The Horse's Arse Read online

  It was a prodigious vision, seething with life. It knocked the breath out of Yasmin; it even silenced Sami.

  “This is amazing,” gasped Yasmin when Phelan returned with the tea.

  “Do you think so?”

  For someone whose imagination had stirred up this maelstrom he sounded strangely shy and hesitant.

  “It’s awesome,” said Sami, studying the cloud of inky creatures and trying to decide if they were locusts or scorpions. He’d dissected a locust at school.

  Phelan looked delighted, but a little shaken.

  “You’re the first to see it,” he said. “I’ve just finished it. It’s The Seventh Seal.”

  He made it sound like it had fallen out of his sleeve and standing looking at it now, he could almost believe it.

  “Is this what you teach in your classes?”

  For a moment Yasmin had forgotten what she came for and was wondering if there was some way she could join the class.

  “I try to,” he handed out the tea mugs, “though I can’t say I’ve always learned the lessons myself.”

  “Can we see the others?” Yasmin pointed to the canvases behind.

  “The ones that are finished,” he replied rather coyly. “We’re not officially ready for the grand unveiling.”

  He put down his tea.

  “You’re witnessing a historic moment,” he confided to Sami, “the culmination of a lifetime’s work.” And with a flourish like a conjuror revealing the outcome of a card trick, he spread seven canvases out with their faces to the wall and twiddled them around, the fourth excepted, one by one. At every twiddle the harmony of hues grew richer as new chromatic notes were added to the scale. Where the fourth canvas stood there was an audible silence, like the striking of a dead key on a piano.

  Yasmin had thought of herself as a colourist, by English standards, but she had never seen colours like this. They seemed to pulsate and hover on a cushion of air a centimetre above the picture surface.

  “Your colours are magical,” she said, “they’re alive. How do you do it?”

  “You listen to them,” he answered. “Sometimes they squabble and need separating, like children. Sometimes they get along fine, start a productive conversation and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, they sing.”

  Sami stifled a laugh, then stared and gulped. The figure of a topless woman was peeking out from behind the canvas turned to the wall. He blushed and prodded Yasmin, who followed his gaze. There on the floor, in a gap between The Fourth and The Fifth Seals, a Modigliani nude was reclining. The top half of a Modigliani nude, to be precise. The bottom half was blank except for a black and white photo attached to the stretcher with masking tape.

  It brought Yasmin back to reality with a bang.

  “Do you mind if I take a picture?” she asked, pulling out her phone.

  “Be my guest,” said Phelan, crossing his legs and resting one elbow languidly along the top of The First Seal like an English milord posing for a portrait by Pompeo Batoni. In that position, Sami noticed that his purple socks had started a squabble with the scarlet cape of the First Horseman of the Apocalypse.

  * * *

  “I think he’s innocent,” said Sami in the car on the way home. “He doesn’t look like a thief to me. He’s a bit weird, though,” he giggled, “he says colours can talk.”

  “He may not be innocent,” said Yasmin, “but you’re right, he’s not a thief.”

  Patrick Phelan was no thief. He was a faker and, from the look of that Modigliani, an extremely good one. She’d been asleep on the job; if it hadn’t been for Sami she’d have missed it. She was so blown away by his paintings she forgot what she came for.

  “I owe you, Sami. Take Your Child to Work Day is supposed to be for teaching kids about their parents’ jobs, but you taught me something about mine today. I’d have missed that picture of the naked lady if it wasn’t for you. Noticing stuff like that is what makes a good detective, and your mum took her eye off the ball. This is worth a pack of cola bottles.”

  “Something else I’ve noticed, Mum,” said Sami later as they turned into Ilfracombe Road. “There’s a white van behind us and the same van was following us on the way there.”

  Yasmin turned just in time to see the back of a white tranny disappearing into the road bordering the park, too late to catch the number-plate. But she thought she saw a patch of fresh white paint on the side, as if a logo had been painted over.

  “Are you sure it was the same van?” she asked Sami uneasily. “There are a lot of white transit vans on the road.”

  “Yes, but they don’t all have the same number-plate.”

  Take Your Child to Work Day, Lesson 2. Yasmin got a pencil and a petrol receipt out of the glove compartment and handed them to Sami, who wrote down a number and handed them back.

  “A packs of cola bottles, and some yellow belly snakes.”

  Chapter XXXVIII

  It happened so quickly Sami didn’t know what hit him. One minute he was dribbling his precious football down the road trying to break his personal speed-dribble record of 15 seconds from the front door to the park, the next he had a blanket over his head and was being bundled into the back of a van. By some primal reflex he managed to grab the football, but his school bag with his mobile phone was left on the porch. He had no way of contacting Mrs Dudek downstairs, who looked after him on schooldays until his mum got back from work.

  Sami felt the van swing left and left and right and left, and as it hurled him one way, then the other he tried to keep a mental map of where he was going. He got as far as the Blackhorse Road, then his GPS lost contact.

  At that point he started to worry about what to do.

  He’d heard of kidnapping. It happened to rich kids, mostly, the children of celebrities, and from what he’d heard they were usually tied up. But Sami wasn’t, and it set him thinking. What he was thinking was that when they got to wherever they were going, the van doors would have to be opened to get him out. That, he realised, would be his make-or-break moment. He’d know it was coming because the van would slow and stop, he’d hear the engine being turned off and the men – he thought there were two of them – getting out.

  He worked out a plan. It involved a sacrifice but in his present situation he had no option.

  Unfortunately Sami’s plan had a flaw. What he hadn’t anticipated was that when the van slowed and stopped, the doors would be opened inside a docking bay. Not being familiar with the sound of garage roller-shutter doors – the family Micra was parked on the street – he had no time to develop a Plan B. So he stayed poised to put Plan A into operation with the football tucked under his right foot.

  No sooner were the van doors opened than Sami’s precious football came flying under the full force of his boot smack into the face of a burly man in a beanie hat. Before the man could work out what had hit him Sami had jumped down from the tail flap and ducked away, to find his escape route blocked by a roller-shutter door.

  By now the driver had got out and made a lunge for Sami, but a feint from the kid caused him to slip and drop his keys. Sami swiped them, found the attached remote control keypad, waved it towards the door and jabbed at the buttons. To his amazement the roller mechanism clanked into motion and as the door lifted off the ground he slithered under. Through the gap he could see the football rolling towards him. He willed it closer, but just as it inched within his grasp the driver got up and made a dash for the door.

  Sami bid goodbye to his beloved football and jabbed the remote. He heard the clanking of the roller door behind him and didn’t hang around for long enough to see it clank shut on the driver’s foot.

  * * *

  When Yasmin got home she found him sitting on the sofa in his Gunners baseball cap, looking gutted.

  “I’ve lost the Arsenal ball,” he moped, “the one Mr Burningham gave me.”

  His mother didn’t seem remotely interested.

  “Mrs Dudek rang me. Where have you been? What happened?”


  She sounded breathless and upset.

  “You’ve torn your jacket. Have you been in a fight?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Oh Sami! Tell Mum what happened.”

  She flopped onto the sofa beside him, and the story came out.

  “So how did you get back home?” she asked, astonished.

  “I ran until I got to an Underground station and squeezed through the barrier behind a lady with one of those wheelie case things. When I got to our end I said I’d lost my mum as I was playing Fruit Ninja when you got off.”

  “What station was it?”

  “Walthamstow.”

  “No, I mean the one you got on at.”

  “The Arsenal station.”

  He meant the Angel.

  “Did you notice the name of the street the garage was in?”

  “No Mum, I was too busy running. Oh, but here,” he reached in his jacket, “I got the keys.”

  He dropped them on the couch.

  “They fell out of this bloke’s pocket when I tripped him up. I couldn’t see his face – it was dark in there and he was wearing a Beanie hat. People in Beanie hats all look the same. Like idiots.”

  He squeezed the peak of his baseball cap and pulled it down over his eyes.

  Yasmin’s fear and shock dissolved in admiration.

  “Well, I never… Sami the adventure hero!”

  She opened her arms for a hug, which the hero accepted.

  “Oh, and I left my schoolbag on the porch,” he added.

  “I brought it in,” she said, pointing to the passage where it was hanging on its usual peg. She picked the keys off the sofa with a tissue and bagged them for the lab. “Anyway you won’t be needing it for a while. No school tomorrow, you’re off to your Nan’s in Leicester.”

  She picked up the phone and dialled her mum.

  Chapter XXXIX

  Pat whistled as he crossed the leaf-strewn lawn with the bundle of newspapers under his arm. He never read the papers – he found them an unnecessary distraction – but Grant passed on his old ones for studio use.

  Now that the Seals were into the final straight, Pat was fired up with a new idea for a series of paintings of nudes in allotments. A series of paintings had a certain gravitas. Think of Monet: it was only when he started painting in series that people began to take him ‘seriesly’. Pat grinned; he’d try that one out on Wolf on Friday. It was about his level.

  Criminal waste, he thought, as he passed the pear tree hanging its autumn boughs heavy with fruit over the hedge from his neighbour’s garden. Those few branches were the sole survivors of Ron’s relentless campaign against rampant vegetation. Ron had a pathological fear of rampancy. He had pruned all the branches on his side back to stumps so that the tree now leant lopsidedly into Pat’s garden, trailing its tresses of reddening fruit like a Titian-haired temptress leaning over to brush her hair.

  On this fine autumn day the scene cried out for the Renoir woodland nymph-in-the-nip treatment. What Pat wouldn’t give to stretch Irene beneath it and let the Indian summer light dapple her thighs! An impossible dream on a Saturday morning, when his neighbour would be on the blower to the porn squad before the tip of the brush had kissed the canvas.

  Pat was musing on Marvell’s Thoughts in a Garden as he climbed the sun-warmed steps to the verandah. Since that day with Maisie in the allotment those fruity verses had been ripening at the back of his brain, diffusing an aroma of déjeuner sur l’ herbe.

  “What wondrous life is this I lead!” he declaimed out loud when the door of The Shed was safely shut behind him. “Ripe apples drop about my head; the luscious clusters of the vine upon my mouth do crush their wine.”

  A marvel, that Marvell. A sexy beast, a prince among poets and MP for Hull into the bargain. Those were the days! He wondered idly what sort of poetry the Right Honourable Member for Hull would be writing now.

  The three allotment sketches he had made with Maisie were propped on the plan chest to the left of his easel, on which a prepared canvas was already resting with the greenery blocked in around an unpainted triangle reserved for Irene.

  She was due at 10.

  “Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less withdraws into its happiness,” he intoned over the accompaniment of crumpling newsprint as he tore the old paper off his painting table to replace it with new. A fresh start always gave Pat the virtuous feeling of a housewife tucking in crisply laundered sheets. This was the good bit, the new beginning, when ideas careered freely through the brain before reality slammed on the brakes.

  He picked a paper off the top of the pile, opened it out and flattened it on the table surface, then went to organise his palette. Squeezing out glistening heaps of paint was a physical pleasure akin, he imagined, to the satisfaction a baby must feel, on rising from the potty, to discover he’s deposited a perfect turd. A fresh-laid palette was like a smorgasbord for a psychedelic dung beetle.

  Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Naples Yellow, Zinc White (warmer than cold unfeeling Titanium), Terre Verte, Viridian, Cinnabar Green (the colour of sunlight through sappy spring leaves), Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet (the colour of love all year round), Alizarin, Magenta, Indian Red, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Orange… The names on the paint tubes resonated with a poetry as ancient as the thousand names of Vishnu.

  Irene floated in on the dot of 10, punctual as the tide. While she undressed behind the screen, Pat studied his sketches for elements to complete the composition.

  The viewpoint was inside the potting shed: sylvan nymph glimpsed through open door luxuriating under a canopy of apples, with receding rows of bean canes lending depth on the right and an autumn cabbage patch, with that milky bloom, returning the eye caressingly to the foreground. The triangle formed by the nude on the sun-streaked grass was to be contained within a larger triangle extending from the shed door towards the vanishing point of the bean cane and cabbage rows outside the frame, leading the eye and the imagination towards a fertile field of boundless possibilities.

  Leaving the pub with Dino the week before, Pat had spotted a roll of old Astroturf from the so-called beer garden lying out on the street for the rubbish men. What a piece of serendipity! A perfect nymph carpet. He’d carried it home and hosed it down in the garden until it came up sparkling, good as new. Its greenness put the grass on the lawn to shame. Halfway through the op, of course, Ron came out and poked his nose through the gap in the hedge.

  “Spring-cleaning the lawn for autumn,” was Pat’s explanation. “Look, no weeds!”

  The nose withdrew without a word while the rest of Ron’s mug composed itself into a silent harrumph.

  Miserable bastard. No one could say Pat didn’t work at neighbourly relations. He tried.

  When Irene came padding out in her old silk kimono, the greensward was spread out on the floor to welcome her.

  “See, old cat, I’ve got a carpet for your bower.”

  “It’s a bit prickly,” said Irene as she lay down.

  “We’ll soon fix that,” said Pat and nipped over to the house for his green bathmat.

  He arranged it under her elbows and hips and stood back to admire the effect.

  “La Luxe!”

  By God Irene was a good model. She looked as relaxed as if she was lying in clover.

  “You’re a star.”

  He kissed her on the top of the head and crossed to the easel with spring in his step and a song in his heart.

  There is something in the way the human head sits on the neck and the neck on the shoulders that tells you most of what you need to know about a person. Those two conjunctions, when correctly aligned, make up two-thirds of the sum of human beauty, and by that measure Irene was Venus herself. As soon as Pat had positioned her reclining figure in the triangular space reserved under the apple, those were the points – the cruxes of the matter – on which he got to work.

  He imagined late summer light slanting through leafy branches, dappling the shoulders and breasts,
underpainted in green, with pink and yellow, while the neck was cast into warm shadow – burnt sienna, Indian red and violet – by the head. Touches of magenta and cadmium orange on the shoulders; flecks of Naples yellow brushing the left breast, where the sun struck through, and the tip of the chin. Wavelets of cinnabar green dancing under the chin where sun mingled with shade, the secret meeting place of chiaro and scuro – a place of assignation, cool and mossy.

  As he got into the rhythm of the broken colour and the hues began to weave their chromatic spell, Pat drank deep of a familiar intoxication. When it came on in a rush like this there was nothing else like it, except sex in sunlight. It should be bottled. He was beginning to feel quite pleasantly tipsy when, reaching over to clean his brush on the newspaper, he experienced a sensation like being really drunk.

  He was seeing double.

  Looking up at him from the table was the very same head on the very same shoulders he had just been painting, under the headline: ‘RARE DEGAS SELLS TO KHALEEJ MUSEUM FOR $40m’.

  Pat stared at the paper, stone cold sober. The spell was shattered.

  “Are you alright, love?” asked Irene.

  “Fine,” he said faintly.

  “You sound a bit funny.”

  “You know me, funny as they come.”

  The attempt at a joke stuck in his throat like phlegm. Whatever happened Irene mustn’t see this.

  “Lousy juggler, spilt the sodding turps.” He cleared the painting gear off the table, lifted off the top sheet of newspaper and dropped it into the gap behind the Seals to look at later.