Chapter Eight
EIGHT
The cat? Obviously it runs off when the police arrive. Cats may not know much about prison, but this one knows enough, it’s an outdoor cat and has no intention of becoming a locked-up cat. Besides, it knows that people will like the man more when they find out he’s a world-famous artist, but they’ll like the cat less when they find out it isn’t homeless. We want to look up to men, but we’d prefer to feel sorry for cats, that’s how the world works. So the cat decides it’s probably just as well to go home and have dinner now, and wanders off to the other end of the alley, and that’s the last time it sees the artist. Animals don’t have telephones that ring at dawn, they’re very lucky, they never find out that they’ve lost someone. But at the end of the alleyway the cat stops very briefly, looks around, and runs its tail through the paint on the wall, which hasn’t quite dried, and if you didn’t know better you’d swear that it had tears in its eyes.
Louisa? She runs until her throat feels like it’s about to burst from lack of oxygen and happiness. Just once, she got to paint a wall with her idol, paint with her whole being, and it was incredible that the building was still standing afterward, that her hammering chest hadn’t smashed every brick. She runs so far that evening that when she finally breaks into a parked car to sleep, she passes out on the back seat as soon as she’s locked the doors. She hasn’t slept so deeply since Fish was sleeping next to her.
The artist? He sleeps too, dreaming about a summer and a boy. When he wakes up in the hospital later that night he blinks against the bright light, and can only make out the outline of the well-dressed man in the chair next to him. The artist whispers hopefully:
“You’re… here?”
The well-dressed man, whose name is Ted, takes his hand tenderly and leans closer, waits patiently until the artist recognizes him. Then the artist whispers:
“Sorry… I thought you were Joar, just for a moment…”
“I know,” the man named Ted says sadly, because the artist says Joar’s name in his sleep every night.
The two men have known each other forever, almost their whole lives. If you have loved anyone as much as Ted loves the artist, so much that you’re prepared to be mistaken for someone else just to see your friend’s face light up for a couple of seconds, then you know what he feels. Otherwise there’s probably no way to explain.
“Are we in a hospital?” the artist wonders, looking around the room in confusion.
“Yes,” Ted nods.
“Not the police station?”
At this Ted tries to conceal his irritation, not entirely successfully.
“The police thought you were homeless! They thought you were a vandal! What were you even thinking? If I hadn’t heard the shouts from the alley—”
The artist interrupts him with a weak voice that’s barely more than a gasp: “Did she get away?”
Ted throws his arms up in despair.
“The girl in the alley? Yes, I saw her run off, the police were all busy with you.”
“Good, good,” the artist smiles, blinking slowly, like an exhausted child declaring that they absolutely, most definitely, aren’t remotely tired at all.
“This was on the ground. Is it hers?” Ted wonders, pulling the postcard out of his pocket.
“Yes, yes,” the artist whispers unhappily, running his fingers over it.
Ted can hardly bear how slight his friend has become, with his sunken face and almost transparent skin, like thin ice over death. The eyes are all that’s left of the person he used to be, the illness has aged his body to that of an old man, but the eyes are still those of a mischievous little kid: playful and loving and dazzling and entirely impossible not to fall in love with.
“What happened? What were you doing in that alley?” Ted asks tenderly as he tucks the artist in.
The artist’s fingers trace the bump on his forehead and he thinks for a few moments, then whispers: “I just wanted to see if I could still jump in the sea and miss the water.”
He laughs so hard he starts to cough, Ted doesn’t look remotely amused, perhaps because he knows how much Joar would have laughed.
“We agreed that you were going to wait in the café at the train station! I leave you for an hour, and you manage to get yourself beaten by the police?” Ted grunts.
The artist brightens up and exclaims:
“Yes! Isn’t that great? Like being young again!”
He starts coughing again.
“It isn’t funny,” Ted says seriously.
“It’s a bit funny,” the coughing man insists.
“This was all your idea! I was going to go to the auction and you had one job: to stay at the station and not draw attention to yourself. How do you think that went?”
The artist breathes deeply through his nose and for the first time looks a little ashamed.
“I know, I know, I just got it into my head that I wanted to see the painting against a big, white wall one last time. I was just going to sneak into the auction for a little while, but the guard wouldn’t let me in. He had no idea who I was!”
He says this last sentence with a happy grin. Ted sighs so hard that his spine creaks. The artist’s illness means he no longer looks like himself, which is at least a small consolation for a dying man who has always hated being famous.
“So what were you doing in the alley, then?” Ted asks again.
“I went round the back of the church to see if there was a window I could crawl in through, like we did when we were fourteen.”
“You’re not fourteen anymore.”
“What do you mean? Of course I am! So are you!” the artist laughs, then asks: “By the way, what happened to the cat?”
“What damn cat ?” Ted exclaims wearily, because how much can one person manage to get up to when he’s left alone for an hour ?
“I made friends with a cat,” the artist whispers proudly.
“You drive me crazy,” Ted groans.
“It isn’t very nice to be angry with someone who’s dying,” the artist teases, and is immediately punished with another fit of coughing.
“I’m angry because you’re not taking this seriously,” Ted snaps, far more angrily than he intends.
“Oh, I’m taking it seriously, Ted. I’m just not afraid. It’s been a long life,” he replies, like he has so many times before.
“No,” Ted whispers, moist-eyed.
Because it’s been a painfully short life, the blink of an eye, a single summer’s day. Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death. Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault.
“It’s been a long life,” the artist insists. “It’s been…”
He tries to say something else but is cut off by such a violent fit of coughing that his thin frame shakes. Ted is struck by the panic of love and just wants to help.
“Drink some water! Look, the nurses left some food! Eat your vegetables!”
The artist laughs through the coughing and wheezes:
“Vegetables? Do you really think that will make any difference now?”
It’s a joke, but that doesn’t help, because now Ted’s whole chest is shaking. The artist hasn’t seen him this desperate in twenty-five years. The artist wants to comfort him, but there’s no point, ever since they lay on that pier the year they turned fifteen, Ted has been terrified that everyone he loves will die. Sooner or later he’ll be proven right.
“Don’t be sad,” the artist smiles.
He considers saying that it’s actually Ted’s fault, because if you live as healthily as Ted does, you only have yourself to blame if you’re the last one left. But this doesn’t feel like the right moment.
“Don’t concern yourself with what I might be feeling!” Ted snaps.
This isn’t the first time he’s been sitting beside a hospital bed, the artist has been dying for a long time, just very slowly. Now it’s happening mercilessly quickly. He’s stopped taking his medication, it doesn’t help anymore, he’s decided that he’s had enough. He isn’t remotely scared, and it’s hard for Ted not to be angry about that. “A long life,” the artist keeps saying, but obviously that isn’t true. Because Ted could end up living until he’s eighty, a whole extra life, without him! It’s so hard not to be angry with yourself then, impossible, when all you want to do is cry out: “You have to live, for me.”
“On my gravestone I want you to put: ‘Enter from other side,’?” the artist whispers, because he knows jokes like that drive Ted mad.
“Be quiet,” Ted mumbles.
“Or ‘Here lies a man who ate his vegetables but died anyway,’?” the artist suggests.
He starts coughing so badly that the nurses come rushing in, thinking that he’s dying. Ted grunts wearily:
“Don’t worry, he’s just laughing at his own jokes. There’s nothing wrong with his lungs, it’s his brain…”
Then one of the nurses laughs too. She tucks the artist in, pats him on the cheek, and walks toward the door but seems to change her mind, then changes it once more. She turns around carefully and says softly:
“My husband loved your work. We saw some of your paintings in a gallery once. I loved the way he looked when he was looking at them.”
“Thank you,” the artist whispers.
“We should be thanking you,” she replies.
She could have asked him for an autograph, it would have been the artist’s last, she could have sold it for a lot of money. But that would never have occurred to her.
When she has closed the door softly behind her, the artist whispers to Ted:
“I’m sorry my death is so unexciting. If I could have made it a bit more spectacular, the price of my paintings would have gone up. Was a heroin overdose really too much to ask? Or getting murdered?”
When Ted doesn’t reply, because he’s so angry, the artist tries to give him a pillow and suggest that it isn’t too late for that last idea. Ted rolls his eyes. Then he nods toward the box in the corner of the room and says, as if it ought to make the artist feel a bit embarrassed:
“You haven’t even asked if I did what you asked me to do. But the answer is yes. I bought it, and it was ridiculously expensive. It cost all you had.”
The artist nods gratefully, without a trace of regret.
“Good. Artists are supposed to die poor.”
Ted looks at him sternly for a long time before he mutters:
“Easy for you to say, I’m the one who’s going to have to pay for the cremation.”
Ted makes jokes so rarely that the artist isn’t at all prepared for his own laughter this time. When the nurse comes running back in, Ted has to confess that this time he was actually the one being funny. The nurse looks suspicious, like she doesn’t believe him. She leaves the door slightly ajar.
“Can I see it?” the artist whispers when they’re alone again.
Ted nods resignedly and gets up, then carefully lifts the world-famous painting out of the box. There’s a small framed map of emergency exits and escape routes on the hospital wall, so Ted takes that down and hangs up the painting instead, seeing as escape routes are now surplus to requirements. When he turns around, the artist is lying in the bed looking at his own artwork, and crying, crying, crying.
Ted takes his hand gently and promises: “On your gravestone I’m going to write: ‘I love you and I believe in you.’?”
“I love you and I believe in you too,” the artist smiles, resting his head heavily on Ted’s arm.
Ted looks at the painting, at himself on the pier, side by side with his best friends that last summer they were children. Then he looks at the signature in the bottom corner, the skulls the artist always drew next to his name, and says:
“I saw the skulls on the wall today. That’s the first time you’ve painted them in… I don’t know… years?”
“I didn’t know I’d missed them so much,” the artist replies, wearily but happily, like a five-year-old after a long day with a new playmate.
“Who was that girl in the alley?” Ted wonders.
The artist smiles excitedly.
“Her name is Louisa! Her best friend was called Fish! Louisa has run away, she’s gone missing, but she turns eighteen tomorrow, so then she’ll just be gone instead. She sleeps in cars. And she paints so that… so that… did you see the wall, Ted? She painted so that… so that the roofs blew off the buildings.”
The corners of Ted’s mouth tremble when he admits: “I’ve been longing to see you paint skulls again.”
The artist blinks calmly: “It’s Easter, and a girl who was being chased appeared, and she was nice to a homeless man in an alleyway… and she painted a church. It would take less to make you start to believe in God, Ted.”
“Yes,” his friend agrees reluctantly.
“Don’t cry for me, Ted. I got to experience everything. It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it I got to see something unbelievably beautiful.”
Ted nods disconsolately. “That girl’s paintings?”
“No. You. I got to see you.”
Ted’s ears are ringing as he lays his forehead against the edge of the artist’s bed. Afterward it will feel as if this went on for several days, because that’s how death sounds. Once upon a time, church bells used to ring for the dead, now it’s telephones, and the more they ring, the more important the person was. When a world-famous artist dies, phones ring on every continent, people talk about him on the news, people who have never met him cry. Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.
Early tomorrow morning even the most serious critics, even those who have never written a kind word about the artist’s paintings, will whisper “Oh no” into their phones when they hear what has happened. And Ted has to forgive them, because in grief we are reminded that we’re human beings. In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.
Strangers’ phones will ring all around the world, but perhaps most of all the artist’s own phone will ring, endlessly, in the darkness, because Ted will call his number again and again. That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness. The vibration of his laughter, the smell of his skin, his phone number. How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.
The artist in the bed closes his eyes and has so little strength left in his voice that Ted has to read his lips: “Write on the gravestone: ‘Does this coffin make me look fat?’?”
It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.
If any of the nurses hurrying past in the corridor see what Ted does next, they’re merciful enough to pretend they haven’t noticed. The almost-forty-year-old man gets up carefully onto the bed. Four hands lace their fingers together, their bodies so close that when one man falls asleep, he does so with the other’s tears on his lips. There Ted lies beside the love of his life, and the love of his life isn’t afraid, or angry, or even lying in a hospital bed anymore. He is lying on a pier in the sun, with salt water on his skin and Ted’s kisses on his eyelashes.
So a world-famous artist falls asleep, and soon telephones are ringing everywhere, soon they are talking about him on the news, at daybreak his death will belong to everyone and everything. But for a very short while that night in that hospital room, it only belongs to Ted. A soft little exhalation through the stubble of his beard, one final little beat of his heart, and then the world is smaller.
The very, very last thing the artist whispers is: “Find Louisa. Give it to her.”