The Late Hector Kipling Read Online Free PDF Page A

honest. She’s making an effort to be as honest as she can be. And she is calling that art.’
    ‘Well, what do you think about that, Hector?’ says Mum, and I know that she’s really referring to my paintings and how that’s what she thinks of as art. But it’s the same as the conversation about chicken. We’ve been having it for twenty years. She knows very well that I’m happy to call all sorts of things art, even to the detriment of my own paintings. It’s that bit she doesn’t like. She wants me to stand up for what I do; she wants a passionate hero, affirming his patch; and that’s all well and good, but the fact is I’m totally open-minded on the subject. If Marc Quinn wants to freeze his own blood in the shape of his head, or Jake and Dinos want to stick dicks onto kids’ chins, then it’s all fine by me.
    ‘I like her, Mum,’ I say, as Tracey’s talking about pulling a foetus out of her pants, ‘I think art should be honest.’
    ‘Well, I’m going to bed,’ she says, ‘I think she’s a bloody fruitcake.’
    She goes into the kitchen and rattles a few things around, turns off the lights, delivers a careful list of instructions about how to turn off the gas fire and how we’re not to unplug the fish tank, and shuffles off out the door, nodding back to the telly. ‘She’s dirty,’ she says, ‘she’s a dirty bloody lunatic, that lass. I’m lost.’
    Me and Eleni watch the rest of it and when it’s over we unplug everything but the fish tank and start kissing. I’ve had a few beers and all I want to do is kiss her for hours. We can hear my dad snoring upstairs and we undress as much as we dare and fuck, right there on the cream settee that my dad, based on nothing, is allergic to.

    The next morning, Sunday, we’re awoken by the sound of hammering. Not like someone’s hanging a picture or putting a nail into the floorboards, but intermittent, heavy, laboured hammering, and the sound of falling masonry, as though my dad’s knocking down the fireplace. I pullon a sweater and yesterday’s underpants and wander downstairs to investigate. And there’s my dad, stripped to the waist, huge grey sledgehammer, knocking down the fireplace.
    ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ I say.
    ‘What?’ he says, looking at the television.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    He swings around and sees me. ‘I’m knocking down the fireplace,’ he says and runs the back of his hand across his brow. We’re both stripped to the waist: him from the neck down and me from the feet up. Sparky’s tucked away behind the curtain on the window ledge, choking on the dust and shaking like he’s developed a chronic case of doggy Parkinson’s overnight.
    I remember when this fireplace was built, sometime back in the seventies, back when Mum and Dad were still aware of trends and still supple enough to follow them. Irregular slabs of purbeck stone and polished grey slate. I remember the plans laid out on the dining-room table and this bloated Italian bloke who stank of pork pointing at them with a translucent yellow screwdriver. Mum and Dad nodding and asking questions. Mum wanted a trapezium over the flue, Dad wasn’t so keen. And now here he is: rid of it at last. He’s spread a dustsheet out over the carpet and he’s up to his ankles in broken rock and plaster. He puts down the hammer, wipes his hands on a towel and slumps into his chair. Jiggered, as he would say.
    ‘Bloody hell, Dad. What you doing that for?’
    ‘We’ve decided it’s to come down,’ says Dad, nodding at Mum, who’s sat in the conservatory scanning the colour supplements.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ I say again. ‘Fucking hell’ is what I’m thinking, but ‘Bloody hell’ is what I’m saying cos I don’t swear at home. It’s not what we do. The air’s gone mad with dust. Sparky’s spasms are making the windows rattle.
    Mum looks up and smiles. ’Well, look who’s here,’ she says, puts down her magazine and pushes herself up out of her little