Chapter Ten
TEN
It isn’t the best first impression you can make, it really isn’t. The can of spray paint sails through the air until it meets resistance, and when it does there’s a loud noise, because that resistance happens to be Ted’s glasses, and then his eye. The sound that follows contains a fair number of complicated words of the sort used by people who are too posh for ordinary swear words.
Louisa, who heard footsteps behind her and just assumed someone had come to murder her, the only reasonable assumption, isn’t really sure if she should apologize or throw something else. The man in front of her is short and thin, the same way the artist was, but he’s smartly dressed in a blazer and pants that don’t look like he slept in them, his face is clean-shaven where the artist’s was bearded, and his eyes are grown-up and serious where the artist’s were full to bursting with childish curiosity. The man picks his glasses up from the ground with one hand, holds the other over his eye, and sighs:
“Are you… Louisa?”
Her eyes dart from one end of the alley to the other, as if she wants to make sure she can run away from him if she has to.
“Are you from the police?” she says suspiciously.
“If I was from the police, I’d already have thrown you in jail for assault,” he replies tersely, his English is perfect but the accent is funny.
Louisa mutters back:
“Assault? You were the one who crept up on me! I thought you were a murderer, and I didn’t even throw anything at you, I just threw it in your… like… general direction!”
Ted takes an extremely deep breath.
“Well, I’m sorry if my face happened to get in the way of one of your projectiles,” he says tartly, putting his now rather crooked glasses back on.
“Apology accepted!” Louisa grunts, perfectly seriously.
“God, I can see why he liked you…,” Ted groans, in a way that really doesn’t sound like a compliment.
“Who?” Louisa exclaims.
“Him,” Ted says, with the sort of seriousness that adults adopt when they’ve spent a whole day trying not to cry, and points at the skulls on the wall.
Louisa blinks in confusion and tries desperately to remember how to breathe.
“You… you knew him? C. Jat? I…,” she begins, but doesn’t get any further, it’s hard to talk when your lungs and heart are in a little heap on the floor inside you, because now Ted is holding out the postcard she had given to the artist.
“He wanted me to give this back. And the can of spray paint he borrowed. But you can only have that if you promise not to throw it!” Ted says sullenly.
Louisa takes the postcard with trembling fingertips, her vocal cords still frozen with shock so all she manages by way of a response is a nod. Ted’s expression becomes slightly more sympathetic then, at least in the eye that wasn’t hit by a can of spray paint, so he says rather more amiably:
“He wanted you to know that he really, really enjoyed painting with you. You evidently told him that you’d see him again here, so he wanted to apologize for not being able to come, but I’m afraid he…”
Ted’s voice isn’t strong enough to carry the word “died,” so Louisa helps him by whispering:
“I know. I… I heard on the news.”
They look at each other for just a moment, but neither of them can bear to maintain eye contact.
“He left something for you,” Ted says through his teeth, looking down at the ground.
Behind him are a suitcase and two boxes, one large and one small, and when Louisa sees the small one she can’t stop herself asking:
“Are those his ashes?”
Ted blinks heavily behind his crooked glasses.
“How did you know that?”
“My best friend Fish died. They didn’t let me keep her ashes, but they were in a box like that, and there was a guy at the church who let me hold them for a little while. I was her only human. The minister was nice, he made sure she was buried under a tree, she liked trees. One day I’m going to be seriously damn rich and buy a really nice gravestone for her. Or rather… about her. Well, I mean…”
Then Louisa’s brain points out that perhaps this is enough words out of your mouth now, Louisa? As if it wasn’t her brain who came up with all the damn words in the first place! Louisa knocks her head with her fist a little bit in frustration. Ted, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything, which makes Louisa very jealous. His brain seems a lot more disciplined than the anarchic mush she’s got inside her own skull.
Ted takes a deep breath and picks up the large box, it takes an embarrassingly long time for Louisa to realize that means he wants her to take it. He holds it out gently, as if the contents were very fragile, so naturally Louisa takes it so clumsily that she ends up sitting on her backside with the whole thing in her arms. Ted leaps forward and stops the box from falling with a look of such panic in his eyes that it’s obvious he doesn’t really want to part with it. When he eventually lets go of it, his whole chest seems to be fighting against his whisper:
“He… he sold everything he owned so he could buy this back. Everything he earned in his entire career, but even so, I only just managed to buy it back at the auction. I told him it was stupid, but he said artists were supposed to die poor. All he wanted when he died was to be able to give it away to whoever he wanted. And he wanted that person to be… you.”
Louisa stares uncomprehendingly, first at the box, then at the man in front of her.
“What are you, his lawyer or something?”
Ted evades her gaze like a silverfish beneath a bathroom lamp that’s just been switched on.
“No, no, I was just his friend.”
“I’m sorry,” she says at once.
“You don’t have to be,” he says dismissively.
“I do,” she insists. “If you were his friend, I’m sorry. Because the whole world lost an artist, but you lost your human. And I’m sorry you had to share that with the rest of us. You should be allowed to have your grief in peace.”
Ted is almost forty years old, but those words hit him as if he were just fourteen. That makes him angry, because he can’t cope with being fourteen today, he can’t cope with feeling everything in the whole world one more time. So all he manages to pull himself together to say is a curt:
“Thank you.”
Then he turns away. He picks up the small box that holds the ashes of his huge, incomparable friend, takes his suitcase, and starts to walk out of the alley toward the train station on the other side of the street. He has completed his mission. But of course Louisa’s brain suggests that she ought to shout something else, so she does:
“I’ve never met a grown-up like him!”
Without looking back over his shoulder, Ted admits weakly:
“Neither have I.”
He almost gets to the end of the alley before he hears Louisa’s cry echo off the church and around the world, so he realizes she’s opened the box and found the painting.