PECKHAM PAVILION / BEN EASTHAM
SEA BLUE
Under the mask of fearfully wanton runaway boy hid an enraged resignation
Chapter 1
Bobby Assay, or Robert d'Assay, as he had insisted upon being called since his fifteenth year, had taken another solitary morning walk from his apartment in an elegantly disreputable arrondissement. Bored by the momentary solitude that succeeded the evacuation of several girls from his late-night-littered flat, Assay sought out the coffee shop he determinedly patronised in defiance of its Guinness-shit coffee and aggressively accented Anglophobe waiters. He sat outside, cigarette aspiring wistfully towards a cloud flecked sky, flashing haughty disapproval at those emerging from the Starbucks next door.
Assay considered himself to be a writer who had not as yet accumulated the requisite experience to furnish his undoubted talent. Still young, he believed wholeheartedly in the maxim that a writer should write only of what he has lived. On emerging from an extended education, comfortable with all the technical tools of literature, he realised that a sheltered upbringing had tragically deprived him of any experience, at least of the type he considered it suitable for a young man to write about. Employing laudable logic, he deemed it necessary to hone the tools of his talent against the whetstone of life.
After great deliberation and exhaustive study Assay discovered, with surprise, that he judged Maupassant superior to Orwell and that his gift would therefore be better served by a stint in Paris than Wigan. So he had set off to fulfil the first duty of the writer – to live! So enthusiastically had he lived, however, that he found himself very frequently forgetting what it was he had lived. His recollection of the previous night, for instance, was at best fragmentary. Waiting for his coffee to arrive, he considered becoming a post-modernist.
Could a post-modernist also be a bohemian? Assay did not see why not. He would be a post-modern bohemian. He thought about writing this down but thought it better to finish his cigarette first. He finished his cigarette and realised he had no pen. He would write it down later. He looked down to his left to make sure that the title of the slim volume of poetry was visible above the pocket in which the book sat. It was. He put the book on the table anyway.
Chapter 2
As he stared aimlessly through the curling sun-drenched smoke of a third cigarette Assay was startled by the appearance on the opposite side of the road of a girl so beautiful he could not think of any words to describe how beautiful she was. She was very beautiful. He thought a bit… the radiant beauty of this extraordinary creature struck, he decided, to the very pith of his being. Her movements were sinuous, languid; her whole figure pert and angular as if a winged god hovered above the luminous entanglement of her red hair, holding a single strand upwards so as to drag her body erect and force her ballet-pumped feet to dance upon their toes. Above all was a hyacinthine mass of red hair in lurid contrast with the pallid ivory of a heart-shaped face upon which were prominent impossibly pouted, blood-red lips. Her demeanour was one of cool survey, audacious, even wild… she had slipped away.
For the second time that morning Assay regretted not carrying a pen. He considered asking the waiters but decided against battling with their exaggerated incomprehension of his stuttering French. He was filled with a palpable sense of restlessness, of wanderlust. When one wanted to see something without equal, the romantically different, where would one go? There could be no question about it. What was he supposed to do here? He had erred. He would go to Venice.
Chapter 3
He left for Venice that evening delighting in his own spontaneity. He travelled by sleeper train, having read somewhere of implausibly exciting comings-together of lonely souls at the thundering train's all-night bar. The saloon car was instead rather anti-climactically populated by a group of aged British businessmen in suits drinking cognac and congratulating each other loudly on the absence of their wives. Sitting alone, Assay's eyes were caught by one particularly voluble member of the senescent group, the man with both the most sober suit and most garish tie. No sooner had his sight settled than he realised with a tremor that the senex was false. He was young; there could be no doubt about it. The fact was disguised by attitude, expression and excessive hilarity – a glass of whisky waved high and low as the man shook in laughter at the jokes being told around him. Did the others not know or notice his fraudulence? Wasn't it obvious that he was not, could not be, one of them? As Assay watched the performance of the youth he began to feel nauseous, a sensation he attributed to a combination of the movement of the train and a lack of sleep the night before. Returning to his cabin, he felt dizzy and confused. He sensed a subsidence of the firm ground of reality; the room span and garish patterns invaded his infirm sleep.
The sun woke him hot at the window. He had arrived in Venice. Assay marvelled at the putrid, decadent stench that greeted him as he stepped from his train. He travelled from the station to the Hotel Excelsior on foot, desperate to avoid the gondoliers whose typically criminal disposition unnerved him. Assay was prepared to walk almost any distance to avoid prolonged proximity to Italian males. The hotel was cool and mercifully free of Italians, which two facts colluded in his decision to take lunch there.
Surveying his fellow diners, Assay's gaze alighted upon an English family sat some tables away from him. Decorous and neat, the family consisted of the conservatively dressed and conspicuously middle class parents in addition to two adolescent boys and a young woman of roughly the same age as Assay. With astonishment, Assay realised that this young woman was incomparably bland. He could find no words to describe her. No-one had invented sufficiently insipid words. In fact, he thought, it was not that there were no words to describe her… there are, for example, perfectly good words like nose. She had a nose. The problem was rather that there were no adjectives to describe her. That was the thing. Assay stared longer, dismayed at the poverty of his vocabulary. He rolled several words around his mouth but could find none that would stick to the enigmatic blankness of that figure.
This woman did not seem to be missing any of the appendages considered to be consistent with the female human form. However, neither could any of them be considered distinctively small or large enough to constitute a feature. Her hair was fair. She looked quite tall. He realised with a shudder that he had been staring unblinkingly at her for some minutes. He felt unwell. He returned to his room and unpacked slowly. Again he slept.
Chapter 4
On awaking later that afternoon Assay decided to escape his unaccustomed lethargy by means of a trip to the beach. The scene at the shore, its flesh and frivolity, depressed him unexpectedly. Not a man who had ever considered himself duty-bound to productivity, Assay was nonetheless slightly horrified by the ceaseless indirection of activity on the seafront. Children squealed.
He stood facing the sea. The sea seemed to him profoundly boring in its implacable faultlessness. The sheer disinterest of the deep, with its vast and determined tendency towards equilibrium, seemed to him an affront to human heroism. The sea was nothingness, a void, the antithesis of human creativity, swallowing invented meaning, the ebb and flow of human misery. "Bastard sea, I always knew you were feminine" he said quietly and scratched the side of his face with the first two fingers of his right hand extended towards the shore. He slumped back into his deckchair and pulled his writing materials from a bag. He perched the notebook on his knees. His pen shivered poised, damoclean, above the glaring paper.
Still searching for articulate thought, Assay's perceptions suddenly snagged upon a movement on the shore. It was the family he had seen at lunch and, amongst them, the powerfully non-descript girl whose image had, he realised with a start, clouded his thoughts ever since. He stared again. She wore a plain, short dress, upheld by two straps tied neatly over her shoulders and in no danger of slipping seductively. Beyond this description of her garments Assay's powers of depiction failed once again. She had two legs, neither of which was wooden. She was not obviously physically or mentally disadvantaged, though Assay refused to dismiss the slim hope that a psychological defect was being obscured by heavy and potentially fatal doses of pharmaceuticals. He noticed with dismay that her apparent height was in fact illusory – Assay had been deceived by her juxtaposition to two brothers who he now saw were unusually diminutive. The writer lay his pen down, defeated.
Over the coming days, his obsession grew. He found himself following the girl around Venice, desperate to observe a physical or behavioural feature that might mark her out from the textbook of female humanity. He learned, from the hotel register and overheard conversation, that her name was Francis Lucy Arnold. Each name considered alone was suitably dull, but the fact that she seemed to be in possession of three first names encouraged him. "Stupid name", he thought, reinvigorated…
[to be continued]
INFORMATION: The Peckham Pavilion represents the Hannah Barry Gallery at the 53rd Venice Biennale. The role of peckhampavilion.com (this website) is to extend the parameters of the Pavilion, contributing to the project before, during and after the physical exhibition in Venice. Each participant in the Pavilion project is given one page to present work made specifically for the website, and to represent their work featured in the Peckham Pavilion.
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SATELLITE GALLERIES: The Hannah Barry Gallery is located in the heart of Peckham, South London. It is one of a growing group of diverse and intriguing cultural institutions based in this part of the capital: LINKS: • HANNAH BARRY GALLERY, LONDON• 53RD VENICE BIENNALE |