The Conservation Society part 4

"I went to Turandot at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden not the performance I saw at Glynbourne a friend got me tickets sat in the nose bleeds but the stalls after the interval the National Theatre's got a few duds on at the moment darling my ticket for Glastonbury Festival hope they're backstage hope I'm back for the Lake District off to Chelsea for oysters for my party you coming mustn't forget the wine lodger left without paying the rent unemployed suing him only two weeks rent but it's the principal and he's Portuguese...."

Jake stared abstractly at Laurence, his dinner guest, sat before him in a high backed arm chair like a shrunken skull with a see-through bouffant and wondered whether melanoma was not the only thing white people were lacking. Jake had, once again chosen badly, his own life was in real danger, his cancer had returned, Disability Living Allowance had been stopped, an application for Personal Independence Payment rejected and his only other financial support ESA once again under review. Like many in the UK's hidden financial climate starvation and suicide threatened his reality.

Jake had dared a Facebook clarion-call for help on his wall.

'Vunerable right now. Life not going well. Need a friend'.

He had received a private post in his message box from a friend promising a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on.

"... Bournemouth she not being well for a while my mother brother and sister live too far away it's left to me we really never got on she's difficult not that my relationship is great with my siblings things are difficult don't know how I'm expected to get away to Europe this year and pay for the care home I'm not missing Avignon festival Peter Brook Mahabaratha of course you coming to the shaman gathering on Mikonos I'm a healer or so I'm told book on Mandala's coming on working to deadline exhausting..."

Jake excused himself and went to check on the casserole the ingredients of which he'd bought with the last money he might ever have.

The Conservation Society part 3

Between the first Facebook post announcing his death and his actual demise on the Arts and Crafts verandah of The Conservation Society, Arnold, now sunk in morose voyeurism as threads of comments kicked his existence into the past he lost the will to live, his virtual demise having eclipsed the rumour of his own reality.

Well before Arnold hung artfully arranged as a Jake and Dino Chapman in the garden of The Conservation Society not only had the Facebook post announcing, prematurely, Arnold's death not been taken down once it had been confirmed by his ex-wife who had seen him shuffling about like a trapped animal in the gloom of his flat through the letter-box; the announcement that he was indeed alive, Arnold noticed, received a reception so luke-warm as to be more devastating than being pronounced dead.

'Fuck, he couldn't even succeed at his own death'. Came one comment.

Great news?' Read another.

Most fell into virtual silence following his resurrection.

The Comedy fanzine, though it issued an apology for the distress caused to the erstwhile comedian, allowed not only the former life-rubishing posts connected to his departure to remain undeleted but also allowed a debate as to his age, 'actually, I 'm only fifty-seven' he said to no one.

'75, isn't he!'

'No, he wasn't 75, 70 more like'.

'Nah, he was over 80'.

Arnold did not know what was being indicated; none of the many commentators had thought to dial his landline or mobile phone to confirm for him or herself the rumour, or even after confirmation of life, knock at his door apart from the silhouette of his ex-wife through the frosted glass of the front door of his basement flat; what could this mean.

To say that Arnold felt bitterly betrayed was understatement. He felt keenly now that the world in which he had lent his affable if flawed personality, his talents, his class, his excellent manners, his time hosting events listed in the most cultured listing magazines in the country, his efforts, albeit behind the scenes, to make things generally nice for other people- had been rewarded with, clearly, and Arnold scrolled once again through weeks of comments, had been rewarded with collective malicious joy at the moment of his 'death', his resurrection followed by the worst coup de grace or nail in the coffin; total indifference.

The Conservation Society part 2

After Arnold had gotten word of his own death things could only go down hill. He wasn't even Ill; one day he settled before his computer screen, opened social media and scrolled through a veritable flood of tributes and reminisces from people who crawled out of his present and distant past to fill comment boxes on Facebook and Twitter. On his own Facebook wall he read 57 RIPs, from well-wishers, and counting.

While Arnold made himself a filter coffee in his East Dulwich basement flat bought at a time when property was cheaper and the area he lived in comfortably 'down-to-earth' and not yet apeing a village in Provence, with it's bijou cafes, power-mummies and the children Tabitha Taser and Tarquin Taser, and passive-agressive high-achievers but a working class borough of South-East London - for an instance the edges of his own physical being shuddered, momentarily, as though, like the famous man prodded by a million fingers of a million admirers, eventually liquifying him, in one single day Arnold had begun, in his mind's eye, to move out of focus.

In the 1980s and 1990s, sets and subsets had merged, each seeking in each other a supposed move up some imaginary social ladder. The Brockley set found parity with the Greenwich crowd, the Greenwich with the East Dulwich, the East Dulwich with the Camberwell Grove set; however, none could quite penetrate the hallowed higher ground and higher financial status of Blackheath and Dulwich Village.

Like interlocking and interchangeable electric eels in a selective soup, the groups mingled and merged in a number of mind-bogglingly self-selective crush zones; comedy clubs, poetry cellars, Eastern European Gypsy Evenings, Bread Tasting Garden parties, concerts, festivals, out of the way restaurants and distinguished one from the other, seasonally, to mark oneself out from the crowd that saw itself selective and which, unlike Scandinavia was bound together, in the main, by the wrong kind if snow.

Rock n Roll deaths were not uncommon and following in the wake, and at the actual wake, of one who had overdosed on narcotics it was not uncommon to find traces of the very same narcotic, in specks and lines around at the location at which the bereaved gathered in a chorus of sniffles and shuffling which had little to do with tears. An alcoholic demise was invariably celebrated in the pub which had merrily contributed to the wet-brained death of the recent cause-celebre and on online fanzines the wider community, in a jamboree of schadenfreude, put the boot in. 'Failing comedian, wasn't he!' 'Last gig terrible, no act, drunk', 'Arsehole! 'thought he died years ago'. At the near-end of their own failed careers it seemed Arnold, as an alternative comedian had somehow slipped from being laughed with to being himself the object of ridicule. 'Loser!'. Comedy fanzines high-lighted his contribution to comedy greats and even credited him, in his day with being the originator of a whole genre but, in the same breath they, strangers and some so-called friends and acquaintances alike knitted at the guillotine of his alleged death. 'Fucking talentless pisshead', a former friend and club promoter wrote.

In the beginning someone had posted an enquiry, an enquiry that hinted heavily at death as reason for online absence, albeit a brief one, and within two comment boxes of the original text Arnold went from present tense to past tense; that someone who ad written the insidious post had followed a young lady to her European homeland, broken the umbilical cord to his London gang in a shower of confetti, only to, months after separate and divorce, finding himself an exile d'amour, in Lichtenstein. In exile he had sought to elevate his own miserable series of disastrous romances and take a shot in the dark enquiring after one of the gang who showed, early on, public signs of hubris and addiction in equal measure to constitute an ingredient for career suicide in a distant future it was now ripe to inquire into.

'Where's Arnold? Haven't seen him around?. Has anyone heard from him?'

'What's happened?!'

'Heard he was dead'

This short flourish of Facebook posts Arnold himself had observed in horror, were to be the catalyst, from which a death-by-a-thousand-pernicious-needles would lead to...well, his actual death on the Arts and Crafts verandah on The Conservation Society's sofa.

Seated with his coffee he scrolled from the first genuine snow drift of concern to the full annihilating avalanche, from queries, to conjecture, from uncertainty to confirmation and dead-certainty in the blink of an eye; dead, here being the operative word.

Arnold thought of going out but paused, he had noticed that his local organic greengrocer had joined the speculative fray along with the landlord of his local pub, with a litany of condolences and somehow, later that day and later in the week and following months, each time his spirits failed him at his front door, his coat half on, his keys dangling from his right hand.

The Conservation Society

The Conservation Society

Valerie and Tony were beside themselves with fury; that day and all weekend people were coming from all over, for the exhibition and later the party, and Arnold, an old friend fallen on hard times and thus useless to anyone, had only gone and died on their Grade II listed veranda.

“What shall we do with the body?” asked a bewildered Valerie to no one in particular, “We can’t cancel”.

“Fuck him, Fuck, fuck fuck fuck”, Tony’s mobile phone rang “ Hi Ted, Yeah we have  everything's set up, amps, mics ....Andre, Glen Tiles from Squash...Get here for...well, a jam really, just plug in...okay, Bye, Ted, Bye!, Bye, bye”.

Tony looked murderously at the corpse stretched out on one of the two raggedy sofas. The veranda, a wrought iron decorative tiled late-Nineteenth-century affair in the Arts and Crafts tradition, was divided by a central door, an  exit, as it were, leading directly down a dozen steps to a vast wooded garden; although the Arts and crafts movement invited nature into living spaces, a fresh corpse was all too real.  

Valerie crossed the high-ceilinged stuccoed hallway to the basement door. She would go downstairs to the basement to make sure the exhibits; paintings, sculptures were exactly how she had arranged and rearranged them the evening before; It was eight O’clock in the morning, at 11 a.m. the first of the local residents, who lived within the elevated one mile radius, would be arriving soon. The Conservation Society was cosily bordered by a chain of cappaccino out-lets, farmers markets, micro-breweries, art galleries and whole-food shops which marked the area beyond as exclusive and whose boundary began and ended at the main roads of Lewisham Way, Crofton Park, Adelaid Avenue and crowned by a green mound-shaped open expanse; Hilly Fields. The houses surrounding Hilly Fields were originally built two centuries ago for wealthy industrialists involved in business at the docks at Greenwich and Deptford and the Port of London during the zenith of mercantile and maritime trade during the colonial century. The area directly above Greenwich was now colonised by the middle-classes and known wryly to outsiders as ‘The  Conversation Society’ and to those within,- who were currently applying for the status of 'Village' huddled within a metropolis of several million ordinary souls-  asThe Conservation Society  The guests would begin arriving to view the creative works in general and scrutinise the house and garden in particular; it was the first day of The Conservation Society’s Open House Art Week.

Valerie cast a perfectionist’s eye on the art-work but having shifted and re-shifted paintings, watercolours and sculptures the previous evening late into the night she resolved that though the triptych oil entitled ‘shoes’ could possibly be interchanged with the black and white analogue photograph triptych entitled ‘The Teignmouth from a moving train’ for balance – she would sit with the mild discomfort of her indecision. She stared out through the basement window at the view afforded where soon women’s ankles and men’s brogues, Birkenstocks and chinos would mingle in small groups or wander about, their owners voices praising the unique wildness of the garden and eccentric character of the house for Valerie was aware, even if mildly, that the house and garden were what were really on show, somewhat unfairly, she thought turning to survey, once again the artistic rendering and collaborative effort of herself and those she chose to include in her circle of close friends.

As Valerie mounted each of the twelve steps leading up to the ground floor she mentally reviewed tasks, as yet uncompleted which completed, would each, like mile-stones signally the successful progress on a journey, underscore a day that went by without mishap. There were things she could control; There was the party later on in the evening...God knows there were enough of those, she thought. No, she would hold back on the measures keeping a keen eye on the odd lush for whom the Open House Art Week was an excuse to get drunk; she would be generous with her selectivity to those who showed a genuine interest and especially to those who actually bought a piece of work and also to those who, through their occupations and connections gleaned from conversation, showed some potential usefulness, though she did not like to admit to ruthlessness a keen weather-eye did no harm ; she had already a dozen measures of wine mentally ear-marked for those whose attention she might want to sustain for longer than a brief tour of the gallery space. She would stand sentry before the table of beverages and snacks set up in the furthest left had corner directly in view of the entrance.

On the second step she paused to remind herself get her friend and fellow artist Adrian Luxdor to be on side but kept at a safe distance should his natural exuberance be upsetting;. Gay and extremely mercurial, at times his mischievousness out-weighed his emotional intelligence though she suspected that behind the camp and foolery he knew exactly what to say, when to say it and to whom when he chose to, but his manner was so arbitrary as to make him a liability to be gently control. Valerie enumerated several tasks and errands she would remember needed urgent attention to send the lovely Adrian out of the orbit of an art lover who might be easily flustered by the presence of an artist in full flow.

Where should the booklet listing the art works and their respective sale price would best be displayed on a table, separate from the drinks and snacks; there were enough hand-outs for everyone to go away with. She calculated the number of boxes, a dozen, taking into consideration the estimated footfall during the week. Yes, more than enough, that was that. She told herself. She moved on to the fourth step.

The grissini, Italian bread sticks and the dips were ready and waiting and she would remove them from the fridge adding chives and parsley where necessary atop the ornate bowls at quarter to eleven. Bowls of crisps were not too common, were they; they were organic and expensive; she would leave a packet in full view, maybe not. The baguettes needed slices; not too thick. The previous day she had halted at the idea of a cheese board though she had seen several last year during her mid-week rounds at other houses. No, they had wide open-plan kitchens which the guest passed through to enter gardens or other rooms, her kitchen, a cluttered galley was not open for public view. Unlike others in the area who owned their homes Tony and herself lived in one of seven high-ceilinged flats a result of the mass conversion of grand house affected in the 1950s to accommodate a growing urban population. They were lucky that the landlord, who lived half way across London, appearing within their midst so rarely as to allow the house-holders, all artistes of one form or another, to feel, not only that they were owners of this charming if crumbling pile, was a kind of  patron of the arts also giving full and free use of a basement the landlord had overlooked as potential capital.

On step five she panicked she had promised to not remind herself that after twenty years the landlord was, -  she stood there, her knuckles whitening against the chipped egg-shell paint of the banister, -finalising plans to subdivide the basement, tear down their beloved veranda and turn the basement into two flats thus ending an era of parties and events such as the one she was now arranging. “This is the last party we will hold down here, ever”. She said out loud in the direction of the only indoor toilet accessible to over two decades of revellers as though it were an animate object. As a house, no as a community they had fought and won the right to have the veranda, the exterior at least, listed gaining Grade II status as the last example of bygone craftsmanship, and early Victorian wrought iron and tile work. The fight for the right to hold onto to the basement, in the climate of a housing shortage and property slump had been fruitless. Her heart sank at the thought that, once converted, strangers would move in. Strangers who would be chosen by some estate agent, strangers who would be paying the full market rent well above the protected rents most of the residents enjoyed as a result of a campaign fought, some years previous by house members in the face of rising rents, a draconian heating system and rising damp, and spearheaded by environmental health and the fair rents tribunal, resulting in a fair and low rent for those tenants of over ten years tenure. These strangers, full-time professionals would demand a curfew on the noise of rehearsals and general racket of art in progress going on above their heads; Valerie already hated these strangers with an intensity that surprised her; she welled up with tears of anger she made no attempt to hold back. And there was the matter of the body...

The crowd had arrived, a constant flow, swirling downstairs, nodding at the artwork, earnest conversations, cards exchanged, drinks sipped, but the art-work played second fiddle to the garden. Valerie felt pride as she descended the steps into the sunlit grove created by the veranda and the edge of a small wood. She cast an eye back to the veranda; older locals of The Conservation Society took up places on the sofas and chatted. Valerie was pleased, so pleased, in fact that she was only partially aware of Adrian Luxdor making his way towards a large tree, gathering people as he went; he was looking up and pointing. Valerie kept panic at bay and coolly moved towards the arty crowd now gathered beneath the new installation hanging among the oak leaves.

“Is that what I think it is.” Asked Adrian Luxdor  in his customary loud and over-dramatic style. 

There followed a pause, or rather a gulf into which the afternoon threatened to plunge; the birds and The Conservation Society fell silent.

“Yes’, said Valerie sweeping around  to address her cultured audience below Arnold's body arranged artfully in the tree. “It’s a Dino and Jake Chapman, an original”.