process.
The next iteration was different. If his life was a symphony within a symphony, then it was a symphony – with a few dissonant notes – dedicated to married life. Or so he’d decided. The next iteration made him wonder if he was right.
It was the iteration that had begun with him standing outside that door.
The ponytail was a mistake. He only kept it out of a vague sense of defiance. And maybe he drank more than he ought to – a bad habit, sipping from a can while he painted. Also, he was single and childless. A matter of necessity: painting didn’t really pay the bills, no matter how solid your reputation.
He loved to paint.
He learnt early on that his brushwork, something imprinted on his brain through practice and effort, was a skill that faded as soon as he rejoined Maureen and the kids. The syndrome cut both ways. For example, he couldn’t drive in this iteration, even though he could remember driving the kids to school. Go figure.
Weirder still, his choice of subject matter – why he’d chosen it – faded on his return home as well. A painting would become an indecipherable blur of browns and beiges when he tried to recall it later, out playing with Bridget and Rose in the back garden.
Because he wasn’t just single and childless in this iteration. He was friendless, too. There were no relationships to exert their own unique, magnetic pull. He could go home whenever he chose.
He could stay as long as he liked.
His specialty was still-lifes: odds and ends that he found lying in the network of cobbled streets around his studio or tossed into some skip. Sometimes he wondered if he was just being lazy: finding the right models could be problematic, paying them more problematic still.
There was more to it than that, though. He was fascinated by the paraphernalia, the detritus of the everyday. He wanted to transmute the mundane into the beautiful. His style was rough, expressionistic, and his paintings were large, especially in contrast to their subject matter.
Of course he wasn’t the first. He remembered one painter, an Irish-American he’d known, who simply picked some small, everyday object – an ashtray, a packet of cigarettes, a beer-can (!) – then painted it in isolation. Another who’d specialised in drawings of burnt-out matches.
One night he woke up sweating. He was slumped in the battered old armchair that he’d found in a skip three years earlier, with a pounding headache and half a dozen empty cans lying on the ground at his feet. Above, pigeons squabbled and flapped noisily on the studio’s one skylight.
For a while waking up had been accompanied by a momentary flicker of disorientation and panic, a sensation as cryptic as it was terrifying. Where was he? Until he caught the reassuring whiff of turps.
He’d had a dream. A nightmare. He’d been out cycling in the country. A winding road deep in the Wicklow Hills. He’d gone down a narrow, grassy cul-de-sac – not that he’d known it was a cul-de-sac until it was too late. There’d been a cottage at the end of it, a couple of sycamore trees, a patch of lawn. Behind and beyond that little garden was mountainside; its slope partially denuded of fir trees, neat rows of pink stumps replacing that familiar dark green. Two children had been playing on that lawn and a woman had been standing in the doorway. There was a battered old Peugeot parked in the driveway.
He’d known right away what that cottage and those children, the woman, meant; just by how the children rose to their feet (they’d been crouching over something; a butterfly or a frog, more than likely) and by how the woman’s head half-turned.
They’d been expecting him.
He’d been filled with terror – had turned his bicycle around as quickly as he could, then pedalled back up that hill with every ounce of energy he could muster, been careful not to look back once, reminding himself again and again of his studio back in Dublin.
Of what mattered to him.
A dream? Or something that had really happened? He wasn’t sure. These days, his memories were a confusing mixture of the genuine, the half-remembered and the wholly imaginary. He had ventured out into the country a handful of times, looking for new stuff to paint.
The funny thing was, he was sure he remembered that house. The details were blurry and uncertain, but hadn’t a friend lent it to him? Then there’d been some sort of argument – he couldn’t remember with who, or why – and he’d spent the day cycling around a network of tiny lanes, not returning until it was nearly dark.
Or had that been a dream too?
That particular morning’s haul had looked unpromising at first: a woman’s shoe with the heel broken off, a bunch of very old, rusty keys he’d found half-caught in a drain, a pacifier. Until he’d spotted the picture frame on the granite windowsill of an abandoned house. It was a tiny, ornate, gilt job, clearly intended for a photograph on some bedside table. Even battered and dirty, it still retained some of its former glory, which explained why some drunken passer-by had picked it up and left it on that windowsill in the first place.
Not worth taking home, but not worth consigning to oblivion, either.
Back in the studio he arranged the objects in a tight cluster – the keys to the forefront with the shoe to one side and the pacifier on the other, that tiny, empty frame in the background.
He already decided on a title, even before he’d finished mixing up the paints, humming softly under his breath the whole while.
‘LOST & FOUND.’
He worked quietly and with complete concentration, even eschewing the beer he kept in the noisy little fridge over in the corner, until he was done.
Afterwards he headed over to Kehoes – that dingy brown interior, so like a bar you might find anywhere in the country rather than the heart of the city.
He remembered the dream just as he was sitting up at the counter, only now it seemed less like a dream and more like a memory of long ago.
He hoped it was just a dream. He really did. Otherwise…
Once those little episodes had been a lot more frequent. Over the years he’d learnt to anticipate and resist them. Because all it took was a second’s lapse in concentration, the wrong thought in the wrong place, and he was off-piste. And getting back got harder each time.
But suppose he was remembering something that had actually happened? Another one of his attacks? Then why had the woman and those two little girls been waiting for him at the end of that cul-de-sac in the first place? What had he been thinking, in order to conjure them into existence?
He took a long sip from his pint.
Did it matter?
A few hours later, staggering back in some downpour to the studio, the city lurching about him, iridescent and lovely in the rain, the dream was entirely forgotten.
Next morning. He sat in his armchair, nursing a hangover and studying the finished piece.
Weird. He’d chosen the objects at random, but they had a collective poignancy. As if they shared a common history. It was the empty gilt frame though, standing behind the other three objects, that drew his eye again and again.
Why? He wasn’t stupid. He knew any painting played on associations that already existed in the viewer’s mind. That was part of their power. Just like he knew this painting had very specific associations for him. And he couldn’t get that bloody dream out of his head.
Because there’s nothing in it, he finally decided. Nothing in it, when there should be.
He stood up, looking around at the other canvases crowding the room. A moment when you took stock. It should have felt good. He had more than enough work for another show now. So why did he feel like it was all about to slip from his grasp?
That bloody dream…..
His head throbbed. For a second Cormac the Artist swayed very slightly where he stood, then ran one hand over his hair.
It wouldn’t let him go. And he still hadn’t answered the question he’d asked himself the night before: if the dream was a dim memory of something that had actually happened – one of his little relapses – what had he been thinking about when he cycled down t
hat cul-de-sac? And why were images shuttling through his mind now, rapidly and insistently, the woman and those two little girls in every single one?
Normally each possibility was little more than a flicker, only potent in the right set of circumstances. So what was happening to him now didn’t make any sense. He’d legged it, as was only right and proper. He couldn’t have ended up with her. The woman.
Unless –
He remembered: fading evening sunlight lancing through a cats-cradle of dark branches, the grass growing in the centre of that lane. How the potholes had punctuated the tarmacadam, making his descent a bumpy one.
He’d been imagining that house before he even saw it, but that first glimpse of his two daughters, playing out on that lawn – how the dying sun had caught Bridget’s red hair, making it look like it was on fire, Rose’s lanky frame little more than a silhouette as she stood up – had caught him completely off-guard.
Sure, he’d run away. Later, though –
Later, that glimpse had haunted him.
It was haunting him now. So what was he going to do? What was he supposed to do?
*
He stood staring at the locked studio doors for a long time before turning away and making his way slowly up towards Dame Street.
Art or Family: it was the sort of decision you made in the abstract. In fact, he’d done precisely that, many long years ago. But his peculiar ability to move at will from one iteration to