Prose: Stone Heart

That evening, on his way to the airport, Giles drove to Imogen’s flat.  The police had occupied it after the attack and it had been empty since.  It reminded Giles and Amal of Imogen too much for either of them to go there.

As Giles opened the door, he was hit by chemical fumes.  He walked down the narrow hall and into the open studio space.  On one side was a floor-to-ceiling window.  At the far end stood an easel and on it, a large frame.

Giles had aimed to support Imogen in her art but his patience had dwindled.  She had wanted to communicate, to be in his sight, his presence, but was frustrated that her childhood relationship of longing girl to occasional father had not evolved to include a recognition of her nascent womanhood and individuality - something approaching equal terms.  Her views felt unvalued. He had praised her often, hadn’t he?  Had he?  He had meant to.  But contact became formulaic - expensive lunches with an insightful book or birthday card containing exhortations to excel.  He pointedly questioned her on her art but, was it him or her who soon cut each conversation to modern literature?  And then politics swam in.  Her effusions on Danby, her championed conspiracies. This necessitated a practised balancing act.  His transgressive tumbles - ideologue - her heated refutation.  The routine wobbled and collapsed.  As they parted on the steps of a restaurant, fired with these scripted exchanges and the wine quickly sunk, neither felt closer.  The distance was affirmed, the views maintained, the lines unchanged.

One evening before the attack Giles had telephoned Imogen.  He had sat down and cleared his head of distractions.  Not the right time. Someone else was there, sharing a private joke, sniggering in the background.

So it was that, as he was about to set out on the journey to rescue his daughter, Giles, alone and able to absorb it without disturbance, beheld her most recent work.  The painting was that which months before Imogen had begun with a horizontal red crescent depressed in the middle.  Now completed, those two arches formed the very topmost part of a megalith - a massive crimson heart-shaped stone - the picture’s main subject.  The heart, standing half-sunk into a shallow hill, overstretched a darkened landscape and was flanked by two similar but much smaller hearts on the shoulders of the hill.  Giles stepped back to take it all in. 

Despite the subject’s ostensible symbolism of love, the vast weight of the central stone, the darkened red tones and the shadowed sky together induced not love but foreboding.  Golgotha, he spluttered.

Giles slowly re-approached the painting.  He saw that the texture which he had first taken as a smooth stone surface, was not so.  As he examined it more closely he saw the rock was scored with pockmarks and termitic indentations, not that of a surface long exposed to the elements but rather with a character resulting from some caustic chemical precipitation, a body-wide acid attack had disfigured the form that had first seemed pristine.  Giles looked closer.  Many of the holes were so deep as to penetrate right through the stone allowing the evening dark behind to transude.  On the ground lay fragments of rock exuded from the holes above.  The standing heart-stone dominated the landscape.  Yet larger still in scale, Giles now saw in the top right corner of the painting, a god-sized hand grasping a great metal chisel.  Crumbs of red rock clung to its point, and slipped from it, falling to earth.  A metal plate at the foot of the easel bore the title:   Heritage.

(Extract from novel Liberty)