Portraits of insane women

Art galleries are perfect for picking up women, a fact surprising to Warren; his entire working life had been in art galleries, and he’d had no idea. He’d met his wife Georgina in a gallery – that’s where they had both worked – but the fact that men and women used Warren’s carefully curated spaces to feed explosive, untiring sex lives appalled him. His efforts to waken the soul with the tender strokes of art were wasted. Years of registering, ticketing, cataloguing, placing, interpreting, caring, protecting meant nothing. The public didn’t want his art. They wanted secret nooks for fleshy encounters. Soft chairs, heavy curtains, peepholes - tissues even. His art gallery was a pick up joint and Warren, a pimp.

But Georgina had run away. With Vernon, a wedding photographer. And although he’d tried the bachelor life for a few weeks, without her, without Georgina, without a woman, his life was dingy and meaningless. He had decided to do some thing about it. Georgina’s last email spurred him to action. Your vacuous chimp-scrawl makes my eyes vomit, she had pounded out in fat capitals. Where had she learned this language? It can’t have come from Vernon, the quiet wedding photographer, who specialised in novelty poses for his couples (his Pulp Fiction set-ups was very popular) Warren had no bad feelings towards Vernon. He’d never met him, but he’d walked past the man’s studio a few times and once glimpsed him arranging a family portrait and using a puppet to make the children laugh.

Warren wanted to stop doing furtive things like watching Vernon using puppets to make children laugh. Warren wanted forward movement, and a new woman would give him this. And if Warren couldn’t pick up a woman in a gallery then who could? Manchester Art Gallery’s revival of the Art Treasures of the UK exhibition from 1857 seemed an appropriate popularist choice; many single, available women would be wandering unsupervised. All he needed was the nerve and the blood.

Warren was appalled at the poor quality of the hang. The schools of Sienna, Arezzo and Florence were chaotically jumbled together and ascribed in slap dash fashion to Ducio, Cimabue, Giotto.

He found no fulfilment in the art, but he spotted an interesting woman; slim, somewhere in her thirties, and with ginger hair, which made her seem more attainable. Her nose was small and turned up at the end. He decided to make his move in the photography section where she was narrowing her eyes in intense concentration before a landscape by Gustav Legney. Warren imagined their gazes as beams of torch-light mingling in front of the photograph and felt suddenly exposed and tiny. Words swelled like a bubble in his chest, and he thought he would never free them. Then he remembered the advice in the book: offer your feelings about the work, then reveal something personal - such as the picture reminds you of a place you holidayed when you were small.

Instead, Warren blurted, ‘Did you realise that the sky and sea parts of this image would have had to be exposed completely separately then stitched together?’ Adding quickly, ‘It reminds me of my father.’

The woman pressed her lips together and widened her eyes, nodding slowly. ‘Did your father expose himself?’

‘Expose himself? No, no’

She broke out in squeaking little laughter ‘No I didn’t mean - I’m sorry. I mean did he expose pictures? Was he a photographer?’

‘No, he was a grocer. I’m Warren by the way.’

‘Becky.’

Becky looked at Warren’s face, then down to his shoes, which must have confirmed something; she made a darting fish movement with her hand and a whoosh sound with her mouth indicating they should overtake the couple in front and move on to the next picture – Rylander’s 'Two Ways of Life'.

Warren and Becky were looking at art together. They were behaving like a couple. This was easy.

Rylanders 'Two Ways Of Life' was made up of 36 separate negatives stitched together in the way Vernon digitally merged different images to make the novelty film stills for his newly weds. The photograph had been controversial in 1857, as it depicted orgiastic scenes involving bare breasted women. Warren worried Becky would ask him which way of life depicted in the photograph he would prefer. He had no adequate response, and would be inclined to say a little of both, so he hoped to God she had read the same book about picking people up in galleries and knew to avoid direct questioning.

‘Sometimes I feel,’ said Becky, ‘that my life is lots of separate exposures stuck together - like I see the world through a giant fly’s eye.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Warren said, unable to imagine what she was talking about.

The next display was a set of medical photos called 'Portraits of Insane Women', images that seemed to Warren exploitative and made him feel greasy. But Becky liked them more than anything else.

‘Look at their faces. In those days people knew how to be insane. You had proper mad people. Do you remember how street people used to mutter? You don’t get that now. What happened to muttering? It was like a different language - burbling, rasping, full of passion and grit. I used to like to hear them muttering. When I was a kid a woman used to follow me round the supermarket softly singing and tittering. Another used to swear. Where are they now?’

She bent her neck for a new angle. ‘You can see she is authentically deranged. The hollowness behind the eyes, the twisting of the mouth. Mad people have very thick hair, have you noticed? Do you think they have special shampoo? In asylums, I mean?’

Warren was concerned about her attitude to the insane women, but he felt that these attitudes were something he could work on. He was out there now. You had to work with the materials you were given. That’s what he’d read.

In the café Becky and Warren talked about their lives. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend, and had been visiting the gallery for months. Warren was the first normal person she’d got chatting to, so when he proposed his plan she was happy to agree.

***

At Vernon’s photography studio Warren and Becky flicked though a few examples of poses. Vernon had many of the necessary costumes, but, if need be, he could simply knock up the whole thing digitally. It was up to them. Warren, however, was prepared. He showed Becky the film poster for forties film noir Gun Crazy and she agreed right away; the gaze in the woman’s eyes was exactly like one of the portraits of insane women at the gallery.

Georgina would be amazed when she saw Warren with this red-haired girl in high heels and short skirt, breasts bursting out of a tight green sweater, pointing a hand-gun at the viewer, with Warren behind her, cigarette drooping, a fugitive look on his face, his eyes exposing a vacant soul whose only mission was the ruthless pursuit of pleasure.

The Buddy Holly Electrician

I don’t know what we were arguing about when you threw the bowl but I remember I ducked just in time which was a good job judging by the speed it whooshed over my head disgorging a comet’s tail of cereal behind it before smashing into the wall with a clang of porcelain that reverberated in the silence. I remember clearly us both standing there, looking the mess on the wall and floor, before bursting into laughter, kissing, then making love on that old scratchy sofa where, afterwards, we lay in each other’s arms, looking up at the splashes and curls of cereal that had formed a teeming many-armed galaxy on the wall. You asked me if I would clean the mess up, and I said yes, but I couldn’t help thinking it was unfair - you’d thrown the bowl, yet I had to clean up.

The next morning you weren’t angry when I showed you how I had left the bowl lying where it fell and hoovered carefully around it. You just laughed, and we hugged and made love on the scratchy sofa, and for the first time in years we felt complete.

We were both pointlessly, stupidly stubborn, always had been. We knew that neither of us would ever clean up the bowl. It stayed exactly where it had fallen. Sometimes we hid it with a piece of furniture, often we didn’t bother. We joked it was an installation and we were looking for arts council funding. By Christmas the upturned cereal bowl was part of the house. The smell was gone, the puddle of cereal creeping out from under it had become a hard, brown splodge, and it looked festive with tinsel trailed around and a bauble on top. It was the best Christmas we’d had. We didn’t row once. It was as if our sour, curdled love had been drained away and replaced with a sweet and pure liquid. And all because of the bowl.

All this time we knew that if we disturbed the bowl, a stream of demons would rush out to infect us and later that year we were proved right when a young electrician, who, in his thick black spectacles looked a bit like Buddy Holly, had to crawl under the floor boards to rewire the house. We’d rolled the bowl up inside the carpet and put it safely in the hall, but the Buddy Holly electrician thought we wanted to throw it away, and took it to landfill where it was crushed and buried.

When we realised what the Buddy Holly electrician had done we sat there. The raw, fabulous silence. The shock. Something malevolent growing around us. We breathed a foul atmosphere on the edge of explosion.

But we didn’t hold it against the Buddy Holly electrician. We allowed him to complete the job and after a while noticed that having the Buddy Holly electrician around had the same affect as the bowl. It seemed he had inherited its powers.

***

We listened to his words as told his wife on the phone that he would have to stay a little longer, and I remember you wrote down the things he said on a piece of paper which you rolled up and put away in your pocket. I cleared out a cupboard for his electrical tools whilst you helped him unwrap a new toothbrush and showed him up to the bathroom. We listened outside the spare room to the rustle of him removing his trousers and the thunk of his belt buckle landing on the floor. Having an electrician around the place would be useful. There were many jobs he could get stuck into. He’d always have plenty to do.