itself, my eyes needing a long moment to adjust to the light in the room which seemed to be suffused with some sort of ochre mist, something grainy and falling, an effect of the low evening rays reflecting off the walls, or more explicitly off the red script which covered the entire gallery from ceiling to floor along its length, handwriting in various types and sizes, a continuous swathe of text which closer examination revealed to be snippets of news stories lifted from the provincial papers – The Telegraph, The Sentinel, The Herald, the Western People – all recently dated and all dealing with court cases which covered the full gamut from theft and domestic violence to child abuse, public order offences, illegal grazing on protected lands, petty theft, false number plates, public affray, burglary, assault and drink-driving offences – in short, all those cases that came within the remit of the district and circuit courts, all detailed in descriptive passages crossed with contextualising pieces and direct quotes from court transcripts in which voices of victims and the accused, plaintiff and defendant, sang clear off the walls
when I got him to the ground, Your Honour, I administered
we have stood by him even though he has caused us untold grief
a series of consecutive slaps, Your Honour
I hope he rots in hell, no right father would have done what he did to this family
a strong smell of soot and petrol from her, Your Honour
four types of psychotropic drugs in his system
woke up three weeks later with quarter of my skull gone and fitted with a titanium plate
you will have no luck for this you bastard
and so on and so on, a surge of red script flowing across the gallery, ceiling to floor, rising and falling in swells and eddies through various sizes and spacings, congested in the tight rhythms of certain examples only to swell out in crashing typographical waves in others, a maelstrom of voices and colour and it was quite something to stand there and have your gaze drawn across the walls, swept along in the full surge of the piece while resisting the temptation to rest and decipher one case or another, wanting instead to experience the full flow and wash of the entire piece, my gaze swept on in the relentless, surging indictment of the whole thing, its swells and depths, until I was startled from my reverie by Mairead who appeared by my side to press the exhibition catalogue into my hands with an anxious expression, positioning herself at my elbow where she looked fretful, not a mood I would have associated with her on such an occasion but one which became clear to me when I turned the catalogue over in my hands and read the cover title as
The O Negative Diaries
An Installation by Agnes Conway
Medium – Artist’s Own Blood
and I stood there in the middle of the crowd, vacant of everything save the single thought – that whatever dreams a man may have for his daughter it is safe to say that none of them involve standing in the middle of a municipal gallery with its walls covered in a couple of litres of her own blood because this, I slowly realised, was what I was looking at, this was the red mist that suffused the weak evening light which streamed in the front windows in such a way that the script itself appeared to project from the walls into the middle of the room, the livid words and sentences themselves hanging in a light so finely emulsified that we might take it into our very pores and swell on it, so that even if the crowd broke up the continuity of the space there was no doubting that the light served to make everyone part of a unified whole that occupied the whole gallery, Agnes’s blood was now our common element, the medium in which we stood and breathed so that even as she was witness-in-chief, spreading out the indictment which, how ever broad and extravagant it may be on rhetorical flourish, how ever geographically and temporally far-flung it might be, the whole thing ultimately dovetailed down to a specific source and point which was, as I saw it
me
nothing and no one else but
me
plain as day up there on the walls and in the sweep of each word and line, I was the force beneath, driving it in waves up to the ceiling and it was clear to me through that uncanny voice which now sounded in my heart, a voice all the clearer for being so choked and distant, telling me that
I did this
I was responsible for this
whatever it was
definitely something bad and not to my credit because only real guilt could account for that mewling sense of fright which took hold of me there in the middle of that room, something of it returning to me now
sitting here at this table
that same cramping flash within me which twisted some part of me with such sudden fear that before I had made any decision whatsoever I was praying, or rather
I was being prayed as
a prayer
torqued up out of me with an irreversible urgency, speaking itself to completion before the words had properly stumbled through me
Jesus Christ
let it be some vision ahead of her
and not torment behind
responsible for this
just as Mairead grabbed my elbow, a startled look on her face which, for one wild moment, had me believe I may have spoken my plea out loud like a madman because I was now finding myself scrabbling on a knife-edge of panic, a horrible vertiginous moment which I overcame only with a savage effort of will which pushed me in a sudden, awkward lurch across the floor and out the door into the March dusk where rain and the rush-hour traffic clogged the narrow street in which the gallery was situated and those few people who had stood out into the mist to smoke and chat along the pavement now stared at me in such alarm while I tried to gather my wits and steady my breathing that I had a clear vision of how I must have looked careering through the gallery and out into the street, the country man with the big farmer’s head on him in the collar and tie, shouldering his way through the crowd with his two fists balled at his side
fit to kill
fit to fucking kill
Mother of Jesus
and so much for the promise to put my best foot forward for Agnes’s sake on her big night, so much for making a good impression on her behalf I thought bitterly as I stood there with the rain pissing down on me, nothing but sour embarrassment churning around inside me as
a young man with a wispy beard took a step towards me, concern writ across his face and I can’t remember what I said to him or how I replied but his two hands were suddenly raised in front of his face as if someone was going to lash out and hit him – and how ever I responded at that moment it seemed to convince him fairly sharpish that he did not want anything to do with me so he backed off, leaving me alone on the sidewalk outside the gallery where I stood for a further half hour, trying to get a grip on myself, getting soaked through while the crowd gathered up and down the street, smoking and drinking wine before eventually breaking up and spreading out into the gathering night by which time I had calmed down a bit
just a bit
my temper and nerves under control somewhat, helped
