Still Waters

Forty-three

Faron had scarcely spoken on the way over. Stripped of its makeup, the face that looked out through the mini-cab window seemed even younger than its nineteen years. Hoxton, Haggerston, Hackney, Bethnal Green, London Fields: all of her ambition was in moving away from this, not driving back.

For Grabianski it was alien. The moment he passed-where? — Highbury Corner? Stamford Hill? — the minute he crossed that indefinable boundary between North and East, he felt himself slipping into a world he didn’t know and if not feared, was at least wary of. Discounted shoes and rebuilt cycles, fashion watches and made-to-measure suits, Lycra in forty-five styles a snip at £14.95 a meter, chopped herring, cheap curries, salt-beef bagels, dry salted fish, pigs’ trotters, pigs’ tails in a bag for 99p. There ought to be a wall, Grabianski thought; probably there was.

The driver turned and spoke over his shoulder and Faron answered him. Not far now.

Grabianski had read somewhere, probably around the time of the Whitechapel Open, there were more artists living in this part of London than in the rest of the city stacked together. Studios in houses, old bakeries, breweries that had folded too soon for the boom; studios in arches underneath the railway lines that still crisscrossed from Stratford and Bromley-by-Bow to Willesden Junction and Kensal Green. Sloane had been here before most of these, not his natural home either, south of the river that, but here was where he had produced his first serious paintings after art school, here was where, if the years in the States were forgotten-as largely they were-he had stayed.

The cab pulled up outside a row of tall, flat-fronted buildings with broad stone steps worn smooth at the center with use and age.

Grabianski told the driver to wait and followed Faron out onto the wide pavement. A collarless dog that had been sniffing at the dustbins stacked inside the low wall came and sniffed at them instead. Absently, Faron petted its head.

“Which one?” Grabianski asked.

She pointed. “The end.”

There were steps down to the basement, steps going up. Bins aside, the space at the front sported the plastic and paper debris of casual passersby, an old chimney stack someone had filled with earth but in which nothing apparent grew, some bottles and a can or two.

Reaching up, Faron rang the bell. After a while they heard music and then footsteps, fast and heavy, on the stairs. Sloane shot back the bolt and threw open the door, staring out. He was wearing the same dungarees Grabianski had seen him in before, the same interrogation in those strong blue eyes.

“What the fuck d’you bring him for?” Sloane asked.

Carefully, Faron unfurled her eyes. “He asked me,” she said.

Sloane sniffed and wiped a hand across his face. To Grabianski he said, “Now you’re here, I guess you better come inside.”

The last sound Grabianski heard before Sloane slammed the door shut was the clunk of Faron’s heels along the pavement, the closing of the cab door.

At some stage, the entire top floor had been laid bare, stripped back to plaster and board, beyond plaster to the rough brick. Paint was speckled and smeared across the floor and the farthest wall. Metal shelves held a massed assemblage of brushes, palette-knives, and paints, sheaves of paper spilling from brown, loose-tied folders, books illustrating other artists’ work, catalogs, a collection of LPs with covers that were bent and torn. Raised off the floor by bricks at either end of the room, two four-foot speakers splayed out a raucous, arrhythmic sound that Grabianski thought might be some kind of abstract jazz, but like nothing he had heard before.

Canvases in various sizes leaned against one another haphazardly around the walls; propped on an easel near the far window, half-finished, was an oil Grabianski recognized as being in the style of William Stott of Oldham. Grabianski had stolen one once, a small seascape, from a private collector in Leeds.

Towering over all this, constantly claiming Grabianski’s eye, was a single huge canvas, wider and taller than the span of two men’s arms, which had been stretched and tied within a free-standing wooden frame. Fervid and loud, the paint lay thick in sheets of color, vermilion and magenta overlaid with crystal blue. Closer to, you could see where earlier attempts had been scraped back and covered over, scraped and covered, punched and gouged and pummeled closer to the painter’s vision.

“What?” Sloane yelled across the noise.

Grabianski didn’t take his eyes from the canvas. “It’s yours.”

“Course it’s fuckin’ mine!”

“I mean it’s not a copy.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It’s crap.”

Like the surface of water breaking, music stopped. Sloane moved closer to his canvas, then away.

“What’s wrong with it?” Grabianski asked.

“What’s wrong,” Sloane said, “is it’s no longer nineteen-fucking-fifty-nine. Now why don’t you tell me what you’re here for, so’s I can get on?”

When Grabianski had told him, Sloane ambled to the window and gazed out. “Why,” he said, moving to the record deck, “should I want to get so far up Eddie Snow’s nose?”

Grabianski shrugged. “The fun of it? The challenge?”

Sloane looked at him. “The money?”

“That, too.”

Sloane lowered the pickup arm and the cacophonous sound of the Art Ensemble of Chicago refilled the room.