing to demand, what a curious thing for one such as Stanley to demand. That a portrait show its subject smiling. And how out of the blue it was, Stanley’s sudden enthusiasm for his younger brother’s smile. In any case, the picture had had an effect of some kind in the house. It had informed Stella that perhaps she didn’t know her eldest son as well as she thought.

The very next day, when Stella was dropping Christopher off at the adult education centre, she brought the picture in with her to show to Poppy. Stella felt strangely loath to remove it from its situation on the mantlepiece. To disturb if felt almost sacrilegious, like pinching a candle from a Catholic altar. It belonged there, she felt, like a sleeping infant in a cot. 

She made a mental note that she would get it framed as soon as possible, just a small, thin, bamboo frame, nothing too dear. 

She treated the picture with great care, placing it inside a hardbacked copy of Atonement by Ian McEwan and carrying it like this, pressed between the two many-paged halves of the book. She put the book in her handbag- (it took up practically all the room there was). She wedged her purse in front of it so that it couldn’t open and the picture would remain tightly contained in the book.  

In the usual foyer of entrance, Christopher parted from his mother, hurrying off to the classroom for registration. Stella called after him but he didn’t turn back, not even to offer one of his half-hearted waves. He disappeared and Stella lingered. Poppy greeted Stella joyously but Stella did not reciprocate. She was locked into an intent seriousness. Poppy watched with fascination as Stella brought out the copy of Atonement from her handbag and carefully opened it up, revealing the important sheet of paper at the volume’s centre. Poppy wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or concerned by the fevered care with which Stella tendered it. Poppy studied the picture. It was clear to Stella that Poppy did not see what she saw. Poppy saw a cold, reptilian complexion; something unsettling, balefully gloomy, dripping in enigmatic loathing. The subject’s loathing or the artist’s? Loathing for whom, or what? Poppy wasn’t sure. She supposed the mystery was the point.  

“Who is that meant to be?” Poppy asked, amazed by the idea that it was meant to be Christopher.

Stella was perplexed, and irritated, by Poppy’s question.

“Well…Christopher, of course,” she replied, a little shortly.

“It’s…” Poppy was about to say that she thought it was a nasty, punitive piece of work. But, looking into Stella’s big, desperate eyes, Poppy understood without difficulty that the image meant a great deal to Stella and that she saw it as a detailed and accurate portrait of her son. Poppy looked for Christopher in the image, sincerely wishing to discover him, but all she could encounter was a stranger, an imposter.

“Do you know who might have produced it?” Stella said, with a note of obvious impatience in her voice.

“I’ll find out for you, Stella. Leave it with me.” Poppy stretched forth an eager hand, to lift the image from the book. Stella sharply shut the book, with a loud snap. Her hands, one on the jacketed front, the other on the back, came abruptly together. The shutting book made a surprisingly powerful noise, a deep, dry stamp. 

“I’ll come with you if you don’t mind,” she said.

“Sorry, Stella, that’s not convenient…”

“I don’t think I can part with it,” Stella said.

Poppy didn’t understand Stella’s attachment to this image. It was certainly striking and intriguing and affecting but Stella was clinging to it like it was some kind of heirloom, a thing of sentimental value, like an old piece of jewellery, a ruby ring, a brooch.

For a few moments, neither party knew how to proceed.

“I’ll take a photograph on my phone…” Poppy suggested. “I’ll show it to the class and see if I can find out who made it.” 

“That’s fine,” Stella said, slackening. She re-opened the copy of Atonement and Poppy took a picture of the picture.

As the day went on, it began to dawn on Stella that she didn’t really care who had produced the portrait. She even enjoyed the mystery, the mystique and aura it gave to the picture. Poppy’s reaction to the image continued to bother her, that she had responded with suspicion rather than interest, aversion rather than awe and admiration. How could she fail to recognise what was so plainly rendered. Expertly rendered: she now felt able to grant the picture this compliment. Honestly, it diminished Stella’s opinion of Poppy.  

She didn’t even go into the framer’s. She hovered outside the little shop but she didn’t go in. Under the old sign, cream lettering against a mustard background, its big glass windows showed various square, rectangular and oval frames, imageless frames of various styles, tints, woods, and thicknesses. She imagined that the framer would probably want to keep the picture, that she would have to part with it, (for a day, a few days, a week!), while he fashioned a small bamboo or pine or maple frame around the paper. She would rather the picture remain frameless than be apart from it.

Instead of going into the framer’s, she went directly home and drew a definite sigh of relief when the picture had been repositioned on the mantlepiece between the vase of wilting flowers and the old family photograph. Beside such faded, wilting things, the picture seemed excellently new and vivid. That explained why it was so arresting, so commanding, particularly when it was displayed at the centre of the mantelpiece. It outshone the things that flanked it. 

Stanley normally picked Christopher up from college on Friday evenings. Stella relieved Stanley from this duty by text. A little while ahead of time, she drove back to the education centre. She parked the car and went to the reception area. She was the first guardian to arrive, ahead of the day’s end.

            Christopher appeared before Poppy. Stella barely acknowledged him. He lingered by her but she did not say anything. It took an age but eventually Poppy appeared. A chubby hand blindly clutched one of her own. She was walking beside a young man with a huge, bulbous head and a lazy left eye. He looked distraught and frightened, even when he smiled- which he often did.

            Poppy seemed preoccupied but Stella still went right over to her. No, she reminded herself, she wasn’t especially interested in solving the mystery; just as soon as she had made it her mission to find out, it had dawned on her quite how little it mattered- and, yet, it would be…nice to know. She couldn’t deny that it would be nice to know, though she wasn’t sure what she would do with this knowledge.

            “Well?” she said to Poppy, a little haughtily. Poppy, still holding the hand of the cranially abnormal student, had clearly forgotten all about the portrait and had nothing to report to Stella. It was obvious that she had forgotten all about it.

            “Stella, I do apologise…I’ve been completely…” etcetera, etcetera. 

            “Never mind…” Stella said. 

            The sliding doors promptly parted revealing heavy rain outside. The sky was huge and white, with not even the slightest scribble of cloud in evidence. The rain splattered unappeasably on the asphalt, agitating the wide, shining film that had already formed across the huge, emptying carpark with rings and ripples. Christopher followed Stella across the carpark to the car. His beard was becoming thick and chaotic, and there was an usual sullenness to the expression on his face.

            Inside the car, a few seconds after Stella had started the engine, she asked Christopher if he wanted to listen to a CD. Christopher said he didn’t. Normally he delved right away into the glove compartment and put something in the player. This time he sat quite still, in his usual place beside Stella in the front passenger seat. He liked the tinny thunder of the rain on the roof and windscreen of the car. He liked the squeak of the wipers; and he liked the repetitive way the wipers collected the raindrops into a thin, curved line of water, briefly erasing what rain had landed on the screen only for new numerous needles of rain to immediately undo that work- until the wipers changed position once again, and then again, and again, and again. 

The afternoon of the day following, Stanley was seated on a piano stool, picking apart “staple-sheds”. There was no piano anymore- the wide, black stool was all that remained of their erstwhile baby grand. He enjoyed dismantling the long goalpost-shaped columns formed by staples in their boxes- the column that one loads into a stapler or a staplegun. Stanley called these columns “staple-sheds”.

            He was seated in the centre of the living-room, a deliberately domineering and immovable weight. Each dislodged staple he cast contemptuously to the floor. From time to time, he glanced up from his work. He looked, unsmiling, at the Christopher-picture and the Christopher-picture looked, unsmilingly, at him. Bastard, he would utter. Goblin. Phantom. Ghoul. Unlike Poppy, he did see Christopher in the image. He was there, present, albeit misleadingly. Swallowed, swallowed inside some heinous but not opaque thing. Heinously developed. 

            Not quite a year before his father had disappeared, Stanley had fashioned a fake card for Valentine’s day. He had addressed it to his father, and made it seem as though some anonymous woman from the village had posted it through the house letterbox. 

In the card shop, he had delighted in choosing the tritest, most smoochy card he could find. The one he eventually chose came with an envelope that, gloriously, wasn’t white but a deep, erotic pink! Penning the message within was no fun. It had been hard, hard work, it had taken hours and hours, several days to come up with a credible wording, words which smacked of genuine amorous authenticity, which did not betray the mischief at work. He had not expected his mother to mind as much as she did, to be as averse to this imaginary valentine as she showed herself to be. 

            He recalled this episode, this debacle, as he sat and picked at the joined staples. He had never been found out. The incident left behind an increasingly faded sense of its own significance. 

The final staple-shed demolished- (nearly as long as the handle of a teaspoon when he started on it)- Stanley elected to go out for one of his observational walks.

“Do you think you could take care of dinner this evening?” Stella sweetly pled.

Stanley could not. 

            On his excursion, he took with him a medium-sized book of lined notepaper with a ring-bound spine. (He despised inflexible notebooks). His pencil-gripping hand moving at a tremendous rate as he walked, he added the following observations to his long leger, his intensely visual litany, his poetic inventory:

            Greenish, floppy hazel catkin tree on the lawn, top of the turning onto West Quay road. Adjacent: a tree with blackened, dried seed pods. Pods so dry that the seeds inside tell within the skin. I am unsure of the species.

On the doorstep of an unnumbered house: five empty milk bottles in black wire pintbottle carrier.

Trio of houses with rounded bay windows. Central, semi-cylindrical jut. Houses are softly hued: yellow, bubblegum, and lavender, in that order, from right to left.

            On the other side of the river, mad, lone, lost swan running along the shore with much flapping of great, white wings. Nearer the water: two placid egrets, courting I think. Eerily precise assembly of dunlins on our side of the river. Twelve of them, evenly spaced, posing or waiting, with feet in the water. (Each one of the twelve is perfectly reflected in the water; the surface of the water is utterly undisturbed by ripples or breeze).

            Stanley went straight upstairs when he got home, kicking off his shoes. He went to his chaotic, overstuffed room and laid the notebook on his bed, spread open at the pages which bore those scribblings of which he was the proudest. He displayed and adored the used notebook with liturgical solemnity. 

            Stepping back a few paces from the open book, he felt a sudden wetness come into contact with one of his socks. The wetness, which had settled but not dried into the carpet, seeped straight through the nylon and coldly tickled the foot inside.  

            It wasn’t rain or a ceiling leak or something he had spilt himself. Someone had definitely been in his room; someone had entered his room and spilt or poured something on the carpet. Spilt or poured what? A glass of water? White wine? Tea? He perused the area in question: indeed, the carpet was subtly darkened in several irregular, moist patches. 

            He bent down and pressed a finger into the largest of these wet patches. He brought the wet finger to his nose. He sniffed but couldn’t smell anything- (he did not have a very acute sense of smell). With some hesitation, he tasted what was on his finger. Acrid! Horrid! He spat in revulsion and made six long guttural gagging noises.

            Someone had urinated on his bedroom floor.

            Stanley fled his room, fled his nightmarish residence. He fled his desecrated bedroom floor, fled downstairs, fled past the baleful image of Christopher on the mantlepiece, his mother catatonic on the sofa not drinking her tea and her unblinking gaze fixed tightly upon the picture, and the real Christopher in the other room now uncomfortably confused with the picture’s eerie passivity. He tore through the kitchen: it was swamped with unwashed crockery and recent, unsorted shopping and empty eggboxes and cellophane and plastic packaging awaiting recycling. On a circular breadboard lay half a red bell pepper, shockingly vital and stark, like a bisected human heart.

            He reached the garden. He stood on the patio, breathlessly facing the garden, the sky above twilit a deepening blue. Hanging from its chain, the un-cushioned egg-chair slowly swivelled, one way, and then the other. The patio was freckled in rosettes of moss, grim weeds craned from the cracks between the tiles. The path to the bottom of the garden was hidden in a copious yield of young nettles: in amongst the jagged nettle leaves, the little yellow flowers shyly lurked. And among the outnumbering nettles, he clearly identified clumps of cowslips and the first blobbed, purple stalks of hyacinths. A buddleia bush bore seven cones of flower, seven false noses, small and taut.         

It was killing him, this place. Here. What he knew as “here”. He was devoted to it, so devoted to it. But devoted to it so perversely and pathologically. The pain this place caused him was what he loved about it and what gave him strength and succour, the very fact that it was killing him gave him strength and succour. It was the setting in which their three lives were performed, theirs and no-one else’s. He faced it, this setting, alert to its vividness, its radiance, but he knew there was something in it that could not be extracted, something which, in his current state, he could not experience and articulate. He was hostile to the picture of Christopher on the mantlepiece, to which his mother felt such a strong and bizarre attachment. Yet he believed in art. He presumed that she extracted such strength from it because it sustained or nourished or completed her. But he could not see how. To him it was something sinister and unhelpful. Let alone redemptive, it wasn’t even expedient. To him, something about it- something indefinable- constituted it punishment rather than release, complication rather than clarification.   

Art was the only remedy he knew of, the only thing that made him whole. How else could one be made whole but by art? Art was the answer, the answering half. But if art was the answering, the complementing half, what then was the half he possessed innately, the half he hoped to make whole with art? This place, his two cohabitants: they had formed him, they were the half he carried, the half that was natively him. Naturally, that determined the nature of the “art-half” that he sought so desperately. What he was informed what he sought after. What, then, was his mother, if such an artefact was pleasing and sustaining to her? He began to hate her, fear her, feel revulsion for her. 

And Christopher, why was he such a fit subject? Something to do with his indifference to the endeavour, and to his own likeness and representation..

Stanley thought about piss. Yes, he remembered Christopher’s bedwetting. He had once wet a bed they were both sleeping in. Stanley could just about recall the feeling of being startled, of waking, startled, to the issue of a warm, troubling wetness.

As to his own bedwetting, Stanley could only half-recall half-remembered, half-perceived under-duvet urinations- almost always following heavy (Scotch) whisky consumption- never any other form of alcohol. Usually, at some point there came the release in dreamworld of some crotch-height valve. Then, precipitated by a furiously enjoyable and uncontainable spraying, there followed the intense but brief confusion of changing worlds, of leaving one plane of consciousness and entering another. And then, in the bed, with legs wet, the mental alarm-bell and society-taught self-castigation: Piss, PISS, PISS! would be unbearably ringing in the ears. 

As to his mother’s piss: well, he had heard it tinkling on the other side of locked doors. He was quite sure he had smelt it, lingering on the air of bathrooms he had used after her. Acidic, slightly honied, sharp. Different from and yet somehow congruent with the dull foulness that persists in the male urinals of public houses. 

From the flimsy branch of a nearby tree, a glum, plump pigeon cooed libidinously. From here, Stanley wasn’t sure what the way forward might be.

            After ten minutes, chilled by the chilliness in the air, Stanley went back upstairs. He passed his mother and his brother, unacknowledged. He went to the study and put on Bitches Brew, the 1970 Miles Davis double album. He didn’t care which side or band. The stylus landed somewhere in the middle of “Spanish Key”, his favourite track. The rummaging bass clarinet was like a summer bee, buzzing and bumbling, hopping from flower to flower, penetrating each bell of petals, collecting orgasms on his black and hairy lower body.

Dinner that evening was conducted in silence. They were such a sorrowful picture: his mother, melancholically slicing her sausage into smaller and smaller pieces; Christopher, measuring his suspicious mouthfuls, getting beans and onion gravy down the front of his cardigan. 

            The urine Stanley had discovered on his bedroom floor, hung, a present but unuttered fact, over the dinner-table, over the dinner, a dark cloud. Some kind of challenge, perhaps. A dropped, scented handkerchief.

            Gradually, the thing to do formed in his mind. 

Stanley felt sick as he crept downstairs that night. There was no light in the living-room but it wasn’t pitch black. A neighbour’s car came down the drive and stopped outside the house opposite. The orange of the headlights briefly animated the room. From its place on the mantlepiece, the picture almost glowed. Stanley could see it: he could sense it. Or maybe he could just imagine it so intensely, so accurately, that, by a trick of the mind, he was able to see it, though it was unreached by the necessary illumination. Grim, gloomy, stone-faced. Ghoul, Stanley thought. Goblin. It was there, palpable, but almost totally invisible. It was miserable and holy, like the face of some supine sleeper of stone in a locked crypt, like an effigy at some nocturnal hour in a church. He tiptoed towards the picture. He  picked it up and held it in his hands.

            What he was about to do had been on his mind for hours. In his mind it was a huge thing, a huge thing to do, a huge thing that he had to do. Of course, it was even huger as he held the picture in both his hands, as he looked down at the significant A5 sheet between his fingers, thumb on top and the rest of his fingers beneath. 

            In the moments before he tore it up, he at last espied the image’s vulnerability, a surprising meekness that he could not deny was contained in the picture. He destroyed the picture quite methodically and not totally. With a painstaking enough effort, it could be reconstructed. He halved it, quartered it. He didn’t stop there: eighths followed the quarters, sixteenths the eights. It was hard to go much smaller than that. He balled his fist, clasping the papery shards inside, making of their many one furious foetus, fit to burst out in sudden, ejaculatory parturition. It felt good to encompass the thing, to finally be larger than it, to have conquered it. It hurt the hand which conqueringly held it: it hurt like heat and felt to him as though it was marking his palm with some kind of stigmata. 

Finally, in the centre of the dark room, he opened his fist and let the sad blossom of paper fragments shower upon the carpet. It was a funereal act, like when people loose fistfuls of dust on a coffin. He was saying goodbye to something.

            He went to bed, leaving the white mess unaltered. For about a minute, he stood by the door to his brother’s bedroom. It was gently ajar. He stood in the frame, listening to Christopher’s snores and watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. It was an image of perfect somnolence. 

Stanley had trouble sleeping for nearly an hour but by about two o’clock in the morning he managed to fall asleep.