Per Cent For Art

Well.

It’s obscene.

Vulgar, aye.

An eye-sore. A heart-sore.

Imagine what’ll be said about it.

Maurice takes puffs off his vape and Muireann sucks at another cigarette without vigour. They stand hunched both, yards from one another gawping through a gap in the fencing. The ‘artist’, or whoever, has half-arsedly hidden the work-in-progress behind zip-tied swathes of plastic sheeting that flap lamely under drizzle and grey wind.

They wanted someone local y’know, and it’s a Leinster man done this, turns out.

From Laois, Deirdre told me.

Carlow, I’d heard.

May as well’ve got a Dub down for the job.

Aye. I can’t take my eyes off of it.

May as well’ve put the money to better use.

Thousands, I’d say, gone into this.

Sixty thousand euros.

Maurice wheezes, coughs, chokes, bends double, rises up, bends again.

You’re fecking joking me? He splutters. He mutters, takes another puff to steady himself. Man dying too slowly.

I’m not. One per cent for art. It’s a scheme.

It’s a scam!

It’s a government scheme.

It’s beyond me.

The state promises one percent of the budget for projects like these to commission a piece of public art.

I see, I get it.

It’s a sculpture, so they’ve been told. Unfinished, apparently, if what as yet needs doing is not apparent. A throne or a seat in white terrazzo stone, speckles of sea shell, quartz, green glass. A cylindrical slab of a pouffe, big enough for a wide-arsed sixth-year or two tiny first-years to perch on for no reason. Three yards behind, a splay of the same composite, taller than your average hurler, and as broad. Two sheafs of fractalized wings, chunky symmetrical layers converging at a spinal column that holds all their great weight. The wing tips curve and almost conjoin in an empty point way over their heads.

Imagine what’ll be said.

Watch out, the big cheese is onto us.

Maurice nods over Muireann’s head and she gathers her wrinkles at her nose hearing the slip-slap of Dunnes Stores shoes on spanking new tarmacadam. Three thousand for the tarmacadam alone. Paid up out of that miraculous six million that no one thought Saint Michael’s Secondary School really merited, or wanted. No one but big cheeses and fat cats and neglected mothers.

Mister Fitzsimons, Missus Kenneally, can ye not smoke on the premises? The voice of the big boss is squeamish, squelching. You’re a worm, Muireann wants to say to her.

A ways under forty, yet. Dressed in gaudy overbright violets and whites, hair lazily coiffed, scant make-up.

Alright, Miss Gannon. Maurice half-closes his eyes and bobs his head with grandfatherly condescension. Forgive us our trespasses, we said it might be grand, with no students around the place. With the exams being over and all.

Principal Gannon nods sharp as a tooth. Yes, but there are seventeen kids actually present today. We’ll have students in our care all the way to Friday. Really, there should be no smoking in the school, even outside of term-time.

Tell that to young Billy Goggins! Maurice laughs like a bogger and the boss titters and shrieks. You’re a squirrelly little fool, Muireann would just love to say to her.

Ye are admiring the artwork I see. The principal wants to change the subject. Has no sway over them, telling them what not to do, even so.

Authority of a roadsign.

Makes you think, Maurice says and Gannon’s face is a moonbeam.

Muireann stubs out her fag under her heel and a white wind steals and bobbles the fagbutt under the temporary fencing, has it cosy up against the left wing.

They each take turns pretending not to notice. Disgusted, Muireann is. This ground, polluted. Black badness pinches her gut and her upper back, bile rises in her gullet.

I don't think much of it, Muireann says. A growl. The boss whimpers and lifts her chin. Always half-balk.

I wouldn't claim to understand it myself, goes on Gannon. But there will be media interest, word-of-mouth, so forth. I feel it gives us an air of prestige, if nothing else.

The air is whippy and perpetual. Cool butter-knife blades of wind at the hems of their trousers, indifferent to summertime and ‘art’.

Muireann is a dark fug on the air, though rooted somehow. Stuck to the place.

You can imagine what'll be said, Maurice says. Eyes fully closed now, hound head shaking solemnly.

How do you mean?

You're as dull as cow dung, Muireann could say to her, but Maurice explains:

There's a belt of vulgarity off it, it's all anyone will say.

I can't imagine-

A great stone snatch in the schoolyard! Maurice shouts before clamping huge hands over his hairy mouth and blushing through the gaps in his white pudding fingers.

Apologies, but I'm only imagining what'll be said.

Gannon’s ears redden in sympathy, a glaring stoplight glow. She pretends not to have heard.

There will be a ceremony for the unveiling at the end of August, she says. Will ye be attending? I can't make ye, of course.

A shriek of a laugh, then a shuffle, a nervous half-second solo two-step.

Come in here during the holidays, invitation to misery.

We will of course, says Maurice. Because of course they will.

The school principal jogs off with flimsy gestures and rolling eyes, caged animal eyes. Poor woman.

Maurice puffs gaily as the side-door thwacks shut behind her.

Go on, I've to mind a handful of first years at the bell, he says. Delighted with his day. You must get off them fags, he adds with a jiggy titter and trundles off.

What are we to do about this, Muireann wonders. Something must be done.

The winding up of a loveless summer, days of contrivance and conspiracy. Bad ideas and lonesome imaginings.

Then, revelation on a night wind after a small few glasses of Jameson.

We’ll meet at dawn next Sunday, there’ll be no one about.

Maurice was all for it, white wiry hairs on his fat red cheeks all on end, dancing. He had listened to Muireann’s project with dumb, thick enthusiasm. Said he got it and the whole town would get it.

The hour come, the pair are back staring through the fencing in low grey light.

Well.

Run in there to the artroom and grab the tube of paint.

Any colour in particular ? Dogged obedience. Archetypal maths teacher.

I hadn’t given it much thought. Follow your guts.

Maurice goes and returns. He trundles back all jingly keys and tremulous jowls, not a whisper of subtlety or grace. Muireann shunts aside one wall of the wire fencing. Eases herself through the gap. Maurice extends a shaking arm, an unopened squeezy bottle of blue acrylic. Primary, good.

Muireann snatches the bottle and goes to the artwork. There she lets rip a languorous squirt onto the right wing of the sculpture around hip height. Maurice gawks on, all aflutter.

Sweet divinity.

Muireann gets a good gloop of it holding fast, if two tears do trickle in a race to the tarmacadam. Happy with her gloop she turns her back to the stone, sees Maurice wide-eyed, wide-minded. Just you wait.

She unbuttons her sable velveteen trousers and let's them drop to her ankles.

Mother of God.

Maurice can't help but holler, he is a shimmer with the thrill.

Muireann backs up with careful indignity. She plants both arse-cheeks against the terrazzo, upon the gloop of blue paint. It is pleasantly cold, pleasurably sticky, she can almost taste it through her arse. What a sensation. Imaginary jam, bilberry or blackcurrant.

She shares a look with Maurice who jumps two feet in the air and pumps a fist to the victory of it.

Muireann activates her pelvis and her old aching spine and brushes her gloop in wide thoughtful spirals. Ancient form.

She buttons up her pants and steps away. Maurice is audibly buzzing, slowly vibrating his glee and horror. A droning thrum that seems to make sense of the act. Muireann finds herself in agreement with his extasia, or some kind of harmony. She looks upon the ragged circle of her effort and nods.

On the August Monday, in the airy morning, the unveiling takes place. Two dozen students with dire heads on them are there. Licks, pets, gremlins, the openly disinterested progeny of the neglected mothers.

Muireann chitchats with colleagues, or pretends to. Derision and malice would usually surface in small talk’s groping silences, but not this Monday. Muireann has a sweet and puckery up-twist to her lips.

Maurice hasn't come, with any sense has chosen early retirement or a heart-attack instead. The artist hasn’t come either. Perhaps it was Maurice all along?

Muireann laughs to herself and is happily ignored.

After discourses and claps the big cheese strikes a pose. She has been to the hairdresser’s, she wears heels and pearly earrings. A local journalist takes some lazy photos with a smartphone. Prestige captured.

A flourish and a yank and Gannon whips off the white bed sheet that had been covering the sculpture’s modesty for the occasion.

There are two or three polite gasps, flaccid applause from tiny hands. There were those who hadn't bothered to sneak a look at the thing in advance and these murmur empty opinions.

Interesting.

Odd enough.

Yeah.

The sculpture has been cleaned, naturally. Muireann expected as much. But her smile inflames at the revelation. The white stone looks pure enough but a tinge reaches her eye. Motes of plastic blue clinging to the odd cockle shard, remnants of the interaction.

A signature of disgrace, a claim upon this great ugly thing. A renewal, an accord, a betrayal, a sad act. Done deal, her immortality. She will haunt this place until raining decades drag her colour to the ground, and there she will seep into the foundations of the old school and find crevices and black holes near the coming extensions and the renovated gymnasium where she will sneer at the foolish youth until her distaste is wrought across the front gates of the place in great airy black writing. All this is imagined.

See you Monday week, says Principal Gannon at the end of the thing.

Lord Almighty.