An odd time followed. Perhaps you might say all times in our area seemed to be odd, but people were acting as mad as March hares. I must admit I felt unsettled after my evening out on the marshes, and that may have made me even snappier than usual, but people were trying my patience. It began with Xanthe the moment I got home.
She had got bored with the dvd, and, leaving Misty engrossed in it, had gone for a poke around in our bedroom drawers and cupboards, if you please. I was furious that Misty had let her do this, as I can be quite obsessive about my privacy, but he said he had seen no harm in it, as Xanthe wasn’t likely to nick anything, and anyway we had nothing worth nicking!!!
Even so, she had unearthed an old riding-crop I kept wrapped up in one of Mr Beresford’s carrier-bags in the bottom of Granny’s chest-of-drawers in our bedroom. I wouldn’t have expected Xanthe to be shocked (not after some of the things I’ve heard she’s been up to in the past), but she had a fit of the vapours over it.
“You haven’t used this on poor little Misty?” she squawked.
I do get proper hacked off with all this Poor Little Misty nonsense I get from her, as though he was some quivering, helpless little will-o-the-wisp. He stands sturdily on his two flat feet, and can certainly give as good as he gets in a fight.
“He enjoys it”, I said “Anyway, the little bugger usually deserves it!”
Misty thought this was hilarious, but Xanthe retreated emotionally to her caravan.
“You see?” I said “This is what happens when you go letting a woman go poking around the place! Jesus Christ, I really thought Xanthe would know better, some of the things she’s got up to in her time!”
“She’ll be alright”, he said, still bloody laughing “I’ll show her it’s not anything to get worked up about. So I get my arse whipped sometimes? People get up to worse things”.
“Ah but this is her precious little Misty who’s getting his arse whipped”, I snapped “She’ll now no doubt spread it all around the neighbourhood that I’m a sadistic swine, a complete monster”.
“It won’t be anything they don’t already know”, he said, now so prostrate with laughter that he was half-hanging off the sofa and clutching one of my legs (Misty never does anything by halves).
“Oh thank you very much!” I said.
“Good job she never got round to finding the can of squirty cream at the bottom of your supply cupboard”, he said “I might have had to explain what you use that for as well!”
I wanted to be done with the commission for Andrea’s portrait as quickly as I could, and so for the next few days I worked flat out on it, so much so that I ended up giving myself a bad ache in my left shoulder. I was also hampered by the weather. It continued humid and stormy, which often meant that the light was very bad to work by.
One lunchtime I was having a short rest, and watching a programme about a London artist, who talked about painting and sketching live models. At one point she said “an emotional bond” could often form between an artist and their subject. The thought of an emotional bond developing between myself and Andrea was downright depressing.
Whilst I was watching this Xanthe came in, clearly in another one of her “states”. Even though I was now supposedly Shinglesea’s answer to The Marquis de Sade, it didn’t stop her wanting to spill her latest personal crisis all over me it would seem. This latest one was too silly for words.
“Julie Sparrow was telling me that she had once stayed in the same room Jason and me had at [the - bleep - inn I can’t mention]”, she wailed “And she said she woke up in the night to see a little girl sitting at the bottom of the bed, and the landlord told her the little girl had murdered her father back in 1806 by cutting his head off!”
“What a load of bollocks”, I said “Well it is Xanthe, for crying out loud! That place is Victorian, it wasn’t even built in 1806, and I don’t see how any little girl could go around hacking off a grown man’s head, even if he was asleep at the time! [I had a bizarre image of a little girl trying to lift up a bloody great butcher’s meat cleaver, and then methodically sawing off a head with it]. And you’re raving mad if you believe anything Old Sparrow-Shit’s been saying!”
I did feel a lot better after coming out with all that, I must say. Sometimes a line has to be drawn and you have to say Enough Is Enough - particularly when that old fraud Julie Sparrow is mentioned!
If I thought I had heard the last of that blasted pub it was clear I was mistaken. Jason went on about it next. He wanted to go back and do another “vigil” there. Not only that but he thought it might be an entrance to Hell.
Now, between you and me, I’ve never really been able to tell how serious Jason is about all this Entrances to Hell nonsense. More often than not I was inclined to think it was all a practical joke. That doing the website appealed to his quirky off-the-wall sense of humour. Certainly he shows a lot of imaginative flair when he’s doing it. But just occasionally, I get the niggling suspicion he’s actually being serious, and this was one such occasion.
“Just that when me and Xanth was staying there”, he said “I got the distinct feeling that the floor in our room was giving way. Now I’ve heard of that happening before. There was a case of a hotel in Bristol in 1873, when an old couple nearly slid through the floor into another dimension …”
We were interrupted at this fascinating point by Mrs Jackson, who had popped in to talk about swine flu, and what did I think of the government’s plan to vaccinate the whole country, and would it work (how the blazes should I know!), and what about all the illegal immigrants, would they vaccinate them as well, because if they didn’t there wouldn’t be any point, would there?
I packed up all my kit and moved out to work in the garden shed, taking my invaluable wireless headphones with me so that I could drown out Kristy’s incessant voice as well.
I worked with a feverish intensity, and at times I was so felled by the exhaustion that resulted from it that I feared the old depression was coming back. I was tired and absent-minded. I found myself becoming gargantuan irritated by things that would normally be just everyday annoyances. Bad drivers, rude shop assistants, Kristy’s non-stop voice, the news that Tony Blair might become the first President of the EU, all sent me into states of hypertension.
I hated Andrea’s portrait. I couldn’t seem to get it right, it was as if the shape of her face kept changing. I was having a crisis of confidence. Her husband’s digs about my pictures not selling for very much shouldn’t have affected me to the extent that it did (particularly as he was such an abominably bad artist himself), but I found myself questioning my whole life and what I was doing with it.
It’s hard to deal with anything when you’re exhausted, and I’m realistic enough to know that a lot of my problems were simply down to not sleeping properly. And when I did sleep I was plagued by bad dreams. Classic stress dreams, such as the one in which I was climbing over endless wooden fences whilst being pursued by some anonymous sinister figure dressed in black. Although we were meant to be running we were moving in a sort of lethargic, slowed-down way, fairly typical of a dream. In another I was in the middle of a large crowd of people, and I had to try and work out which of them were real people, and which were zombies.
“You’re working too hard”, said Misty “Perhaps you need to slow down a bit. Take more time over the picture”.
“No”, I said “I want it out of my sight as soon as possible”.
The bad dreams continued for the rest of the time I was working on Andrea’s portrait. I won’t go into the details any further as I know other people’s dreams are on a par with their holiday snaps: not terribly interesting, and I’ve probably already exhausted my tolerance quota in this department. I finally finished the picture one Friday morning during a violent thunderstorm, which seemed quite appropriate somehow.
I could barely wait for the paint to dry on it before I could off-load it onto Mr Beresford. When I got to his ship I found he wasn’t in, but the place was being manned by the stuck-up fat girl who helps out sometimes, and who always acts as if she’s doing everyone an almighty favour when she does. This girl could be attractive, but she’s cursed by a haughty sneer which seems permanently plastered across her face.
Her rudeness is quite staggering at times, and I often count myself fortunate that, as she doesn’t exactly work herself into the ground, I rarely have to see her. She’s the sort of person who goes in for a lot of tutting and eye-rolling when you talk to them. I have long since nicknamed her Princess Petal, and can only hope her doting parents aren’t too proud of their handiwork in inflicting yet another smug, arrogant bitch on an already over-burdened world.
“Are you expected?” she asked, as though I was some dog-turd that had been accidentally brought in from the street.
“He knew I would be dropping it off at any time”, I said.
“I suppose I’d better have a look at it“, she sighed, in an insultingly longsuffering way.
“What do YOU need to look at it for?” I snapped.
She took no notice of me whatsoever (what else is new?!) and eased her vast bulk out from behind the counter.
“I should be at lunch really”, she sighed, again.
“Well don’t let me stop you”, I said, and I had to severely restrain myself from adding ’after all, you look as if you need fattening up!’
With an impeccably-manicured claw she unveiled the masterpiece I had sweated long and hard over. She looked at it in total silence and then covered it up again.
“I’m going on holiday to Cyprus next week”, she said, returning her bulk back to its previous behind-the-counter position.
This comment, as far as I could see, had absolutely no relevance to anything whatsoever.
“I’ll put it in Mr Beresford’s back room”, I said.
When I returned to the front of the shop, Petal was staring at me sulkily.
“You should go abroad more often you know”, she sighed (I’ve noticed she sighs all the time, and goes ’mmm’ in an irritating way).
“I’ll bear that in mind”, I said.
“It might open your eyes a bit“, she said.
This remark was so intolerably arrogant that I mentally envisaged smashing Andrea’s portrait over her smug head.
Instead I wished her a curt “goodbye”. Tch, civilisation eh?