The Shades Read online

  Someone dropped a book dramatically. Someone groaned, Today? Bummer. The seriousness of the situation filled Rowan’s head, seeming to displace the oxygen along with it. He was stifled with panic and longed for air. He would have left the room because he was suffocating, but he stayed to listen to the discussion instead; he didn’t want to give the wrong impression by bolting out. Someone asked, “If we misjudged everything now, what makes you think we can make anything right in the future?” This provoked an argument between the scientists and the pseudo-skeptics, which Mr. Stewart mediated with a wincing glee. Fortunately, the bell rang soon enough and Rowan was able to follow the flow of students before realizing they were going to the cafeteria. The idea of eating at a time of crisis seemed indulgent, so he veered to the library, running across the quad, up the steps of the new building, recently renovated to resemble a Soviet bunker. Lungs bursting, he realized how unfit he’d become since dropping cross-country. He slow jogged his way to the bank of computers, and searched “acidification of the ocean” once he had sat down. He was shocked when over 2 million entries came up. He read the first few, learning that people had been talking about the destruction of the coral reefs for a while, but in the meantime, man-made CO2 had been steadily dissolving into the ocean. While this had the effect of slowing absorption into the atmosphere, it had been to the detriment of sea life as CO2 was forming carbonic acid, raising the pH level, and changing the ocean’s chemistry, so that shellfish were struggling to do their most basic function: reproduce and grow. The idea of a dumb mussel struggling to form a shell was so mind-blowing and pathetic that Rowan knew that something had to be done. By the time the first afternoon bell had rung to call him to his art elective, metalwork, he had different priorities. He had been hammering a copper bangle and planning to enamel it in a deep blue color, maybe do a cool astral pattern as well, but he saw how frivolous that was when so many of the most naturally perfect things were being eroded by the sea that housed them. Mr. Stewart was right: the tipping point was now.

  He sprinted back to the science block, to Stewart’s classroom. Running was less painful once he had found his stride and remembered to breathe. His teacher was perversely technophobe and had made it known that he preferred the spoken word as his chosen method of communication—failing that, handwritten notes, but never emails because they wouldn’t be read. He had a drop box for notes inside the classroom door that would be checked twice a day. Rowan intended to leave a note requesting an appointment where he could be sure to have his teacher’s undivided attention. He had so many questions. There was so much more he wanted to know.

  The door was wide open.

  Mr. Stewart was at his desk, hunched over a plate of food, munching while reading a journal that was propped nearby on a pile of books. Rowan hovered in the doorway, eyeing the fish and mushy peas from the Friday menu, awkward at having interrupted his teacher’s lunch.

  He stopped chewing and looked up with a friendly hello. His lips parted to reveal a layer of translucent green on his front left incisor, where the shell from a mushy pea had lodged, giving him a piratical air. He seemed to know it was there, as he picked out the debris with his finger. “Do you know that within fifty years,” he continued, “there won’t be enough food or water to sustain human life. However, if we all converted to veganism for more efficient land use, there’s hope. Needless to say, the memo hasn’t reached Canterbury Downs.” He jabbed at the fish with his fork. “Besides,” he said, chewing, “I never met a piece of battered cod I didn’t like.”

  “Shall I come back later?” Rowan asked. “When you’re—”

  “No,” Stewart said, pushing away the plate. “What can I do for you? . . . It’s Rowan, isn’t it?”

  Rowan nodded. It pleased him that Stewart knew his name. This was only the second time they had met. “You said if we ever had questions—” He broke off. He had so much respect for this man, it was making him shy.

  “Last year I gave my speech about water shortages and some selfish bastard wanted to know how that might impact his holiday in the bloody Bahamas. As long as it’s not that, I’m yours.”

  Rowan thought of Merhan’s swimming pool and the memory twisted in his heart. He told himself nothing else mattered. This conversation was meant to be. He stepped forward into the room. “I want to know what to do,” he said.

  Then he couldn’t help it: he burst into tears.

  Catherine hadn’t seen Aggie Mackay in a while; she guessed in about sixteen months. When they’d last met, Aggie had just won the prestigious TBA prize, a grant from the wireless telephone company, and had moved from her mother’s bungalow in Portaferry to an artists’ co-op in Deptford. She was still in the process of adjusting to the shock of her good fortune and the separation from an alcoholic girlfriend. Aggie loved her new situation, part of a converted fishermen’s warehouse, a block away from the river. She’d always lived near water and fancied herself as “a bit of a mud-lark,” a reference to her childhood combing riverbanks, picking over stones and debris that she used in her first assemblies. She said that the local market sold the mother of all black puddings, where she could eat for three quid as if she still lived in Northern Ireland without having to be there. She had offered to take Catherine to lunch there, but Catherine was always busy and never had made the time to go with her.

  When Catherine had last visited the studio, it was little more than an empty space. In the interim, it had filled to capacity and now brimmed with projects, tools, materials, and construction paraphernalia with the Soulmap center stage.

  Catherine walked slowly around the perimeter, a mountain range, ten by ten, and three and a half feet high. It was built from wire and papier-mâché newsprint and thickly sealed in a dark yellow lacquer. She was silent to allow Aggie to deliver a commentary in a halting Ulster burr.

  “As you can see I’ve been experimenting with a new resin. It’s thicker than what I usually work with but it has a more of a, y’know, multidimensional quality . . . It’s a devil to use—almost dry before it leaves the can.”

  Aggie rubbed her ears. Her hands were chafed and scratched. She never used protective gloves, as she didn’t like having any barrier between her skin and the materials.

  “But I’m liking the way it takes. It’s more dense, y’know. Deeper. And I’m quite content with the effect of the larger scale, which we’d talked about, you might ha’ suggested, and the repetitions, crag upon crag . . . Thought it was a good sign cus when I was doing the construction, instead of worrying, how was I gonna make another effing peak, I was juiced all the while because all the time I was building I was thinking of infinity.”

  It was true that Catherine had suggested the larger scale. When Catherine had first seen images of Aggie’s reliefs, body parts emerging from collage that bridged the gap between two-dimensional works on paper and multidimensional sculpture, she’d been so captivated that she’d taken the first available flight to Belfast City Airport, to find Aggie in a shed at the bottom of her mammy’s yard, past a pig pen and an enclosure with a mangy Connemara pony. There Catherine had seen the promise of the original Soulmap, although she had thought the scale too small to contain all its ideas. She had encouraged Aggie to expand and develop its physical mass, discussing with her the possibility of including a larger version in a group show. She also had been taken with Aggie’s Home series, consisting of ordinary items—a woman’s shoe, bread bin, toaster, blender—all coated in her ubiquitous resin. Catherine was impressed by Aggie’s ability to objectify her pieces, harnessing the properties of the mellifluous honey-lacquer, using it like amber to suspend and capture her entities in time. Catherine had bought the entire Home series, in the belief that post-exhibition there would be interest in this unknown artist and it would make for a good profit.

  By the time Catherine completed her rotation, she had seen that the construction was lifeless and didn’t work. Gone was the dynamic expression of the smaller piece. This large version had the inanimate look of a
topographical model from the Museum of Natural History. Aggie’s experimental resin was as hard and dark as treacle; where the surface might have heightened, or added depth, it had deadened and embalmed. Catherine realized that by asking her to focus on the natural world, she had directed her away from her urban, working-class upbringing, for which her Home appliances were a commentary on feminine roles, domesticity, and her mother’s aspiration. She had asked her to put on hold her most potent memories, the curdling inhibition of growing up gay and Catholic in a parochially homophobic, Protestant neighborhood, and steered her away from a personal geography and history that had given her work its dimension and substance. She saw immediately that this had been a mistake.

  Catherine paused to consider. There was a time when she would have said what she thought. She wouldn’t have hesitated to tell Aggie Mackay to go back and reformulate the construction without the ugly varnish. She would have had no trouble dealing with the artist’s disappointment, resentment, anguish at the waste of months of effort and the torture of being asked to destroy in order to build again. Catherine would have insisted on the primacy of her vision, formed by instinct, shaped by experience.

  Aggie looked at Catherine expectantly. Her eyes were pinky red and as vulnerable as an animal’s to slaughter. Her rosaceous skin could have been mixed from the same bloodshot palette, aside from a splattering of warm brown freckles, the color of a giraffe’s pelt. Any likeness to the tall mammal ended there, as she was stocky and short.

  Aggie sensed her ambivalence. Catherine Hall always knew what she liked, said what she thought, made people cry with her exacting standards, and was taking way too long to respond.

  Doubt crossed Aggie’s face like a shadow.

  “What are you thinking, Catherine? Are ye not liking it?” she asked.

  The answer was no, but Catherine didn’t say so because she was asking herself whether that mattered. Time and time again her judgment had proven unsound. Why were her opinions about art any exception? Perhaps she just wasn’t seeing it and had become a Medusa so that everything she looked at turned to stone—the obliging artist had only done what she was told. Catherine asked herself whether she had to like a work to sell it. Half her clients saw art only in the context of the C. Hall Gallery: as long as it had the imprimatur of her name, this was enough assurance that the investment was blue chip and would return. If they didn’t care or understand what they were buying, why should she? Aggie Mackay had toiled to execute her vision with her beaten hands and heart; who was to say that wasn’t enough? The sculpture was imposing and had impact. Catherine imagined it in the middle of a large living room, a conversation piece, with a price tag of £100,000 in her mind it was already sold. If the act of survival was a compromise, why shouldn’t art be as well? There were already too many tears in the world to make more.

  “On the contrary.” Catherine spoke slowly, improvising her answer. “I’m loving the boldness of scale that’s unafraid to announce what it is . . . that is, in itself, an important statement about identity.” This was true; size, in combination with a landlocked quality, did give the Soulmap a melancholic dignity. “I want you to keep going with this series, make sure that you map every place you have been. Do you think that this is something that would interest you?”

  Aggie gave a sly, interior smile. With her red eyes, she looked quite diabolical. “That’s a lot of resin, Catherine. Do you know how old I am? I’m going to be twenty-eight soon.”

  Catherine laughed as if to say, Nonsense, you are a baby. “Lewis will be in touch to make arrangements and help get you anything else you need.”

  “You’ll have to let me take you for lunch at the market when you’re next here. We’ll have that black pudding I was telling you about. You’re probably thinking offal is awful, but trust me, by the time it’s meltin’ on your salty tongue it will have changed your world.”

  “Change my world? I like the way that sounds,” Catherine said. “We have a deal.”

  He was only a second into a version of the dream. He and Rachel were camping, this time they were in a snowy wilderness. She was leaving the tent—not the luxe, glamping number of his dream before, but a basic tarp strung across a pole, open at the sides and flapping in the wind, leaving them exposed and cold. He knew that this was the last time he would see her and had so much to tell her about what had been going on since the accident, although in the parallelism of dreamtime he was keenly aware that her death hadn’t happened yet. When he tried to say something, he couldn’t speak. No words would come out: he was paralyzed and choking with emotion. When he was jolted awake by his mobile—his mother calling—he was glad to get up, talk, and breathe. She informed him that she was coming to school the next day to take him out to dinner. She would organize a weeknight exit pass. Could he please book a restaurant and choose somewhere nice? They could go anywhere he wanted. The interruption was also a good moment for Rowan to ditch the wet towel. After returning from the showers, he had fallen asleep—probably the first time since starting at Canterbury Downs that he’d been anywhere near his bed before midnight.

  The timing of her visit wasn’t great. He already had plans but didn’t mention them; he wasn’t likely to be given any choice in the matter. At the beginning of the weekend the students congregated in Stewart’s rooms and it was good fun, a party without alcohol. Mr. Stewart provided apple juice, hummus, cheese, and crackers, paid for out of his own pocket, as it was an unofficial gathering. What made these evenings work was that anyone could come. No one was excluded and there was none of the usual hierarchical bullshit to get in the way. This made for an upbeat mix: everyone was encouraged to be vocal and almost no subjects were off-limits—culture, teachers, politics. Stewart took a backseat but kept enough control to make sure that nothing too outrageous happened that could be reported and bring him reproach. When Stewart heard Fred boasting about how many spliffs he had stockpiled for later, he motioned Fred to step outside. When they came back in, Fred was quiet, humble, as if he’d been corrected. There were some kids who didn’t get what the evening was about. They came and ate from the spread and left without talking to anyone. This pissed Rowan off because their behavior was against the spirit of the evening. He was surprised that Mr. Stewart never said anything but sat in a collapsed armchair, impassively watching the juvenile prats come and go. Rowan was convinced that he was a seer, that he could look to the future and tell that what they had coming was going to be retribution enough.

  Rowan chose a local pub, the Tudor Arms, for their meeting, even though Kitty warned him that the food was ratchet. This was a compromise, to walk there and get back earlier, rather than drive all the way to Canterbury in search of better cuisine. He wasn’t that bothered about eating; his mother was much more likely to care. On the nights she didn’t go out, she used to make complicated dinners, lost on him and Rachel, who didn’t like herb-drenched sauces. But Rowan disliked waste as much as he did her cooking and always made an effort to get something down. His father was always the first to make appreciative noises—Rowan couldn’t tell if he was humoring her as well. Often Rachel would refuse to eat, and there would be a tense standoff between mother and daughter, with Rachel leaving the table to graze on cereal and Catherine frustrated because she thought Rachel was being obstinately ungrateful of her efforts to put good food on the table. Rowan was with Rachel on this one. As he and Rachel would have been happier eating bread or pasta, as they did whenever possible, it seemed their mother could have saved herself a lot of effort by recognizing this simple fact.

  Rowan waited by the bar, sizing up the medley of agricultural workers’ tools and memorabilia on the walls, relics from a time before the invention of new industrial exploitations. There were photographs of hop pickers in Sunday best with white-smocked children; their poverty and hardships temporarily scrubbed away to create a decorative genre of quaint rural nostalgia for consumption by the new nineteenth-century urban society. These sentimentalized portraits were offset in the pub b
y the rank smell of yesterday’s beer. When some lads swaggered in carrying pecs and biceps, seriously built, followed by their girlfriends in miniskirts and high heels, Rowan retreated to the dining-room alcove occupied by a silent, elderly couple to avoid their loud banter and being seen as the weedy voyeur he sort of was.

  He glanced at the menu. Nothing inspiring: fish and chips, hamburger, veggie burger. He settled on the latter. He was having a go at being vegetarian, but so far finding his options limited. Ozzy had a point when he said there weren’t many concessions made for vegheads. His mother wasn’t going to like the menu, but then she wasn’t driving several hours for the food. On the phone she’d said, There’s something I need to talk to you about, as if she had news that could only be delivered in person.