It was seven-thirty in the morning when the papers rang asking for comment. Boris promised politely that he would respond once he had found his bearings. And to this end, he stood up, shaking away the glittering vestiges of his nocturnal unconscious as he slowly eased into the morning emptiness left in their wake.
Boris pulled a yellowing gown over his shoulders and stepped into his slippers. He caught himself in a mirror on his way out into the lounge room. When, he wondered, just when had he begun to look so curmudgeonly. Shaking his head he plodded into the kitchen. He brewed espresso on the stove, preferring not to eat on that morning.
The phone rang out several times over the hour as it passed, but Boris ignored it. He drank his coffee black on the balcony, banishing the desire for a cigarette back down into some barren corner of his gut where it could be acknowledged without breaking the four and one half months of discipline that had passed.
The images in question were four large photographs of a sexually mute human body. The angles he had chosen were baffling, and he had selected photos from a model whose delicate young body evoked the under age.
Boris had been well-advisedly late to the opening the previous evening. The offending photographs were seized by police men and women who watched soberly as the muscular young hands of the gallery loaded them into a van.
He had been publicly condemned on the late news bulletins, but the issue had only now seized the public’s attention with the dawn of a new news cycle.
On the radio later that morning he was asked if he were a pornographer.
‘Certainly, I shouldn’t think so.’
‘But you are sexualising children.’
‘I’d prefer to leave that up to the children.’
The interviewer grew frustrated by the lack of a winning sound byte.
‘So you are not responsible for taking sexual images of children then?’
He had no desire to answer with a convenient half-truth.
‘The images are what they are. It’s possible that someone might find them sexual. Although surely those who condemn me as a pornographer are saying much, much more about themselves.’
The interview ended on this rhetorical note and Boris’ heart sank slowly.
Later in the morning he heard a news bulletin where his terse comment was tacked onto the end of a story in which he had been verbally disembowelled by a newspaper columnist. Boris was decired as a ‘disciple of the postmodern cult of relativism’ and a man ‘desperate to make a statement’ who puts ‘children at risk for the sake of his own artistic ego’.
Boris pictured his next major work. IT would be a sketch, antamoical almost, of an an animal eating itself, but then again, this was one of the world’s oldest images.
Nobody had so far said it in words, nor put it in print, but as the sun took its mantle in the midday sky, straight reporting moved into reportage and analysis. His critics subjected his ouevre to a harsh, populist glare and the dots of his artistic past slowly connected into the form of the deviant his artistic past.
As he bit the skin around his fingers an old comrade called him, offering to take him to lunch. Boris accepted.
Boris had edited a student newspaper with Jacob many, many years previously. He was now a successful, although not altogether well known writer of sketch-comedy. He’d also released a collection of jokes and tales that he had garnered during his travels of the Baltic states.
They went to an expensive restaurant on the harbour. Boris felt underdressed in the flannel shirt and jeans that he had thrown on. His friend ordered a plate of oysters and a game hen. Boris had no appetite, and settled on a roast pumpkin soup.
His friend grinned all the way across his flat face, but said nothing. Instead, he decided to allow Boris to set the tone and boundaries of the conversation.
They spoke idly of Kosovo until the food arrived.
It was as he crunched oyster shells in his hands that Jacob’s patience finally abandoned him. ‘You’ve really put your foot in it this time, Boris. Well done.’
Brois drew together the shards of his bravado, but they dissolved in a sigh.
‘This is what I had wanted. What I had set out for when I started the work. I should feel, I don’t know, exhilarated or something, but er…’
Out in the street with his lens pressed against the restaurant window, Boris spied a newspaper camera man. He watched his finger poised over the lens, settling again and again on the trigger, like a cat’s tongue lapping up milk.
Boris felt a splash on his palm. A woman in a navy suit had spat in his soup as she passed their table.
‘You’re a dirty old man,’ she said with her coat bundled under her arm.
Jacob looked thoroughly amused. He scrunched up his face apologetically.
‘Sorry old mate, if I’d known’.
‘No, it’s quite alright.’
The woman lingered.
Jacob addressed the woman. ‘Look, what is it that you want? Perhaps my friend can order me another soup for you to spit in.’
She grimaced, and walked away to pay her bill.
Boris looked around. A few diners eyed him cautiously. A man nearby gave him a wink and a thumbs up.
He thanked his old accomplice for the lunch and left the restaurant, leaving the soup and its sputum to grow tepid.
Back at his flat, Boris wilfully ignored the flashing lights on his answering machine. He slumped onto his couch, his middle-aged paunch stretching out the flannelette lines.
Hang it, he thought. He leapt up from the couch and began to rifle through desk draws and cupboards for a cigarette. He found an old crumpled packet of tobacco in the small hollow beside his microwave. The tobacco was dry and stale but would do. He rolled a cigarette with his fingers and patiently he pressed its tip onto the electric stove top until it combusted.
Out on his balcony again, he smoked. And he wondered, as the controversy swirled around him, if there should have been something different to the easy gloom of the Autumn afternoon? Something more urgent, perhaps, to the twittering of birds anticipating the twilight. Something more consequential to the clouds above and the blue-brown fuzz of the city skyline.
No, there was no such weight. Controversy existed elsewhere, in some other cerebral dimension. The world, its earth, air and water, knew nothing of it.