The film merged with another about a man who worked in a factory that made plastic crucifixes. He checked the quality on the production line as they cooled from the extrusion machine that spat them out. Some of them were mangled; Jesus hideously melted when the plastic hadn’t formed properly. It was the checker’s job to sort the damaged ones into a box to be remelted and sent back into the machine. But every so often he put a deformed Jesus in his pocket, he took it home and nailed it on his bedroom wall with all the other melted ones he’d saved from the machine.
Victor enjoyed the close-ups, they looked like versions of The Scream by Munch. Jesus’s mouth drooping, flowing down towards his chest. Hideously rearranged, shoulders dangling on his cross. Various permutations of his hands joining his torso, seared to his hips, his thighs. Burned and twisted and browned, no longer the pure, pink Jesus that was supposed to come out of the machine.
If there were no perfect things in the world there’d be no one stood at a production line having to sort things out, Victor thought. If there were no lines or fences between things; no cages at the zoo, the doors would just spring open and all the lions and tigers would come running out. He'd like to see a lion roaming the streets. But nothing out of this world ever came around a corner. When it rained it stopped. When the sun came out it went in again. The sun didn’t bake you and the rain didn’t soak you for forty days and forty nights like the bible had promised.
He wished it would rain for forty days and nights. He’d like to see how the world would look drowned. He could sail up Main Street in a boat holding his plastic crucifix; his deformed Jesus out in front of him, proclaiming the goodness of his journey, the purity of his heart. Hailing the natives who’d line up on the banks as he sailed past, baring gifts; shiny deformed beads and melted crucifixes. He’d toss them out and their hands would joyously take them; seeing no difference between a good one and a bad one because when the world gets new like that there are no distinctions.
Or maybe he’d strap a large melted Jesus to the helm of his boat like they did on old fashioned sailing ships. But he could only remember women with bare breasts on the prows of those ships. Women were banned from them because they brought bad luck but sailors put them on the prow to bring them luck.
It was a crazy world but not crazy enough.
*
“Why don’t you go on safari if you want to see a lion?” the hairdresser said.
Victor watched her in the mirror as she bent over the top of his head separating a section of his hair with her comb, preparing to trim the ends. She was very young, probably sixteen or seventeen. An apprentice, a hair sweeper who had just been given the green light to cut and style.
He always chose a women hairdresser, he liked how they pressed close seemingly oblivious to the contact. He liked feeling the warmth through their thin clothing, the pressure of their torsos, the occasional brush of their breasts. The press of a doctor, a nurse, a dental assistant. Clean and warm with no emotion.
“There are no surprises on safari just clichés and Americans,” he said.
“I saw a photo of Japanese businessmen on safari, they were lined up on the back of a Land Rover wearing SARS masks.”
“I like that.”
It was a weird image, he filed it away, maybe he could use it in his work.
“If I went to Africa I’d wear a space suit like the bubble boy so I wouldn’t catch any of those horrible diseases,” she said.
He stared at her in the mirror until she glanced up at him. He held her eyes.
“Don’t deny you’re beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” she laughed.
“Yes, beautiful.”
“I’m not beautiful.”
”You are absolutely beautiful.”
“I’m not beautiful.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sheena.”
”Sheena . . . own it, don’t deny it and don’t let anyone tell you you’re not beautiful.”
She looked at him in the mirror, uncertain now.
“No one tells me I’m not.”
*
Victor’s flatmate Gregg, trapped the seed-heads of dandelion flowers in shiny resin. When Victor walked around the city he saw groupings of Gregg’s paperweights in shop windows everywhere. Little glistening colonies suffocating nature. Victor was sure that when the paperweights were left alone they reproduced and that one day the whole world would be filled with Gregg’s translucent moon globes.
Gregg would stride out of his studio in the warehouse they shared, kitted up in his protective suit and industrial visor like he'd just got back from outer space. A great waft of chemicals filling the flat when the door opened.
Victor had never told him that he'd made the same things as a child in his grandmother’s outhouse wearing no protection at all. He could still remember the smell; whitewashed walls, damp raincoats and bird shit all mingled with the toxic smell of resin.
Victor's grandmother had bought him a modeling kit for his birthday. The kit came with small plastic moulds in different shapes. Victor would pour a layer of Epoxy resin into each mould, allow it to set, then he’d arrange shells and bones and feathers on the hardened layer. When he was pleased with the composition he’d pour a final layer of transparent resin over the top, drowning the objects, forcing out any air. Sometimes the air bubbles got trapped as they tried to escape, he liked it when that happened, it looked like the things had tried to live on, breathing inside the plastic. He’d made key rings and paperweights. A brooch for his grandmother embedded with shells that looked like pearls, nestled on a fan of pigeon feathers.
In his grandmother’s outhouse he’d fallen in love with making things. He’d experienced a feeling of completeness disappearing into something fully for the first time. And the rewards had been great; impressing his grandmother, his friends. Bringing something new into the world that no one had ever seen.
And now he made papier-mache heads; waist high sculptures coated with shellac that looked like they were shedding or growing their skin - he didn’t know which. He created a translucent effect from building up thin layers of papier-mache. He lit them from the inside with an electric light, giving them the appearance of being alive at the centre - a shiver under the surface of an insect body. The heads had no eyes just wide open mouths, all of them the same twisted shape. Arranged in a line on the floor of his studio they had the callous, blind beauty of sentinels.
He’d started making them after the crash – a three car pile-up that had cracked his skull and scrambled the bones in his body. It had taken him a year of physical therapy to begin to live what people call a normal life. Going back to his studio had been the hardest thing. That first day he’d fallen to the floor and wept. He’d sat for hours staring at his materials thinking he’d never make anything again. He’d tried to reconnect with the desire he’d had, but he couldn’t remember how he’d felt before the crash. He knew that once it had felt like breathing but that had been when he was a child. He’d kept coming back sitting on the floor and feeling empty, until the idea for the heads came. He’d seen them first like clowns in a row at the fair, pivoting slowly, their eyes sightless, their mouths red and open, beckoning punters to land a ping-pong ball inside. The image had stirred him and he’d begun to make the heads.
His Car Crash Heads had caused a sensation when he’d first exhibited them. People had read so much into them. The open mouths, the missing eyes, the speechlessness of them - like mute witnesses to a catastrophe. But when he’d kept exhibiting exactly the same sculptures, he’d failed to get another exhibition.
A curator at his last exhibition opening had asked loudly if he could do her one in red. He’d told her that red was too obvious for his Car Crash Heads. That they came in shit brown and shit brown only and she’d have to fucking live with that. But he couldn’t make them any differently. He’d tried to think about them in a different way, using different materials but they came out exactly the same. He couldn’t make his hands do anything else.
*
She had a bruised sluttish look that he always found attractive. Her cardigan was buttoned up her back. All of her clothes seemed put on backwards - in a hurry - in a deliberately anarchistic fashion, like she’d just fallen out of bed and dressed in the dark. He’d waited for her until she’d finished work. They’d kissed a couple of times at the bar, merged together without much purpose then broken apart. She’d smiled at him thinly after each kiss. He’d seen a grey tooth, an incisor that looked like it had died at the root, he’d found it improbably sexy.
He moved close to her. He smelt the chocolate flavored martinis she’d been drinking at the bar. She turned away slowly as if she was gliding, as if her head had separated from her body and was moving off in front of her into the room.
“Do people buy them?” she asked doubtfully, staring at the heads.
He pictured one of his sculptures in a suburban lounge, staring out with flat pebble eyes at some fat guy in a vest wolfing his TV dinner while he watched his favorite sitcom.
“Not lately.”
“How much do you sell them for?”
He knew she wouldn’t believe him.
“Sculpture is very expensive.”
“What are they about?”
He shrugged, “I started making them after I was in a head-on collision.”
“God . . . did anybody die?”
They always wanted to know about the deaths, it was the first question they asked. People never said: did anyone survive? Are they ok? How do they live after something like that? Not one person had ever asked about the survivors.
“Three people.”
A mother, a father, a child. A whole family wiped out in a station wagon.
“You were the lucky one.”
He nodded. He didn’t like talking about the crash, but he knew that other people wanted to talk about it. It was inevitable when they saw the heads. In their eyes he saw the fascinated stare of rubber-neckers. People who’d never been in a major crash, who hadn’t experienced the brutality of it, always wanted to know the body count. If he’d seen a decapitation or someone die in front of him? If the police had carried off a head in a body bag? They wanted all the gory details, but the truth was he really couldn’t remember much at all. He sometimes made things up, changed the numbers that had died. He’d make up whole scenarios about heroic acts and people behaving badly, he’d done that a lot when he’d first exhibited the heads.
He didn’t want to talk about the crash.
He hoped she would tell him something. That sometimes she saved hair from her clients; hair that was unusual or had caught the light in a certain way when she’d been cutting it. That she’d saved it in a piece of newspaper and had folded it into the pocket of her coat. That she’d taken it home and pressed it between the pages of a book and treasured it. And that after everyone had gone home, after she’d swept the floor and was closing up she’d sometimes stare for hours at the clippings heaped on the floor - black and red and gold mingling with platinum blond.
“Was it a thriller?” she asked.
“Because things seem much more closer in black and white. Because the detail moves out from the background and becomes more important. Because there’s a place where they make crucifixes and rosaries and crazy, cactus Christmas tree lights. There’s a place where they make cocktail umbrellas and souvenirs. Where ashtrays shaped like Africa are spat out and cooled on conveyer belts. All the places where the lines have to match up and the words have to be right – they always have to spell out something. Because there are factories where men visit the toilet after they’ve put things down their trousers; they pull them out and look at them, run their fingers over the damaged things, the things that are not quite right and have a kind of beauty. A new beauty, a melted beauty.”
Sheena stared at him for a few seconds then burst out laughing.
“I worked in a factory and they’d just laugh at you if you said something like that.”
*
“A hairdresser,” Gregg had said. Victor knew what he was thinking. He didn’t need to say anything else. “What happened to Alice . . . the dancer from Pure Grace, didn’t she used to go out with Adrian Fischer? Isn’t she Marilyn Chambers niece?”
Everyone had to be connected for Gregg, everyone linked in a web that centered around the arts. Six degrees of separation, and everything and everyone had to be cool. Even his moonlighting job making the moon globes was seen as cool - an ironic, knowing wink to the souvenir trade. Gregg wrote blurbs about placing them in gift shops, how he was disrupting the boundaries of what was thought of as a souvenir and what was art. In his real work, as a sculptor, he made giant souvenirs, creating an ambiguity around the objects by blowing them up a thousand times their natural size and positioning them in his installations. And he was lauded for it.
Victor wondered why Gregg was still living with him now that he was seen as such a loser.
“Alice wasn’t interested in me she just wanted to fuck a player,” he told Gregg.
“I thought you were keen on her.”
Victor wondered how Gregg thought he knew anything about his feelings for Alice. He couldn’t imagine Gregg really thinking about him deeply at all. He saw himself pinging through Gregg’s head bound up in a connecting fabric of the school he’d been to, and who he’d fucked, and who he hadn’t fucked, and who he was going to fuck, and where he’d exhibited, and where he was going to exhibit, and if he’d get there before Gregg. A spiraling DNA strand wriggling through his head. Perhaps it was all the toxic fumes from exploding seed-heads in the resin, perhaps there were all these holes blasted in his brain that everything else slipped through.
Artists were supposed to be the trailblazers, the people who suffered to bring things back from the darkness for everyone else, but most of them were shallow. Often they went to art school because it ran in the family, like becoming a doctor because your father had been one.
Victor had struggled at art school. He’d never felt like he belonged. He didn’t speak the right way, he didn’t come from the right place, he wasn’t embedded in the right fabric; the one that everyone talked about and expected you to belong to. There was so much that people like Gregg took for granted.
He’d lived with his grandmother who’d worked in a factory, welding pipe-fittings on a production line. His grandmother who had got her picture in the local paper when she was a girl; the miniatures that she’d painted set out on the sideboard in her mother’s house. Staring out from that photograph as if she could never quite believe that things could happen. Staring out at him as if she knew everything would be taken away.
Art school had been full of pretenders like Gregg who would sneer at a hairdresser. Gregg should have been licking their feet. His carefully distressed bed hair was always styled within an inch of its life. If spiders made nests that’s what they’d look like; sticky and matted and hardly there at all - dull grey and see-through, something you’d see floating in soup in a Chinese restaurant.
“So does this hairdresser do anything else?” Gregg said.
“She does hair. She sculpts hair. She uses her hands to cut it and colour it. She makes thousands of tiny decisions every single hour of every day.”
“I was only asking.”
“I’m in love with this woman.”
“You’ve never mentioned her before.”
He saw Sheena’s moon face, her grey tooth, her cardigan buttoned on backwards. The muddy brown strip of regrowth in the centre of her scalp. Dull eyes staring back at him. Slack mouth opening - the mouth of an eel.
“We’re engaged,” he said.
*
Three of Gregg’s huge resin globes were positioned around the gallery. Victor stared through the bluish resin at the figures trapped inside. A pair of shop mannequins had been embedded inside each globe; a man and a woman, their clothes flowing backwards in the resin, making them look like they were being pushed by a centrifugal force. The woman’s hand stretched out as if she was trying to attract someone’s attention.
They reminded him of the line-drawings that had been sent into space to communicate with alien civilizations, except in those images the man’s hand was making the gesture. In Gregg’s sculptures the man was inert, his arms stiff at his sides. There was something creepy and cold about mannequins and they seemed creepier and colder set in the resin.
Gregg had trapped air bubbles floating out of their mouths, cartoon speech bubbles forever caught in the act of speaking but saying nothing. It was clever, and Victor knew how hard it was to create the effect at that scale.
The positioning of a body could speak volumes, a hand, a finger could say so much. But there was a dead feeling about the sculptures. The documentation of ennui. The documentation of emptiness. Why was so much art about the meaninglessness of life, Victor thought? The drawings that had been sent out to alien civilizations held more hope in them, more authenticity than anything he’d seen recently in a gallery. They were from a time and place where people weren’t ashamed of imbuing something with meaning. He was tired of seeing meaning punctured. He wanted something to hold onto. He wanted to see something that would move him to weep, something that would make him fall to his knees and change his religion. A lion moving towards him around a corner, a crack opening in the earth. Something that would fill him up instead of drain everything out of him or make him snigger slyly. He was sick of sly laughter. He was sick of irony. He was sick of it all, sick of the heads, sick of making them, he couldn’t even bring himself to make one more batch.
One more batch.
He couldn’t believe he’d thought about them like that. The production line felt closed.
“Still making those car crash dummies?”
He heard a voice behind him. It was Jeremy Black, a photographer who’d made a name for himself manipulating photographs of horses galloping in moody landscapes.
Before the invention of photography, painters had painted horses galloping with all their limbs in the air. It was a photographer who discovered that one of the horses hooves was always on the ground. A photograph brought them down to earth, placed one foot on the ground forever. And Jeremy had cleverly redressed the balance, in a series of photographs he’d set the horses free again by lifting them off the ground.