Dante Fog

By Stuart Greenhill

While other boys celebrated their raging hormones by scragging each other from one end of the sports field to the other, Angus Fog was the solitary figure that watched. While other boys played rugby in winter, tagged and bombed each other at the town pool in summer, he sat and did nothing because in his twelfth year, Angus lost his passion. He subconsciously suppressed the why and when the event took place but the repercussions would significantly impact his life.
Angus works for ten years as a theatre designer and builder in Wellington, New Zealand, before his mother, frustrated with his lack of artistic success, buys him a ticket to London. There he creates an alter-ego from the clique bohemian art world. He changes his appearance and name and becomes the successful artist, Dante Fog.
Dante's initial subject matter is the beauty in other people's childhoods. Later, he searches for beauty in the adult world but fails to find it, until he falls in love with Bronagh.
When Dante wakes on the floor of his studio hungover and fearing he may, in a jealous rage, have killed Bronagh or her suspected 'new lover' or both of them, the magnitude of that unknown childhood event resurfaces. Dante must return to New Zealand as Angus to uncover what he suppressed all those years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528967778

Stuart Greenhill

Stuart Greenhill studied English literature and the history of art at Canterbury University. He spent a decade teaching before applying his creative skills to business. This is the first of his novel life that has been put to paper. When Stuart is not writing, he is distilling Gin at his Fenton Street Distillery in the small rural town of Stratford upon the Patea River, New Zealand.

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Gun

About the Author

Stuart Greenhill studied English literature and the history of art at Canterbury University. He spent a decade teaching before applying his creative skills to business. This is the first of his novel life that has been put to paper. When Stuart is not writing, he is distilling Gin at his Fenton Street Distillery in the small rural town of Stratford upon the Patea River, New Zealand.

Dedication

For Jo.

Copyright Information ©

Stuart Greenhill (2020)

The right of Stuart Greenhill to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528934183 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528967778 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

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Automaton

It was still dark when his hangover woke him. He lay on the wooden floor and watched the ceiling spin to the one-legged automaton pole dancing across the lane. She suggested everything was in its rightful place, but when he sat his body ached and the stench of vomit told him something terrible had happened, but he couldn’t recall what. He dry-retched. His throat was raw and reflux brought tears to his eyes. The ceiling flickered with the dancer’s red laughing lips, as though she knew he was missing something far more important than a leg. How long had he slept? What day was it? The woman cast, forever dancing on one leg or no leg, seemed like his touchstone—a reminder that anything was possible; that life had no limits. The irony that she was broken, had one routine, one leg and danced on one spot escaped Fog, who tended to ignore obvious if it got in the way of self-delusion.

He crawled to the bed—a mattress on the floor—and rubbed warmth into his aching legs until a finger slipped through a rip in his trousers and touched wet bark.

A jolt of memory.

A tree in a park.

Lovers in a taxi.

He recalled following her… no… them from the party. It was raining, the tree was opposite a row of Victorian houses, and from a branch, his eye pressed against a first-floor window until the forms became people he could name—Bronagh and the Australian.

Other fragments of the evening returned: a dog shitting, a garden and a knife. His stomach dropped to the weight in his pocket. Digging beneath a sodden handkerchief, he pulled the knife free. It lay still and silent on his open palm, the blade tucked like a secret inside the metal sheath. He shivered, cold, placed the blade on the bed beside him and pulled off his wet thermal and shirt then chinos and boxers up and down his pallid legs—hairless boughs, she had teased, for dead birds and snow.

He tried to dry himself, but the blanket only scratched, so he patted his chinos for the crackle of a cigarette packet, sucked a flame until the tobacco glowed, drew deeply, as one practised in filling awkward silences with posturing, so emptiness wasn’t silent but without an audience it was. He released a long onomatopoeic breath that carried russet leaves from a dead heart.

He needed to piss. He was a black cloud thundering at the head of a hangover, limping over brushes, tubes of paint and broken canvas. Where was his memory of this? Who had been here and trashed his studio? How had he twisted his ankle? He felt something wet on his big toe—was it paint or shit? Where was his other shoe?

He turned, distracted by a mirror-length view of himself. A naked incubus emerging from spent smoke and shadowed eyes burnt black by seeing…

…her framed in the townhouse window.

His eye pressed to the glass, seeing them kiss.

And there had been an emaciated dog hunched on the street outside, squatting, crab-like, on tiptoes until a white turd dropped. Good dog. He wanted to take credit for that shit. Wanted to pick it up and put it in an envelope. Pick it up and push it through the slit-hole in her door…

Framed in the window he had seen them kissing, and he felt an owl clasp his taloned heart, bleeding:

Drip-drop, he dropped into the frozen garden. Drip-drop, twisting an ankle, winding himself.

Drip-drop, down with turds on leashes, curly-whirly-long-thick-thin. Down with bloodworm, cockroach-splattered and creepy-crawlies walking over his broken brown.

The park gate creaked. The streetlight drizzled pointillist across the glistening road. It was almost 3:00 when he limped his jealousy to their door.

Was that how it went? Had he crossed the road, knife in hand and killed her or him or both? He could not remember.

She had once told him, ‘All hearts should be refreshed in spring. No ever-ever-afters while skin shines brighter than the sun.’ He should have known.

And after, he could not remember what, but in the taxi home, he noticed the season had changed. Out the window an ugly world had risen in discords of blood red, orange-yellow and the Kirchner people on the streets were elongated, disfigured, jagged-edged and ugly, and he recalled their tumbling-leaf faces turning to welcome him into the ugliness and the turmoil and the suffering of a winter and he coughed until his eyes filled with tears.

His cigarette-butt zit-died in the pan. His acrid piss followed. A trapeze of yellow swung beneath a lampshade aping his fears, dark to light and back again, revealing in the mirror a fop of dark hair stuck to his forehead, the heavy quizzical eyelids, the quirky pout and languid expression of uncertainty, until he looked at his stained hand resting on the porcelain basin.

He twisted the tap to the hard end of its thread, waited until cold became hot, scrubbed vigorously until the swirling red torrent ran clear and then washed the knife and shoe. One shoe. Where had he lost the other? Beneath the tree? On the road as he ran or in the taxi?

He splashed cold water on his face, drank from the tap, picked up the wet vest, jacket, shirt, trousers and stuffed them into a bag. With a towel he wiped his shrivelled cock, butt and legs again. The scratches on his legs stung—his ankle throbbed. He pulled on overalls, and with his discarded clothes in a bin liner, limped barefoot down the stairs and out the building’s front door.

Across the lane, beside Denny’s Strip Joint, Mr Huang’s laundry hissed vapers through the roof as his family worked through the night. Its green façade contrasted with the red tattoo shop next door, covered with patterns and symbols curvilinear with hatchings, and alongside that was Islington Indian. Its façade was covered from top to bottom with white text on green and squatted beneath Victorian brick at the intersection with Upper Street.

He limped to a pile of rubbish bags outside Huang’s, avoiding a street light, not wanting to be spot-lit in the human zoo of a common circus. The automaton winked, her blue top dropped, and the red bulbed-nipples caught the northerly chasing leaves down the lane. He tightened his grip on the rubbish bag until he buried it beneath the others.

The post office clock struck four when he re-entered the studio. He found a T-shirt, vest, woollen trousers and a trench coat and dressed; his shin was bleeding. In the bathroom he stuffed toilet paper inside his sock to absorb the blood, noticed the knife on the basin and snatched it up, angry at his oversight. Back in his studio, he dragged a wooden ladder to the centre of the gothic-window and climbed to perch on the stone lintel. In a cleft, he wedged the knife and sat back thinking it would be safe there. Cold stone pressed at his back and into his knees, rain slanted onto the window, and his thoughts returned to Bronagh fucking. He retched again, spat the bile into the darkness, wiped tears from his eyes, nose on his sleeve, looked for truth but found life. What was it but a conflict between the visible and the suppressed? He had caught those moments in the blink of an eye, with the flick of a brush, and believed he had found truth with her. But the hair on the back of his neck told him there was someone else who’d deceived him. He didn’t know what that someone did or how or why, but he knew when. He tightened the coat across his shoulders and watched the automaton’s red-lip laugh and wink as if it knew the secret.

Angus Fog

When he was little, he beamed up at strangers and told them, ‘My name is Angus Fog. Angus is Scottish, and Peterhead is where my great-granny lived.’

His Nana Jean said, ‘When you are old enough, you will play in the Pipe Band, march up the main street on Anzac Day and make your great-granny very proud.’ And she would flap her left arm in and out, in and out.

‘How marvellous, Jean, you’re playing the pipes,’ cheered Auntie Constance.

It did not matter that his great-granny had been dead for 18 years because that side of the family, his mother’s, believed you could still be alive when you were dead; just as you could be dead when you were alive. Angus had not understood that at the time.

His great-grandfather built bridges over all the streams and rivers around Mount Taranaki, which used to be Mount Egmont, but whoever was anywhere first, always had naming rights. That was something he was told to remember: History always prevailed, even when you thought it was dead.

He told people his surname was Fog. ‘Fog was English. Fogs, Mists and Hooping-Coughs all came from the Fens, which is in the east of England.’ His father’s family came from England. His father told him the English and Scots had a history of fighting each other. His father said, playing the bagpipes would frighten the English-side of him to death. Angus did not want to die, but he still felt he had to please his great-granny.

He had a pen pal until he was 12. He wrote and told him he lived in Stratford, but not the Stratford where Shakespeare lived. Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. It was founded in 1196. His Stratford was founded in 1877 upon the Patea River, which ran through a small rural town in Taranaki, New Zealand, which was in the Southern Hemisphere. He wrote and told his pen pal that Maori were here first, and Taranaki meant shining peak because it rose 2,518 metres above sea level, but that was tiny compared to the height Shakespeare rose to.

Angus had been a happy boy until his boyhood happiness disappeared. He couldn’t tie it down to a day or week, but he knew it happened after he had posted his last pen pal letter to Romeo DaSilva, and that was in summer.

Romeo lived in Santa Rosa, Laguna, the Philippines, which was in the Western Pacific Ocean. He wrote and told Angus that his dad had run away with another mother. Angus thought that was sad, very sad, because he believed mothers and fathers, like swans, mate forever. So, if it was the cause of his lost childhood happiness, then it occurred during the summer of his twelfth year.

His mother had put the change in his temperament down to hormones, his father to gormless stupidity, as if it had dropped from his pocket, and he hadn’t bothered to go back and pick it up. His mother’s frustration overflowed sometimes. ‘Remember Angus, when random things excited you?’

He shrugged non-committed.

‘You do!’ And she would take him by the shoulders and shake, like his grandfather did to the television, shake it in the hope that something loose miraculously fixed itself, and the picture came back on. ‘When a twig in the creek sent you scrambling to collect enough for your armada,’ she insisted, ‘You blue-tacked them across a sea you painted on your bedroom wall.’ Her tone changed, but her smile remained, ‘Your father was not impressed.’ He remembered, and he remembered the fractured light through Nana Jean’s sherry glass as she sat on a deckchair in the garden. The glass resting against her cheek and shafts of colour-filled cracks and wrinkles of her skin with velvet, as the surface filmed translucence. Even the coloured shadows across a swimming pool gave him pleasure, how light and colour-transformed liquid into something metallic, something pliable, something soft.

That was before it had occurred, when his report card read, ‘Angus entertains the class so much that he could teach it on his own.’ The following year he moved to the back of the room to sit with his only friend Harvey. There he played battleships on the inside cover of his textbook.

And it changed his name. He had always thought parents that named sons Nigel were cruel, but for those, like him, who weren’t christened Nigel but became one, it was doubly so. During the Nigel No Friends’ Period of his early adolescence, while other boys celebrated their raging hormones by scragging each other from one end of the sports field to the other, he became the solitary figure that watched. While other boys played rugby in winter, tagged and bombed each other at the pool in summer, blew up frogs with firecrackers in spring and made forts and went to cubs and scouts year ’round, he withdrew to playing mournful tunes on his bagpipes, like Flowers of the Forest and Going Home.

His mother had taken the change in his report comments to heart, and when his high school teacher dismissed hormones as the reason for his withdrawal, she dragged him off to the library in the hope of reviving his enthusiasm for things and introduced him to art.

‘Art gives boys like you an opportunity to dream,’ she told him. ‘You must have dreams, Angus!’

Angus detected numerous flaws in the statement, which he chose to ignore, not because his sullenness prevented him, but because he liked his mother’s attention.

The town’s hub of culture was the library. It resided on the first floor of the municipal building in the middle of the main street. The test for a boy with pieces missing was darting through the Hall of Remembrance to the library steps without dying. Hundreds of photographs of young men tilted forward from the walls, like martyrs and saints. Dressed in all their pride, they projected all their warrior determination to reassure loved ones they would protect them and if needed, die attempting to do so, which they did to their horror in their mutilated millions.

‘Poor sweet boys,’ Mother would say, ‘A tragic bloody waste,’ she insisted, scolding that someone no one had ever found, holding that someone without a name to account. Best not to look up. And Angus tried not to look up. He wasn’t a hand-holder, but he would, in his head, hold close to his mother as their steps echoed a tiptoe, so as not to wake death or other human obscenities forced upon the young.

When he got to the stairs, he’d run up them, frantically up, up, up two steps at a time; the hair on the back of his head needling as gut-wrenching sadness and death chased close behind. And at the library glass door, he would stop and hold it open, waiting.

‘Hurry, Mother, hurry.’

But she would not hurry, and the gap between open and shut would shrink as his fear expanded, because he knew soon, very soon, not only his mother but he too might be sucked back down and be trapped behind glass in a frame filled with lost dreams. Some nights he lay awake sweating hot with guilt, wondering how long he would hold the door open next time to keep himself alive before he shut his mother out. And he would wonder why his mother never feared, never hurried, never cared to escape, as if there was another mother inside. A mother that knew death and sadness and loss, one that had some sort of deal going on.

Art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement were limited at the Stratford Library. ‘There just isn’t the demand for the arts,’ justified the librarian. ‘People want hunting, sport and gardening, you see.’

Sixty-thousand cows alchemised grass into gold around his hometown where large houses squatted upon kiwi dream sections, and Lux-liquid mothers peered with pride from their kitchen windows at clipped grass edges, weed-free lawns, hedges cut, gardens fenced and driveways swept. They slept all night knowing Blitzen was annihilating slugs and snails across the district, while DDT was destroying anything tunnelling. Every weatherboard and corrugated roof, every letterbox, signpost, fence and pergola was summer-painted. Health stamp children raced this way, and that on mountain bikes, scooters, skateboards and roller-skates. Seasonal changes saw mothers frocked and stockinged or mini-skirted high in summer, hairdressers permed, cut bobs, blow-waved and coloured and set all days. Fathers wore smart shorts, knee-high walk socks and garters in summer, and corduroys, oilskins, nugget shoes and home-knitted jerseys in winter.

And the town’s wealth brought aspirations to be more than just a farming community with associated service providers. A small minority with a loud voice took the town’s strong Thespian connection onto the global arts calendar. Streets, already boulevard-wide, were given Shakespearian names, such as Cordelia, Regan, Portia and Hamlet, as successive councils and mayors slowly stripped away heritage to leave only plaques informing visitors and future generations of what had once been. There were no gondolas upon the river, just boat races at the pubs (four of them). No men in tights, just tight men chasing leather balls upon the green, but the bard’s tragedies still played out. Behind venetian blinds and curtains, love, betrayal, jealousy and pride gorged themselves before waddling on down to the next generation.

So Angus’ early knowledge of art was polarised between frescoes and sculptures of hairless fannies and shrivelled penises, and the overly impressionistic, psychotic and depressive art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was to that latter period his mother directed him.

‘I don’t really like this art, Mother.’

‘Keep thinking like that, Angus, and you will have no choice but to become an accountant,’ she scolded. ‘Is that what you’d like to be, numbers and no dreams?’

He thought of his father hunched over the kitchen table tallying up all the lambs he’d sent to slaughter, the kilometres he travelled in his car, and bills that needed paying, and answered, ‘No.’

‘Well, apply yourself to art because there are no better observers of life than artists.’

So, he went with the impressionists and fauvists because their art at least bounced across the retina of life, which comforted a boy that feared depth. Matisse became an Open Window to flower pot, yacht and water and Monet splashed colour, as only one with an eye could. Dabs and splotches, flat planes and vibrancy provided light and uncomplicated places for him to hide. There was little effort to find pleasure in these, which delighted his mother. He took the books home and sketched and mimicked what he liked, used reference books at the city library to glean what he could about the artist’s lives and applied the information to his own. Clandestine smoking lasted a week. A Salvation Army store beret lasted much longer. But the arty-farty was all too much for his father, who called the entire bloody thing a charade brought on by an overindulgent mother.

After Angus took off the beret and stopped using oui and bonjour, the paintings began to speak to him. The language wasn’t foreign linguistically but was in meaning. They drew out questions that were intuitive rather than constructed from a conscious need to know.

The Poor Fisherman by Chavannes haunted him. He had asked his mother, why the man stood in the boat with his back to his family and looked so sad? Why was the Mother picking flowers while the child, the baby, sat alone on the grass between them? And why did The Cry of Munch’s Woman reverberate through the entire picture and when he turned away, why did he sense his world was shattered by that cry too? She said she did not know and ordered via post, Golding’s books on cubism and the post-impressionists.

‘It will help you sleep better, Angus.’

Picasso’s multifaceted view of life didn’t help him sleep. For a boy who thought he was already in pieces, cubist art was a miserable experience. Dali’s formed into nightmares that sat him up in bed screaming or wandering through the house searching for limp clocks, or a girl running with a hoop. Kandinsky’s abstractions lacked Van Gogh’s truth, and that was too adult and unsettling for him. And when he saw the boy in Schiele’s portrait of Mother and Son, he wondered what shipwreck dropped life rafts into those teal blue eyes. His mother had said, artists were seers, so he endured until art became his reference point to interpret his world.

It was his mother, years later, that had sent him to London. She arrived one afternoon at the door of his Wellington flat. Despite having clambered up a flight of steps, being buffeted and drenched by a southerly gale, she still had a smile when he opened the door.

Her suitcase matched the green felchet hat that teetered precariously at the back of her head. A paper boat swamped by the deluge, Angus thought, as he stepped forward to hug his welcome but gripped her shoulders instead and shook a puddle to her feet.

‘I thought I’d surprise you.’

‘You have. Love the red gummies, Mum.’

‘Please, darling, call me Penny.’

‘Why, why would I call you that?’ he stammered unsettled by the request.

‘Because that is my name.’ He caught his mother’s cautious smile; her head tilted in the hope of a favourable response. ‘Seriously, Angus, there are so many mums and mothers in the world; wouldn’t you just like a Penny to be different?’

As she stepped into the flat, he told her he preferred mother, knowing it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

Her bag dropped to the floor. She flicked a drip off the tip of her nose and said, ‘I thought if anyone would understand…’ her voice faded, ‘… never mind.’

His mother was defined within the borders of motherliness, and he wanted to keep her inside that comfortable scope. His reference points for ‘mother’ were Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz, Durer, Raphael, prints and paintings weighted heavily towards mother as victim, and in her arms, always in her arms was the child. Angus believed, even at 35, the status of child-victim still gave him emotional leverage and protection.

He turned from shutting the door to his mother’s suitcase.

‘I see you have a new bag.’

She screwed up her nose. ‘A little too new, isn’t it. I expect it will develop character when it visits new places.’ She looked up fearing she would be contradicted. ‘Cairo, then… perhaps, Turkey, definitely Athens, Morocco, Rome.’ She caught herself, ‘Silly. Getting carried away. Should be happy I’ve…’ she looked at the bag, ‘we got to Wellington. I suppose, it will remain just another bag off the shelf until later.’

’So, why are you here?

‘Because of you, dear. Come on, we’ve got a travel agent to find.’

Angus leaned into the southerly down Ghuznee Street, still buttoning his coat. His protestations that he enjoyed working at the local repertory theatre, that it wasn’t a waste of his fine arts degree, were swept away by the howling wind or totally ignored because once inside the Cuba Street travel agents, his mother stepped up to the counter and bought him a ticket to London.

‘But I don’t want to go to London, Mother.’

‘Don’t be silly! Of course you do. All talented artists go to London to develop their skills, isn’t that right…’ And she peered across at the young travel agent’s nametag, ‘… Lucy?’ And Lucy duly agreed.

‘Oh, how dull,’ chipped Angus over his Mother’s shoulder, ‘of course you would agree! How bloody predictable, you’d do or say anything for commission.’

His mother rebuked his rudeness as he knotted his arms back up Ghuznee. She insisted he must not waste his talent. ‘And even if you don’t have talent as an artist here, then London is the place to find it. Mark my words. It is!’ And the wind gripped his shoulders as if complicit and shook and shook and shook, as if it too thought he wasn’t correctly wired.

‘How long are you staying, Mother?’

‘Until I see you on that plane.’

‘Father, will miss you.’

‘Only as his cook and cleaner. Besides you’ll be half a world away in a few weeks. I want to make the most of you now.’

She refused his bed for a dilapidated couch in the lounge. Like most of the furniture, it legitimised the term semi-furnished on his lease. He hoped the discomfort would send her packing, but it didn’t.

The first Monday in Wellington, his mother bought a pair of sandshoes and set about plotting out the streets, like they were rooms in her garden. Theatres, shopping malls, food stalls and markets became beds of colour; Taranaki Street became a rockery, Cuba Street filled with palms, distinctive and difficult to lose; Ghuznee Street, she knew as a fortress with dull façades and light poles transforming into painted poppies. The abstraction suited her. There was a legitimacy about it that reminded him of childhood simplicity. Her nameless new world lacked expectations, things could just be, and she expressed that pleasurable freedom in the small pleasures she bought back, like chocolate and wine.

Work was his excuse not to accompany her. Constructing props and stage sets were things he could happily knock down and rebuild, but he would not dismantle the idea of Mother. He felt it protected him and feared that without it, his mother would be vulnerable too.

On the morning of his flight, his mother helped him pack and shared the taxi to the airport, reassuring him, ‘There were better opportunities for the likes of him overseas.’ She never elaborated on what the likes of him actually meant, but having come around to the idea of going, he could stretch his imagination until it meant special and talented.

Outside departures, he left her waving a handkerchief, but it wasn’t until much later that he realised the absurdity of her standing still with her suitcase at her feet.

Catch Me If You Can

The train emerged from under the airport into the sunlight with a rising intimation of impatience and boredom matched by many of the faces. Despite himself, Angus was anything but bored. He had travelled from one side of the planet to the other to be part of a script… No, he thought, not part of a script but the lead character in a movie or a novel. He stared out as industry and warehouses merged into housing estates and tenements, then into high-rises and office blocks with penthouses on top, as small brick walls, graffitied and dirty, became large and clean; villages, once pastoral, became multi-storied blocks of concrete, and he just knew he had to find height; he told himself he had to rise above the common.

The train hummed under footbridges enclosed by cages that stretched across tracks and alongside streets rowed in dull brick uniformity, past orange overalls, shaped like humans, and wire fences collecting plastic and signs. No Climbing. Keep off the Tracks. No Trespassing. He sat back with a nonchalance, knowing the setting was telling him to climb beyond this level. And he looked across at two tourists who were the only people speaking. In muffled but excited chatter, their fingers pointed and plotted their trip on a map to the next museum or castle. They too knew there was something beyond, but they couldn’t look up, not while in character, to nod an acknowledgement that they were special too.

Among the suave and cultured