500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(55)

“We’re going to look at some art,” announced Kim-Ange.

“I don’t know anything about art,” said Cormac.

“You doodle all day long!”

“That’s different. And modern art is weird. It looks like a kid did it.”

“What an original and valuable insight,” said Kim-Ange. “You’re in the middle of one of the best centers for art in the world and all you want to do is sit in steak house windows in Leicester Square.”

Cormac wished he’d never told her that. “Shut up.”

“No, you shut up! You might learn something!”

Cormac trailed after her like a reluctant child as they entered a huge factory building with high brown chimneys right on the riverbank. There was a low, wide set of glass doors along the back end, and small children with scooters and tricycles were gleefully careering about the open space.

Inside, away from the sunlight, it was gloomy and cool. The sloping concrete floor opened onto a vast underground chamber filled with odd shapes and sizes. Cormac folded his arms and announced that he couldn’t tell a piece of sculpture from the sign for the toilets, but Kim-Ange oohed and aahed. Cormac nodded patiently and wondered whether there was a fast-food restaurant nearby, because in Kirrinfief the closest McDonald’s was fifty miles away, and he found it something of a treat; it reminded him of birthdays when he was a child, when the entire family would make a special trip, and Jake had been bugging him to find out what KFC tasted like.

“Come look at this,” said Kim-Ange, recognizing a bored person when she saw it. “These are cool. It’s a guy who went mad. And he painted pictures of his madness. And they’re the best insights into trauma I think we have.”

Cormac was expecting something weird and surreal—melting clocks maybe. He wasn’t expecting what he saw. The upper galleries were dimly lit, practically dark, and he found himself in a small room, shaped like a pentagon, with large canvases hanging on each felt-covered wall. The effect was close and claustrophobic.

The first thing he noticed was there was nothing on them: no shapes, no drawings of anything at all, just great blocks of pure color looming above him. What on earth was this? What a complete waste of his time. He didn’t understand modern art, and that was that. Kim-Ange, meanwhile, was off to the side, staring, utterly rapt.

He peered closer, then took a step back, so he could take in the whole of a canvas at one go. It was three blocks of color, but it could—did, in fact—look like the ground, the sea, and the sky. The sky section was a deep rust color, like dried blood or the warning of something ominous; the blue section below was battered and rough, as if the sky was upsetting the sea, because something terrible was coming; and the earth was brown and dry, as if everything was hopeless and everything had need; it was unutterably bleak, extraordinarily beautiful. How? Cormac thought. It’s just some paint on a wall. But it filled him with deep and heavy emotions.

“Oh my God,” he said finally.

“I know,” said Kim-Ange, who had a look of fervent reverence on her face, as if having a religious experience. “Aren’t they amazing?”

Cormac looked at another one. Here there was a diseased yellow, the color itself, the very pigment, like a howl of disgust and misery. It had the ability to spear his mood, get right to the heart of him; he felt the artist was crying out, personally, for help, straight to him.

“Who is this artist?”

“Mark,” said Kim-Ange, respectfully. “Mark Rothko.”

“Is he still alive? What happened to him?”

Kim-Ange looked at Cormac and he immediately knew the answer.

“Suicide,” he said. “It’s written there.”

“Plain as day,” said Kim-Ange, with an uncharacteristically grim tone.

Suddenly Cormac found himself thinking: of Robbie, yes, but also of Lissa. Is this how she had felt? Why she’d had to move?

“Amazing,” he said, gazing at the paintings.

They passed through halls and rooms of modernism, of the world sliced up and twisted around.

“Why did they start doing this?” he said.

“Why do you think?” said Kim-Ange, pointing out a Braques. “Look when it all started, a hundred years ago.”

Cormac blinked. “After the First World War.”

“After the war”—Kim-Ange nodded—“when the world got ripped apart. After Hiroshima, it got torn up again. You couldn’t look at life the way people had looked at it before.”

Now Cormac couldn’t see enough of it. He wandered through the galleries of Picassos, Dalís, mouth open.

“They’re all soldiers.”

“We’re all soldiers,” observed Kim-Ange, eventually pulling him away. “Art is amazing,” she added perkily. “And you get a slice of cake at the end of it. Shall we?”

And Cormac was just about to enthusiastically agree, and concede that, okay, London maybe did have a bit more to offer than he’d originally thought . . . but his phone buzzed, and he took it out and stared at it, disconsolately, reading a message.

“Oh, bugger,” he said.





Chapter 42


“Why didn’t you call me?” he almost yelled down the phone.

“It’s just a broken wrist,” said his mother, equally crossly. “I called a taxi. Honestly, don’t worry about it.”