Extract from "The Grin Without the Cat," by Sara Lodge. Forthcoming in The Book of Iona: an Anthology, edited by Robert Crawford. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016)
I was so young when I met him. Only seventeen. I was doing a project at school that required me to write about a painting and, being both contrary and ambitious, I chose a sculpture. Darius Dacre’s latest work was on display at Tate Modern and I took the train in from Leamington Spa to see it on my own – so self-conscious that I stared at my pale face in the window throughout the journey. ScratchCard was a gallery-sized piece of red plastic covered in black wax, which Dacre had scratched all over with burins and nails and chisels, gouging out the wax to make marks that looked like cave art, or blackboard graffiti. Scrolling rings and waves and violent dashes and injuries to the surface. It fascinated me in the original sense of the word: ‘to deprive of the power of escape’. I stayed in the gallery for three hours, watching how Dacre’s work amused some and disconcerted others. Viewers were invited to mount the scaffold to add their own mark, rubbing away at a surface that, when exposed, revealed a pattern of tiny skulls spelling out ‘You Are Not a Winner’. I was seventeen, but I got it.
I was thinking about death a lot then. All the glamorous people I knew were dead and death itself seemed the ultimate way of forcing people to speak to the hand. Most adults were warped and mouldy with compromise. They were bothered about strange spills on the sofa (not me!), and who would want turkey at Christmas (not me!), and what that odd ticking noise was that the car made when we reached 50. I didn’t want to reach 50. It seemed improbable and faintly disgusting, like scorpions mating.
So I wrote a long essay for Year 12 about ‘Dacre and Death’, which got a 20 out of 20: a mark hitherto regarded as impossible by our class. And I sent it to him. Like the smug implacable little lemon pip I was. I wrote to the Tate, told them to forward it to Dacre, and proposed to meet him sometime to discuss it.
Six months later, I was in my first year studying History of Art at Cambridge and had almost forgotten this indiscretion when my parents forwarded me an envelope containing a postcard of a badly stuffed walrus. In a capitalised biro scrawl, as of a shaky hand leaning heavily on the pen, it read:
Imogen Grimshaw
I will see you dead
on the stroke of four pm
on Feb four
Dacre
I was thinking about death a lot then. All the glamorous people I knew were dead and death itself seemed the ultimate way of forcing people to speak to the hand. Most adults were warped and mouldy with compromise. They were bothered about strange spills on the sofa (not me!), and who would want turkey at Christmas (not me!), and what that odd ticking noise was that the car made when we reached 50. I didn’t want to reach 50. It seemed improbable and faintly disgusting, like scorpions mating.
So I wrote a long essay for Year 12 about ‘Dacre and Death’, which got a 20 out of 20: a mark hitherto regarded as impossible by our class. And I sent it to him. Like the smug implacable little lemon pip I was. I wrote to the Tate, told them to forward it to Dacre, and proposed to meet him sometime to discuss it.
Six months later, I was in my first year studying History of Art at Cambridge and had almost forgotten this indiscretion when my parents forwarded me an envelope containing a postcard of a badly stuffed walrus. In a capitalised biro scrawl, as of a shaky hand leaning heavily on the pen, it read:
Imogen Grimshaw
I will see you dead
on the stroke of four pm
on Feb four
Dacre