Chapter 17: Polite Fred and Wicked Al

There’s a Jack London story about a boxer that has haunted me ever since I read it. The boxer is nearing the end of his career, might be facing his final fight if he loses. Down on his luck, the best he can do to prepare for the encounter is train on the streets. What he really needs though, is a thick, juicy steak to give him stamina for the night ahead. There’s no one who will lend him the means to eat well and the boxer can only stare longingly through the window of a restaurant serving the meat he needs. That evening, the veteran boxer does his best in the ring. Using all his tricks he stays even or slightly ahead. Yet the boxer runs out of energy at the very end of a fight he could have won. If he could have only eaten well earlier in the day, the energy from that meal would have turned the battle – and the trajectory of the rest of his life – in his favour.

What made me think of the story was that I had replenished all my paints and bought dozens of new ones thanks to my sales at the RDS. Five of my six paintings had persuaded a passer-by to take them home and I rejoiced in the satisfaction of being more than four thousand Euro better off than I had been the previous week. I could have used that money for the holiday period ahead: rent, electricity, phone, presents, drinks out (unbelievably expensive, much better not to buy anything at the bar), clothes. The windfall could easily have been used up in providing me with a stress-free life over Christmas.

My supply of paints, however, had been dwindling. For just two hundred millilitres of a really good quality oil paint, you could spend up to a hundred Euro. Some colours were a lot cheaper, though, and my supplier gave me a ten percent discount. Consequently, for one thousand, three hundred and seventeen Euro, eighty-eight Cent (I kept the receipt for my tax return) I had been able to bring a box full of colour back to my studio. Unpacking and arranging the tubes was like eating the meal that the boxer had yearned for. Delight, inspiration, and intoxication flowed through me as I handled the paints. Raw Sienna. Indian Red. Dark Verdigris. Phthalo Deep Green. French Ultramarine. Dioxazine Purple. Cadmium Deep Red. Lemon Yellow. Zinc White. Titanium White. Paynes Grey. Vandyke Brown.

By the time I’d emptied the box, my mind had conceived of dozens of new paintings. The simple act of examining the colours on the tubes was enough to excite me with new possibilities. Did I have any regrets about investing so much in oils, brushes and canvas? Perhaps. If the works I intended to create with them failed to sell, I would certainly question my investment. Yet I’d never been so fecund in my art. Ever since regaining contact with Celine, I had felt the beauty of the universe was close at hand; that I could connect to it; that my brushes were a conduit for a divine radiance. I just had to trust myself. Be bold when boldness was needed.

With Celine acting as a conduit to that sublime and glowing realm, I sketched my new ideas. Sheet after sheet I covered in lines of charcoal or 4B pencil, resenting even the short pause required to tear out the finished page, until finally, hours later, the rush was over.

Time for a break.

My body was singing with satisfaction, akin to a replete, post-coital feeling, yet with far more energy, with more of a desire to get up and move around. So I did just that. My duty to the La Catedral Studios community was to care for the plants. Off I went through the building, watering, clipping, brushing up. And the entire time I could feel the call of the pile of new drawings in my studio: come, come see, see what you did. Even though my ability to whistle was barely competent, a series of half-remembered cheerful songs from the 60s took to the airwaves from my rounded lips.

‘Is that you Cyn?’ Carmel’s peroxide head appeared around the curtain of her studio entrance. Like me she had a partitioned alcove rather than a full room.

‘Shall I refresh your palm?’ I held up my watering can.

‘No need. But do come in.’ Smiling, Carmel held the curtain aside for me. Beyond it was one of the tidier studios. She had a desk with jewellery-making equipment (pliers, clamp, hand-held soldering gun, punches) and glass jars holding collections of semi-precious stones she had gathered from beaches. An easel was leaning against the far wall, currently empty. Her paintings were on the shelves of a tall unit bought from IKEA. In the corner of the room was a small palm tree, which was thriving thanks to a skylight in the roof above.

Carmel was a shamelessly commercial painter and always had in hand a dozen or so completed small paintings, usually only sized around A5, set in simple white frames, a supply of which she kept in a box beside the shelves. A typical scene for a Carmel Watson painting consisted of bright blue skies above a sandy coastline. That or cats. When it came to painting cats, Carmel was your go-to girl.

Unfolding a chair for me, Carmel said, ‘what did you think of Neo getting banned from Mar-a-Lago?’

‘What? When did that happen?’

‘Oh, you’re in for a treat. Look at this.’ Carmel picked up her phone and opened X. ‘There, from yesterday.’

The clip showed Neo in a tuxedo moving between women with glittering dresses like a shark among fish. There was something about him that the women didn’t like and even though they continued to smile, they parted around him and regrouped in his wake. Then he lurched at a woman in a golden dress, doing what? Trying to kiss her? Wrestle her? Screams. Women staggering into each other and some falling to the ground. Men rushing over. And as one of them held Neo by the upper arms and earnestly said something right into his face, Neo very definitely kissed him. Uproar as the Irish tech billionaire was engulfed by a swarm of black-jacketed men.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘I wonder what drug he was on.’

‘Entitlement?’

Carmel laughed. She laughed easily, which was a characteristic I appreciated. ‘He hasn’t apologised or said anything since. His shares dropped for a day. But they’ve bounced back today unfortunately.’

‘I should invest some of my RDS money in DreamAds, I’m one of the few people who can vouch the technology works.’

Again Carmel gave a chuckle. ‘You’re still using it? You weren’t able to get out of it when that leak came out?’

‘I’ve an email from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties offering me free legal aid for a case against DreamAds and the Irish state. But the legal system takes ages. In the meantime, I have four months still to go,’ I put down the watering can that I’d been holding in my lap, realising I wanted more than a quick chat with Carmel. ‘And honestly, it’s hasn’t been that bad. At least, not since Celine broke out of the constraints they tried to put her in. I wake up refreshed and while I don’t generally remember much of my dreams, I don’t feel like there have been any adverts in them. Plus, my art has never been better.’

This time her laugh was a little nervous. ‘Is Celine your unconscious?’

‘I’ve stopped calling her that, she’s far more conscious than I am. It’s just that I’m normally unaware of what she’s experiencing and thinking. We all are. You have an inner being too. I prefer to call her by a name. I know it’s weird. Maybe I could say my “id”, Freud’s term for the personality’s source of desire and creativity.’

‘I find the idea there’s someone else in my mind a bit upsetting,’ Carmel looked at the ground as she gathered her thoughts. I said nothing. ‘I know what you mean about creativity. But that doesn’t imply that someone else is alive inside my brain. Like an alien.’

‘See, from her point of view, we’re the aliens. The id comes first, both in terms of the evolution of humans from lizard brains and also in terms of our individual birth and acquisition of personality. Wait,’ I checked myself. ‘I actually have no idea about Celine’s point of view. I just know that she’s real and that Cyn Sweetwater is a composite. It might feel like I’m the one making the decisions, but a lot of the time Celine is the one who is making my choices and I’m just rationalising her desires.’

With dismay, I saw Carmel shake her head. For some reason, I really wanted her to understand. To help me, perhaps. Because the truth was, I was floundering among a lot of unknowns, and my brief internet search among Freudian ideas wasn’t giving me the answers I wanted.

‘Look, you must have been out somewhere and a guy starts talking to you. Did you ever get the type who sincerely believe they are having a conversation with you out of a shared interest in a subject, say a film, or a band, when it’s painfully obvious they want to have sex with you? If you were to challenge them, they’d deny it. Be offended. But that’s what’s really happening.’

‘For sure,’ said Carmel. ‘When I was in my first year at uni a lot of the boys were like that.’

‘Let’s say the guy who is talking to you is called Fred. Inside Fred is Wicked Al. Wicked Al is more fun, more creative, more lewd. Wicked Al, though, is also more selfish, destructive and all-round trouble. Probably. I don’t know that for sure. Inside Carmel is Wicked Jane. And while Fred and Carmel discuss the merits of Radiohead, Wicked Al and Wicked Jane are having an entirely different conversation, a shocking one probably.’

‘Oh Cyn. Be careful. Maybe you should give up the dream hood.’ Completely unexpectedly, Carmel put an arm around me. She was bigger, sturdier than me and I felt engulfed. This was a maternal gesture that I hadn’t experienced in a long time and my eyes filled with tears. I leaned into her shoulder for several minutes.

‘Have you got a moment?’ I said at last. ‘Come and see my sketches. I think they will reassure you that all’s well.’

Letting go of me, Carmel laughed as she said, ‘the last guy to invite me to see his art was definitely more Wicked Al than Polite Fred.’

The closer we got to my studio, the more I found my heart beating faster. A longing to see my own work again made me hurry. This was a desire I very rarely experienced. Often, when I’d finished a work, I had no motivation to look at it any more having thoroughly explored its interesting qualities in the course of drawing or painting. These sketches were different. I hadn’t exhausted their effect on me yet.

Once inside the alcove, I gave Carmel the only chair and having put the sketch book in her hands, stood behind her so I could see the images as she turned the pages.

‘Oh Cyn,’ Carmel was looking at the first: a woman’s face looking directly at the viewer as if emerging from surrounding flowers. ‘So much love in her eyes.’

Careful, reverential even, Carmel turned the page and gasped. The next was of a woman regarding her left hand, the fingers of which were the stems of flowers whose blossoms were fantastical yet sensual shapes. The woman’s expression was calm, as though she was saying to herself, that’s what I thought.

Each new page caused Carmel to draw breath and by the last, her hands were shaking. When she looked up at me, I could see the trails of eye-shadow tears on her cheeks. ‘Your whole soul is in these. Your beautiful, grieving soul.’

Chapter 18.