Authors: Chloe Aridjis
Every institution has its visible side and its invisible one, and our Gallery was no different. We guards inhabited both realms, occupying backstage and front, though more the front, and the Gallery’s image depended on us. Curators and directors meanwhile remained behind the scenes, dispatching important decisions from somewhere below. Guides were a third category in between. They felt superior to us yet inferior to the curators, and moved freely between above and below, deferential towards those who knew more, terse with those they assumed knew less. Most of them were cordial. Except for Guy Mount.
And each time we overlapped in a room, my ears were forced to listen as he raised and lowered his voice, especially loud when he sensed the visitors’ excitement, then down once he had their attention, then up again the moment he caught sight of someone drifting, then down once he had them back. That day his voice seemed to issue from somewhere beyond, as if he were speaking through many characters at once, a deck of worn, greasy cards in which the top one acted as mouthpiece for those stacked beneath.
I sensed a current travelling up my right arm, electricity waiting to short-circuit and run amok, and I struggled to contain my anger, forcing a smile when two completely disoriented teens came up to ask after the room with the Hogarths. Something like heartburn flared up at the centre of my chest. An animal was awakening, cracking its joints and flexing its claws. Yet by some magical force, or perhaps simply through channelling Ted, for he would’ve resisted confrontation and accepted his position within the hierarchy, I managed to contain myself.
What they failed to ask at my job interview nine years ago was whether I ever entertained violent thoughts, to which I would reply, today,
Yes, all the time, and more so with every passing hour
. How not to occasionally envision the Gallery as a great locus of violent acts, a potential arena of destruction at both the paint layer and the human?
When I went to stand in front of Venus my eyes could only focus on the network of cracks, a shawl of time draped over her shoulders and running down her back, the paint thinned under so many gazes, especially male, the heaviest gaze of all.
As if to prove my point, a middle-aged man entered the room and came to stand in front of her, his oily pink face full of rapture. I withdrew to my post, a vanishing act in my grey uniform. After a few minutes of gaping he extricated himself from the spell and moved on, falling captive, before long, to another two-dimensional figure; even the most beautiful things, I loved to remind myself, carry out a limited conquest of space.
During my final shift I experienced yet more pulses of anger, the kind I have for the first day or two each time I quit smoking, when two girls entered the room laughing. One of them was punching things into her phone as she walked. If there was one thing I hated it was gadgetry, especially in the museum, and though the tiny plastic keys hardly made noise they always seemed loud to me. I bit my bottom lip as the girl stopped in front of me, ignoring my presence to the point that her right foot was nearly stepping on mine, and pressed a few keys. I was taller so could look straight down at the phone in her hand and see what she was typing. As far as I could tell, she’d composed one message, sent it off, and was now starting another. She ran through her list of contacts, her little fingers impatiently kneading the pad, and started yet another text. Grab the object and toss it across the room, I thought to myself, watch the screen crack into lightning bolts.
And then, like some kind of biblical release, a wonderfully familiar tune at a quarter to six: the jangling of keys. Just as on every other afternoon at a quarter to six, my colleague Henry came ambling through the rooms, hinting to visitors that soon our tiny kingdom would close. He jangled them loudly as he walked, indulging in his favourite moment of the day, when the sun set on our museum and everyone, native and from overseas, was ushered towards the door. There were always one or two individuals who hung back until the last possible minute, to buy the final postcard or see that final painting, and Henry would remind them they could return tomorrow but the reply never varied: they had an early plane or train to catch, this was their very last evening in London, they couldn’t leave until, until, until . . .
At closing time, key jangling aside, I often thought back on old Dietrich, a former colleague. Dietrich had worked at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, home to one of the finest painting collections in Europe, people say, for fourteen years before coming to the Gallery. He was with us for only ten months and then left under mysterious circumstances. He missed his old job too much and suffered from a ‘devastating nostalgia’, he confessed, for the paintings in the other collection. Everything, in fact, was about
the other collection
. At the other collection, there were many more Dürers. At the other collection, there were also more Cranachs (twenty-two to our eleven). At the other collection, the frames were less conspicuous. At the other collection, there were fewer tourists. At the other collection, people didn’t talk so loudly in front of the paintings. At the other collection, they had a nicer way of announcing that the museum was closing. This last reminiscence was, in fact, what wouldn’t free him.
I can’t remember when it started—it must have been the day someone in the canteen inquired into how visitors at the Gemäldegalerie were asked to leave at closing time. Upon hearing this question, Dietrich’s face lit up and he wiped his mouth with a napkin before explaining to all at the table that each afternoon at exactly 5.45 the museum would play the opening bars of
Ode to Joy
followed by a recording that would say ‘The Museum will be closing in fifteen minutes’ in German, French, English and Spanish. Between each language the same tune from
Ode to Joy
would ring out. After a decade and a half of listening to this morsel of Beethoven—without ever, he admitted, buying the recording and hearing the rest—it was etched in his mind like his own name.
It wasn’t long after this conversation in the canteen that Dietrich started to look greatly disturbed whenever closing time approached. His face would cloud over and he’d grow distant and not reply when spoken to. Something was wrong, there’d been a shift in the Teutonic plates, and one day he stopped coming to work. Later, we were told a cousin had come to take him back to Berlin. That was years ago, when I first started working at the Gallery, but I’d still think of him at closing time.
After the
pushout
, museum-guard parlance for kindly requesting all visitors to leave, would come a quick sweep of the rooms to make sure no one had escaped our notice. The paintings fell out of focus; we searched for movement instead. After the halls were cleared, we would congregate in the vestibule for a final tally, some of us spent and still, others twitchy and impatient. Once everyone had been counted we would descend by the main staircase to our changing rooms and branch off into male and female. In a low end-of-day buzz, my colleagues and I would start to unzip, undo and unbutton, removing our grey and returning to civilians like a deflated army on reserve, no uniforms ever allowed to be worn outside the museum, and together with our male colleagues finally rejoin the city.
After going through the motions that evening for the 3,000th time, I exited into Trafalgar Square, reminded of the weather and whatever else had been taking place outside. The square’s lack of coherence bothered me whenever I stopped to give it thought and in a perverse desire to prolong my bad mood I did just that, reiterating my dislike at having to contemplate anyone’s back, from that of Admiral Nelson to Charles I and his horse, not to mention the back of whatever unsightly thing had taken up residence on the plinth. Everything faced Westminster instead of the Gallery and that day just to add offence the two fountains in the square had been stilled, decapitated sea monsters on which pigeons and tourists came to roost in even greater flocks than usual.
Daniel and I had agreed to meet in Piccadilly Circus to go to the Indian restaurant his Colombian friend had recommended. I walked up Haymarket and arrived a few minutes early, struck for the first time by how the layers of the fountain there, also stilled, could easily depict a few circles of hell. Towards the top was a ring of miserable carbonised pigeons, heads tucked in breasts. Below the pigeons, a ring of tourists breathing in city fumes. Below the tourists, a ring of steps coated with the muck of countless shoes from countless countries. Over these three rings, in a failed gesture towards transcendence, towered the statue of Eros with a snapped bow. I caught sight of Daniel about to cross the junction and rushed to meet him before he came to me.
After so many years in London, I still didn’t have a grasp on Soho’s geography. The streets slipped through my fingers the moment I’d walked them regathering behind me like water, and I always had the sense that its residents and prowlers had a secret knowledge of the city’s chambers, held up a mirror to places no one else bothered to look.
That evening the streets became a blaring blinking tangle of neon. Each turn felt like, and indeed was, the wrong one. At first I simply followed Daniel and his limp, assuming he’d looked up directions, but all he could remember, he eventually confessed, as Wardour turned into Frith and Frith to Greek, Brewer and Lexington, was something about a porn shop in an alleyway.
After following several false leads, his instinct proving no better than mine, we came upon an alley with rows of shops with blackened windows. Large, crimson XXXs blinked above the doorways and huge light boxes with pictures of naked women with stars on their nipples cast an erotic glow on to the pavement. In one upstairs window I spotted a woman’s face looking down although she sat so quietly, I wasn’t sure whether it was a woman or a mannequin. Her lips, candy-apple red, seemed poised to indulge every wish, yet there was something, perhaps her vacant stare, that didn’t seem real. It looked strangely familiar and I wondered whether I’d seen it before, behind another window.
Below in the alleyway, large bald men in suits, seedy doormen of fulfilment, hovered in shop entrances. They stopped talking when we appeared, probably eyeing us as potential customers, and lit fresh cigarettes as they stood guard over the red velvety curtains that they alone had the authority to sweep aside, a parting of the curtains, a parting of the legs.
I glanced up at the window but the woman with the deadened gaze was no longer there. As we stood searching for the Indian restaurant amidst the flickering erotica, two peculiar men turned the corner and came ghosting down the alleyway like bodysnatchers on a mission. One was much taller than the other, he could have used his companion as a cane, and they both wore caps angled over their eyes. They passed uncomfortably close to us, I could hear the scraping of their leather jackets and smell the cigarettes they’d just stamped out, but their faces remained hidden and all I saw were their mouths, a dash and a smirk.
The men looked around before jumping into the XXX shop next door, the shorter one removing his cap as if in deference to Eros, a tastier version than the statue in Piccadilly. Once they entered, the velvety curtain fell back into place like a toreador’s cape, obliterating all traces of their arrival. From the doorway of the shop opposite, the competition watched with envy.
Halfway down the row of peek-a-boo shops, whose aggressive lights diverted attention from their shoddiness, we discovered one building without any Xs. Its entrance, a corroded metal door with torn notices for live sex shows, stood ajar. We decided to go in. There was an unlit stairwell, the lights from outside falling on the first stairs but no further. I followed Daniel, who took tentative steps, raising his stronger foot first, then hauling up the other. As the building’s concrete intestine wound its way past one floor and into the next, each lit by a frugal bulb per landing, we passed a pair of clogs laid out on a stair, as if someone had had second thoughts, removed his shoes and headed back down barefoot. The third floor contained only silence and two closed doors, so we forged onwards yet at the fourth and final floor there was no indication of a restaurant. I don’t think either of us truly expected to find anything there.
On the way down I nearly tripped on the pair of clogs and when we reached the ground floor and stepped back into the night, the neon cries of the sex shops and the smoking vultures in the doorways seemed somehow unreal.
Yet right before leaving, I remember looking up at the upstairs window one last time and there she was, the pretty lady with the glassy stare, and I realised then why she looked so familiar. She reminded me of one of the mannequins in the Ed Kienholz exhibition they’d had a few years ago at the National Gallery. An intervention of sorts, they’d said, twentieth-century art placed alongside the old, and I’d been so intrigued by this installation, which took days to set up, unfamiliar flurries blowing through the halls of our museum, that once I heard it was complete I dropped by the Sunley Room on my first lunch break and wandered through the imitation crepuscule of Amsterdam’s red light district, the trapped silicone whores gazing at me through the rain-streaked windows of their showcases, and I remember that as I hurried out, disturbed by the seedy crimson installation winking in our midst, I’d noticed a woman sitting quietly on a bench a few metres from the exhibition and wondered for a second whether she was part of the show before seeing it was one of my colleagues, suited and waistless like me, at her post.
We never found the Indian restaurant and, with my appetite ruined and Daniel’s whetted, we ended up at Spuntino’s, an Italian place in Rupert Street with loud music and young waiters with tattooed sleeves rushing about, two pounds for a Jack Daniels in a tin cup, five fifty for a small pizza. I think we were both relieved to be in a place where we could hardly talk against the punk volume of the music and the chaos around us, and not until after we’d eaten and stepped back into the night of Soho, flyers and rubbish blowing through the streets and the pageantry from pubs spilling out on to the pavement in a jumble of smoke and chatter, did I become aware of my desire to smash the panes of glass in the alleyway. Losing one’s way is never unintentional, they say, there’s a reason you take one street and not the other, pursue false leads or listen to bad directions.