Pollocks had never done much for me – to my eye they’re a lot of squiggles and drips with a thick layer of pretensions – but for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off this one. Yes, it was filled with squiggles, harsh strokes of blacks, blues, reds, stirred up on a canvass of incoherence, but there was something about it that held my gaze. It made me feel suspicious. I heard Alice from behind.
“Don’t tell me you like it.”
“I wouldn’t say I like it, but …. there’s something in it.”
“What’s the word?
I thought for a moment.
“Ominous.”
“Well I suppose that’s an improvement. You usually refer to him as Jackson Pillock.”
I glanced aside, noticed the amused twist of her lips, and felt one of my little surges of adoration. Then she took out her phone and moved a step closer to the painting.
“You want a picture of that?”
“It’s got something.”
“Something I wouldn’t want on my phone.”
She took her picture and stepped away, but I remained staring for another minute, even though I didn’t like the picture. I began to see a shape in the mess, just above the central point of the image, a distorted face. The word hung in my head: ominous.
I had an awful night: what seemed like hours on the restless edge of sleep, mentally tangled in a vague recall of the painting from the museum. It felt like a malign, multi-coloured swirl, threatening to drag me into something nasty, and the vague impression of the face kept appearing then disappearing in the mess. Maybe it only lasted for a few minutes, but it felt like hours, and I felt like crap through our last day in the city.
It continued when we got home, not every night, but two or three in a week. Some nights it was a vague irritation that quickly subsided, others a presence that wouldn’t allow me to rest or wake up. After less than a month it was bugging me. Alice suggested that I take a sleeping pill. I bought a mild variety that put me to sleep but didn’t stop the picture from creeping into my mind once the drug had worn off, and it begun to hang around through the morning. So I went to the doctor and got a prescription for something more powerful. It helped me to sleep more deeply for longer, but the image still clawed its way into my dreams in the time before waking. Some days it left me alone, but on others it came back to mess with my mind. Working kept it bay for most of the time, and reading helped, but if I let my mind go it was back again: throbbing colours, writhing squiggles, the shape like a face. And there was that word was always there to describe how it felt: ominous.
Alice went from being lightly concerned to worried about me. She asked a lot of questions about the picture, but like me couldn’t work out why it had messed with my head. I had looked at plenty of abstract paintings in the past, some apparently created as acts of violence, but none had ever done anything like this. She thought that if we could understand why it freaked me out we could begin to put it right. She had the image on her phone, had transferred it to her laptop and suggested that we look at it together. I didn’t want to.
“It might be a start.”
I glanced at the screen, suddenly found it more disturbing than I remembered from the gallery, and quickly turned away.
“Maybe it’s just something in the combinations of shapes and colours,” I said. “Some psychological accident.”
“Maybe it’s something else.”
She paused, and I guessed something awkward was coming.
“It might help if you talked to someone professional.”
“A counsellor?”
“Maybe someone with the qualifications to go deeper.”
“What? See a shrink to talk about a painting?”
“It’s not about a painting. It’s about you!”
I resisted for a few days, but had more bad nights then agreed. Alice had already researched some prospects and got me to look at the web pages for three psychotherapists who were not far away and seemed to work for a reasonable price. I took a couple of days to decide on one to see, then made an appointment for a week later.
“What if I keep having the dreams?”
“Give it two or three sessions. Then we’ll see.”
Then I had a couple more bad nights.
It was a relief that the following Friday, before I was due to see the therapist, I went out for a curry and beers with Toby. He had been a friend since school, someone to share the occasional night out and talk about football, movies, families and any nonsense that came into our heads. It was almost always light hearted, and I wanted to keep it that way for the evening so decided that I wouldn’t tell him about my bad nights. We each had samozas and a biryani, a couple of pints of lager, and an ice cream in a coconut shell. We were on our mint teas when he mentioned that he had recently been in the area where we grew up.
“Waverley School’s gone,” he said. “Closed down because there aren’t enough young kids in the area.”
“I heard of that. What have they done with it?”
“Knocked it down, building a block of flats.”
“Another one.”
“The park over the road’s still there. I had a stroll around it.”
“What’s it like?”
“Much the same. I’m sure all the flower beds are where they used to be. There were a couple of mums pushing prams. A couple of people walking dogs. I was glad something in the area hadn’t changed.
Then I shuddered and realised it had something to do with the Jackson Pollock painting. It was coming to me slowly.
A waiter appeared with the bill and that was the end of it. Toby and I shook hands outside and he went to a bus stop while I walked to the Underground station. I had fifteen minutes on a train with an uncomfortable memory.
Nine year-old me on a park bench, reckoning it was clever to have slipped away from the nature class group led by a teacher and watching a small dog chasing a ball across the grass. The dog caught the ball and took it back to a man along the path. He pretended to throw the ball behind him so the dog chased the wrong way, then he rolled it towards me. I stopped it with my foot and picked it up. The dog ran towards me and jumped as I held up the ball. The man smiled and I gave him the ball. He said thank you, then sat beside me and asked if I liked dogs. I think I said yes.
“You can come along with us if you like, throw the ball for him. He likes playing with new people.”
I looked up at the man’s face and realised he looked different to other people I knew. He had a wispy beard on his chin, a moustache, flared nostrils and wore a black beret at an angle.
“I shouldn’t. I’m meant to be with my teacher and the others.”
I looked along the path, realised I couldn’t see any of them and felt a moment of fear.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We can find them.”
He placed a hand over the back of mine and gave it a little squeeze. I looked away, stared out to the lawn for a moment, then jerked my hand away and stood up.
“I have to get back or I’ll get into trouble.”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted to do but guessed it would be a lot more trouble than I would get from the teacher. I walked a few steps quickly then began to run, not looking around until I could turn a corner and seeing that he was still on the bench with the dog sitting beside him.
I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I sensed the man had done something wrong, but also had the instinct of a young kid to avoid trouble with adults, and guessed that if I said anything there might be a round of questions and outrage and maybe suggestions that it was my fault. But a few months later my mum noticed a story in the local newspaper and reminded me that I shouldn’t talk to strangers, especially when there were no other people around. I asked why not and she replied that a man had been locked up for “doing something dirty” with a seven year-old boy in a nearby park. I asked which park and it wasn’t the one by my school, but later I sneaked a look at the newspaper and saw a photo: different angle, no hat on his head, but clearly the same man. I still didn’t say anything.
It was only as I sat on the train and allowed the memory to take its full shape that I realised what had disturbed me. That vague shape of a face in the painting reminded me of the man. I spoke out loud.
“Fuck!”
Alice was watching TV when I got home. She asked if I had a nice time with Toby, I said it was OK, and waited until the programme she was watching was over. Then I asked if she could turn off the TV and sat on the sofa beside her. She looked worried.
“I’ve realised why that painting has got me into a state.”
I kept my voice quiet but steady and told her about what had happened when I was a kid, and that my mind had done something to connect it to a face I had hidden at the back of my mind for almost fifty years.
“Maybe it had something to do with the chaos in the painting,” I said. “There’s something scary in it, and it might not include a face, but I’ve seen one and made a connection and it’s been coming out in my sleep.”
She looked surprised, a little lost, but sympathetic, then asked a question.
“Are you sure that’s all that happened when you were a kid?”
“Absolutely. It was twenty seconds at most, sat next to a creepy bloke on a park bench.”
“And you didn’t get freaked.”
“I suppose I was, but I was able to bury it.”
“And when you found out what he was?”
“I suppose I was too young to fully understand. All I got was that he was a bad man and that I had been right to run away from him. Maybe I should have said something to my mum and dad, but, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t want to upset them. I wouldn’t have been the only kid of that age who kept something quiet, even when it wasn’t my fault.”
“You’re right.”
We sat silently for a while, then Alice insisted that we have a glass of whisky each. She asked a couple of times how I felt now, and I said that I felt a little numb but thought it would be OK. Then she said there was something to do.
She went upstairs, rattled around in the spare room, and I could hear the sound of our computer printer. After a few minutes she came downstairs and called me into the kitchen, where she stood by the sink with a sheet of paper in one hand and a box of matches in the other. She turned the paper towards me and I saw a printout of the painting, all those swirls and squiggles and the vague resemblance to a face at top centre. I stared at it for a moment, feeling more numb than unsettled. Then she held it over the sink and gave the matches to me.
“Burn it.”
“What?”
“Set fire to the fucker. Give him what he deserves.”
I waited for a moment, not knowing if the idea was daft or brilliant, but could see from the look on her face that she wasn’t going to let me out of it. So I struck a match, held it below the bottom edge of the paper, and watched the flame do its work. The face dissolved into an abstract vision of hell. Alice dropped the paper into the sink, let it curl and frazzle, pushed the embers together with a butter knife then turned on the tap. Everything went down the plughole. Then she hugged me tightly, we went back to the lounge and finished the glasses of whisky.
I slept very well that evening, and the next day cancelled the appointment with the shrink. I still have a vague memory the picture. It doesn’t disturb me any more, but Alice deleted the copy from her laptop and phone, and I won’t look for it again.
Image: Untitled, 1946 by Jackson Pollock. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, non-commercial use