Martin JP Green

'The Art Corps' is ten intertwined stories about the embattled Gilpin Gallery. Read Chapter Two for free.

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Chapter Two

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It is 1994. The Gilpin Gallery has been standing for over one hundred years. In its shadow Bill Hays is parked up in a six-tonne truck and thinking about the sea. Fifty miles from the nearest coast, his thoughts are out there, his heart seeking the massive impersonal reassurance of the sea.

 

What has brought this on?  Is it the sky starting to mass like lead to the West of the sternly classical bulk of the gallery? Is it the wind frisking with the wisps of his white beard? Is it the fact that he is sixty-three years old, dog-tired and prone to bouts of narcotically potent nostalgia? 

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On this unusually warm and oppressive May evening he could sense a storm about to break and with a frisson of memory was transported back his life as a young man in the Merchant Navy when the elements had routinely asserted their pre-eminence over the fortunes of man.

 

He had seen the world cracked and torn apart by tropical storms on the Indian Ocean and the feeling it had given him of utter personal insignificance had been liberating. It was this sense of liberation for which he was now feeling achingly nostalgic and, instinctively, he reached for his pipe, only to withdraw his hand from his pocket with a wince.

 

He had promised his wife that he would give it up and the old briar lay cold and faintly acrid in his tool bag in the gallery basement. He shook his head, feeling shipwrecked, cast up on the shore of impending old age with a tired body and a mind yearning for everything that had long past. He was imprisoned, shackled to this van, to this tiresome task, to this bloody city, to the gallery which had been his life in effect for the last thirty years. And yet he was not a solitary castaway. 

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“What time did they say the wagon was coming?” Ted Corker, rattled and prickly, yelled from driver’s window of a smaller adjacent vehicle. He was preoccupied more with the thought of taking his shoes off and getting his feet under the tea table than anything else, including the sea. He was ex-army, in any case, as borne out by acquaintanceship with the environs of Aldershot and a tenuous grasp of basic German - the only useful by products of his two National Service postings. Bill Hays checked his watch. 

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“Between half three and half four. They were setting off from London at one. Should’ve been here by now. It’s gone five. Maybe you and Dennis ought to get off. I’ll manage on my own if there’s a couple of them as well. It’s only supposed to be a table piece so it shouldn’t be too lunky.”

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To read more, download the whole of Chapter Two for free.

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