The Connoisseur’d heard that she was the only genius in town. Weimar republic hairdo blacker than a goth’s heart. Improbable, glowing, crème-de-menthe eyes. Allegedly had a tattoo of Frederick Barbarossa’s last words winding around her inner thigh. Apparently, she painted photo-realistic canvasses indistinguishable from actual photos, which to his mind seemed utterly pointless. He could not wait to tell her this, yet never quite got the opportunity.
For a while, they’d danced around the periphery of each other’s lives: the Connoisseur scored a gramme of flake from her roommate, just to give him an excuse to visit their flat—she’d been out all night. They sat on opposite ends of scarred tables in too-loud pubs; he tried to lean in close, to overhear what she was saying to people better-looking, younger, more interesting than himself. Once, he got close enough to hear that she was explaining how Audrey Flack and Chuck Close were the only people she measured herself against, realised he didn’t know who they were and, suitably chastened, retreated to another table.
Her laugh was loud and mannish and sometimes devolved into a long-time smoker’s lunging cough. The light caught the edge of her hair and flared back like light off a starling’s wing.
Just down the street from his flat, an empty shop had been converted into a gallery for, as they used to say, one night only. Inside, Fine Art students preened in dresses that were last in style in the 1950s and parents looked confused and sad as they wondered just why they had paid for all this. The lights were too bright and someone somewhere was playing some awful trendy indie on repeat. Someone had cut something into it, some clever trick of audio-engineering wasted on inserting the repeated line What do you love, what do you love, just on the cusp of hearing.
Once inside—after he’d cracked open a can of cider—the Connoisseur drifted amongst the small groups chattering in front of the paintings and sculptures, trying to see if the event had reached the critical point he craved. Finding a small bare section of wall with a fire extinguisher hanging on it he paused to take the occasional reinforcing swig from his tinnie. He spent the next ten minutes stock-still, staring straight at the fire extinguisher with lips pursed and brow knitted together. Anyone unlucky enough to pass between him and the fire extinguisher he reacted to with a passive-aggressive huff, tilting his head and stepping around them, as of one whose concentration has been broken but might be regained if he was just left alone.
Once he’d seen—out of the corner of his eye—that his little performance had attracted a few onlookers, blinking as they tried to make out what he was engrossed in, he turned and loudly proclaimed “Genius!” to the room in general.
Bored, perhaps, with making such a nuisance of himself so early in the evening, the Connoisseur went looking for the table selling the cans. He blew his nose and threw the tissue into what might be someone’s conceptual installation but might equally have been a dustbin, and when he looked up he came face-to-face with himself, full-length, as in a mirror.
The artist of this particular work must have caught him as he came out of the flat one morning, hungover or coming down, trudging to work. He had a little ritual of stopping and checking his appearance in the mirrored frontage of the motorcycle accessory shop two or three doors down; he made a habit of it, and worse, always tried to disguise it: a little roll of the neck, a yawn and stretch as he passed, gaze drifting oh-so-coincidentally to check out his reflection.
He’d been seen, obviously, caught out, photographed and then—possibly because a photograph rather lacks the damning, accusatory air you can work into a painting—pinned to the canvas. His always-furtive, rather guilty air had caught something in the painter’s imagination; they had spent a long time magnifying it until his image had passed into caricature: he looked to blame for everything. He looked, he thought ruefully, like Peter Lorre caught having a wank.
In the painting, you could almost see his hairline as it receded, the scalp growing through the gaps between the swept-back hair. Harsh lines scored around his mouth; across the forehead remnants of too many smiles and frowns. Dead black hollows ringed the eyes. He looked at it and saw himself as he really was: foolish. Vain. The body on its way to the grave, youth sold cheaply and nothing learned, nothing gained. His skin looked both raw and pasty. He’d missed a couple of spots whilst shaving and the random patches of stubble stood out under his sagging jawline and along the line of his neck like early manifestations of some terrible disease.
“Do you like it?” she said, her hand suddenly on his sleeve. She laughed, and said: “I can’t believe you turned up here tonight. It’s a sign. An omen. Do you believe in those?”
When he only stared at her, she stepped around him, went up on tip-toe and moved in close to whisper in his ear.
“Come outside,” she said, “away from these dreadful morons. Let’s have a smoke.”
They never made it. As they threaded their way through the knots of students and their parents, a man—older than the woman and the Connoisseur but not old enough or dutifully confused enough to be paying for grown-up children to be there—pushed his way out of the throng. He grinned at the Connoisseur maniacally, tiny black eyes glittering under the brim of a greasy Homburg; below that, a twisted fighter’s nose; below that, a ragged Imperial. The barrel-chested frame strained against an oily pleather jacket.
He moved right in close so that the Connoisseur could smell the cider and tooth decay on his breath and get a good look at the thick black hairs sprouting from his capillary-crazed nostrils and he grasped the Connoisseur by both shoulders, as if greeting an old friend. He turned and stage-winked at the genius, who stood watching with a look of bored detachment. The man shrugged, and leered back into the Connoisseur’s face.
“Engaging in an act of reflexive taxonomy, are we?” said the man, chewing the syllables and rolling them around his mouth. “Girding one’s loins in preparation for pronouncing on the intrinsic worth inherent in the displayed work? Or just looking for a shag?”
“Um,” said the Connoisseur. “The last one. I think.”
“Well,” said the man in the Homburg, releasing his shoulders. “At least you’re honest. Who’s honest these days? Dying art that is, mate.”
He repeated this more quietly as he pulled away, with genuine sadness:
“Dying art.”
He stepped back, very quickly, and punched the Connoisseur in the face. He doffed his hat and turned away on his heel. The woman headed after him.
A group of people gathered around where the Connoisseur sat on the floor. No-one offered to help him up. The terrible indie had been turned down, and—more audibly now, as if it were not embedded in the track itself but was playing alongside it—threaded through it was the same, recurring sample:
What do you love? What do you love?
It occurred to the Connoisseur that perhaps the gathering crowd had mistaken this for part of the exhibition, a performance piece.
“Thank you all for coming, ladies and gents,” he said loudly, if somewhat nasally, as he struggled to his feet. He wiped a smear of bloody snot away from his nose. “That was a preview of our new piece, “Romantic Contretemps, Number Seventeen”, which we’ll be performing later this evening. Get your tickets from the bar!”
***
The tired city sagged here, on the cusp of gentrification: on your way to work you were as likely to be accosted by a singularly beautiful missionary from an evangelical cult—pushing free cakes or flyers for prayer meetings into your hand—as by a ragged, hollow-eyed street-person with a ratty dog on a bit of string. A hand-lettered sign on a scarred brick wall declared “Welcome to the Artist’s Quarter” in the most beautiful copper-plate calligraphy. Below it, someone had spray-painted “A quarter will set you back fifty quid, mate”, but no-one seemed to appreciate it. The pavements were scrubbed with a harsh, wintry light and the exhaust smoke clung to the buckling tarmac for a second before dissipating in the razor-cold air. The new chipboard covering up the derelict shops was brand-new; the “Byzantine” arches and Moorish flourishes of the ruined Carriageworks looked dull in comparison, the flashy polychrome brickwork mouldering to a host of greys. Further up, the dressed stone and faded bricks had an unhealthy tinge, like a ghastly infection seeped down from the shattered roof.
Some movement—perhaps, the suggestion of movement—caught the Connoisseur’s eye as he passed the ruin, trying to skirt the Big Issue sellers, the cake-bearing be-pamphleted evangelists and the breakfast-drinkers, already late for work, huffing out of breath.
He thought he saw a hand, outstretched through a gap in the chipboard as if to beckon him: long, slim, pale. Even as he watched, it withdrew back into the darkness at the back of an archway. His mind flashed back to Saturday night, to the genius’s hand as it played across his cheek; he remembered her mannish laugh, her Weimar hairdo, the cold feel of her breath on the skin behind his ear and then he was across the road in a blare of horns and shriek of tyres, screamed swear-words falling in his wake.
Making the opposite pavement, he kicked the flapping board aside. Inside, some trick of acoustics killed the snarl of traffic from the road. Weeds choked the archway and caught at the Connoisseur’s legs as he waded through them, clanking and slipping on the scree of empty bottles, filthy rags and shattered half- bricks below. The interior of the ruin was open to the sky but portions of the shattered roof overhung the quiet and the light slanting through the devastation rendered the shadows abyssal. Pigeons clustered on jutting spars. Blinking he stepped out into the building’s interior—a vast hollow, full of weeds and fly-tipped builder’s waste, most of the roof in jagged piles half-overgrown—then stopped, squinting; but there was no sign of her, or anyone. Pigeons glid across the silence; as he watched, a feather fell lazily through the slanting light then, caught on some unfelt updraught, danced across his vision and behind him.
Only half-following its passage, he turned to go and as he recoiled he fell—for a second, an instant he was neither aware of nor would ever know of—into the exact pose in which he had been captured upon the wall above: an attitude of shocked recoil, a balding Nosferatu reeling from daylight in an ill-fitting pair of suit trousers and a shirt that needed ironing. This vision of him—drawn in the past but only now coming to pass—had been daubed across the crumbling interior facade of the building in thick black paint that had, by some cruel alchemy, been rendered so skilfully that it resembled a charcoal study: harsh lines and quick corvid slashes dashed against the brick, diminishing right angles fading in tone giving the illusion of space; heavy yet distinct cross-hatching filling in shadows that seemed even blacker than those that clustered in the ruin’s corners. The savage lines and harsh treatment of the angles and planes of his face, meanwhile, burnt themselves into the Connoisseur’s soul; dense tonal gradations stood in for the emptiness in his eyes.
Above this towering caricature, fifty feet above street level in the same thick black strokes of paint, paint so black that it seemed somehow still-wet, across the scarred and rotten brick was daubed:
AUXOCHROME & CHROMOPHORE HAVE YOU NOW
***
After this ambush, the Connoisseur found himself slipping away. His reflection grew thin and wan, his shadow a midday blade even at dawn and sunset. He began to imagine that he could see through his skin, and spent hours staring at the complicated traceries of musculature and nerve-tissue that cloaked his rotting bones, fascinated by both the complexity of his substance and the fact that his workmates didn’t seem to realise what had happened to him. Members of the customer-service class knew: cashiers ignored him in shops, stared past or through him as he stood in line, awaiting their acknowledgement; after a few days of plunking his purchases down in front of them and being greeted with little yelps of surprise he found he could walk straight out the door.
At first this delighted him, but soon his glee turned sour as customers entering barged straight past him, often with such force his ill-gotten gains spilled to the floor; others, following, tripped heavily over him as he scrabbled on filthy linoleum to pick up ready meals, tinned vegetables, packets of breakfast cereal.
Every time he went out—
Stencilled in silhouette as he stole from his doorway, furtively checking left and right before stepping into the street: a hundred, no a thousand copies all slightly different, a child’s flipbook with each page torn out and blowing along the street, decorating bus shelters, piling up into drifts in pub doorways, stuck over the furtive, desperate adverts in the windows of newsagents, covering up gig posters on the blank crumbling walls of disused shop-fronts that regeneration had yet to touch, dissolving in bitter rain.
In a pale, delicate wash of watercolours, somehow etched into the plastic side of a bus-shelter: nude, one hand cupping himself, the other extended as if beseeching: a sentimental, even kind image, his face turned away from the viewer and his eyes screwed up against the falling water from the shower-head in an attitude that could charitably viewed as bashful were it not obvious he was searching blindly for the soap.
Handbills block-printed with a woodcut portrait of his face: “YOU DESERVE TO BE TURNED INTO ART” across the bottom in white-on-red Barbara Kruger capitals, an expression of gormless shock writ across his features, plastered across a hundred yards of street frontage, across bricks and cladding and windows, sealing Fire Exits and papering over doors, flapping morosely in a damp wind, piling up in filthy gluts in gutters and drifting silently across wet, pockmarked asphalt.
On his knees, thirty feet up a derelict tower block, spray-painted in shades of iridescent opal, moonstone-paint that shimmered like mica or glitter eyeshadow: caught forever as he groped on his hands and knees, fumbling for a rolling can of soup, horror carved into his face as he glanced over his shoulder, waiting to be knocked into again.
***
After a while it seemed safer, on the whole, to stay indoors. His work didn’t seem to notice, or at least, they never bothered with a phone call to ascertain if he was alive or dead. He was running the hot water for one of his increasingly infrequent showers—his reek beginning to hang in the frigid flat’s air like a threat, a secretive gingery musk—when he realised he could no longer see himself in the mirror. Frowning, he wiped away condensation and peered into the glass. The reflection of the ratty tiles and rusting chrome towel-rail behind him stared back. He was not there. He reached out a hand, tested the mirror’s surface, and gave a little yelp when he stubbed his finger against it.
He glanced up. In profile, sketched into the condensation on the inside of the shower cubicle, he saw himself crouching forward, peering as if short-sighted, prodding at the air experimentally with a finger, face screwed up in consternation or disbelief at what he saw (or didn’t see) in front of him.
Screaming, he ran stark naked into the winter streets.
A sky the colour of old lead. The wind had slackened but the damp crept in the bones. A faint breeze stirred the discarded takeaway cartons, condoms and crisp packets below, rustled the fronds of the sickly-looking ferns growing out of fissures in the brick. Up here, he could see the lights as they came on in the nice little cafés, the converted offices for eco-friendly start-ups, the little shops selling crafts constructed from seashells and handmade jewellery owned by delicate art-school girls who kept very quiet about their private incomes.
He’d torn his fingernails down to ragged bloody ends climbing up, had nearly slipped down more than once; he’d got a splinter the size of a railway sleeper in one foot and he thought he’d broken the little toe on the opposite side when some cast-iron guttering gave underneath him in a shower of rust. The pigeons had all flown off as he clambered towards them but now had returned, cooing inquisitively as they closed ranks and leaned off the edge of the spars to peer down at him: he couldn’t help but feel judged.
He looked down into the street. Traffic was backing up over the speed bumps; tired office workers staggered into the murk. A gaggle of street-drinkers squabbled over something on the pavement outside the chemist’s. The hipster barber had closed up for the night, and one of the trainees was sharing a smoke with a couple of workers from the 24-hour “massage parlour” next door. The workaday world was going home, and not one of them noticed him or cared if he lived or if he died.
There was a tap on his shoulder, and he nearly lost his grip on the slimy brick before hands grabbed him roughly from behind, hauling him back before he toppled out of the archway and down into the street. He shook them off and fell to his knees, grit and broken glass ripping up his knees.
The man in the black Homburg crouched down next to him with a barely-audible grunt. Behind him, the shattered internal staircase dropped away into a pile of wreckage and rubble; he did not look like he’d climbed up, or if he had, he’d been very careful not to get brick dust on his box-fresh black jeans. The man took out a packet of cigarettes, offered one to the Connoisseur, shrugged at his refusal, lit up and regarded him through the smoke.
After a moment of silence broken only by the rumble of traffic and the soft shuffle and cooing of the pigeons, the Connoisseur said, his voice weaker and more petulant than he would’ve wished:
“Why did you steal me and put me in your art?”
The man stood up and appeared to consider this for a second.
“Because you are beautiful,” he said, his voice gravelly but kind. “Because you are ugly. Because you deserved it. Because I wanted to.”
“I hate you. I hate what you’ve done to me and I hate all the things you’ve made.”
The man in the Homburg threw his head back and laughed.
“Well,” he said, “You know what they say: If you don’t like the picture, you’re not standing close enough.”
“Who says that?” snapped the Connoisseur. “I can’t imagine anyone saying that.”
The man in the Homburg stood, flicked his dog-end past the Connoisseur’s head. The wind picked up and caught it, transformed it into a shower of sparks that died before they fell to the wet street, fifty feet below.
“Art is just life turned sideways,” said the man in the Homburg. “You gotta look at it on the piss before you get it.”
“Fuck your aphorisms,” wailed the Connoisseur, “What about me? I had a life!”
“Yeah, and now, you are immortal. Everything vital rots, but the essential saltes last forever.”
“Why not take all of me?” the Connoisseur said. “Why leave this,” and he gestured not only to his own filthy, shivering, blood-streaked body, but the leaden sky and the backed-up traffic and the cold lights of the shopfronts, the rest of the city looming on the hills beyond.
The man in the Homburg shrugged.
“Who wants to see the Mona Lisa’s arsehole? Who gives a fuck about Rothko’s mixing palette? Only nerds and fucking trainspotters. Anyway, it was probably just varying shades of brown.”
“The arsehole or the palette?” said the woman with the Weimar hairdo, appearing from behind the Connoisseur, stepping round him and favouring him with a conspiratorial wink. She draped an arm about the man in the Homburg’s spreading waistline, and walked them both forward underneath the crumbling voussoirs of the intrados of the arch, the better to take in the sunset which was just beginning to stain the clouds on the western horizon.
The Connoisseur chose that moment to throw himself at their backs, intending if nothing else to take his tormentors with him. The man in the Homburg—surprisingly light on his feet for a man of his bulk—skipped to one side as the woman with the Weimar hairdo stepped smartly to the other.
The Connoisseur seemed to hang for a moment over the city, pinned above the lights, an expression of almost beatific calm on his face. Then, gravity intervened. Brakes locked. Cars slewed to ragged halts. Horns blared. People began to scream. The man in the Homburg and the woman with the Weimar hairdo leaned out over the edge of the building. The man in the Homburg winked, and the woman with the Weimar hairdo nodded.
Two months later, an astonishing series of architectural paintings—views of the Carriageworks from various vantage points around the city, with the faded polychrome bricks and collapsing arches receding into a murk that seemed to swell out of the canvasses themselves—were exhibited at various venues. In each, a discerning observer might (were they to stand close enough) be able to perceive a wretched figure falling from the topmost window, falling from shadow to shadow, from the penumbra of a streetlight’s glare to the cloud of black smoke belching from the back of a passing lorry’s exhaust; but no-one, it seemed, ever managed to stand that close, and the figure’s presence went unremarked.
Nelson lives & works in Bristol, UK. He’s had stories published in venues like The Dark, Northern Gravy, Weird Horror, Old Moon Quarterly, Vastarien & several other places.