Nighthawk

It’s midnight, the gallery is closed and I am walking through the main hallway towards my destination. Most of the staff went home hours ago, to their dogs or televisions or whatever it is other people return to at night; the only ones still on duty are the men employed to watch the cameras, and they’ll be smoking and reading papers by now, bellies bursting out of groaning blue uniforms and waddling around making bad jokes about each other’s wives. They see nothing. I am slimmer, younger, smarter than them – I stride on, tipping my hat at the sleeping guard just in case he’s not sleeping and carefully punching in the code at the door which opens with a light, satisfying click. Everyone’s supposed to be on high alert tonight, but from what I can see it doesn’t seem to be much different to low alert. This place is full of idiots. Every place is, isn’t it? I pass through a narrow corridor on the way to the small white room and chuckle gently at the stupidity of it all, but, seeing the familiar emptiness of the room, suddenly it’s not funny any more. I am an artist trapped in a security guard’s uniform, protecting another man’s work for a living, paid to keep watch until dawn and no more. Standing up straight, doing nothing, time creeping on as your legs tense up with cramp – that in itself is enough to drive anyone crazy. I’ve had two warnings already for not standing. But I can’t any more. So I sit. And draw.

I follow a strict routine, always checking no-one else is around before beginning my work, facing away from the cameras as I reach for the tiny sketchbook in my back pocket; they’re still on me but that’s fine. I’m not doing anything wrong, not really. I sit down in front of the painting, take out my artist’s pencil and start. Tonight’s work is another repeat of many mini-versions done over the past few weeks; I can hardly concentrate because of how excited it all gets me: one day students will study how I learnt my craft, sketching my hero’s greatest work when I should have been looking out for thieves. It’s hard to wait though, to learn. Some days I get up and simply forget I’m not famous.

An artist needs quiet to concentrate properly, and I should know. I spend enough time surrounded by noise. On day shifts I stand among the crowds, holding my walkie talkie and looking at people looking, but it’s no good. I can’t enjoy the paintings then, and can’t think about my own work either. My head is too full of the chatter of American tourists, talking so much and so loud and so fast that you think their mouths are just going to give up and fall off. A never-ending flow of the rich and the foolish come thousands of miles to file quickly past, talking about where they’re going to go for dinner tonight, and how they always knew so-and-so and so-and-so wouldn’t last because she’s a Virgo and he’s a Sagittarius, and isn’t it strange that this guy spent his whole life painting people doing nothing? Sometimes I think they’d miss Great Art if it carried a solid gold guarantee on the front. Sometimes I think about planting that guarantee there myself so they can see it. I’m different to those people though. Not only can I appreciate genius in others, I can see it in myself too. And that’s rare.

Even in school it was obvious I was different. One teacher was so impressed that she used to put me in a corner all on my own while other children had to do times tables, and let me loose with the crayons and felt tips and pasta shells. My work was more abstract then; I have matured. Now I do interpretations of other people’s paintings, mostly – like this one in front of me. All the greats were once apprentices, and though my teacher is dead I like to think these sessions are my lessons from him. Breathing deeply, I close my eyes and try to imagine the picture as if for the first time, though I know every brushstroke in it by heart. It’s a simple piece – a glimpse into a building on the corner of a dark, deserted street. A woman and man are on bar stools, looking into the middle distance. Another man faces away from the viewer, and a barman reaches down for something we will never see. That is all. I reopen my eyes and begin to mark the outline of the woman with my pencil; her hair, arms, red dress (which will have to be grey), mouth, eyes which make her neither old nor young; and I smile because I can hear the sound of the lead drawing across the paper, and nothing else. No crying babies, no people in wheelchairs asking if you wouldn’t mind helping me up the stairs young man, no nasty accidents to distract me. In the stillness of night, it’s easy, apart from sometimes when I get to thinking about celebrity.

Usually, we prefer our geniuses to die young and dramatically, or at least to be crazy. Otherwise they fade, swallowed up by the flawed work of more spectacular rivals who were stabbed or shot or jumped off a cliff or fell out of the sky or banged into a tree. We don’t like people to grow old, keep creating, stay sane, be in love, have steady lives and enjoy smooth transition, warmed but not changed by the public’s adoration. We prefer struggle, tragedy, difficulty. And boy is my life a tragic and difficult struggle. Most night shifts I just sit here, and waiting for somebody to jump out of a spaceship, break down the door and say, Son – come with me. The galaxy is waiting. Well I’m sick of waiting. For success, for the end of the shift, for something exciting to happen. Sometimes I find myself talking to the people in the painting about it. I tell them I’m thinking of breaking out. They tell me to wait. That my time will come.

Even the Greats had to wait. They put Van Gogh in the beginner’s class at Antwerp Academy; Kafka was trapped in a job with an insurance firm; even Bukowski worked – for the Post Office, delivering letters – though he at least managed a house in San Pedro and a BMW before he died. In his early days he would have killed for a cushy job like this, sitting on your backside all night, doing nothing – and I’d let him sit, if I was in charge. But in all that time he lay undiscovered, you’d think someone would have noticed something special in him: that someone, just one person in thousands of mornings and God knows how many letterboxes would open up their door, take the post with a smile and say, I know, Charlie, I know. But they don’t. They don’t even notice you have dreams. They laugh when you pass and trip you up when you’re not looking and say a bit too loudly what a shame it is that you didn’t just stick with that nice steady job in Carpetland. I can’t wait until I can afford to pay them next to nothing to watch my painting just sit there all night waiting to be stolen.

I have thought many times about stealing the painting myself, and maybe I should – take the thing down from the wall and run until I’m caught. I don’t want to wait for life to start any more. When they arrest me I could explain and smile sweetly and apologise while the world pores over my life’s work, trying to understand my twisted mind. I think of the guards and crack a small, knowing smile. They still wouldn’t take me seriously, even if I did steal the picture. Nobody takes me seriously. He’ll never get away, they’ll say casually, getting everyone to gather round to watch the crazy guy take the painting off the wall. He’s gone mad! They’ll laugh like schoolgirls as they put the request out for security guards to chase the security guard. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll do it anyway. One day. Maybe even tonight. I’ll show them. When they talk about it in the future, they’ll want everyone to know they were here. Each one will pretend to their friends that they pointed at me on the screen and said: Gentlemen, mark my words. Tonight we have witnessed history. They’ll forget that they laughed and ate doughnuts with their feet up on the desk and said how they always knew I’d lose it in the end. I notice I have stopped drawing: that happens sometimes.

I finish off sketching the woman, and think about reaching out to snatch the original. I see the swift movement in my mind – me charging down the stairs and out the back exit, sprinting all the way down the bank of the Thames. It might make the top of the news – criminals often come before Prime Ministers, or even war. I think about how it might all happen. Alarms would sound, but I’m big enough and fast enough to get away from any of the snacking goons downstairs; I’d be gone before they have a chance to swallow their food. If I don’t bring the world to me now it might not arrive at all, and I can’t take that chance.

“Hello soldier.”

Gerry is already there, behind me, reeking of sweat and cheap aftershave and a life of stifled night shifts. He peers at my sketch on tiny scrap of paper, the back of bus ticket, which I try and hide, stuffing it into my inside pocket:

“Still doing that?”

His voice becomes a small, sarcastic whisper as he brings his mouth to my ear:

“Well, keep scribbling. You never know…”

He laughs too loud, claps a hand on my shoulder, and with that You never know he’s sure, like everyone else, that he does.

“It’s sketching,” I snap. “And this one’s not finished.”

“They’re never finished my boy, that’s the thing about them. Well, anyway…”

Gerry takes a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, flips it open with obvious pleasure and starts to walk away.

First published in Aesthetica Magazine (2004)