Museum Piece

It was just my luck.

I hadn’t even been a week at my new job, and here I was, stuck inside the Museum because of bad weather. And I wasn’t even supposed to be there, in the first place.

Bad weather, did I say? It turned out to be The Storm of The Century – The Grandmother of all Blizzards of March 14, 1973 – my birthday, incidentally.

In my gap year, just for fun, I had been working as a waitress at Le Riche Oursin, an upmarket French Bistrot in the tourist area. Who should walk in but the curator of the Graffiti Plus Art Museum – only, I didn’t know who he was at the time.

He ordered our special bouillabaisse en croûte and linguine with octopus in garlic and red wine for mains.

It was a slow day. The owner encouraged us to talk with clients to ensure further custom. He even allowed us to sit down, if the clients asked us to. It just so happened that I was in the right place at the right time.

M. Émile asked whether I had ever visited the world-class Graffiti Plus Museum, and I replied that I intended to go, sooner or later, and that I was new to the area, having travelled from Malta, Europe, to make the most of my sabbatical. His face lit up, and he mentioned Caravaggio.

As we say in Maltese, words are like cherries, and we were soon in earnest conversation about the relative merits of different epochs, techniques, and, of course, the artists.

He said I impressed him with my knowledge, and so I said that my thesis had been “Comparing, Contrasting, and Analysing the Dissimilarities and Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern, with Incidental Reference to Modernism”. It’s quite a mouthful, I know - but I had pulled some strings, and it was already being cited as a work of reference. 

M. Émile put down his forkful of linguine, dabbed at the corner of his lips with the napkin, and said, in all seriousness, “I am here and now offering you a job as Curator. The general Call for Applications goes out tomorrow, actually; we are building three new wings and we need personnel, and I am going to retire this weekend.”

When I picked my jaw off the floor, I told him that I had to work my notice, because otherwise I would have to pay a fine, as per my contract of work. He said that was fine by him.

My boss said he would be sorry to see me go, but he knew that a job in line with my qualifications was the ne plus ultra for someone like me.

A couple of days later, however, M. Émile called and told me he had talked with the Board of Directors, and they had offered to pay the Notice Money for me, if I would go to work on the morrow (Wednesday) because on Sunday, they were expecting three coachloads of tourists, and I needed time to get to know the place.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked me.

“Sunday’s my birthday!” I said.

“So much the better, then.” He said, and offered to speak to the Bistrot boss himself about my termination of employment.

I knew I was going to love my new job. I had my own little cubby-hole office, complete with settee, mini-fridge and hotplate, and closed-off toilet and sink. The idea was that if weather conditions were too bad for me to travel, I could sleep there overnight, in comfort.

M. Émile took me for the regulation tour of the place. Prints, sculptures, mobiles… it was heaven. He pointed to a few doors here and there, with ‘Do Not Enter’ notices on them. “Those are not just for Visitors,” he said. “The owners said they will ‘fix the contents’ with the help of experts, some day soon and open them up.” I shrugged.

On Saturday, the weather was already bad. Everyone else went home, but I did not want to drive all the way down to my aunt’s in Birmingham, Alabama, so I decided to stay the night.

In the morning, the situation was even worse. I was snowed in. The tour buses had been cancelled, the telephone lines were down, and the electricity and internet were intermittent (it later transpired that power went out for ten million households, some for more than a week). I resigned myself to a long day of reading – by candle-light if needs must. One can only watch so much of a thundersnow from the windows.

And then I remembered the Do Not Enter notices. No one would know if I explored the rooms.

I grabbed the L.E.D. lantern and the huge ring of keys marked with room numbers. The heavy wet snow and raging gale outside heightened the impression that I was on some adventure voyage in a video-game… one that cost the country $9.9 billion in 2020 dollars in real life.

And the ride was bumpy. The first verboten room had banks upon banks of video monitors, some of which showed overseas television stations - and sundry electronic equipment. Lights flashed on and off, and there was a steady background hum and constant beep-beeps and whirrs. Interesting.

In the other out-of-bounds room, there were boxes upon boxes of artefacts, labelled Sumerian, Viking, Berber, Roman, Iron Age…There were a number of 3D machines. I could only hope that this was because they were going to start selling souvenirs in the near future. Fascinating.

In the third room there were a number of easels set up – and on each was the beginning of a painting. It all fell into place. In the souvenir shop they had a section for “authentic fake reproductions” which people assumed were drawn from scratch. However, here I realised that this was a scam. The paintings were being done on very faint photocopies of originals, and a postcard in Glorious Technicolor tacked to the top for reference with regard to shades, tones and hues. It was a sophisticated paint-by-numbers scheme.

It was the last room, however, that was by far the most intriguing.

The walls were covered with copies of well-known portraits. Each frame had three buttons at the bottom… and of course since there was no one about, I decided to press them all, to see what would happen.

The stark white daylights went off, and psychedelic strobe lights from the corners of the ceiling lit up the room in circles of colour.

“What does a girl have to do to get noticed around here?”

Say what? The voice came from the portrait of Margaret Wilson, ‘The Martyr of Solway’.

I remembered studying the poem about how her hair had floated around her head like a halo in the water of the Solway Firth…

Martyr of Solway

A Daughter of Time:

Won’t sign abjuration oath;

Condemned to drowning.

Chained fast to the stake;

No allegiance to the King…

Watches her friend die.

Why not save your life?

Recant, revoke, and renounce,

All that you hold dear.

Martyr of Solway –

Naked, looking to the left…

Dressed, looking towards right.

Your soul is now free;

Flowing, like your hair…

A Tale of Trail and Triumph…

A worthy victim.

The original had been a nude, with clothes put on later for the sake of Victorian-style “decency”.

All the portraits talked. Well, it was more like a zillion vibrations, reverberating through the room; the cacophony of radio static or playground babble. But, after a few minutes, I realised that each personality had his own voice, timbre and accent. If I concentrated, I could hear each one clearly. On a side-table, there was a cane basket full of headphones; I assumed that wearing them would simplify things for visitors.

The four panels depicting Marilyn Monroe erupted into giggles together, yet slightly out of sync, giving the sound slightly surreal effect. It set my hair on end.

Van Gogh coughed, a grimace on his cadaverous face. It’s only humans here, isn’t it? We could do with a couple of Louis Wain’s cats. They would keep away the mice you think you hear when someone calls you.

Napoleon snorted. Cats! Bleurgh. Why not horses? Mine – Désirée, not Marengo or Vizir or any other one of them – Babieca, Dhūljānāh, Matsukaze, Bucephalus, Shadowless… This was surreal.

Mr Spock interrupted them in his clipped tones. There’s a counter in the first room that sells overpriced tat – framed reproductions of reproductions, jigsaw puzzles…and even fancy stuff  like Hiawatha’s wampum necklace and Starship Enterprise uniforms. For shame. It’s illogical.

How cool. Spock knew what there was in a room that was not in his line of vision.

Napoleon Bonaparte, forever astride Marengo (talk about being saddle-sore!) chimed in. We of the fifth dimension are imbued with seventh sense. We know what you are thinking. Resistance is futile.

Hey! ‘That line is plagiarised from the Borg.’ I told him, and pressed all the buttons again. The strobes went out, the daylights flickered back on, and I switched them off as I walked backward out of the room and locked the door, straightening the “Do Not Enter” sign. 

I was stunned. As I walked back to my office, I wondered whether it had all really happened.

I was in the middle of making myself a BLT sandwich when the phone at the desk rang.

It was M. Émile. “Hello! The phone lines are down, and I am talking to you via satellite. Is everything all right with you?”

“Oh! Hello. Yes, I’m fine, really. I was making myself a snack.”

“Have you battened down the hatches, ha ha? If you are watching the storm from the windows, you’d better stop, and close the louvres, just in case the panes break.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks for the heads-up. I will.”

“Do not, o n any account, leave the building. You may get hypothermia, or even have an accident…”

“No, of course not.”

“Here we have a total whiteout, with huge snowdrifts everywhere. Do you think you can pull through for a couple of days? If not, we will send a helicopter to rescue you from the roof!”

“No, I’m fine. Really. I have enough food for a week, for sure. Its fun, actually, I feel like Robinson Crusoe without Friday…”

“All right then, I’ll ring off. I will call you again this time tomorrow. Oh, and – Happy Birthday!”