The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  After that my memory of the evening gets patchy for a while. Of course in its aftermath I went over it a million times, obsessively, combing every thread to find the knot that set the pattern changing beyond recovery; hoping there was just one detail whose significance I’d missed, the tiny keystone around which all the pieces would slot into place and the whole would flash jackpot rings of multicolored light while I leaped up shouting Eureka! The missing chunks didn’t help matters (very common, the doctors said reassuringly, completely normal, oh so very very normal): a lot came back along the way and I picked what I could from Sean’s memory and Dec’s, laboriously pieced the evening together like an old fresco from husbanded fragments and educated inferences, but how could I know for sure what was in the blank spaces? Did I shoulder someone at the bar? Did I talk too loudly, riding high in my euphoria balloon, or throw out an arm in some expansive gesture and catch someone’s pint? Was the brunette’s roid-rat ex snarling in some unnoticed corner? I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who goes looking for trouble, but nothing seemed out of the question, not any more.

  Long buttery streaks of light on dark wood. A girl in a floppy red velvet hat leaning on the bar when I went up for my round, chatting to the barman about some gig, Eastern European accent, wrists bending like a dancer’s. A trodden flier on the floor, green and yellow, faux-naïf sketch of a lizard biting its tail. Washing my hands in the jacks, smell of bleach, chill air.

  I do remember my phone buzzing, in the middle of an uproarious argument about whether the next Star Wars film was inevitably going to be worse than the last one, based on some intricate algorithm Dec had come up with. I jumped for it—I thought it might be something to do with the work situation, Richard wanting an update or maybe Tiernan finally returning my calls—but it was just some Facebook birthday-party invitation. “Story?” Sean wanted to know, raising his eyebrows at my phone, and I realized I had grabbed at it a little too urgently.

  “Nothing,” I said, putting the phone away. “And anyway how about the Taken series, the daughter started out as the victim and next time she turned into the sidekick—” and we went back to the film argument, which by this point had gone off on so many tangents that none of us remembered what anyone’s original stance had been. This was what I had needed from the night, this, Dec leaning forwards over the table gesticulating, Sean throwing out his hands in incredulity, all of us trying to shout each other down about Hagrid— I pulled my phone back out and set it to silent.

  The trouble at work hadn’t been my fault, actually, or at least only very tangentially. It stemmed from Tiernan, the guy in charge of exhibitions, a lank, long-chinned hipster with vintage horn-rimmed glasses and two main topics of conversation: obscure Canadian alt-folk bands, and the injustice of the fact that his art (meticulous oil portraits of ravers with mindlessly glaring pigeons’ heads, that kind of thing, produced in his parent-funded studio) hadn’t achieved the prominence it deserved. The year before all this, Tiernan had come up with the idea of a group show of representations of urban spaces by disadvantaged youths. Richard and I had both leaped on it—the only way that could have been easier to publicize was if some of the disadvantaged youths were also Syrian refugees and ideally trans, and Richard, despite his general air of unworldly vagueness and ragged tweed, was well aware that the gallery needed both status and funding in order to stay open. Only a few days after Tiernan first floated the idea—offhandedly, at the monthly meeting, picking crumbs of doughnut sugar off his napkin—Richard told him to get started.

  The whole thing went like a dream. Tiernan scoured the dodgiest schools and council flats he could find (in one place a bunch of eight-year-olds pounded his fixie bike into Dalí with a lump hammer, in front of him) and came up with a collection of satisfyingly scuzzy youths with low-grade criminal records and scruffy-edged drawings involving syringes and tattered blocks of flats and the occasional horse. To be fair, not all of it was that predictable: there was one girl who made small, sinister models of her various foster homes out of materials she had pilfered from derelict sites—a tarpaulin rag-doll man slouched on a sofa chipped from a lump of concrete, with his arm draped around a tarpaulin little girl’s shoulders in a way I found kind of disturbing; another kid made Pompeii-esque plaster casts of objects he found in the stairwell of his block of flats, a crushed lighter, a pair of child-sized glasses with one twisted earpiece, an intricately knotted plastic bag. I had taken it for granted that this show would be trading entirely on its moral superiority, but a few things in there were actually pretty good.

  Tiernan was especially proud of one discovery, an eighteen-year-old known as Gouger. Gouger refused to talk to anyone but Tiernan, give us his real name or, frustratingly, do any interviews—he had been in and out of the juvenile system for most of his life and had developed complicated networks of enemies, who he was afraid would come after him if they saw him getting rich and famous—but he was good. He layered things, spray paint, photographs, pen and ink, with a ferocious slapdash skill that gave them a sense of urgency, look fast and hard before something comes roaring in from the side and smashes the picture to shards of color and scrawl. His pièce de resistance—an enormous whirl of howling charcoal teenagers around a spray-paint bonfire, heads thrown back, neon arcs of booze flying from waved cans—was called BoHeroin Rhapsody and had already had interest from several collectors, after I put it up on our Facebook page.

  The Arts Council and Dublin City Council practically threw money at us. The media gave us even more coverage than I had expected. Tiernan brought in his youths to shuffle around the gallery, nudging each other and sniping in undertones and giving long unreadable stares to the “Divergences” show of mixed-media abstracts. Various distinguished guests responded to our invitation saying that they would be delighted to come to the opening. Richard puttered around the gallery smiling, humming bits of light opera interspersed with bizarre stuff he’d picked up somewhere (Kraftwerk??). Only then I went into Tiernan’s office without knocking, one afternoon, and found him crouched on the floor touching up the detail on Gouger’s latest masterwork.

  After the first stunned second I started to laugh. Partly it was the look on Tiernan’s face, the mixture of scarlet guilt and puffy defensiveness as he flailed for a plausible excuse; partly it was at myself, for having bounced cheerfully along through all of this without a single suspicion, when of course I should have copped months earlier (since when were underprivileged youths even on Tiernan’s horizon?). “Well well well,” I said, still laughing. “Look at you.”

  “Shhh,” Tiernan hissed, hands coming up, darting his eyes at the door.

  “My man Gouger. In the flesh.”

  “Jesus shut up, please, Richard’s—”

  “You’re better-looking than I expected.”

  “Toby. Listen. No no listen—” He had his arms half-spread in front of the painting so that it looked ridiculously as if he was trying to hide it, painting? what painting? “If this gets out, I’m dead, I’m, no one will ever—”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Tiernan. Calm down.”

  “The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school—”

  “Is it just the Gouger stuff? Or more of them?”

  “Just Gouger. I swear.”

  “Huh,” I said, peering over his shoulder. The picture was classic Gouger, a thick layer of black paint with two savagely grappling boys sgraffitoed into it, through them a wall of minutely penciled balconies with a tiny vivid scene unfolding on each one. It must have taken forever. “How long have you been planning this?”

  “A while, I don’t—” Tiernan blinked at me. He was very agitated. “What are you going to do? Are you . . . ?”

  Presumably I should have gone straight to Richard and told him the whole story, or at least found an excuse to pull Gouger’s work from the show (his enemies
were on his trail, something like that—giving him an OD would just have made him even more of a draw). To be honest, I didn’t even consider it. Everything was going beautifully, everyone involved was happy as a clam; pulling the plug would have ruined a lot of people’s day for, as far as I could see, no good reason at all. Even if you wanted to get into the ethics of it, I was basically on Tiernan’s side: I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real. As far as I was concerned, the exhibition was exactly the same as it had been ten minutes ago; if people wanted to ignore the perfectly good pictures right in front of their eyes and focus instead on the gratifying illusion somewhere behind them, that was their problem, not mine.

  “Relax,” I said—Tiernan was in such a state that leaving him there any longer would have been cruelty. “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Tiernan blew out a long, shaky breath. “OK. OK. Wow. Got a fright there.” He straightened up and surveyed the painting, patting the top edge of it as if he were soothing a spooked animal. “They are good,” he said. “They are, aren’t they?”

  “You know what you should do,” I said. “Do more of the bonfire ones. Make it a series.”

  Tiernan’s eyes lit up. “I could,” he said. “That’s not a bad idea, you know, from the building of the bonfire right up to the, when it’s going down to ashes, dawn—” and he turned to his desk, fumbling for paper and pencil, his mind already brushing the whole episode away. I left him to it.

  After that little wobble, the show went back to rolling smoothly towards its opening. Tiernan worked flat out on Gouger’s bonfire series, to the point where I was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping more than a couple of hours a night, but if anyone noticed his dazed, grimy look and constant yawning, they had no reason to connect them with the pictures that he lugged in with triumphant regularity. I spun Gouger’s anonymity into a sub-Banksy enigma, with plenty of fake Twitter accounts arguing in semiliterate textspeak over whether he was your man from down the flats who had stabbed Mixie that time, because if so Mixie was looking for him; the media dived on it and our followers skyrocketed. Tiernan and I did discuss, semi-seriously, getting an authentic skanger to be the face of the product, in exchange for enough cash to support his habit (obviously we would need one with a habit, for maximum gritty authenticity), but we decided against it on the grounds that a junkie skanger would be too shortsighted for reliability: sooner or later he would either start blackmailing us or start wanting creative control, and things would get messy.

  I suppose I should have been worrying about what if it all went wrong—there were so many ways it could have, a journalist getting all investigative, me screwing up the slang on Gouger’s Twitter account—but I wasn’t. Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t. So it caught me completely off guard when, a month before the exhibition was scheduled to open and just four days before that night, Richard found out.

  I’m still not sure how, exactly. Something about a phone call, from what little I could gather (pressed against my office door, staring at the dinged-up white paint, heart rate building slowly to an uncomfortable thump at the base of my throat), but Richard threw Tiernan out so fast and on such a searing gust of fury that we didn’t get a chance to talk. Then he came into my office—I jumped back just in time to avoid a door to the face—and told me to get out and not come back till Friday, when he would have decided what to do about me.

  One look at him—white-faced, collar rucked up, jaw tight as a fist—and I had more sense than to say anything, even if I had had a chance to come up with anything coherent before the door slammed behind him with a bang that spun papers off my desk. I packed up my stuff and left, avoiding Aideen the accountant’s round avid eyes through her door-crack, trying to keep my footsteps easy and jaunty on my way down the stairs.

  I spent the next three days being bored, mainly. Telling anyone what had happened would have been idiotic, when there was a good chance that the whole thing would blow over. I had been startled by just how angry Richard was—I would have expected him to be annoyed, of course, but the depth of his fury seemed totally out of proportion, and I was pretty sure he had just been having a bad day and would have settled down by the time I went back to work. So I was stuck at home all day, in case anyone spotted me out and about when I shouldn’t have been. I couldn’t even ring anyone. I couldn’t spend the night at Melissa’s place or ask her over to mine, in case she wanted to walk in to work together in the morning—her shop was only five minutes beyond the gallery, so we mostly did walk in after a night together, holding hands and chattering like a pair of teenagers. I told her I had a cold, convinced her not to come over and look after me in case she caught it, and thanked God she wasn’t the type to decide I was cheating on her. I played an awful lot of Xbox, and put on work clothes when I went to the shops, just in case.

  Luckily I didn’t live in the kind of place where I swapped cheery waves with my neighbors on our way out to work every morning, and if I missed a day someone would call round with cookies to make sure I was OK. My apartment was on the ground floor of a slabby, redbrick 1970s block, jammed eye-jarringly between beautiful Victorian mansions in an extremely nice part of Dublin. The street was broad and airy, lined with enormous old trees whose roots rucked up big patches of the pavement, and the architect had at least had enough sensitivity to respond to that; my living room had great floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors on two sides, so that in summer the whole room was a glorious, disorientating tumble of sunshine and leaf-shadows. Apart from that one stroke of inspiration, though, he had done a pretty lousy job: the outside was sourly utilitarian and the corridors had the hallucinatory, liminal vibe of an airport hotel, long line of brown carpet stretching off into the distance, long line of textured beige wallpaper and cheap wooden doors on either side, dirty cut-glass wall sconces giving off a curdled yellowish glow. I never, ever saw the neighbors. I heard the occasional muffled thump when someone dropped something on the floor above me, and one time I had held the door for an accountant-looking guy with acne and a lot of Marks & Spencer shopping bags, but apart from that I might have had the whole block to myself. No one was about to notice, or care, that instead of going to work I was at home blowing up emplacements and inventing cute gallery stories to tell Melissa on the phone that evening.

  I did do a certain amount of panicking, off and on. Tiernan wasn’t answering his phone, even when I rang from my unlisted landline, so I had no way of knowing how thoroughly he had ratted me out, although the lack of contact didn’t feel like a good sign. I told myself that if Richard had been planning to fire me he would have done it straight out, the same way he had to Tiernan; most of the time this made total, comforting sense, but every now and then there was a moment (middle of the night, mostly, eyes snapping open to the slant of pale light sweeping ominously across my bedroom ceiling as a car passed near-silently outside) when the full potential of the thing thumped down on top of me. If I lost my job, how would I hide it from people—my friends, my parents, oh God Melissa—until I could get a new one? In fact, what if I couldn’t get a new one? All the big firms I had been carefully cultivating would notice my sudden departure from the gallery, notice how the star of the big hyped summer show had abruptly dematerialized at the exact same time, and that would be it: if I wanted a new job I would have to leave the country, and even that might not do me much good. And on the subject of leaving the country: could Tiernan and I be arrested for fraud? We hadn’t sold any of Gouger’s paintings, thank God, and it wasn’t like we had been claiming they were by Picasso, but we had taken funding under false pretenses, that had to be some
kind of crime . . .

  Like I said, I wasn’t used to worrying, and the intensity of those moments took me aback. In facile hindsight it’s tempting to see them as a premonition gone awry, a wild danger signal propelled to me by the force of its own urgency and then scrambled, ever so slightly but fatally, by the limitations of my mind. At the time I just saw them as a nuisance, one that I had no intention of allowing to freak me out. After a few minutes of spiraling panic I would get up, shock my mind out of its loop with thirty seconds under a freezing shower, shake like a dog and then go back to whatever I had been doing.

  On Friday morning I was a little jumpy, enough that it took me several tries to find an outfit that felt like it sent the right message (sober, repentant, ready to get back to work)—eventually I settled on my dark gray tweed suit, with a plain white shirt and no tie. All the same, when I knocked on Richard’s door I was feeling fairly confident. Even his curt “Come” didn’t put me on edge.

  “Me,” I said, putting my head diffidently around the door.

  “I know. Sit down.”

  Richard’s office was a riotous nest of carved antelopes, sand dollars, Matisse prints, things he’d picked up on his travels, all precariously balanced on shelves and stacks of books and each other. He was sifting aimlessly through a large pile of papers. I pulled up a chair to his desk, at an angle, like we were going to be looking through brochure proofs together.

  He said, when he had waited for me to settle, “I don’t need to tell you what this is about.”

  Playing innocent would have been a bad mistake. “Gouger,” I said.

  “Gouger,” Richard said. “Yes.” He picked up a sheet from his pile, gazed at it blankly for a second and let it drop. “When did you find out?”