the plates were cleared away and I helped Malcolm drain a second bottle of a bland 2001 Gigondas.
‘You must be wondering why I asked you to lunch, and here of all places,’ he said finally, staring with the vague disdain of a sated appetite at a tray of steamed mussels proceeding by waitress to a patron at the far end of the busy restaurant.
It occurred to me that Malcolm had to have a streak of sadism. ‘It’s truly a lovely view,’ I said.
His two hands combined to shoo away the very thought. ‘Nonsense. Come, I’ll show you.’ By the time he had readied himself to rise, the bill was approaching him. It was intercepted by Ruby, who had been working her boss’s phones from the café. All the same, the canny waiter persisted with a courtesy visit to our table, and Malcolm rewarded him with a superfluous tip. He made his way out of the restaurant, fielding the smiles and waves of the waiting staff like an A-list celebrity.
Malcolm Frisbee was famous for his irrational tips. The restaurant menu had warned that a 12.5 percent ‘discretionary’ service commission would be compulsorily added to the bill, but Malcolm had survived a crab poisoning that had ended his first career, and as a means of getting restaurant staff fully on his side, he indulged a fetish for fat tips.
We caught the lift down to the fifth floor. I followed Malcolm into the first gallery, where a special exhibit was running. It was called Beyond Painting. We stood before an elderly picture frame. It seemed fatally damaged, with a single diagonal slash running some twelve or so centimetres down the middle of an unpainted canvas.
‘What do you think?’ In his crumpled, blue linen jacket he was the quintessential arts professor examining a degree student.
I panicked, ‘Of this?’
‘Yes.’
I took two steps back, but the explanatory card was still too far to the left to read surreptitiously. I was between the devil of a slashed canvas and the deep blue sea of a confession of artistic ignorance. ‘You mean this very canvas?’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘It is a Lucio Fontana. Surely you know Lucio Fontana.’
‘Of course,’ I lied, clearing my throat. I did not know much about art: my formal education had holes in it wide enough to sink a college building. To my eye it did seem like an unfortunate studio accident that had aborted a great master’s attempt to paint . . . but it was hanging in a gallery of Tate Modern. Not to consider it an artistic disaster seemed safer. ‘It’s a unique concept, a daring painting.’
‘It is not a painting,’ Malcolm responded. Three female London-art-student types in flip-flops drifted closer, making no secret of their interest in our conversation. Their overlong jeans had fraying bell-bottoms as capacious as skirts and trailed loose threads, causing other visitors to give their wake a wide berth. Malcolm continued, modulating his voice to accommodate his new audience, ‘If you notice, the canvas is untainted by paint. The only pigmentation on it will be the discolouration of age. It’s just the slash; notice the centrality of cut to canvas, notice the new, third dimension it conveys to the previous linearity of the artwork, its boldness . . .’
‘Exactly,’ I said, warming to the subject. ‘Its uniqueness—’
‘Rubbish,’ Malcolm interrupted, reaping a brace of nods from his new listeners. ‘It’s not unique; everyone who can afford a blade is slashing canvases these days. Pay attention, Humphrey Chow. Back in 1955 when Fontana had the gumption to present this as a work of art it was unique. It’s old hat now. Comprehend? Come.’
I ignored the students’ rolling eyes and followed Malcolm away from the sweep of their scorn. He took me through the huge galleries on the fifth floor of the former thermal plant. Slowed by digesting food and thought-provoking art, we browsed the hangings somnolently, with much nodding and contemplation through half-closed eyes.
Finally we stood in the amplified silence of a huge, empty hall that could have garaged a couple of articulated trucks: empty, that is, but for seven large movie screens affixed to the walls. Footage from seven grainy CCTV cameras featuring the same deserted studio at night was running simultaneously on all the screens. The exhibit was Mapping the Studio, by Mike Norman. Mike’s studio was not a very psychedelic one. It seemed stacked with odds and ends, like someone’s garage; it was a place where things were made, not a place designed for show. The only thing that moved in the videos were rats. When we arrived, there were only three other visitors in that room, the largest gallery by far on the floor, and they looked on with some embarrassment as Malcolm began to pace the room ostentatiously. Starting from one end of the room, he took large, measured steps in a straight line across the room. He did the same thing on the other side. Then he walked across to where I was waiting at the entrance to the room, trying to hide my mortification behind a Metro newspaper.
By this time, several more visitors had entered the hall and stood in a loose gaggle beside me, watching Malcolm appreciatively. A uniformed security guard procured by the surveillance cameras also drifted in through the opposite entrance. He watched us through narrowed, less appreciative eyes.
Malcolm was panting by the time he reached me. As he caught his breath, a middle-aged woman flustering her way through a handful of brochures removed the audio guide from her ear to ask, in an artsy American accent, ‘I missed most of that. Sorry, what’s the name?’
‘Malcolm Frisbee,’ said that worthy. His voice had the resignation of a B-list celebrity destined to a lifetime of halfway recognitions that had to be supplemented with the occasional introduction.
‘I don’t mean your name. I mean your piece, your performance art. It’s not in the brochure . . .’
Her meaning dawned on Malcolm. ‘I’m not a performance artist!’ he snapped. He took my arm and turned away. We left the gallery at an angry three or four miles per hour and stormed up the stairs. Malcolm used the exercise to work off his anger at the indignity and to work up an appetite for desert. Back on the seventh floor, Ruby was waiting at the café with a prescience that verged on smugness as she nursed a sixth or seventh espresso.
Our earlier table was taken, but a waiter found us a better, if smaller, one for two, right against the glass window. We resumed our meal where we left off, he ordering a white and dark chocolate mousse and I, an ice cream. My order arrived almost immediately, but despite all his tips, we had to wait for his mousse. In the meantime, Phone-in-the-Ear-Ruby replaced the folder with the offending story in front of her boss. This time, there was also a white envelope under the transparent cover of the folder. Clearly, boss and PA had run this tag-game before. The coffee junkie did not meet my eye, nor did she return to her fix at the café. She disappeared into the ladies, like a butcher stepping back from the slab to avoid the spatter of blood.
The moment had come. The envelope was addressed to me. I did not need a BBC Panorama investigation to figure out its contents. I steeled myself to walk out before the final indignity. I was not going to become another IMX luncheon-termination statistic. I took a final spoon of ice cream.
Nobody did significant gazes like Malcolm Frisbee. He fixed me with one such and asked, fingers drumming a suspiciously calypsonian tattoo, ‘What do you think?’
‘About the ice cream?’
‘About Mapping the Studio! Answer me from here,’ he said, digging fingers into his guts. ‘Tell me what you felt, standing there, watching those giant screens.’
I took another final spoon of ice cream. It was a good thing that the mind was no
