Oil and Water

The scrutiny of the gallery guard weighed on Spencer like a wet dressing gown. He’d felt watched since he pushed through the heavy doors into the guard’s peacefully unvisited room. Spencer was tired from his unplanned journey and thought that the gallery of the unfamiliar town might offer sanctuary. A place where he could clear his head sufficiently to be able to plan his next move. 

He had ignored the guard who lingered near a door-sized slab of a painting on the right wall of the gallery. He had turned immediately to the left wall and had been standing silently in front of the first painting hung there for a couple of minutes, trying to think. He just needed to think.

The painting was of a young artist sketching a large pig’s head. The pig was dead in the profound way reserved for decapitated things. Objectified by the disconnection, but somehow more of a head than ever in the absence of a body, the head suggested a hierarchy of death. Even a dead thing could be less dead than a pig with no head, or a head with no pig. Staring, Spencer became aware of the feeble beating of his heart. He needed to clear his head. Death was death, whatever the bristly head said. There were no less-dead things. He was alive and still wanted to choose his own future. Still could, if he could only think of what to do. Conscious of the weight of his own tired meat, he shuffled away from the pig.

Spencer’s eyes scanned ahead of him as he crept along the left wall of the gallery following the low metal barrier wire that kept visitors and paintings at arm’s length. He sensed the guard watching him from his post next to a large, dark canvas on the right wall. He did not stop next to a huge oil of a group of idealised nineteenth century peasants. The most prominent figure, a rosy cheeked girl, her delicate, bare feet romantically invulnerable to the field’s brutal stubble, was staring at him. As was the stern overseer who supervised the girl and her gleaning rabble. The eyes of the overseer and the gallery guard held Spencer in a pincer of disapproval.

He kept walking and found relief in front of a benignly curving river, rolling past a grassed bank under skies of early autumn grey. Eyes were still on Spencer, glaring from their place on the right wall, cutting through his back like a barber surgeon. Spencer breathed, filling his pressured lungs, and held his ground in front of the painting of nothing. There were other footsteps in the gallery now, another body to share the guard’s gaze and allow Spencer the space to think.  

The gleaning girl was not her. It didn’t even look like her. Except for the delicate bare feet, the last thing he’d seen as he left the bathroom. Bath-softened and steaming, wet in the air. Her feet could never have survived the rough field. Footsteps moved around him now, softened by gallery etiquette. Spencer ignored them. Choosing to see nobody in the hope that he would remain unseen. He focussed on the painting. The river would wash the thoughts of her away.  He could sweep away into the distance on its soft curve. But the future that the river flowed towards was empty. It mirrored the grey sky and carried the reflection of nothing to nowhere. Spencer couldn’t let the water take him there. He moved on, feeling that the stare from the direction of the large dark portrait was being unfairly reserved for him, despite the presence of another moving around the space with him now.

Spencer had driven when he should have been sleeping. He had imagined that he would find peace in the distance that he’d put between himself and the bathroom, but all he had done was stretch his fear over a greater space and carry it with him to a new town. His air-dried shirt stank and his rheumy eyes watched his tired feet trudge over the parquet, avoiding the ceaseless gaze of the guard.

The next painting looked much more like her than the gleaning girl had. This young girl was sleeping. The soft pink arm curling around creased, plump pillows, was… hers. The arm belonged to the feet, steaming and pinkly clean, sticking up out of the water. Hanging over the edge of the bath. This was a portrait of the arm that had once encircled him at the house of a mutual friend and made the deal between them. The small hand had settled on his back and told him the lie that she would never leave.  

After the clumsy, self-taught chess of their early relationship, they had moved in to a flat together and settled into a domestic stalemate. Their dreamt future rapidly revealed itself to be unwinnable, his career prematurely lost with the part of him that he sacrificed to the medication. She became his whole, unlosable life. If he could continue at all, then it could only be with her. She could never leave him, and he could never leave her.

Spencer stared at the sleeping girl in the painting. Her short brown hair was still neat, her sleep could only have been the briefest of naps. It was not the knotted mop that had once smothered the pillow next to his. The sun-catching nest for her late-sleeping head. And neither was it the weightless weed that had billowed and writhed under the bath’s hot water.

The smooth pink arm hadn’t been strong enough to free the hair from the splash and suck of the water. But when the struggle was over and the only movement was the curl of steam over the ripples cast by a single tear, the peace in her face was the same as that of the painting’s sleeping girl. Spencer had given her peace and left none for himself. She could never leave him now.

Spencer felt the guard’s stare on his back. The footsteps of the other visitor were gone and he bore the stare alone. The guard was staring with her eyes, bath poached and unblinking. They steamed into Spencer, seeing his past and keeping him tied to the present of the gallery. The guard knew. The paintings knew.

Spencer turned quickly, forced to move by the suspicion of the guard and the watching walls. The guard was not there. There was nobody there. The wet footprints of some rain-chased visitor crossed the polished floor between him and the tall, dark portrait on the opposite wall. He followed the watery tracks towards the painting. He walked, transfixed until his shins pulled the low barrier wire bowstring-tight, and then he leant in further, creasing at the waist, his eyes dragged to the canvas.

He looked at his own face staring back at him. The last time he had looked at himself he had seen a steam-softened reflection, quivering over the rockpool of a slack mouth. Now he saw a perfect mirror image of himself, no less immaculate in its likeness for being scraped in thick oils. The red eyes were one slow blink away from the terror of sleep. Spencer’s painted brow was creased in the frown that the image forced him to wear. But the shirt in the canvas still dripped with the splashes of struggle and the hands, which hung limply at his sides, were pink and steaming. In the background a bath, a murmuration of flicked brushstrokes showing the same gossamer steam rising from it that wreathed the pink hands. It was a masterpiece. Spencer was mesmerised.  

Footsteps came and went, clicking and squeaking around Spencer, indifferent to his fixation. His lower back burned as he leant in to the painting. He felt glances of concern slip over him and then vanish as visitors moved on and abandoned the petrified man. Spencer needed to move on too. He needed to look away from the pleading red eyes, to continue his escape, but he could not. The barrier wire cut into his fleshless shins and pain climbed up his legs to burn at the base of his craning spine. His mouth dried as his unblinking eyes gummed and seeped. After an unknown length of time, when Spencer saw the steam in the painting begin to curl and climb, creeping out of the frame, the lights went out.    

The darkness moved in the steam and rolled unseen towards Spencer. He felt its hot caress and then the vapour settling and condensing in his raw throat. A hand, dripping, warm and small, found the base of his burning spine and pushed with an irresistible strength.  

Spencer surged forward into the blackness, back to the bathroom he had never escaped. If she could never leave him, then he would never leave her.

The next morning the gallery guard flicked a row of switches triggering a staccato dawn which bounced the rarely-visited room rapidly in and out of existence before it settled into the new day. As the guard took up his position he noticed that wet footprints still marked the unmopped floor in front of the large, bleak painting of the man with rolled up sleeves and the pallor of an unripe strawberry. Behind the man, glinting eyes peeked through a tangle of wet hair, over the edge of a steaming bath.