Art & Lies Read Online Free Page A

house.’
    ‘Got nothing to do with me.’
    ‘Do you know where they are?’
    ‘No.’
    He raised the window, but then his mate said something to him, without moving his lips, and the window was speedily lowered again.
    ‘You from the Pest Destruction Office? Were they an ’Elf Azzad?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Did they have the fucking pox?’
    ‘No, but one of them had a baby.’
    I’m not a sentimentalist. Every week life and death passes under my hands and that has given me a certain serious reserve. Intimacy with death has produced, in some of my cruder colleagues, a kind of danse macabre. Daily contact with what seems to them a horrible fate, horrible because unrelieved by any spirituality, fate because inevitable in the chanciest, cruellest ways, has grown in them a love of the grotesque. There is something of the Middle Ages in these modern men, who must be forever caricaturing the suffering they fear. Morbid practical jokes and a pleasure in the corrupt is the hallmark of many of my eminent colleagues. I look at them and I see, not the confident wonders of modern science, but a fearful fourteenth-century face carving a Death’s Head in a gloomy village on the Rhine.
    And for myself? I, who have often leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, the traces in the face of what was slight or mean or superficial, begin to disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, and those in a great indifference. It is possible to be comforted by death in its distinction. Pause now, before this transitory dignity breaks up, and there is left, not horror, not fear, but profound pity. The pietà of the Virgin Mother over the dead body of Christ. Madonna of the Sorrows. The pity of the mother for the child.
    The Spanish girl in the upper room was not a virgin and I have to confess that babies do not move me much. That is, not those healthy hospital lines of crocheted flesh, the mother and baby unit, factory and farm of the future. And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown, will be by the same people exploited or ignored.
    But when she took the child to her breast, it seemed for a moment that the desolate space budded, and that what had been harmed was given back undamaged. The grim room softened and the crack in the window was filled with stars. The baby could not see the stars but they fell on her little body and made a blanket of light.
    Now, with the ugly steel door nearly fitted, I had to insist my way up the wormy stairs to the abandoned room. The kerosene flare and the curtains were gone. The winded mattress was bloodstained from the birth. Nothing remained except for a piece of my shirt. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
    Outside, the graceful yellow fountains of the arc welder threw down the light into the oily pavement puddles. The light struck off the welder’s metal boots in glowing chips. He wore his halo around his feet.
    I questioned him again but all he said was ‘People vanish everyday.’
    He sealed the door into the frame.
    People vanish everyday … The Third City is invisible, the city of the vanished, home to those who no longer exist.
    This part of the city is far larger than you might think. Easy to target squatters and immigrants, black marketeers and tax dodgers, call girls and mad men released into the community. The list of official disapproval is heartily pinned up in every law-abiding square. We know who’s hiding and why, we are the clean outdoor types, we don’t go in for night work.
    People vanish everyday, but it’s not you and me, is it? We are solid and confident, safe and strong, we can speak our minds.
    Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?
    I have an affection for the mediaeval period, perhaps because I am a man of shadows, and