Art & Lies Read Online Free

illegal.
    There was a bottle of vodka on the floor. Thank God it wasn’t gin. Too Dickens.
    I held it up quizzically. There was an inch or so left in the bottom.
    ‘That’s mine for the pain.’
    I poured it over my hands and washed them together.
    ‘Are you Jewish?’ she said.
    ‘Just be glad I’m not an obstetrician. I’d have slit you down the middle by now.’
    That shut her up and her screams too. She was quiet while I pushed my hand into the blood-packed warmth of her body. Quiet and dignified and wide. I was the one bent over, sweating, my back arched, my head down. My hair fell forward on to her thighs.
    She began to give birth. It was a gift, a gift of life in that cold dead room, on the cold dead streets. The baby was ready. The baby was skimming down the birth canal and into the windy world. Gently, gently, I brought her forth as if she were my own. I felt that she was my own. I cut the cord that moored her and she was free, her own, laid on her mother’s belly in a little coat of blood.
    The man came back with a washing-up bowl of lukewarm water and two bottles of vodka. To his intense horror I took one bottle and poured it into the bowl down to the last drop.
    ‘He is Jewish,’ said the mother.
    Carefully I washed her thighs and the long dark stretches of her cunt. I dried her with the rest of my shirt and covered them both in a blanket from the car. I was going to wash the baby and then I thought, ‘The smell is all she knows, the smell is all she has, go away now Handel.’
    I put on my jacket, collected my things and closed the door, promising to return in a couple of days. I left them some money.
    The moon was up and the cold had frozen the fog into brown slabs. I reversed the car down the slimy street dark under the unlit lamps.
    The Second City is political. Politics of slums, apartments, mansions. The correct balance must be maintained. On no account should there be too many mansions or too few slums. Apartments hold the balance; the rich are terrified of being reduced to one, the poor dream of owning their own. The political city thrives on fear. Fear of never owning an apartment. Fear of owning merely an apartment.
    Homelessness is illegal. In my city no-one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabiliser.
    I parked the car outside my house and pushed through the thick sticky fog thinking of old ladies’ curtains. Where the fog parted, the tarry light still lay on the city, dirtying it, exposing it, the harrowed city, beauty pawned, and irredeemable.
    I threw myself into my white bed and fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed that my body was transparent and that the sun drummed on my liver and tuned my spine in yellow octaves that I could play with both hands.
    A few days later, as I had intended, I went back to the house. On the opposite side of the street a bunch of squatters were watching the security patrol welding a steel door over the slumped entrance. I walked up to the patrol and asked one of them what had happened to the people who had been living there. He shrugged and carried on with his work. I realised that, like all security men, he had long since lost the power of speech. He pointed his oxyacetylene torch at a closed blue van.
    There were two men in the front of the cab, feet on the dashboard, bodies sagging into the sagged seats. They stared unblinkingly through the filthy windscreen, the radio on full volume, they were both about twenty-five. They appeared to be dead. I tapped on the window and one of them turned his head slowly, slowly, and looked down at me as though I were a human being. I flashed my medical card and slowly, slowly, he wound down the window.
    ‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m trying to find the people who used to live in that