Exchange Place

Ball and Socket

I am still homeless. The telephone call to a local newspaper, accompanied by a recognized code-word, had indicated the general location of the bomb, a half-mile stretch of the Antrim Road, but nothing specific. The search for the device is ongoing. I am writing this outside Caffè Nero in Ann Street. I have just come from Miss Moran’s tobacconist’s in Church Lane, adjacent to Muriel’s bar. I was running out of tobacco — so disconcerted had I been when evacuated from my home, I forgot to take the two spare packs of American Spirit I kept in the right-hand drawer of my desk. I thought of the empty house. I pictured the desk strewn with papers in the light of the art deco lamp, and myself sitting there rolling a cigarette, about to write some words. But then I would not be the person I am now. What I would write would not be this. There has been no bomb, and I have never stayed in the Adelphi Hotel. I bought the tobacco and wandered up Church Lane, into Bang Vintage round the corner, but such was my mood that I could not look at the clothes with any pleasure. I felt like a lost soul. I thought of the jacket I had bought there last week, in another world it seemed, 1960s chocolate brown hopsack with a faint charcoal stripe, Ivy League style, lovely roll to the lapel, nice drape to the material, I’d been looking for such a jacket for years. When I tried it on before the mirror it looked made for me. The shop owner knew me of old. It’s very you, he said, when I saw it on you, I thought it was your own. I was pleased that he said so, though for all I knew he was giving me a sales pitch. And I too thought the jacket was very me, or what I would like to be. But today I do not feel as if I am very me.

I roll a cigarette. I have been coming to this quarter regularly for some years now, two days a week, taking the same route every time, and I see myself in my mind’s eye retracing my steps again and again. I drive into Little Donegall Street and park the car in a cobbled yard. I lock the car and walk away from it. I turn right at the car park exit and walk past a windowless building, Shroud Manufacturers Ltd. Then a row of shut shops, their names and windows blanked by steel roller shutters covered in graffiti. Further on down is the cavernous loading bay of the Belfast Telegraph newspaper offices. Men in overalls are standing outside it smoking, others are unloading hay-bale-sized rolls of paper from a lorry. The street here smells of paper, cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes. Across the street is a nameless building, windows bricked up, formerly the Flying Horse bar, where I had my first drink, a bottle of Blue Bass. I cross the street and turn right, down Royal Avenue, past the Victorian neoclassical facade of the Belfast Central library, on whose steps I smoked my first cigarette, a John Player’s.

I cross Royal Avenue; half the buildings are festooned with To Let signs. I turn left into Lower North Street, past the Northern Ireland Tourist Office, which occupies the site of the former Alhambra Picture House, where I saw my first film, Around the World in Eighty Days. Some time in the 1960s it was converted into a Chinese restaurant, though still retaining much of the Moorish splendour of its interior, and I ate my first Chinese meal there in 1967, and visited it several times again before it was demolished after being fire-bombed in the 1970s. Today it occurs to me to take a little detour from my beaten track. I am about to make the short cut through North Street Arcade into Lower Donegall Street when I notice that the entrance is sealed by a steel roller shutter covered in graffiti, and now I remember, the arcade mysteriously burned down in 2004. Six years later the site remains undeveloped. As I take another route to my destination, Exchange Place, I see myself, as I have many times, entering Exchange Place to gaze up at the high mansard window of John Harland’s studio, imagining myself floating up invisibly to glide through the glass and look over his shoulder at what he is painting.

He is painting me. I am seated before him in a Windsor chair. He is standing at the easel and he throws little glances at me from time to time, sizing me up, eyes darting from face to canvas and back again, or taking a step towards his palette, which is on a table between him and me. The palette is level with my eye. It looks like a landscape, pigments daubed and pushed and dragged into puddles and crests, mountains of emerald green and thunderous purple collapsing into carmine lakes, hillsides of yellow ochre, fields of violet. Beside the palette is a tray filled with curled-up tubes of paint. A name catches my eye. I stretch out and lift one of the tubes. Phthalocyanine Turquoise. Lovely name, I say to Harland, do you mind if I write it down? Write away, says Harland, you might want to look at the others, there’s a phthalocyanine family, Green Lake, Blue Lake, Yellow Lake. And here’s a nice one, Unbleached Titanium Dioxide, nice buff colour, I put a touch in here and there to damp down a stronger colour. I take out my notebook and begin writing. That’s good, says Harland, keep writing, that’s very you. And I keep writing as Harland paints, writing down what he says from time to time. I’m using an old canvas here, a trial run for another piece, he says, paint over it, I like working with a set of old marks, not to care too much. I like the paint to work by itself, with just a little help from me. Make a mark, see where it takes you. The hinges of form come about by chance.

I knew from of old, or in retrospect, that Harland was an admirer of the work of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, he believed in happenstance, how what you are painting depends on the circumstances, what comes next. You never quite know how oil paint is going to behave. Different viscosity at different times, depending on the atmosphere, temperature, humidity. Sometimes the paint is slow to move, at other times it glides on to the canvas. Bacon, said Harland, believed in luck, or his own luck. When he lived in Monte Carlo he was obsessed by the casino. He’d spend whole days there, and he used to think he heard the croupier calling out the winning number at roulette before the ball had fallen into the socket. And he used to go from table to table. One afternoon he was playing on three tables, and he heard these echoes. And chance was very much on his side, because he ended up with sixteen hundred pounds at the end of the afternoon, an enormous amount of money for him then. Well, he immediately took a villa and stocked it with food and drink, though this chance didn’t last very long because in ten days’ time he could hardly buy his fare home to London. But it was a marvellous ten days and he had an enormous number of friends.

Harland took a step back from his painting. I think I’ll stop now, he said. I’m at the stage now where I don’t want to fuck it up, I’d be deliberating too much, and we don’t want that. Accident, not direction. He took the canvas from the easel and held it before me like a mirror. What do you think? The image was a thing of daubs and patches bleeding or blurring into one another, but I had to admit he had caught something of me, some fugitive expression I recognized. It was very me, very John Kilfeather.