Rapha and Kafka

“Won’t you get sick from sitting on a cold floor?” the baby asked.

“Sounds like something she’d say to scare us into doing something without really knowing why,” I retorted, trying to sound authoritative with a voice that still hadn’t broken.

“But we don’t have anyone to go to now if we get sick. What do we do if we get cold and die?” The baby’s tone was strangely calm, almost in acknowledgment that something this extreme could actually happen, which was a concern and news to me.

I didn’t dare admit I needed the guidance, so I decided to wait a while before slowly getting up and relocating to an ornate wooden bench at the other end of the room, sidling over as if getting out of my fetal position on the floor was of my own volition.

I hadn’t spoken to the baby in a while, but for whatever reason, he had decided to follow me after I left our house in Peckham with a rucksack of thin cheese sandwiches and three days worth of clothes. The decision to run away was still fresh, resulting in a somewhat chaotically packed bag with nothing of much use.

The cold marble floor bit at my feet. I scowled at the socks I’d selected, which were all thinning at the heels.

I wasn’t known for my originality, but I questioned whether anyone really was. I had no prior plans to run away until I picked up a copy of ‘Kafka on the Shore’ by Murakami and read as much as I could absorb before Mum finished work at the bookies and the Oxfam shop closed.

"It's nice, dear, but not important," she'd said when I asked for the £1.95 to buy it. That night we walked back in silence as she smoked four cigs back to back, which most certainly cost more than the book.

I hadn’t read much of it, so my loosely laid plan most probably had faults. Kafka could be dead in the book for all I knew, but his idealistic plan to run away and end up in some library in Japan had legs.

I couldn’t very well copy him though; it didn’t sit well with me. I also had to consider that Mum might have clocked the plan because she saw me reading the book, but from her, this was highly doubtful.

I’d therefore chosen the art gallery as an alternative, just in case. In my mind, it seemed different enough to a library yet the same in all the relevant ways. Kafka was trying to get away from his father, whilst I couldn’t figure out how to find mine, so the synergy seemed to work.

“You know copying is bad,” the baby chimed in.

“You think everything is bad.”

“No, I don’t. I’m glad we came here; it’s pretty.”

I looked up at the painting opposite my bench-come-bed. A dead girl’s glassy eyes looked out of the frame, floating in a flower-covered river in spring. The most tragic of all Shakespeare’s ladies.

“Why did you follow me?” I asked after a time.

“I didn’t want you to be alone, especially now.”

“What’s so important about now?” I asked.

“No one should be alone on their 14th birthday.”

“I’m an adult now. Birthdays don’t count anymore. Adults have bigger and more important things to figure out, like who to vote for in the next election, you know, stuff like that.”

“Impressive, and have you decided?” The baby queried.

“Probably Labour like Dad, you know, promote the rise of the working class and all that good stuff, you know, protect the family and women and children.”

The gallery went very quiet as I surveyed the adopted family I now belonged to. A large collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings stared back. A harem of mainly young women all looked longingly my way.

Dad had said we needed to look after our women. We were their protectors, their guardians. Across the room, the moon shone through one of the atrium windows onto a Rossetti painting of a woman wistfully looking over her shoulder, a plump pomegranate in hand.

I slid off the bench and walked over to her, my mind imagined peeling that fruit for her, being her saviour, the one she couldn’t live without because that pomegranate was everything.

My trousers filled out thinking about it. Not that I knew why, it couldn’t be helped, but I wasn’t ashamed.

When I bought my ticket to the gallery two days ago, I didn’t really appreciate what I was buying a ticket for. The Royal Academy of Art just seemed like a logical choice because I assumed there’d be offices and spaces to hide on account of it still being a school. The fact I happened upon the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition was a lucky coincidence.

I didn’t know much about art and I didn’t get the point to a lot of it, but this work seemed to speak to me. Literally. I’d cried for the first few hours after the gallery closed and the lights went out, but after a while, I could hear my new family singing to me, the ladies all around chiming in unison.

“We must get back to nature, back to what is good, back to justice and sincerity and our moral code.”

“Do you believe them?” The baby asked.

“With everything I have,” I dramatically replied. “Dad had the right idea, but he left. Mum has no idea what day of the week it is. We must protect what is good and right, like the Pre-Raphaelites did.”

The marble floor bit through my socks again as if in retort. The grey night surrounding us took most of the shine from the paintings on display, their truth dampened by the cold air.

“And how do you know what is good and right?”

“You just do, don’t be daft, and I can help show people the way, like Dad did. Help show them what’s right and wrong.”

“But he left, Teddy, Dad left,” the baby said quietly.

“I know, but he’s still a good man, there’s a reason, there must have been, and Mum wouldn’t tell me because she still sees me as a kid, I can take care of myself, she could have told me.”

The gallery appeared to go a little darker. Eyes from every painting seemed to watch in anticipation whilst I rubbed the cold from the soles of my feet again, bringing my knees to my chin.

The face of the same woman shone out of about 12 paintings in the largest room in the gallery. Her flame red hair and rosebud lips were instantly recognizable. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much Rossetti must have loved this woman, must have fantasized over her, protected her to immortalize her in such a way. A picture of perfection I’d never really known.

“Have you seen the black dog?” The baby asked.

I shook my head slowly.

“He’s down the corridor; we should get a dog, like those homeless people you see outside the tube.”

I ignored the dig and wandered through the adjoining rooms to the end of the corridor. A large black painting like nothing else in the collection loomed over the room, bigger than life-size and domineering even in the darkness.

Marchesa Luisa Casati stared down at us via Boldini’s hand. The dark painting detailed her in a full black ensemble, complete with a regal-looking black greyhound at her feet. The only color in the entire piece came from her pale face and a purple sash around her waist. The whole piece screamed chaos.

All the other women around the room seemed to shy in her presence, this ominous threat that stood guard over them. It was the only painting not to center around nature; it couldn’t celebrate life, only death and destruction.

“She looks like mum,” the baby said.

“She does a bit, although mum hates hats.”

“True.”

“Who is she?”

“Someone famous, I guess.”

“Yeah, she looks like a celebrity, like an olden-day version of someone from Love Island.”

The baby snickered.

“I wonder where they all end up, these celebrity women. None of us know their names, only the artists who make them important, I suppose.”

“You mean the men that make them important…”

We let the silence wash over us for a while as we stared at the black painting, both of us imagining the life this woman must have led. What mum might look like in a hat.

“I’m not sure you could show her the way, Teddy,” the baby chimed after a while. “I think she was on her own bad path.”

“Why’d you say that?”

“Well, the bit next to her painting said she died alone and with £20 million pounds of debt.”

The Rossetti model with the flame-red hair seemed to gasp, shocked at the company she was forced to keep. The rebel and the saint, sharing the same air.

“I wonder where she’d be if she had someone to protect her, someone like dad around?”

“Dad couldn’t have helped her, Teddy, he could barely help himself.”

“Take that back.”

“You’re an adult now, you don’t need to pretend, not like mum does.”

Silence filled the room again, and the cold marble shot into my toes in some kind of agreement.

“It’s all fake, none of this is real,” the baby said coldly, the voice echoing in my head. “You wanted to run away to find the truth, and it’s all here in front of you, but only if you’ll see it for what it is.”

Luisa Casati’s portrait bared down at us. A woman with so much vibrancy, so much light to give the world, but at the same time, so much pain and darkness. It hurt to look at.

I sat down in front of her, my eyes pricking, making my nose itch with tears. I wanted the truth, but I wanted it to be something specific, something beautiful and clean and easy. I wanted the Pre-Raphaelite life, one where honesty and justice were served, and parents loved their kids and stayed together. The reality was black with cigarette smoke and tar.

“You can break this cycle, you know,” the baby whispered. “You can make something that they never could.”

I cried until the gallery opened and the cleaners came in. They didn’t even notice me hidden under a bench in the main hall, though I’m sure one of them questioned the smell of cheese sandwiches.

When they finished, I packed away my things quietly and headed to the bus stop to catch the 387 to Peckham station. Mum was still at home; I watched her from the back garden window as she pottered easily around the kitchen cleaning up around my sister.

“Morning, Teddy, what do you want for breakfast, angel?” she asked as I walked through the kitchen, completely unaware I’d been gone for 32 hours, or at least she strangely made out that was the case.

I shook my head and smiled as I walked up to my sister's room, hanging back to peer through the door as she played with two hand-me-down dollies before school, their voices just like hers but an octave higher.

Once in the safety of my room I immediately began rummaging through drawers to find an old piggy bank I must have raided the year before; a few rogue coins echoed in the bottom. As I shook the pig, two £1 coins fell onto the bed, which I took as a sign.

My face still felt tight from the evening's tears, but then I realized that Kafka hadn’t cried, and neither should I. I pocketed the money and left the house again with a better understanding of what I was leaving this time and what I would be coming back to. Oxfam opened at 9 a.m., and I needed to know what the ‘on the shore’ bit of Kafka on the Shore really meant.

So I set off in search of more truths; the pavement around the train station was now filled with men commuting to work, men who blindly followed one path as I headed in the opposite direction.