EXTRACTS
A is for A line
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Exclusive excerpts from Irwin Allan Sealy's latest novel Red. Red, Irwin Allan Sealy, Picador, 2006, hardback, p.344, £16.99.
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Red, Irwin Allan Sealy, Picador, 2006, hardback, p.344, œ16.99.
`Now look.' She pulls a stretch lamp down, already reading the strip in her hands.
He sees a ribbon of dots and dashes, like old Morse code.
`You see the way this gold sits beside this blue, what it's doing? See the back and forth? The way they feed each other. Tell on each other, kiss and make up? Or this blue and this kind of pistachio. See the way the brush falls, see the stroke coming down and then pushing into the blue, see how it nudges. Go closer, hold it up against the light. See?'
He's seeing as never before. She fetches a magnifying glass and he sees the room swell and dissolve in its luminous circle. Mottled brown and violet swim under his eye like cold-water fish, then a tangerine so upsetting he leans over and falls in without a splash, hangs there underwater, a waterbaby sucking on mutant lungs, on tadpole eyes. The brushstrokes come up close and nibble, he strokes their sides and watches them flick away, heliotrope with umber, scales of colour whose logic he now begins dimly to perceive. Watches them knit together and come apart, is there at the moment of their birth, presides over their dissolution.
...
He lowers the magnifying glass and turns to the sorry remains of the canvas.
She reads the look. `Don't fret. He'd have approved. He was a scissors and paste man. Well, he'd have approved in theory. But probably he'd be madder'n hell!' She's laughing.
`With disciples like you, who needs Judas?'
`It's just a copy. They do some incredible fakes in this town. Everyone, students, professionals, technicians. This is the city of the Hermitage, don't forget.'
Now he feels cheated and she reads that too.
`OK, it's real, it was. I bought it, or my husband did. It was the real Aloes. But we didn't destroy it, we set it free. When Matisse went to visit Shchukin in Moscow he threw a fit because his Music was behind glass. Shchukin reminded him the musicians already lived in a frame, so what was a bit of glazing? But there are paintings where cutups don't work. Come on upstairs.'
She's on her feet, from cross-legged to standing in a scissors movement that has him revising her age. He stands up, his head so light every hair on it has found an independent tangent. His eyes so heavy they could spin off into space and find new orbits. His body newly moulted, the old skin in a heap on the floor, feet oddly sure as he follows her heels up a vertical face.
Up above is a blank white wall, the same that holds the ladder he's on with four steel pins, and a plasma screen. He holds on tight, afraid of falling. Ladders at home he leaves to painters, house painters, and he could be a mile up this one. More. The floor looks like earth from space. He looks for the Great Wall of China. The screen is downloading something.
`It's the Red Studio. From 1911.'
It's a window but when she opens it the painting's still hanging there. The window frame, the sill, lead nowhere else. There is only the painting. Scandal-red and still pitching at the speed of light. He's ravished, blown away.
`We can go in, but you have to do as I say, all right? You can't touch anything in there.' She takes his hand. `Except me.'
`OK.'
It's all red. The whole thing, every wall, floor and ceiling, down to the furniture. A new red. Yellow in it, but the reddest red he's seen.
Something strange has happened to the hand that's leading him. It's gone behind glass and been refracted. It's gone specimen flat and the lines and the bones stand out in white, as if she's entered a special kind of outsize X-ray chamber. Her head too has flattened out, and the rest of her, like a figure from an Egyptian mural. It's so foreign he should by rights have a visa. He looks down, his mouth suddenly dry with wanting her, and finds he's going like that too. The room is a bagatelle, the furniture all pins and string.
`Ah-ah, don't touch, remember. This is where he worked. Works. This is 1911. That nude in the corner no longer exists in your time, our time, it was destroyed.'
The table nearest them, which has a wineglass and a painted dish and a vase of nasturtiums, has stood up, turned into geometry. If the still life things on it had bulk to them they'd slide straight off. She hops onto it and stays all the same.
`OK,' she says, sitting there, her voice gone italicized and coming from all sides so it surrounds him like a gas. `Do as I say?'
He nods. Standing right there at the table looking into her eyes.
She holds up her hands. `Paint me.'
She picked the idea clean out of his brain: he wants that more than anything. Just the sight of her mouth like a crushed rose, her unsocked feet, makes him want to strip and paint her, smother her in something if not himself. There's only the tracksuit to take off but his hands are shaking from the wave of need that swamps him leaving only his mouth dry. The red line of lace from the Hermitage is invisible against the skin of her that's gone red like everything in the studio. When she's naked, her clothes stick flat on the wall. Like the clothes of a princess spread on the banks of a stream in an old miniature. She lies back on the tabletop into no depth. To keep her there he'd have to tie her down, he thinks, if gravity still applied. And paint her some other colour or she'd disappear in the universal red.
She reaches back and hands him a spray can. He squirts a puff into the general air, testing. It hangs there at eye level in a barren brilliant cloud, silver-grey.
He paints her from the feet up, watching intently as first the nails then the toes go metallic. Her feet are silverfish, her thighs tinfoil, the bush steel wool. The face must be done top down, the hair on the head in one light circling swoop. While the paint dries he inspects the ochre frames, the pottery, the sculpture; she studies the grandfather clock without hands.
`All right,' she says, in that same papery mica membrane voice and turns and sweeps the table clear. Dish and vase and wine glass go floating through the red void to new locations. `Now,' she turns to him and spreads her arms. He unfolds her like a wall chart cunningly hidden in the back of an old abecedary and pins her to the table.
A is for A line. She looks up at him.
`Kill me.'
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