Travel Book
The Neon Rose – Fred Johnston
The First Day
Il m’a dit: His body was not in the studio. You know that, where I found it. It was at the bottom of the stairs up to his bedroom. There was a lot of blood. All around his head. Here and there. Like a dark red shining halo. At first I didn’t know who it was. I leaned over him. Then I called the police.
The studio, again as you know, was across the yard.Where was the girl? She was not there. I don’t know where she was at that time. But it was late in the evening. I am told that some people think they should turn up the flagstones in his yard. That’s not funny. Continue, please. He was fully dressed when I found him. I smelled wine and thought he was drunk. Then there was the wine bottle on the ground, in pieces. Blood and wine. Yet he wondered, couldn’t help it, when the young avocat left, his lawyer.
Whether they’d painted the interview room just for him.The smell of paint came off the green walls, or perhaps had stayed in his nostrils from the painter’s studio; a shadowy square box of paintings half-completed, squeezed tubes of paint, thinners, brushes, books, canvas, photographs, a ruinedcouch, a massacred table, images trapped in that room and suffocating slightly under the painter’s defiant dream, every sitter slammed against a brown background of indistinct hills and curiously gabled towns.
This stuffy stuffed room and walled yard which had seen and captured so much, so that it was not unbelievable that the murder of the man was there too, its Borgian tableau imprinted in the air, if only some sufficiently sophisticated piece of forensic technology existed that could detect it. The solitary guard allowed him time to sit and smoke,one cigarette, as if he had all the time in the world. Whether the little nervous avocat believed him or not, the story of finding the old man was raggy at best, no longer seemed the point. And the Embassy solicitor, an accent straight out of the moneyed bogs of the Irish midlands, the politically safe bogs, where now and then someone would dig up the half-fossilised remains of an ideal but straight off with it to the museum of such unnecessaries; this man who opened his interview with I don’t know what to say wasn’t helpful. As if he needed help. He smoked, the guard looked out of the barred Napoleonic window on a stone barracks’ square quilted with the leftovers of a recent shower, the heat in the yard matching the heat in the room, he could imagine soft tendrils of steam moving over the Paris pavements.In the bar, The Green Roost, the sign outside a shamrock and the barmen French to the bone, posters on the walls advertising The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones – no historic irony intended – and The Bhoys of Bluehill – three French students who could barely speak English let alone Irish and who played every Monday evening and no-one listened, he’d been in the pub so often he knew the way the crowds worked; then, over the Hommes, a framed reproduction of the 1916 Proclamation and over the piss-drain, ancient acid-spotted posters for Guinness delivered from horse drawn carts, you could buy a copy of the Irish Independent from behind the bar, the TV was tuned snowily to Irish TV and The Sunday Game had the place rocking: in here, in this transported plastic comes-in-a-kit Irishness he’d met the Jew, well, the half-Yid, brought up in England, traces of a posh accent, and at first he thought the great white face with its absurd frame of thin tinselly red beard and the splotch of flat dyed redhair wanted his body. At the back of the man’s head, how could you not notice him yet no one seemed to, like something dropped from the ceiling, perched a small black beret; a tight scar sketched over a blade-thin nose, a rash of silver Romany rings, all shapes,on blushing fingers.
Watching the man, the way no one paid him any mind, the alone-ness of him in a pub where noise was important; the few true Irish who came in pretending to be IRA men on the run or some-such and the noise varnished the pretence, everyone working a fix, on the make, ney-under-the-table men, apershow-are-ye, a corrupt country spreading its corruption in mansized molecules, the French barmen so utterly quiet and tolerant and ashamed of what they had to work with: he’d watched the man and discovered a kind of uneasy reflection and so the next time he came in he offered him a drink, watching the wet bluegrey eyes in the white plate face grapple with a mote of suspicion then open like a child’s.
He bought the man the drink as much as to say I’m not like the rest in here, fakers and cowards, well I could define that if I wanted to, but you know what I mean, not real, the sorts of Irish that make you want to puke and spend half their lives puking, I came here to get away from them, what did you come here to get away from? He told the man over six or seven drinks that he hated his country and if that was too abstract, and everyone thought hatred of one’s country was abstract, not enough in itself to make you do anything, he said it was politically corrupt and the man humphed and said So is France and he replied, feeling a tad disappointed that no, he didn’t mean quite like that. He meant that the very air was corrupt; politics, the Arts, one was not a balance to the other, it came out of bog-poverty and generations of cheating the foreign landlord some said but that was Okay for Sunday newspaper columnists on fat wages to say, but it was more than that; the other man saying that in the Polish ghetto, now I know you won’t believe this, the most corrupt, I mean morally corrupt, you know, the most exploitative of the ghetto Jews were other Jews, you’re telling me nothing new, it is the history of people who don’t know who they are anymore.
Or who’ve let others tell them for too long. He’d dribbled in a gaseous Martini, so delicate for working fingers, of travels by train and wearing tags and being smaller than the other children and yes, you might call me a Jew, but I lost the real part of that in London over the years, Anglicans, not church-goers, didn’t say yes or no, just ignored I was a Jew, but they were the nicest people in the world, dead now, I learned to call them my family, they reared me, a snotty child with a name-tag round his neck, they had none of their own, get me? My own, don’t ask, I never bothered. Smoke, most like. And before you say it, why does the Yid always start defining history from Those Days? Because for some of us, I suppose, there was nothing before that matters and less afterwards, in terms of who we really are, especially the children, like me, but I don’t really give a fuck. Cheers. More to it than that, I know what I mean but it’s hard to define, he’d argued, Ireland has nothing to compare, I hadn’t thought where you started your history from, but I had imagined The King David Hotel would be an equally defining place; and the look, sad as a robbed child, in the man’s marine-glossy eye, as if he’d found a friend and lost one in the same moment, or hadn’t said the right thing, or had been crudely misinterpreted; music just starting, the diddle-eye in the background, got him on to the subject of what the Church had done in Ireland to little children.
What drink does to you, he heard himself say none too gracefully, to the man; I apologise, I am not anti-Jewish. I don’t know where that came from. From history, the man said, you’re obviously a history man. Don’t apologise. Anyway, it had nothing to do with me. My Jerusalem is here, and this – banging the bar-top – is my Wailing Fucking Wall. Why did you call yourself a Yid, it’s not a nice name? What’s in a name? Fuck you, Paddy. The Irish are the most racist people in the world, especially when they’re not at home. We’re a poor second, particularly when we’re not real. Drink up.
At that stage in drink when nothing’s an insult. Or when murder can happen over a silly remark. No one knowing quite who he is any longer, or what side’s up. Rings catching the squalid light. A Planxty poster, years old, on a wall. The guard whistled a tune. It sounded like Jazz. There was such good, such young Jazz, in and around Paris and the best place was over on the Left, which wasn’t what it had been but still had the caveaux and caves here and there where the young bucks tried their hands. All the Black great Jazzmen who’d played Paris. History. And the guard whistling the tune reminded him that the painter had taken him there to meet her one evening, the very first time, and after that had come the studio and the end of his known life.
