Andrew J. Kingston

2017

All gone

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To take my mind off things, I decided to go to the Royal Gallery. Or at least, the Royal’s travelling show, which was passing through, with a small fanfare and the kind of light excitement and local coverage which might mean a decent local turnout.

 

It was just right, I needed to take my mind off things.

 

I thought about what to wear, but reminded myself I didn’t have a choice, what with my wardrobe being just a little less than accessible, as of earlier in the afternoon.

 

“Terry,” I called out, grinning as I crossed the pedestrianised street towards him.

 

“Fuck off!” Terry exclaimed when I told him my predicament. “You’re joking, right?”

 

I’d known Terry since school. We were never best mates, but had stuck and drifted together. Two late 20-somethings, with occasional double dates, periods of consolation and the odd overlap and recycling of on-off girlfriends. For Terry, more off than on. For me, even more so.

 

“Well, I suppose you’d better come round after the gallery and get something to eat. Take your time looking at the pictures. And you can’t stay.” He didn’t say why.

 

If I’d thought there would be a buzz at the gallery, I wasn’t the only one disappointed. Delilah Crabbe and Davis McCaffrey were on the door and ushered me in with an enthusiasm born from the need to get me in quick so they could attend to the rest of the people behind me. Had there been any people behind me. I was ‘it’, or at least it was me and the bloke with the limp and glasses on a chain, who, as one of the town’s ‘characters’ collected newspapers with a bag patently not designed for the number he tried to cram into it.

 

I turned around, expecting there to be a queue. It was just the man with the lamp and glasses on a chain. I tried to avoid eye contact with him, but he gazed right at me; recognised me but them limped off anyway.

 

For some reason, I felt affronted. I should have been relieved but wasn’t. Delilah Crabbe stared after me pensively, looking as if she though I’d make a mess of her beautiful white walls. Now, there was an idea.

 

Nothing to do, but look at the pieces. I don’t usually notice these things, but there was no sense, no style or progression I wasn’t sure what I was looking at or how I should be responding. If I should be responding at all. And yet despite - probably because of the lack of a pattern - I felt myself opening and relaxing. Feeling more and more receptive. Passing a huge still life, then a montage and something insanely ‘multimedia’, feeling the lull and pull of the whole event.

 

Until I hit the back wall and a piece called Rustbelt; an enormous, brutal canvas which at once arrested me with its brute, compelling scale and volume. Again, my sense and sensibilities were adrift and almost in need of a sympathetic reconstruction. I began feeling lightly exhilarated and exhausted. I couldn’t recall feeling quite so numb and affected by anything like this huge ‘Rustbelt’ canvas before. At least not since I started pulling myself together after the rotten car-crash teenager days.

 

The man with the papers went; Delilah Crabbe evidently finished her shift and it started getting cold. No busier, sadly. At some point, Davis McCaffrey tried to engage me in conversation, probably wondering what the hell I was doing. I realised it was quite a good question. I needed to give it some serious thought. And when I did, and realised it was six o’clock, I remembered my house had burned down and I had nowhere to sleep that evening.