Theft: A Love Story

8

I cannot blame Hugh—that would be ridiculous—nor can I equate myself with Van Gogh. Just the same I am entitled to make the point that it was Vincent's saintly brother Theo who brought an end to sixty days of painting in Auvers-sur-Oise. You can find three thousand art books filled with bad reproductions and as many dull opinions that the sixty paintings from those sixty days were a "final flowering" and the crows in Vincent's wheat field were a "clear sign" he was about to kill himself. But fuck me Jesus, a crow is just a bird and Vincent was alive, and there were crows and wheat in front of him and he was producing a canvas every day. He was as mad as a toilet brush— why not?—and as boring as a painter, and Dr. Gachet may not have actually invited his patient to come and live with him, but painters do these things, so suck it up.

When the sun went down, when the light was lost, Gachet's house must have reeked of Vincent's need. So sorry, on everyone's behalf. At the same time, he was on the phone to God, and after sixty days he went down to visit Theo on the Paris train, not to plan a fucking suicide, but to talk about selling some of these paintings. Why not? There is not the least doubt he knew the value of what he had done.

From Auvers-sur-Oise to Paris is a very short journey. I have made it myself, quite recently, and a less romantic trip is hard to imagine, even in Sydney's western suburbs. In my case it was made even less appealing by my companions, one of whom had nasty lip sores and a mighty desire that we should share the same Pernod bottle. Ninety minutes after walking down Dr. Gachet's now-famous garden path I was in Paris. Ditto Vincent. Theo was his dealer, his famous supporter, his brother, the man in whose arms he would soon die, but just the same Theo Van Bloody Gogh did exactly what dealers always do, i. e. he told him how shitty the market was, that the fashion had not yet changed in his direction, that the collector who had promised to buy had now died, or gone away, or had lost his money in a divorce, etc.

Theo, God help him, was depressed. He thought it was time for Vincent to face "reality" which is what Vincent then did, for he went back to Auvers-sur-Oise and two days later he shot himself in the chest.

When I heard Hugh roaring bawling along the road, I had only had forty-seven days and they could not have made me stop with either rope or bullet. I had eight huge canvases, stored in a bloody manger, and a ninth one lying flat and naked on the floor.

Hugh's face was beaten to a pulp, already swelling, a film of blood and snot all over the wide canvas of his cheeks, some of it spilling onto the desiccated corpse he carried so tenderly it might have been a newborn child. It took an hour to extract the story but even then I was confused, imagining the blood to be the result of his fight with Evan Guthrie. It would be another week before I learned that he had been seen on the road above the river banging his head against an ironbark and all the abrasions and bruises across his face, all the broken tissue that would soon swell up and leave him yellow, pink, purple as a foie gras terrine, all this he did to himself, for he, like me, misunderstood the situation.

This was not the first little finger he had broken, and the previous one had caused me more pain and loss than I can yet reveal. Hugh and I thought ourselves in a similar predicament again but, as you will see soon enough, whilst we were quite correct in thinking our tenancy in peril, nothing was exactly as it appeared to be. In any case, I did not abuse my brother this second time. I was sick at heart but did not show it. I encouraged him to continue with his immediate plan which was to find a high dry place to bury his dog whose queer light corpse I helped place in my best rucksack. Thus he set off, dog in pack, spade and crowbar in his hands, and I returned to my canvas.

For I knew the clock was running, that soon the midgets of officialdom would be swarming around us, like a white-ant hatch threatening to glue itself to the perfect holy surface of the living paint.

Being short of supplies and having met resistance from Kevin at the co-op, I had had no work planned that day, but time is precious, passing with every breath and I decided I would touch the thing I had been frightened of the most, the framed embroidery our mother hung above her dreadful bed: "IF YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A MAN DIE, REMEMBER THAT YOU, TOO, MUST GO THE SAME WAY. IN THE MORNING CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING, AND WHEN EVENING COMES DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE YOURSELF THE DAWN."

I did not want to touch it, no more than put my hand on a flat iron, hiss of skin, smell of flesh. I spent a good hour cleaning up the studio, scraped the lino, laid down paper and a length of unprimed cotton duck. If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die. I removed the mixers from the drills and set to clean them. There was no actual need to do this, but I slowly peeled all the accumulated paint that had made its own little planet on the X-shaped armature of blades. "YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING" and all the painted past was layered like licorice allsorts, sedimentary rocks, green, black, gorgeous yellow, sparkling mica, fool's gold they call it in the Marsh. I did not wish to start. I scoured the blades with wire wool until they were burnished and then I screwed up my eyes and plunged the whirling shaft into the heart of Mars black, carbon black, graphite, two hundred and forty volts, one hundred rpm, phthalo green with alizarin crimson and I had started. I was in. I shook the drips off that last mix, what a very cold light-sucking black was lying there, a lovely evil thing captive in a can. At its lovely nasty little heart was alizarin crimson. I could already calculate how I would edge those shapes as yet unborn—that alizarin crimson would make a border almost as black as black, but also, on the aft of "PROMISE" like the burning edge of a leaf in a firestorm. Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burned umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered down it was a pearly grey, a secret skin you can still see behind the smudges of, say, MORN, and on that site, and in other places too where my mother's dreadful fear was bent and twisted, you can today observe the pentimento, the erasures, the smudges, the changes of mind as I pushed, sometimes like Sisyphus, at the resistant letters which now must be made to serve,, me—not the Roman chisel or the language of the poets-until "DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE" was as ugly and noble( as the milk-factory fire of 1953, ten men dead amongst the twisted tin and smoke. On the last day, very early on a dew-bright morning, I made a series of washes, 9/10 gel, and these I lay, lighter than a river mist across the blacktop.

As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know "Should I know your name?"

But let me say only that I rubbed at it and buffed and scraped and sanded until it was an argument both within itself and against itself. Jesus it would put the fear of God in you, to see the skeins of secret black, it could choke you, and hick you, and put your naked toes onto the fire.

This work continued three days. And it was done. Ominously, there were no visitors. And by that time Hugh had disposed of his dog and his little eyes were deep and hidden and he was very quiet around the property, mostly hacking at the thistles. I stayed away from Bellingen, judging it wiser to avoid the crime scene completely and drive the extra thirty minutes to Coffs Harbour.

There were already difficulties—limited supplies, no phthalo green, a change of palette I would rather not have made. On the fourth day after the metacarpal came the first assailant, an idiot from Bellingen Council with long white socks, a building inspector with a clipboard in his hand. He went around the property with a surveyor's chain, measuring the distance from the river bank to the septic tank. That's how a small town gets rid of you. They declare your house in contravention of the regulations. Why would I give a shit? It wasn't mine.

Money very short. I cooked baked vegetables until even I was sick of them, and Hugh—God bless him—did not once complain. But all this time no-one actually told us why we were now hated. We were fighting the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and it was not until eleven days after the broken finger that the police came rattling across the cattle grid, not the locals but two plainclothes fellows with a driver from Coffs Harbour.

Seeing the car, Hugh fled arrest, charging headfirst across the floodplain and I did not find him until dark when, having heard the police car finally depart, he emerged, wild-eyed and muddy, from a wombat hole.