The Point Page 8

  No. Not often. But so far, often enough. Just now and then, someone pays that kind of attention. And, I’m sure you know, artists make art for themselves. It’s nice if people notice, but you do it for yourself. Your own demands, your own standards.

  You have to be tough, says Bim. You have to believe in yourself.

  Any artist does. They don’t survive, otherwise.

  Can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, eh?

  Flora smiles faintly. It’s evident she’s heard this before.

  I could make claims, she says. Music is for the ear. Painting for the eye – try touching a Cézanne, however much you want to. Dance is the eye and the ear. Mine is eye and touch and taste and even sometimes hearing.

  The musical slurping of soup.

  I was thinking more of aural textures – crispness, and such. Mayonnaise, the audible softness of it.

  You have the words for what you do, says Bim.

  And Flora, after all, lets his photographer take pictures of the kitchen in full working mode, but only through the long window which opens on to the restaurant. Bim does quite a good job of writing her up, he is not dishonest, he uses her words exactly as he taped them, but because he leaves out his, the arguments with which he led her to tell him how she feels, the responsive nature of her passion, she comes across as pontificating, making grand rotund wordy claims for food as art. Spouting a diatribe, humourless and didactic. The journalist with his insistence on making the cook admit her passions is simply absent. Her delicacy disappears, her reticence is invisible. The glamour of the piece is the photographs of the kitchen working, taken on quite a slow shutter speed so the figures of the cooks in their starched jackets and toques are whitish blurs across the precise steel and copper spaces of their surroundings. The Dance of the Kitchen, the caption says. Living Dangerously, screams a box heading. The pictured food looks beautiful. Flora is enraged. There, she says, that’s exactly the problem, the eye is involved but not the tongue or the belly or the brain. It’s all diminished. I knew I was right not to want to do it.

  She gave the journalist one of her favourite recipes, the tripe dish that is a version of the Lyonnais fireman’s apron, thinking it would be earthly and humble and lacking in pretension, but of course it is long and quite complicated and seems precious, and in words like this not at all delicious.

  Your own book, that’s what we need, then you can take control of it, says Elinor.

  Maybe, says Flora. That interview shows just how hard it is. After all, I do believe that Bim Becker’s intentions were good.

  You were furious. Beside yourself.

  Oh yes. But I still think his intentions were good. And yet look how it turns people out. I think I should just cook, not write about it.

  9

  Jerome usually walked home from The Point. He crossed the sloping lawn and walked up behind the High Court. The night was cold, with a moon and the kind of windy cloud that makes the moon look as though it is scudding across the sky at great speed. He craned his neck back and gazed at it; the illusion was inescapable. Even knowing it wasn’t true couldn’t stop you seeing it. There’s a poem about it. The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. ‘The Highwayman’. And the highwayman came riding – Riding – riding … Not a terribly good poem, you were supposed to think later, but kids loved it. The highwayman riding to his lover, The landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord’s daughter, Plaiting a dark-red love-knot into her long black hair. The highwayman comes riding, riding, but she has been turned into a trap, tied to the bed and bound to a musket so that its muzzle presses into her heart. The forces of good, but evil because they are against the heroes of the poem, expect her lover to come galloping in and they will have him. But when she hears the sound of his horse’s hooves she manages to pull the trigger, and warns him with her death. Saves him with her death. He remembered arguing about it in the playground. Would you do it, would you shoot yourself through the heart to save your lover from capture? He still didn’t know the answer, but expected not. But the poem, the galloping glamorous rhythms of the poem were still in his head.

  It was quiet, not silent, plenty of rustlings and stirrings, but no traffic. He took the road beside the High Court. He enjoyed walking alone through the night, thinking about highwaymen and black-haired beauties and the nature of love; he’d get home and do some hours work, Flora’s sublime meal sitting comfortably in his stomach. Even her rich antique peasanty dishes managed a digestive lightness.

  There was a violent screaming skidding noise from the road in front of the art gallery, the sort that you expect to hear end in a rending crash of steel and sudden steaming silence. But that didn’t happen, instead a car came hurtling round the corner, weaving from side to side, going too fast for such a narrow road. It was a VW, one that had been cut down into a convertible, and it was full of people. He had a sense of it being stuffed with bodies, pale floppy bodies like celery in a glass, as many as could be shoved in. They were shrieking, laughing, singing. Jerome stepped off the bitumen, there were no footpaths and some hedgy groundcovers grew close to the edge. When the car was only a few metres from him it swerved and mounted the gutter and he realised that it was driving directly towards him, and he threw himself into the prickly bushes. The car swerved back to the road with another shrieking burst of laughter and screamed round the corner and up past the gallery.

  His legs were shaking too much to get him out of the bushes. When they calmed down, and his heart stopped flapping like a bird in a cage, gradually he clambered out, scratched, bruised, aching, stinging. His stomach turned over and he vomited his dinner back into the hedge. He knew he should feel grateful he was alive.

  10

  Jerome

  I always liked to work in the night. On my own work. Especially after one of Flora’s meals. They gave you such a sense of wellbeing, and the wine loosened the bonds of reason on the brain. I don’t say untied them, or broke them, but loosened, so they weren’t so tight and strong, left some room for … what should I have called it? Imagination? Intuition? Those small cross-flashes of thought that a good brain achieves without its owner knowing how.

  But, as I say, on my own work. For me to pursue what generations have found ineffable, but was so close. One of these nights I would work it out, and there it would be.

  Not that night, indeed. How often have I thought back over it. It’s as though there were two events, the horrible experience of its actual moments, which I can still relive, and then its place as the first violent event of that violent winter. Not that that was apparent then. I suppose much of what happens to us has such levels of meaning: what we perceive at the time, and what we make of it. Writing this, I try to catch how it was then, before … before hindsight cuts in.

  I had a bath and put on self-indulgent pyjamas, wrapped myself in a cashmere rug and made a pot of Yunnan tea. Hot and thin and dry. The house was warm and I was cold. I feel the cold now I am thinner. At least I could make the leap into the bushes; I doubt my portly Franciscan self would have managed it. I lit a fire and sat on the sofa in front of it. I could still see that cut-down car stuffed full of bodies like celery in a glass. Why did I think of celery, so harmless? Their paleness, maybe, or perhaps their vegetable nature. Stringy, a bit limp. Did I want them to be harmless? Young people, they were. Drunk of course. But murderous as well? I wondered if it was a new sport, running people down. They were playing a game, indeed, but what was its end? How deadly its intent? Were they pretending, always intending to swerve back in time? More likely they were simply out of control.

  My body ached, my face was scratched from contact with the bushes, my eyes bulging and strained from the vomiting. I resented feeling so painful when I ought to have been feeling snug in the tummy and comfortably at work. Of course it occurred to me that the young people could be dead, already; failing to kill me, but successful in killing themselves. What is it with the young, I asked myself. Do they think themselves invulnerable? It’
s often described, that sense they have that death is not for them, that they can play with it and tempt and tease it yet still be safe, and the evidence of how wrong they are there crying out in the statistics. Or maybe it’s the opposite, a kind of deathwish, life so meaningless that they actually want to throw it away. Like the young Russians playing roulette with their revolvers, letting fate, chance, luck, decide what will become of them. Not, I have read, quite so random as it seems, for apparently when one spins the magazine of a gun with one bullet in it the bullet tends to weigh that chamber down, so it ends up at the bottom; it is likely that the bullet will not be in the firing chamber, which is at the top. But not certain, by no means certain. But playing death games with motorcars seems to leave less room for salvation. Or do these ugly children believe they have destiny on their side. Destiny, fate … Do they even know the words?

  Unanswerable questions. By me, certainly. Apart from being too long ago, my own youth was so abnormal. I look at the young people of today and they could be a different race, a different species. That son of Laurel’s, for instance; he used to come into the restaurant quite often. She often said how clever he was; I thought that was as may be, but he was certainly very beautiful. In fact he made me think of a Greek kouros. His smile, I suppose, the archaic expression, the lips curling in that ambiguous smile called Daedalean. His hair fair and long, caught back. I’ve thought about that smile. It’s not one that engages others, it’s one that proffers itself as a serene and perfect object of contemplation. I thought that he would not be an easy sort of son to have. A quite charming boy; I noticed the sweetness with which he’d embrace his mother, such a personable lad, curiously dressed in the manner of the young but not unattractively. How she would smile, slightly, even unwillingly, but with tenderness. And something else, I puzzled over that. Now I think it may have been apprehension. Nothing archaic in her smile, just the ancient and everlasting anxiety of mothers.

  I’d notice she’d go to her handbag when he came, and would be discreetly giving him money. Once I saw her take some notes out of the till and give them to him, and then write a cheque to replace them.

  Afterwards I thought about that Daedalean smile, and how it is named after Daedalus the sculptor, him who made the labyrinth which contained the minotaur, and constructed wings of feathers and wax for men to fly with. Maybe he used as his model the face of his own son Icarus, who out of hubris flew too close to the sun so that the wax in his wings melted, and he fell to earth. Fell into the sea, and drowned. I could imagine him smiling like that when his father warned him about the danger, smiling and taking no notice, as is the way of children.

  At the time, sitting on my sofa, sipping the hot thin tea, I had other thoughts. I was considering that general state of the young that my near-murder gave cause to think on, and remembering Laurel’s cryptic remarks about her boy, his cleverness being a cause for worry, and suddenly it came to me.

  Laurel’s son Oscar. Oscar Luft. What was Laurel’s surname? I didn’t know. But that her son should be Oscar Luft …

  I pride myself on my filing system. I keep things that may come in handy, one day. I have a pantry of filing cabinets. It didn’t take me long to find what I needed, under B for Blackhat. A plastic envelope of cuttings, getting on for three years old. A bit faded, but the lad in the photographs, that same kouros smile; I had no doubt it was Laurel’s Oscar. He was in the news because a computer virus he’d written as a schoolboy had shut down the Australian Tax Office for three days. The virus was called Genericus. There’s a kind of illiteracy and yet ambition about these names that disturbs me. Of course this one is famous, but I had not known it began with Oscar. The newspaper articles were written for the ignorant; they did their best to describe what a virus was: a malicious program that can alter, damage or destroy files and computer memory. A rogue program that behaves in the same manner as a biological virus, multiplying and spreading from computer to computer via infected floppy discs, or over the Internet, or by downloading infected programs. All the images in terms of human disease. Useful for the layman.

  So that was young Oscar. Not one of my favourite kinds of people. He wouldn’t like me to get my hands on him.

  The journalist quotes him as saying he has no knowledge of this attack on the tax office, since it’s two years since he had anything to do with his virus. By this time he’s in second year at university. It’s a ghost from the past come back to haunt me, he says. I thought it was dead and buried long ago.

  Instead of which, it had spread around the world, since his first version of it shut down a couple of banks as well as getting into his school system – grammar, I noted – and went on to become one of the most prevalent viruses in the world. Oscar tells the journalist that this is all a mystery to him; he’d shown his schoolmates some of the codes and somebody stole them. He’d contacted one of the anti-virus companies and offered them the codes so they could deal with it but they just called the police.

  So why had he written it? Since he claimed innocence of any malice.

  As a programming exercise. He learnt a lot writing it, but never intended it should get into circulation. He kept claiming it was never meant as a destructive virus, it didn’t have a destructive code, but because of an oversight on his part there was a flaw in it which could corrupt some kinds of files.

  The angelic innocence of it all. Well, maybe.

  He kept on insisting, article after article, the press had taken up this youthful hacker in a big way, that he had no idea how it had got into the tax office computers, it was all so long ago, but he was shocked that it had, it ought to have been picked up by modern anti-virus software, he was horrified and amazed that it hadn’t been. But even so, given that it had got in, it shouldn’t have taken days to get rid of, only hours.

  Some lad, this Oscar. The police didn’t actually charge him, on this occasion, or earlier. His associates, said the journalist, described him as a genius, who probably knew more about viruses than just about anybody in the world. Oscar himself said he wasn’t interested any more in writing viruses, he was much keener on combating them. It was much harder to stop a virus than write one. He tried to get a job with anti-virus companies but they didn’t trust him.

  Hardly surprising. As it wasn’t that his mother should worry about him. But then, a lot of us do things at fifteen or sixteen that we regret later. I should know.

  Normally … ha. I look at the word. What is normal? Normal now or normal then? Normal now is this bare bright room where the movement of the light is the grand event, and Leonie’s bum parked on the page where my pen writes. Pen, you notice. My sweetly scented cat, whose fur smells of sun-dried washing, who purrs when I stroke her and dribbles, so if I am not careful the ink runs. Were later eyes to read it they might think I wept, but I do not weep and there will be no later eyes. This is a private diary, a letter to myself, I squirm at the thought of anybody else prying … I could not write if I thought that it …

  Normal then … ah then I might have wept. Tears of grief and rage that anyone let alone a boy who ought to be innocent and grateful for the wonders the world would offer him should instead bend his talents to their destruction. Could study to abolish these complex works of the human mind in all their beauty and elegance. Oh, I know that most of them might seem to be simple practical daily managing of the banal business of life. But even the dreariest are programs of the heart. I would like to sit him in front of his own beloved work and make him watch one of these malignancies slowly and inexorably eat it away. Make him create more and have them eaten away. A kind of Sisyphean hell. Except Sisyphus had the respite of walking down the hill, looking at the flowers, the sky, smelling the air, deliberately sauntering perhaps, before he had to push his stone back up it again, and I would give this boy no respite. And that would not be bad enough, no, nothing would be bad enough for the hackers and crackers. The black-hearted blackhats.

  But he was a beautiful boy and kissed his mother sweetly when he came to touch her
for money.

  I think of all the young men who worked for me in the heyday of my business. So clever, yet so oddly malformed. Thinking they could program the whole world to their will, yet not knowing a fraction of what was in that world they so insouciantly believed themselves to have mastered. Consider the word hubris, I said to them. Increase your vocabularies, spiritual as well as mental.

  I remember how surprised they were by the spaces I provided for them to work in, the lofty ceilings and arched alcoves, the old books, the furniture delicately fashioned by long-ago craftsmen who thought no detail unimportant, no skill too refined, as indeed do my young men in their sphere, though they did not see the connection between themselves and ancient skills, they expected bareness and bright colours, synthetic surfaces and formless shapes, the architectural idiom of tomorrow, at least as guessed at by the latest young designer.

  I had in mind the study of St Augustine, as painted by Carpaccio in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, in Venice. Not to copy but to emulate. Its clarity and richness, the sense of it as a fruitful working place with books all about and wondrous objects as well, an armillary sphere (do you know, I said to them, that the word armillary is to do with bracelets, precious objects that go round arms, and they gave one another there-he-goes–again looks), a shell, candlesticks held out from the walls in shaggy paws. A mappemonde. I have a picture of the painting before me now. There are sheets of music and a bell, a statue of the risen Christ on an altar in a sort of apse, and a figurine of Venus on a shelf. This is after all St Augustine, who famously prayed for holiness against the sins of the flesh, but not just yet.

  I had carpets on my floor, dim glowing old Turkish ones, worn into rich ancient colours – aren’t they just a bit, well, shabby, said one of my young men – in spirit suiting an Augustinian study, but not true to Carpaccio; his painted work table and bench, the chair and prie-dieu, are raised each on their own dais, for this is a Venetian study, contemporary with the painter, and prone to flooding. Never mind that Augustine wasn’t in Venice, but in Hippo in North Africa, and that his century was the fourth, the fourth into the fifth. A Venetian study in the fifteenth century is a perfectly appropriate place for him. Anachronism is not a concept that would have occurred to Carpaccio; there is a continuity of scholarly life that sees Augustine at home in a Renaissance study in Venice, progress is not relevant. I wanted my lads to see that they too were at a point in a long and sinuous process, not progress, not steps upward, not anything to do with improvement, and that they were not newly invented out of their own heads.