Post Mortem Gary Bell (ready player one ebook txt) 📖

had cut me open from one side of my chest to the other, and that was the closest comparison I could find to this current sensation.

She was twenty-two, as I would soon discover, but had the piercing grey eyes of an older, wiser woman. Her dark blonde hair was long and naturally wild, almost dancing in a defiant bouffant reminiscent of a young Brigitte Bardot. Much like Bardot, all of her outward abrasiveness could not hide her bourgeois grace. While I’d tried hard to look smart in my freshly tumble-dried shirt, she’d done the opposite, dressing in an oversized Pearl Jam T-shirt, tattered jeans and black combat boots; there were flecks of paint on the cuffs of her leather jacket, blue, violet and red. All at once the gallery and its art were only fog behind her colour.

She hadn’t come alone. Sniffing at her heels was an entourage of four young men, each one deliberately shabby and yet reeking of wealth.

I cleared my throat and said something worthless. ‘Yes, it is a rather good painting.’

‘Good?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Good, he says. Look at the shades he’s discovered in his own skin, the clots of paint on his genitals. It’s so reminiscent of Bacon.’

I found the comparison peculiar, but with this beautiful stranger I wasn’t going to stand there and argue. ‘Yes, bacon, I know just what you mean. It is sort of meaty-looking, isn’t it?’

She blinked at me three times and then started to giggle. The sound was stunning.

Her followers were not amused. They narrowed their eyes, and all at once those eyes said fraud, usurper, unworthy of her amusement.

‘Francis Bacon,’ one of her cronies, the one with a goatee, interjected sardonically. ‘Do you even know who he is?’

‘Francis Bacon? I should certainly hope so,’ I replied. ‘I studied him for an entire term at university. Attorney General, Lord Chancellor, he was the original Queen’s Counsel designate, appointed by Queen Elizabeth herself as her personal legal counsel in 1597.’

What had started as a giggle now exploded into laughter that drew frowns from across the room.

‘Jennifer!’ Goatee hissed. ‘They’ll think you’re laughing at the painting!’

‘Oh, let them think what they want! Sir Francis fucking Bacon!’

From that moment on, my disguise was worthless: she had me sussed. It wasn’t long before I had her figured out in return.

She was an Old Dolphin, a former pupil of the illustrious Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, with a family listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry that could be traced back through all manner of lords and barons with its own coat of arms. She must’ve been the only out-of-work illustrator that could comfortably afford to keep her own spacious apartment in Kensington, but she was never overtly snobbish about it. Perhaps it was because of her conflicted feelings regarding her privilege and new-found socialist attitude that she ever thought to give me the time of day to begin with. Maybe she just liked me. For some reason, she even loved me.

Of course, I didn’t come right out and tell her about my living situation, even after we’d been seeing each other for a month or so and she was becoming irritated and suspicious about never being invited back to my fictitious flat. It came to a head in November, when the weather dropped below freezing point and I had no choice but to seek out shelter. Centrepoint was a charity for homeless youths that had originally started out in 1969, offering refuge in a disused basement in St Anne’s Church on Dean Street, Soho. By the nineties, it had three nightly shelters and nine semi-permanent hostels in the capital, with links across the country thanks in part to the work of its new patron, Diana, Princess of Wales. I reluctantly turned up at Centrepoint’s Soho office on a bitterly cold Sunday evening with my rucksack on my back, where I was greeted by a troop of new volunteer workers. One of the volunteers was Jenny. That was how I ended up moving in with her.

Later, after we were married and had moved into what she called our ‘forever home’, she purchased a huge print of Freud’s Painter Working, Reflection and hung it in the downstairs loo. I wasn’t especially keen on doing my business under the gaze of that naked figure, but I told her again that it was a rather good painting.

Later still, the print was torn in two, and on a drizzly September morning in 2016, twenty-three years after my induction into the world of art, our divorce was done and dusted.

16

‘This is cosy,’ Jenny said, peering round my right shoulder with those huge, dove-grey eyes.

I was too busy looking at her to answer. I stepped out of the basement and pulled the door half shut behind me to block her view.

Jenny at forty-six was now a middle-aged, middle-class socialist: curvier, more conservatively dressed, but still stylish. An old grey blazer over a new white turtleneck, jeans and heels and a Stella McCartney shoulder bag; a touch of eyeshadow and pale lipstick; deeper lines and darker hair tied back with a few hanging, wavy tendrils. At once so familiar and so different, like a childhood home after a change of owners; you know the rooms and every flaw, but the wallpaper and furniture have changed. Had it really been eighteen months since I’d seen her last? It seemed impossible, yet I couldn’t decide whether that was because the time apart felt a lot shorter or so, so much longer.

‘I went upstairs first,’ she said. ‘They told me you were down here. Nice couple.’

‘I’ve never really spoken to them,’ I replied, clearing my throat with an unpleasant hack.

She raised her eyebrows as she so often had before. ‘He’s still a hit with the neighbours.’

Jenny’s habit of talking in the third person, a habit I’d learned to love and grown to hate.

‘I couldn’t see your car parked on the road,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me it finally died?’

‘Murdered, I fear. Although the