The Execution. Hugo Wilcken
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on ice. I bought a can of beer from him and knocked it back quickly. Then I moved out of the shade and lay down, with my eyes shut, to feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I could hear a riot of evening bird song, the good-humoured shouts of guys playing football, and the hum of traffic. The grass was prickly and smelt sweet.
It was about then that I first felt a surging sense of well-being, or perhaps contentment. It mystified me at first but what it was, it soon struck me, was that Christian’s wife had left me. She’d accompanied me all the way from Oxford but my long swim had slowly washed her all away. I was back to how I had been before the events of the day, only more so. I felt the grass under me and the sun above me and it seemed to me that I was exactly where I wanted to be in my life. I was with the woman I wanted to be with, doing what I wanted to do. There was the Jarawa campaign, which presented itself to me like a puzzle to be solved.
I thought about my first day at Africa Action, eighteen months ago. Oliver, the guy I was replacing, had spent the afternoon showing me the ropes and had taken me out for a drink after work. We’d discussed his last campaign – it was for a Syrian dissident who’d been sentenced to death for treason. Oliver had arranged a last-minute meeting with Syrian and European Union officials to secure the guy’s release. I remembered him saying to me: ‘It’s a strange feeling when you’ve played a part in saving someone’s life. Almost like you’ve saved your own.’
I felt angry with Christian for saying that the Jarawa campaign was a waste of time. I felt angry that he’d said this to me after his wife’s death, and not before, during the morning’s department meeting. But in any case, he was quite wrong about it. He was wrong about many things. The pieces seemed to slot into place: I would save Jarawa’s life, I decided. His existence would depend on me. Of course I was making wild claims for myself, but it was the way I felt momentarily, like a minor god.
The sun was setting and I dragged myself to my feet, a little drugged with this feeling that was washing through and out of me.
The gallery was already starting to fill up as I got there. Marianne had brought Jessica along as well, because Jane’s away and Marianne’s fussy about other babysitters. Jessica was in an unmanageable state of excitement and was shouting and pulling at the dresses and trouser legs of the people who’d already arrived. She’s going through a really hyperactive phase at the moment. I was wondering what to do with her when all of a sudden she sat down, curled up, and went straight to sleep, in the middle of the gallery space, right under everyone’s feet. I tried to wake her up and get her to come with me but she wouldn’t – you can’t wake a child that wants to sleep. But she couldn’t stay there so I picked her up, took her into the office, and laid her down on the couch. She curled up again then started snoring, very gently. I sat down beside her for a moment and put my arm across her. Messily stacked up against the office walls were paintings, twenty or thirty of them. Opposite the couch was an enormous piece of slate which must have weighed a ton. On it had been painted a picture of a naked woman, in a primitive style. She was asleep on the ground.
I went back into the gallery and had a beer, then another. After an hour or so the place started to get pretty crowded and it was getting difficult to move around. I lost track of Marianne, and for a while I just stood in a corner and watched the other people. Broadly speaking they divided into two categories. There were older, conservatively elegant white couples or single men, who stood around talking in slightly tired voices, drinking white wine and generally not smoking. Then there was a younger crowd in their twenties who drank beer and smoked and were louder. Some of these were artists, some were students, others were friends of Marianne and a few were all three. I knew only one or two of them – I keep clear of that side of Marianne’s life – but they all seemed to know each other. Fragments of conversation strayed my way … to my left, a couple discussed a mutual acquaintance, dumped by her husband for a younger woman. She was in hospital now after a last-ditch facelift gone wrong. To my right, I heard someone remark of one of Marianne’s larger works: ‘There’s something very extreme about it.’ I glanced over to the painting in question. It was very colourful. I couldn’t see what was extreme about it but I wondered nonetheless if the person had a point. It’s not something Marianne and I ever talk about.
A woman in her early thirties came up to me: ‘Remember me?’ I said no, I’m sorry I don’t. ‘You don’t remember a big argument about South Africa at a dinner party? Ages ago, at Nick Tate’s place.’ Then I remembered. Her name’s Charlotte Fisher. She’s South African and she used to go out with Nick. She’s quite pushy and good-looking in an American sitcom kind of way. I remembered the dinner party – it was a long time ago, maybe even before Marianne. She’d taken violent exception to some comment of mine. She’d launched into a great polemic about how her mother’s maid back in Johannesburg was like part of the family and if she wasn’t working for them she’d be on the streets and her children wouldn’t have enough to eat. And how could I possibly know what it’s like when I’d never been to South Africa, how did I dare comment?
I didn’t particularly want to talk to her but since it didn’t look like I had an option I asked her what she was up to nowadays. She said she’d gone back to South Africa for a while, but had recently come back to set up her own PR business, promoting artists. She dropped a few names of artists she’d recently signed up, including one I’d vaguely heard of, a German woman who’s been getting a lot of publicity lately for her blown-up photos of dead people. I said I thought the photos were pretty sensationalist. That’s more or less the point, replied Charlotte. We chatted and jousted about that for a while. I looked around for Marianne, but she seemed to be involved in a very earnest conversation with a middle-aged man. So Charlotte and I continued drinking and talking. She asked me how I met Marianne and I told her about the beach in Portugal. Then she asked me about Marianne’s work. French artists are very in vogue at the moment, she said. She seemed very interested in Marianne.
I asked if she was still with Nick. She laughed sourly: ‘God no, we split up a couple of years ago.’ She didn’t seem embarrassed I’d asked though, just as she hadn’t been embarrassed that I’d initially forgotten who she was. Then she recounted the story of her break-up – telling it as if it were a funny joke, with climaxes, anticlimaxes and a punch line. She’d gone home late one evening, when Nick thought she was out of town, and she’d literally found him in bed with another woman. She immediately moved out – it was Nick’s house after all. She thought she’d get over the relationship quickly but found herself doing obsessive things like taking time off work to spy on Nick. To make matters worse, the other woman had moved straight in with Nick. So she decided that what she really wanted was revenge. But it had to be the right kind: ‘Nasty, but not too nasty’. Eventually she hit upon the solution. One day she happened on a newspaper article about a private detective who used call-girls to entrap wayward husbands. So she went to see him, posing as a worried wife, and ended up paying him a lot of money to get a call-girl to entice Nick up to a hotel room. The whole encounter was captured on video, which she then sent to Nick’s new girlfriend. Later she’d found out through a mutual friend that the couple had split up not long after.
‘And you didn’t feel guilty about it afterwards?’
‘Well, he might have lost his girlfriend, but at least I gave him a good time!’
I laughed for quite a while. We laughed together. I was reasonably drunk by this stage. There were a lot of people in the gallery and we had to stand very close to each other with our shoulders almost touching. I wondered whether the story Charlotte had just told me was true or whether it was a sort of party piece. In the end I decided it didn’t matter much. She was wearing a black dress made of a light gauze-like material, and I noticed that her breasts were almost visible beneath it. As I looked up from her décolleté I caught her eyes. She smiled at me and said nothing.
We continued talking for another ten minutes and then finally she spotted someone else she knew and drifted off. I thought of catching up with Marianne and looked about for her, but she was still talking to the middle-aged man. I watched them for a moment. The man seemed somehow out of place at a gallery opening.