Midfield Dynamo, page 10
Next evening, Vincent viewed the apartment. It was suitable, so, a few days later he moved in with a bag of clothes, a folder of paper, his old Hasselblad camera and three books – short-story collections by Doris Lessing that Suzi had given him for his thirty-fourth birthday. He’d read these stories so many times and enjoyed the feeling of the books in his hands so much that he couldn’t bear to leave them with the rest of his belongings, bundled up miscellaneously in two sacks outside his old apartment building.
Within a few months Vincent began working at a nearby pub, a busy corner Kneipe that filled with labourers each evening from six until late, but was quiet and peaceful during the earlier hours. He put on a little weight, and ate more regularly, his cheeks filled out and his hair, though cut up short, thickened and reddened again. He had taken some new photographs too, of the old East German embassies that circled nearby Stavanger Straße – Communist cubes of concrete and glass, housing countries like Moldova, Cuba, Eritrea, Ghana, the Cape Verde Islands.
One night he went out to photograph the lamps around the square, just as they fluttered from purple to their sombre orange glow. He was fiddling with his tripod when a black woman strode past in a long fur coat, and she asked him if he was gazing at the stars.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘the lamps.’
She looked up at the disc-shaped lamp, it glowing there like a low-flying UFO.
‘If you go west of here, just over the bridge, the lamps are entirely different,’ she said, ‘they are bell-shaped and their glow is paler.’
‘Do you live here?’ asked Vincent.
‘In the Ghanaian embassy.’
‘Is it nice?’
‘I’ve been here years,’ she replied almost mournfully. ‘Are you a photographer?’
‘I’m an artist,’ said Vincent, as he peered down into the eyepiece of his camera.
‘Photograph me,’ she said.
Vincent smiled, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Elizabeth. You?’
‘Vincent. Please go to that lamp, into the circle of light at its base and raise your face a little.’
She posed beside the lamppost as Vincent rearranged his tripod.
‘Please keep still; the exposure is twelve seconds,’ he said.
She stood beneath the lamp, her chin lifted, this beautiful Elizabeth, for twelve seconds, in total silence, then once the shutter clicked closed, she nodded, and bade him a pleasant night.
When Vincent developed the roll he was pleased with the photographs of the embassies and the lamps. The photograph of Elizabeth, however, was somewhat soft, fuzzy and a little too bright.
‘She must have moved,’ he said aloud as he inspected the image.
From the photographic prints of the embassies he made delicate black-and-white collages, realizing as he worked that collaging in this way was itself a sculpting of time and pattern into appealing new compositions populating new time and pattern.
Upon completing six works he contacted Albert. He made a folio from plywood and felt, and one morning in early spring he cycled over to the gallery. Albert loved the collages, and offered to have all of them framed for exhibition in a group show he was organizing the following July.
‘Wonderful, Vincent, wonderful,’ he muttered as they pored over the small but expert works.
Cycling home, Vincent felt strangely empty. He stopped at Auguststraße to see how his old building looked, but it was completely shrouded in pink dust-drapes, and was full of builders. He rolled along to a café at the end of the street and as he stood outside sipping a tea, he looked at the dark boughs of the linden tree above him. He saw the green buds slicing their way out into their small soon-to-be-summer expanses.
He thought of his lungs.
The butcher’s across the way had been replaced with a discreet commercial art gallery. He wandered over. The place was empty and bright, with three tastefully framed photographs of serene mid-ocean waves hung along the right-hand wall. Underneath, a shin-high triangle of white neon tubing leaned against the wall, and to the rear he spied a gleaming metal bucket sitting on the polished concrete floor. He walked to the bucket and peered in – it was full of rough sea salt. He fell silent as he circled the bucket, over and over, drawn in by the centrifugal quietnesses of this small island of metal and sodium. He wanted to pick the bucket up and feel its heft, but he knew if he did, he would ruin everything memorable about it.
His mediocrity as an artist became apparent to him.
He left, and pedalled back up the Schönhauser-Allee hill to work.
That evening, during a quiet moment behind the bar, he wrote to Albert asking him not to bother framing or showing his competent new collages – ‘to scrap the whole idea completely’. Instead, Vincent suggested they meet someday soon for a drink and a couple of cigarettes.
A few weeks later, Vincent, still troubled by the poorly executed photograph he took of Elizabeth, decided to visit the embassy to see if he could propose a re-shoot.
Elizabeth greeted him at the door and invited him into a meeting room filled with the scent of freshly polished timber. Vincent produced the print. The photo had been taken from a position lower than what is usual in portraiture, and this, coupled with the stately confidence of Elizabeth’s stance – draped in fur, framed by the dark, the street lamp glowing like a halo above her – gave the image a kitsch and ethereally regal quality.
‘Très pop-video,’ she beamed. ‘I love it.’
Vincent, who was about to apologize for the picture’s many flaws merely smiled, saying, ‘Then, please have it.’
Elizabeth left to make them coffee. Vincent reclined and as the chair creaked gently beneath him he took in the various pieces of traditional and modern Ghanaian art: wall-mounted textiles, masks, photographs of modernist buildings edged out in red-and-yellow chevrons, pictures of beaches and paintings of sunsets. The colours and patterns entranced him.
When Elizabeth returned with a clinking tray, he asked her about travelling to Ghana.
A year later and Vincent is lying alone on a vast bright beach on the far outskirts of Accra. The sun is out and a breeze skips along the shore whipping sand and rustling the leaves of the giant palms behind him. He’s just finished a joint fashioned from local grass, the sort that leads him daily into mild hallucination.
In the evenings he fishes, then he sleeps in a small grass-roofed bungalow he bought in exchange for his Hasselblad. He speaks sometimes to the locals, purchasing food and books, but by and large his life revolves around a game he plays with himself each day at four in the afternoon when he ventures out into the sea for a swim. It’s a game of balance between the pleasure of swimming in this salty water and the inertia of being well and truly stoned. Sometimes, as he floats on his back, he has visions – the sky often opens before him, revealing celestial spectra of breathtaking beauty. Each day, he inches himself into a more profound high before going for his swim. Perfection, he reckons, will be the day he is too weak to float and too mashed to panic.
He is slim and his hair is sun-bleached almost white. His eyes have shrunken from sunken pebbles to mere dots. His skin is still brightly pale as if no amount of sun will ever alter it. Lying on the sand, he breathes deeply, exhaling a last tendril of smoke; then he rises and walks unsteadily out to the sea, wading one more time into the disintegrating rolls of advancing surf.
Acknowledgments
The bucket-of-salt artwork that appears in the story ‘About the Weight of a Bucket of Salt’ takes its inspiration from an artwork by the Irish artist David Beattie titled ‘Static’ (2013), first exhibited in the group show Solitude. In no particular order (2013) at the Goethe-Institut Irland in Dublin.
Thank you to:
Ruth Hallinan, Don Duncan, Brendan Barrington, Rebecca O’Connor, Sally Rooney, Aoife Walsh, Helen Chandler, Susan Tomaselli, Feargal Ward, Dr Francis Halsall, Anna Benn, Wendy Erskine, Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Nora Hickey M’Sichili, The Joinery, The Irish Writers Centre, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Literature Ireland, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Műút, Longford Town FC, NCAD (ACW), IADT Dún Laoghaire, Clare Quinlan, Paul Gregg, Niall de Buitléar, Michelle Browne, Marta Fernández Calvo, Júlia Rácz, Miranda Driscoll, Peter Curran, Fabian and, of course, to my family.
Particular thanks also to Greg Baxter.
My gratitude to the Arts Council of Ireland from whom I received visual-artist bursaries while writing this book.
Thank you, as always, to Antony Farrell for the belief and encouragement – and all of the Lilliput Press team and board too.
And finally, my thanks to Seán Farrell, who edited this book.
Versions of some stories appeared in the following:
‘Design No. 108’, Dublin Review 52, Autumn 2013. Editor: Brendan Barrington.
‘Midfield Dynamo’, Dublin Review 57, Winter 2014. Editor: Brendan Barrington.
‘Two Towers in a Forest’, Dublin Review 59, Summer 2015. Editor: Brendan Barrington.
‘Trusses’, Dublin Review 65, Winter 2016. Editor: Brendan Barrington.
‘Forty-eight Pots of Honey’ (entitled ‘Honey’), The Moth, Winter 2017. Editor: Rebecca O’Connor. This story also appeared in 2020 in the Hungarian literary journal Műút (translated by Júlia Rácz).
‘Prosinečki’, The Stinging Fly, Summer 2018. Editor: Sally Rooney.
Copyright
First published 2021 by
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill,
Dublin 7, Ireland.
www.lilliputpress.ie
Copyright © Adrian Duncan
NOTE
This is a work of fiction. All characters, businesses, objects-of-art, organizations and events portrayed in this collection are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The diagram that ghosts the contents page is like a drawing one might see on a tactics board in a football changing room. It shows one of many possible patterns that underlie this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.
A CIP record for this publication is available from the British Library.
PRINT ISBN 978 1 84351 808 2
EPUB ISBN 978 1 84351 812 9
The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
Adrian Duncan, Midfield Dynamo
