Jackdaw, p.1
Jackdaw, page 1
Jackdaw
Being the memoir
of a most
interesting assignment
Tade Thompson
Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Acknowledgements
Also by Tade Thompson
Copyright
1
My first connection to Francis Bacon was years earlier.
I returned from work in the evening and headed for the attic, which is where my study was at the time. My friend Camille, ever supportive, called from New York, barely able to contain herself.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘You’ve made it,’ said Camille.
‘Made what?’
‘You’re in the New York Times. You’ve hit the big time.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The New York Times reviewed The Murders of Molly Southbourne. I swear, I got goose bumps when they compared the feelings induced to those of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m sending it to you right now. Congratulations!’
Camille wasn’t lying.
I considered framing the paper, which was an insert, one should add. It not only compared my book to Francis Bacon, but also to Lucian Freud.
I didn’t frame the review, but at times, when the days were longer than twenty-four hours and my patience bottomed out by midday, I would think of it and smile.
Even if I had wanted to frame it, where would I have put it? My study was deliberately spartan. The attic was maybe twelve by fifteen feet, though it was difficult to say because of the irregular shape. I came up by step ladder and the hatch door had a square hole in it. Three flatpack-built bookshelves groaned under the double-stacked weight of my books, next to which I had a desk, which was really an Ikea dining table for a bachelor. I sat on a wooden dining chair, not an ergonomic swivel marvel. I had a reliable desktop. I had a drawing board mounted on two plastic boxes, my art area.
Beside the desk I carefully curated a pile of documents, my ‘later’ pile, that I never, ever got to. My desk was messy too, although there was an order and, cliché, I could find anything because I knew where everything was. I had a whiteboard with current projects and progress figures, along with unrealistic exercise goals. Behold, my humanity.
That I didn’t frame the review is what’s important here.
Three years later, almost to the day, and while standing in the exact same spot, Tarquin, my literary agent, called.
‘Double-Tee!’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘It’s us. You and me, Double-Tee.’
‘Why are you excited?’
‘Can you tell?’
‘Tarquin—’
‘Okay, okay. Listen, do you know Francis Bacon?’
‘The scientific method dude or the Screaming Popes guy?’
‘What scientific method?’
‘Instauratio Magna? Lord Bacon? None of this rings a bell?’
‘I’m talking about the twentieth-century artist, Tade.’
‘So Screaming Popes guy.’
‘Yes.’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, he has people, right? The Francis Bacon people want to know if you’d be interested in writing a book, a novella, based on his works.’
‘Not about him.’
‘No. Not biographical. About his work.’
‘And I can write what I like,’ I said.
‘Yes. Any genre you like.’
I could have said no. There was no pressing reason to take the job. My books were doing well; decent, even. I was in that midlist sweet spot where I surfed the good side of the critics, the fans and the accountants. I was in the middle of writing a book, which my editor forked out the advance for, but seemed to hate. Then there were the screenplays that hadn’t yet sent producers running for the hills. The work proceeded apace, no sign of a block anywhere, and reaped moderate but significant love during award season.
I could have said no.
And yet…
‘It’s interesting,’ I said.
‘Fabulous! I’ll set up a meet.’
‘Wait, what meet?’
‘The Bacon folks will want to meet you, cast eyes on you to make sure you aren’t a serial killer. Or that you are a serial killer, ha!’
‘I said “interesting”. I don’t want to commit.’
‘I’ll set up the meetings. Bye. Bye!’
Excitable motherfucker.
Still, it couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Besides, a lot of these things came up from time to time. About twice a week someone contacted Tarquin about me doing some work for a book or a television or radio show. Most of them didn’t turn into anything more than expanding my circle of contacts. That’s how it went.
I dropped my phone, pulled up my chair and continued with my novel-in-progress. By the time I’d finished one paragraph, I had forgotten all about Francis Bacon.
Trap, my son, came back from school and I spent the next two hours telling him to not do things, then the next half an hour telling him to do one thing, and when he fell asleep, I made love to my wife and slept a guilt-free sleep filled with wholesome, dreamless nothingness.
The next day, when I opened the door arriving from work, a post office slip unbalanced from the post box and fell to the mat. Shit. That usually meant a trip to the post office, seven miles round.
I waited till Saturday. Trap insisted on coming along. He was four and inquisitive, always drawing superheroes in his books and on the walls of the lounge. I got him one of those flexible whiteboard things to channel the artistic leanings, but he still scrawled on the paintjob and the sofa. What could I do? It’s art.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘To get a package from the post office.’
‘Is it close to the toy shop?’
‘No.’ A lie. We would pass within five yards of the shop. The problem with Trap wasn’t buying toys. It was the disappointment when the toy didn’t do what the advert said it would. It stimulated a Weltschmerz of such a depth that it unsettled adults around him. I didn’t want to deal with that.
The post office queue was modest and I gave the slip to Trap. The boy dutifully handed it to the post man. He scanned it, checked my driver’s licence, and slouched out of the room.
He returned with a cardboard box, one foot by two, and the contractions of his forearm muscles told me that it was heavy. The return address said it was from Tarquin.
I thought the box contained author copies of my latest novel and took Trap to the toy shop to buy another toy that would trigger a melancholic wail.
The box was full of books about Francis Bacon. Seven hardcover tomes. One of them, my personal favourite, was entirely in German.
‘Aren’t they delightful?’ said Tarquin over the phone. ‘One of them is hard to find.’
‘I didn’t sign up for an art history degree,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t be a baby. You’re a professional. You knew this job would mean research.’
‘Yes, an online documentary, or something similar. Not… these.’
‘Just take your time. There’s no hard deadline just yet.’
As usual, we were not having the same conversation. Similar, but with enough adjacency to have separate meanings. I should have argued more, but Trap distracted me. Trap and I created a superhero duo called Jot and Tittle. They had shrinking powers, but only when they agreed with each other. Their powers didn’t work when they argued, and since they were siblings, they argued all the time. Trap wanted to get to the next drawing and Tarquin was in the way.
I hung up without protesting hard enough, a mistake.
I’m systematic, anyone will tell you.
I get things done not because I’m smarter than other people, but because I’m organised and persistent. I’ll keep at the task with some kind of evolving plan, and I’ll do it long after most people would have quit and gone to the pub.
I set up a work schedule to get me through the research books. I would read three chapters a day, either from the same book or distributed across. On my whiteboard, I wrote the total number of chapters in all the books, and a daily tally.
One of them was a collection of photographs of Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews in London. I marked this down as a place I’d like to visit, but on the first page I learned it had been moved to Dublin. I loved Dublin. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to go that far. I wanted to eyeball this mess, to lie on the ground and see it from an odd perspective, to feel the give of the floorboards and the slipperiness of the rope bannister. To smell the air and sniff the paint close up. It wasn’t a good time to go. There was never a good time to visit a place where I’ve fallen in love on each visit, especially now that I was older and wiser. It was the accent and the attitude and the hair and the air off the Liffey.
The glossy photographs would have to do. My imagination was the next best thing. Besides, what could the smell possibly be other than mildew and turpentine, the earthy-chemical smell of paint, a hint of stale humanity?
Not going to lie, it was messy. 7 Reece Mews was a psychic compost heap, a record of the mind of a bri
I looked for some order, some organising principle, but all these photographs told me was that this person used whatever was at hand to create whatever he wanted.
I didn’t know Francis Bacon at all. Nobody did.
I never called my own humble attic study messy again.
Bacon had a breadbasket with crumpled-up paper growing out of it like a head of beer. A biography of Karl Marx by Fritz J. Raddatz peeped between some papers. One wall held a circular brown stain with a stellate peeling pattern that seemed to turn it into a pie chart of obscure meaning. There were these scissors which, if they were any larger, would have to be called shears. The mirror in his living area was broken; the mirror in his studio area was speckled with black paint. A set of brush handles reaching out of a jar looked like a corpse’s hand.
I noticed two things that often show up in his paintings. One was the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling with drawstrings. One of these was blue. The other was the ejaculatory splashes of white paint on the wall. I don’t know if he employed other light sources, but the place seemed gloomy to me. I looked at each item in each photo, trying to absorb some essence of the painter from an image twice removed. I wanted a sense of the man’s spirit.
Some of the items made sense as items used for improvisation. A cylinder of corduroy, cut from a trouser leg. A bent screwdriver. A pair of T-squares leaning on the wall. Dulux house paint, roller brushes. A cough mixture bottle holding Zeus knows what fluid.
The walls would have been at home in a crime scene photo if humans had blood of pink, blue, black and white. Cracked plaster, peeling paint, all saying Bacon did not give a fuck. The skylight was covered with brown paper and the general care was casual, desultory.
One hardcover book hidden among the paintbrushes and rollers was Foundation of Modern — nothing. Paper covered the rest of the title. When I got fatigued and my mind wandered I often speculated on the topic. Colour theory? Historiography? Biology? Jazz? There were a fair number of volumes whose titles I could not see, but this one was interrupted in the midst of telling me something about Francis. Ornithology, maybe?
I started a notebook for jotting down impressions. This, I assumed, would serve as my own compost heap. Reece Mews and everything else I had read about Bacon nudged me towards a singular personality, one I would have to open myself up to.
In order to write this, I must access and give full rein to my Id. Full subconscious release. Stab the superego to death.
After knowing him and his work, I’d move into the meat and bone of the assignment, which was writing a story dependent on that ferment. I had no story ideas at that time, but I was confident that if I immersed myself in his world a kernel of narrative would show up.
I was so naïve back then. I had no idea what I was dealing with. I thought it was a simple writing assignment that I could research, then shit out in a week or so, after which I’d return to normal transmission.
I was wrong, of course.
2
Trap woke up in the night and stumbled into our bedroom. He had this new thing where he would wake up screaming or crying, and for about two, three minutes he would squeeze his eyes shut, then he would open them, terrified, repeating the phrase ‘who are you?’ Soothing him usually took about ten minutes. He got it from his mother who, every six weeks, woke up in terror of a giant spider crawling across the ceiling. For Elise, it was always this specific thing, and she had done it since the first night she spent at my flat when we were dating. Gave me a fright with all her thrashing about. We weren’t exactly dating, or rather we didn’t realise we were until that particular night.
None of this would have been a problem were I not the lightest sleeper in the house. All this night-time activity meant I wasn’t getting enough rest.
Trap was still going strong after fifteen minutes, so I opened every window and turned on all the lights, banishing the dark influences and the miasma to make the nightmares go away. I sang a song to him. I told him he was safe.
Twenty minutes, he was fine. Asleep again. I set him down beside his mother, closed the windows, turned out the light. I lay down to sleep, but my eyes would not even close. As an experienced insomniac, I knew how this went. Stay there too long and you’ll never drop off. I got up, climbed the step ladder to my study in the attic.
I picked up the Bacon books with the intention of flipping through pages to get passive knowledge, an old study trick from medical school. When you’re too tired to read, open the books and flip through, looking at diagrams, graphs and illustrations. Some knowledge will filter in and, with any luck, stay there.
I was looking to absorb a mood more than anything, but instead, I encountered Henrietta Moraes. Even now, after everything, my fingers hesitate to type these words. I saw the series of black-and-white photographs that John Deakin took of her. I live in the twenty-first century and I’ve seen nakedness, but I found Moraes disturbing. A woman comfortable naked and radiating effortless sexuality, she carelessly opened her legs to show her verdant pubic growth, spread across the bed, upside down with legs propped up on the wall, sitting, staring at the camera with a half-smile.
I’m stalling. The truth is on seeing the nude pictures of Henrietta Moraes I masturbated furiously and came in seconds. I only became aware of myself afterwards, breathing heavy, waiting for a wave of shame that never arrived. And there she was, not laughing, but smiling, telling me she knew the effect she had on men.
I’d like to say I put it out of my mind, cleaned up and went to bed, but that’s not what happened. I tried reading something different, but my mind kept going back to her, and I got aroused again. I’m not fishing for absolution when I say my mind was not my own. A part of me thinks, typing this, that I’m going to delete it in the second draft, and that I don’t have to worry about it. I was there for about forty-five minutes that night, and I wasn’t researching.
I heard movement from downstairs and pulled up my pyjama bottoms too quickly out of guilt. I fell and hit my head on the edge of my desk on the way down. I didn’t black out, but I was stunned, bright lights inside my eyelids. I stayed on the floor a bit, controlling my breathing, waiting for the throbbing pain to subside. I got up with care and navigated my way down the ladder.
My lust spent, I had a quick shower and went to sleep. I did not dream.
The next day, I got up like nothing happened, got ready, dropped Trap off at pre-school, went my way to the hospital, thinking that was the end of it.
I had a busy day, but I loved what I did, so it passed quickly. I can’t talk about my work because of patient confidentiality. What I can tell you is I drank a smoothie for lunch and sat at my desk with my eyes closed, listening to music from my phone, trying to achieve a Zen state. This was what I usually did, and, combined with deep breathing exercises, it prepared me for the last third of my working day.
Only this time, Henrietta’s face popped into my mind. Not her whole body, just her face, but my response was embarrassingly priapic. The tenting would be obvious to anyone who came into my office which, professionally, would be catastrophic. Nobody gossips like health workers. It takes our mind off the difficult things we have to do. I opened my door, looked up and down the corridor and, seeing nobody approaching, dashed into the men’s room, led by the compass arrow behind my zip. I took a few seconds to stare down at my crotch, thinking of it as one does a disobedient child. I hadn’t experienced this sort of thing since my teenage years, anarchic hormones trying to make sense of their role, telling me to mate and bring forth my own kind, telling me this is the best time with my cells spanking new, my DNA undamaged, my joints supple. Against that, social programming. Centuries of religion and convention bearing down on me, and some sense coming out of my testosterone-soaked brain about pregnancy and what used to be called venereal disease.
A girl taught me to masturbate. I used to have wet dreams like everybody else, but they weren’t linked to what I would later call sex at all. I’d have fragmentary dreams of longing without knowing what I was longing for, then a weird sensation and voila I would have to clean my sheets. She was my puppy-love girlfriend, though. She was a lot more experienced than me, might have been a year or two older, which is like ten years in wisdom. We kissed mostly. Rubbed against each other. This went on for a while, but I started getting erections and one day she stroked me from the outside of my shorts. Boom. An entirely new sensation and a new frontier in laundry.
