The Horse's Arse Read online

  The monochrome scheme extended to the art on the walls: large canvases of a uniform washed-out grey all measuring exactly 200x212cm, the off-square format Boegemann invariably worked in. The only variation was in the orientation. Some images were ‘portrait’, others ‘landscape’ – the challenge to viewers being to work out which, given the 12cm margin of difference. To mix things up further, the artist almost always painted his figures in ‘landscape’ format and his landscapes in ‘portrait’ – except occasionally, to keep people on their toes. “Confounding audience expectations,” said the State Gallery’s exhibition guide. “Fucking with your mind,” said Boegemann.

  Not that his paintings could be categorised as portraits or landscapes. His subject matter was global politics, his message that the world as we know it was doomed or, as he put it, “a fuck-up”. War, torture, starvation, oppression – these were his themes, although they were not always obvious to the viewer. True, most people could decode the meaning of the big grey balls of the Barbed Wire series or the small grey cylinders of the Land Mine series. But sometimes his allusions were more elusive, as with the glass of water on the filing cabinet titled Untitled (Resource Wars) or the sump titled Untitled (Black Gold).

  Brackets were a key component of Boegemann’s artistic defence against the world’s evils – if he could, he would have framed his pictures between them. Outside the studio, though, he dispensed with them. Dirk was a workaholic, alcoholic, sexaholic, chain-smoking hell-raiser who lived life to the limit. When he wasn’t painting he was curating and when he wasn’t curating he was networking, and in the short intervals in between he was raising hell.

  At 39 he was on the brink of burnout, but he wore his terminal exhaustion like a fashion accessory. It suited him. Without it, his long puffy pasty face might have belonged to a middle-ranking Dutch business executive. With it – and the expensive suit and shirt, worn without a tie but with flashy cufflinks – he looked like somebody. Hell, you’d have to be somebody to look that tired and afford that suit. Most people who looked that shagged-out were dossers.

  Dirk’s lifestyle would almost certainly have killed him if it hadn’t been for his assistant Ernst. Ernst booked the flights, the hotels, the restaurants, the hookers; he ran the studio and he scored the drugs. Some even said he painted the pictures, others implied that if he had they would be more interesting.

  Ernst was an artist, or he had been one. Fresh out of art school and scuffling for survival he had landed a dream job with Boegemann that he imagined would advance his career. It didn’t advance it, it became it, and Ernst became dependent on the money. Six years on he still seemed fresh out of art school, with that innocent stare in his wide-open blue eyes. If Dirk’s face looked lived-in, Ernst’s looked like he’d put life on hold and was fast losing hope of ever taking it off.

  At this moment Ernst’s unblinking gaze was fastened on Martin, who had wangled his way into the reception on Bernice’s arm. Ernst had noticed Dirk monitoring Martin’s movements over the heads of the crowd of art world A-listers. If he got through this evening without medical assistance, he’d need a pick-me-up later.

  Tonight’s launch was a big deal for Boegemann; it had the potential to take him on to the next stage. He’d had solo shows at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, at SMAK in Ghent and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, but his pictures were still only selling for a few hundred thousand pounds. The subject matter was the problem: too depressing, the sort of thing that public galleries could present as educational but private and corporate collectors ran a mile from. He risked being sidelined as a northern European gloom meister unless he could break the transatlantic market, to which this show in London was meant to be a steppingstone. The trouble was that American collectors love colour and indulging their unsophisticated taste would have been a betrayal of everything Boegemann stood for. For the State show, though, he had made a small concession. In the new painting Untitled (Summary Execution), the victim’s eye bandage was stained with red.

  It wasn’t only Boegemann with a lot at stake. The gallery was putting its name on the line by exhibiting a relatively unknown artist without a pre-established media profile in Britain, though the hell-raising, if handled properly, might help. Getting punters through the doors would be a struggle, but visitor numbers could always be faked. Who was going to check? In any case the show was cheap to mount since the majority of the works still belonged to the artist. Most of those credited to a ‘private collection’ had come straight out of the stores at RazzellDeVere.

  The Boegemann show RDV had planned for the autumn was part of a new business strategy of mounting selling exhibitions of contemporary artists. It had worked spectacularly for Westerby’s with their one-man auction of works by Cosmas Byrne, but RDV had to fish in shallower waters. With Boegemann they were dipping in a toe. They couldn’t have wished for a better shop window than this solo show at the State Gallery. Cassandra Pemberton had a contact in the marketing department who had ensured that all RDV’s best clients were on the guest list.

  The State’s own list included the usual sprinkling of young artists, past nominees and winners of the Ars Nova, whose role was to mingle with the gallery’s trustees and patrons rather like hostesses in a Mayfair club. The arrangement suited everyone. It suited the artists to be seen at the State and it suited the patrons to feel they were mixing with artists. If one of the artists occasionally misbehaved it added a faint frisson of excitement, like a dab of eau de bohème behind the ears. It wasn’t easy to make the State’s clinical white spaces feel bohemian, but a misbehaving artist or two helped. Tonight, though, even Boegemann was behaving. He was off the booze and manfully resisting the allure of the voluptuous redhead in the little black dress, cut dangerously low to expose the red satin trim on her balcony bra.

  Apart from the bloodstain on the execution victim’s bandage and the odd passing tray of cherry tomato and goat’s cheese canapés, the bra was the only splash of colour in the room – until Godfrey’s arrival in an International Klein Blue Tie with matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. With Enzo in tow, the collector from Pickton looked ready to party.

  Enzo was dressed for the occasion in skinny black jeans and the usual black scoop-neck singlet revealing his nipple rings – not exactly the lounge suit specified on the invitation, though the colour toned in with the funereal crowd. The doorman had been about to refuse him entry when a signal from Jeremy Gaunt, standing by the entrance, persuaded him to let the pair of them through. Instead of showing due appreciation, Godfrey blatantly ignored the paintings – he didn’t care for Boegemann – and made a beeline for Martin, who’d finished his business with Ernst and, with Bernice beside him, was staking out the entrance where the canapés came in.

  State occasions were never a barrel of laughs, but the party atmosphere tonight was more strained than normal. The Less Important Guests were looking nervous and the VIPs were looking bored. Bernice and Martin seemed to be the only ones enjoying themselves, apart from Tammy Tinker-Stone who had just received news of her nomination for that autumn’s Ars Nova.

  She was the only British-born candidate on the shortlist – the other three nominees were Tunisian, Lithuanian and Taiwanese.

  “She’d better win it for Britain,” whispered Bernice to Martin. “She’s getting on, and it’s her last chance before it goes totally global.”

  Tammy was on a high, charging around in a black sequined mini-dress and combat boots collecting video footage of her fellow guests for the Smile Please project she hoped to have finished by the autumn. Unlike Orlovsky, Gaunt had given her permission to film. The chance of appearing in an Ars Nova video might just add the element of excitement the evening needed.

  Tammy’s cast list so far included:

  Jeremy Gaunt himself and his art historian wife Virginia, an authority on British Modernism. Nigel Vouvray-Jones and his wife Sonya, a cosmetic-surgical work in progress known to staff at RDV as The Old Mistress. Dirk Bougemann and Ernst. Godfrey Wise and Enzo
. The museum directors of the Stedelijk, SMAK and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Fay Lacey-Piggott and her Swiss collector husband, Baron Rudolf von Stöckli. The celebrated architects of the unbuilt State extension, Spritzer & Camorra – Spritzer tall, bald and lanky with huge black-rimmed glasses, Camorra small and wiry with a fine head of white hair.

  Among the usual smattering of favoured art critics there was the influential Karel Klima from The Money Paper, the man responsible for making the reputations of the Cool British Artists – despite looking like he slept in his suit. There was the dapper Tom Jonson, who combined his role as visual arts pundit on The Culture Programme with the post of exhibitions director of Orlovsky’s London operation. Unlike the adipose Klima he was frighteningly trim and had the unusual distinction, for a thin person under 40, of having already suffered a heart attack from overwork. And of course there was the usual rent-a-crowd of cBas.

  Tammy didn’t waste any time on them, she could catch up with them later. She avoided Orlovsky too. She knew better than to try filming him, especially with the scowl he was wearing tonight.

  Orlovsky was certainly not looking happy. He was hovering near the entrance with a lawyer on one side and a minder on the other – there was no Mrs Orlo in his life – looking as if the decision to come in might commit him to some irreversibly foolish course of action. He was tired and tetchy, fresh off the plane from South Korea and the opening of his newest Asian outpost in the nick of time for the Gwangju Biennale, and this was the last place on earth he wanted to be. He’d offloaded his Boegemanns and regarded the show as an anachronism. In his opinion, this sort of western art was in its death throes. All you could say for it was that it was painting, and collectors never seemed to tire of pictures on walls. This despite the fact that the walls in many of their houses were either made of glass or non-perpendicular, or both.

  Who in their right mind would want to wake up to that, he asked himself in front of a bleached-out image of a dusty trainer sticking out of a mine crater? These were museum pictures, and with the museum building boom showing every sign of going bust they were no longer a marketable commodity. A museum artist’s prices had to be in seven figures before he was a viable proposition for a dealer like Orlovsky, and most museums didn’t have that sort of money. Collectors had money, but they weren’t buying this sort of work. No, while the market in 2-D works on canvas persisted, you couldn’t beat a Cosmas Byrne dot painting – all style, no content and guaranteed to include a colour that matched your décor. The only problem was getting hold of enough of them since the canny bastard choked off supplies.

  The sight of Martin slurping free champagne with Godfrey cranked Orlovsky’s irritation up a notch.

  “What’s he doing here?” he asked his lawyer.

  The lawyer pressed a finger against one nostril and sniffed.

  Orlovsky followed Martin’s movements around the room with the detached assurance of a spider watching a fly.

  “Have you sent that letter?”

  The lawyer nodded.

  “Good.”

  * * *

  Orlovsky excepted, Tammy had got a good haul. All the same, she felt the footage was rather flat and colourless. What she’d really wanted was a shot of Gaunt wringing out one of his tortured smiles, but he wasn’t performing. She searched the gathering for him and found him standing with Lady Virginia, Dirk and Ernst beside the big execution painting.

  Shit! He was cracking one now and she was too late.

  Tammy had caught the State director in the middle of asking Boegemann, in the nicest possible way, if he would consider donating one of his paintings to the gallery at the end of the show. The ingratiating smile had begun its painful progress across his mouth when it was suddenly and unforeseeably stopped in its tracks. From the direction of the Ladies, where she had been fixing her lipstick, the voluptuous redhead had come waggling and clattering over on her platform sandals and, breezing rudely past Lady Virginia, planted a scarlet smacker on Gaunt’s crooked puss.

  “Shit!” Tammy swore again as an explosion of breaking glass resounded from the other end of the gallery, near the door where the catering staff came in.

  Everyone in the gallery turned to look.

  Godfrey Wise had apparently collided with a waiter carrying a drinks tray, the tray had emptied its contents onto the floor and Enzo was rolling in the shattered remains.

  “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Tammy had started filming, but it was too late.

  Chapter XIX

  The sound of snoring was interrupted by the ringing of a doorbell, but to Martin’s surprise when he woke up the snoring didn’t stop. He turned around to find a tousled blonde head on the pillow, mouth agape, epiglottis serenading the ceiling.

  The doorbell rang again and the snoring faltered but recovered.

  Martin rolled out of bed. He knew the score, even in his sleep. Recorded delivery = summons.

  Who was it this time? He signed for the envelope and tore it open.

  Orlovsky. It couldn’t get any worse.

  Martin swept the envelope and its contents into the open swing bin and shovelled the week’s accumulation of take-out containers on top. He supposed he’d better tidy up for Bernice.

  For once he was rattled. Orlovsky spelt serious trouble. He could probably hold Merv off till the Degas ship came in, and he had Duval over a barrel. But Orlovsky wasn’t going to hang about. He’d seen the look on his face last night and he hadn’t liked it.

  How was he going to get hold of that sort of money? Not by selling spunk doodles to pAf, that was for sure, even assuming they were still in the market for them. He’d made them a BOGOF offer last week and he hadn’t heard back.

  The solicitors’ letter that preceded this one into the bin had estimated the cost of re-landscaping Orlovsky’s garden at £500,000. That was 10 times what it cost Martin the first time round, but Orlo didn’t know that and Martin wasn’t about to tell him.

  He snapped the kettle on, rattled the cereal packet, emptied the dregs into a bowl and pulled open the fridge. No milk. Stuffing dry cereal into his mouth with one hand, he made coffee with the other.

  Milady would be having her coffee black.

  The regularity of the snoring was as reassuring as the ten-second siren at a nuclear plant. As soon as it stopped Bernice would be in there bending his ear with a whole load of blather about last night. That was another of Bernice’s faults, too bouncy in the mornings, like a puppy wanting to be taken for a walk.

  The snoring had stopped. He heard a toilet flush, followed by a spate of hawking and spitting, and Bernice appeared in the kitchen doorway, wrapped in his bathrobe with an unlit fag hanging off her lip.

  “Give us a light Marty love,” she growled. Her voice was always deep, deeper in the mornings.

  He obliged.

  “What’s wrong darling? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

  He retrieved the summons from the bin, wiped off the ketchup and handed it to her.

  She unfolded it gingerly, avoiding the sticky patches.

  “Shit, what a bastard. I thought your garden looked lovely, what I saw of it. Honestly, you’d think Orlovsky needed the money… though from what Karel was telling me last night, it’s possible he does. There’s a rumour going around that he’s overstretched. He’s opened in five new markets in as many years and they’re not delivering the profit margins expected. Plus he’s lumbered with old stock he can’t get rid of, stuff he paid top dollar for before the recession. He was more heavily invested in the cBas than he likes to admit and the only cBa works surfing the slump right now are Byrne dot paintings, which he’s been moaning he can’t get enough of.”

  Martin brightened.

  Good, she’d cheered him up.

  “I wouldn’t worry love, something will turn up. It always does, for a lucky boy like you.”

  She stubbed out her fag in the cereal bowl, opened the bathrobe and straddled his lap. If she’d had a tail, thought Martin, it would h
ave been wagging.

  Chapter XX

  Pat had never had much time for Modigliani, a half-arsed dauber in his opinion, the poor man’s Cézanne. As far as he was concerned half a Modigliani was as good as a whole one, and half a Modigliani was all he’d got to work from: a black and white photocopy of a reclining nude with the bottom right-hand corner torn away.

  As the head was on the top left, everything below the bikini line – hips, bush and thighs – was up for grabs. Pat had some wriggle room this time, and he was planning to enjoy it.

  He could have made the pose up out of his head. That might have been Modigliani’s way – it certainly looked liked that from his skewed anatomy – but it wasn’t Pat’s. Pat could conjure an entire apocalypse out of thin air but when it came to the human figure, especially unclothed, the physical intimacy of an actual presence was necessary to him. Caressing the contours of a flesh and blood body with the chalk or brush was what, in Pat’s case, produced the magic, and on this flaming late June afternoon in The Shed he was looking forward to caressing some special contours.

  Irene’s thighs, bless her, were too soft and dimpled for Modigliani. Unlike with the Degas nude, there’d be no disguising the cellulite under a blizzard of chalk. For this particular job he’d asked Suzy to pose, and blow him down if she hadn’t accepted.

  From what could be seen of Modigliani’s model she was reclining in one of the artist’s trademark cascading poses, hips twisted out of alignment to face the viewer, sliding down the bed under the force of gravity – the sort of pose a rag doll could comfortably maintain but a human body couldn’t endure for more than a minute. Although the tear in the photo was only just below the navel you could tell that things were heading downhill by the steep angle of the right hip in relation to the bed. This was in defiance of the fact that the left hip appeared to be carrying on as normal, following the horizontal axis of the upper torso.