An Excerpt from The Imitation of Patsy Burke: Carla and Véronique

"Why couldn't you just have accepted to make her
pregnant?

In the office you began to talk to Carla mechanically,
and you imagined looking at yourself through her eyes.

To your surprise, she didn't seem to have a good
opinion of you. She was still attracted by your scarred face and caveman good
looks, and your firm chin, and your genius as a sculptor who had hauled himself
out of the English cum Irish settled working class by your own bootstraps, but
as a man you were a complete piece of shit with whom, unfortunately, she had
fallen in love.

She told you that your role, as a sculptor, in
Jean-Louis's corporation induced stress of a truly unmanageable level in its
employees. They all depended (and probably still depend) on your saleable
output to put bread, wine and cheese on the table and to pay for their children's
holidays: once a year, to the Val d'Isère, to ski during the first school
vacation of the year; and once a year to Sardinia or Mauritius, during the
summer vacation period. Furthermore, the stress had increased since your behavior
had become no longer merely violent but uncontrollable. The kidnapping had done
something to you, had broken something in you. People had seen you down in the cafe,
looking at the wall like a madman.

You told Carla you deeply regretted that giving
Jean-Louis a few kicks, a tap on the chin, and then a kick up the backside, in
front of all his staff, that day when he had called the whole company together,
had encouraged, among simpleminded, salaried employees, people to whom you
would never normally be violent because they had never done anything to merit
that sort of treatment, the emergence of the rumor that you had a penchant for violent
behavior.

No, Patsy wasn't the type of man to have a penchant
for anything, except for good sex and a couple of drinks before and after a
hard day's work. And then she reminded you of how you had screamed at
Jean-Louis, as you stood over him, at the exact place where he had fallen to
the floor, and of that last kick you had given him in the testicles. Didn't you
realize how dangerous it could be to kick a man there?

'But I only did it once,' you said.

'You nearly did it again this morning,' she replied.

'What does that damned lawyer get paid for, if he
can't even prevent me from attacking my good friend, Jean-Louis?'




You told Carla that you had simply wished to get the
message across, the message that you no longer wished to pay through the nose for
Jean-Louis's worthless services. The employees, by themselves, were unsatisfactory
but they might have been able to do a halfway decent sort of job if it weren't for
the crap system of Harvard type management Jean-Louis had put in place.

Why couldn't he have stuck to a traditional French management
style? If Jean-Louis couldn't get the organizational structure, culture and
climate of the art gallery right, there was no alternative. He, Patsy, would
have to fire more than half of the back office staff and all of the new, crap Asian
sculptors.

Thus, you explained to Carla, it was all Jean-Louis's
fault if the sales and administrative staff were going to lose their jobs. Some
of them had, of course, toadied up to the new Korean sculptors whom Jean-Louis
had taken on, but Mr. Patsy Burke was too big a man to let his rational brain
be overwhelmed by jealousy of another sculptor, or even by legitimate sentiments,
such as grievance at a growing lack of respect for him as he walked through the
gallery. Patsy dated that lack of respect back to the time Jean-Louis had taken
on his first second-rate Japanese sculptor.

Had Jean-Louis admitted his own guilt? Had he admitted
to the staff that half of them were going to be fired because of his poor
management methods? Had he owned up to the fact that he was an ineffective
gallery owner, who had dilapidated the success brought to him on a plate by Mr.
Patsy Burke, who was not only the best sculptor in his stable of artists, but
in the whole of f**king France?"






"She did not reply to your loaded questions, and just
went on pulling wispy thoughts out of her mind, like pairs of empty nylon
stockings from pink cellophane wrapping, thoughts that had no relevance to what
was going on inside your own head.

Well, so be it. That was modern business. There was
nothing you could now do to lessen the tragedy that you were the only available
business mind in the company, the only man capable of reorganizing it, making a
go of it, after the disastrous financial results that resulted from Jean-Louis's
eccentric style of management, and therefore you might even have to give him
another good kicking and to throw many idle staff out onto the streets, it
might in fact be three quarters of them, not just a half.

Nonetheless, you sincerely wished to be liked, and your
long-term objective was, indeed, to become liked again; to be perceived as a
kindly, measured, reasonable human being, who could shed light, and dry humor,
wherever the ebb and flow of success, as demonstrated by an increase in cash,
or other liquid assets, would eventually lead you.

Yes, you had tried to act the business-man and, while
we're on the subject of acting, you reminded Carla that Véronique had once acted
as your secretary, for a few weeks. You had of course given her a horizontal
promotion--what a beautiful French phrase that is!--and for ninety-nine percent
of the time the play acting between the two of you had passed off well, if only
from a sexual point of view. You had not taken her in, and she had not taken
you in, any other way than physically. But the other one per cent of the time,
that is the one percent that must have stuck in Véronique's memory, and which,
apparently, she had mentioned to Carla, was due to what Véronique called the
extravagance of his ideas. But who was Véronique to judge either the extravagance
or the feasibility of Patsy's ideas? Had she, or any other person in the
gallery, ever taken an idle thought and a block of marble and turned them into
a one million dollar sculpture as Patsy had done? That poor idiot, Jean-Louis,
had of course let himself be fooled by her, thus the problems he was having
with his wife.

'Véronique, bring me the accounts books,' you screamed.

She was not in the office, but you knew she probably
had her ear flush to the door, eavesdropping. That wild scream shook Carla up,
the poor dear. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, in that irritating way women
will never realize gives the whole game away, and she looked at you with hate
in her eyes.

As you waited for your former secretary to hurry back
into the office, you observed Carla closely. She regained control of herself,
and managed to hide the look of hate. Véronique arrived, out of breath. You
looked at the accounts books. You did not understand a single column.

You said, 'Usually when I feel I'm going to come
across a particularly loathsome miscalculation, a strategic error or a shoddy
piece of thinking, I flare up, Véronique, and if I have to shout harshly, it is
because it's the only way I can get you to understand how seriously I take this
business of accounting! But that is not the only reason I screamed at you to
come in here, it is also because of all the pain you are making Jean-Louis's
poor wife go through. Can't you see that the man is too eccentric to
concentrate on more than one task at a time? He should be concentrating on
business at the moment, not on getting his end away with a woman who has
already been treated very, very kindly by the gallery inasmuch as she has
already been shagged by its senior sculptor, on more than one occasion.

You heard Carla's shocked intake of breath as you
revealed again that you had had a sexual relationship with Véronique, and then you
shouted at her harshly, accusing her of being needlessly jealous, using words
that would need much more than ninety-nine percent of your effort, thereafter,
to make them be forgotten.

The two women were now taking you seriously. You told
them you could not understand why people who have gone through some of the
world's most advanced and expensive national educational systems managed to
have sexual problems with their bosses, or secretaries, especially when they
should be demonstrating such  routine professional
behavior as following administrative procedures blindly, and ensuring
transparent earnings before interest and tax, while keeping a lid on
Jean-Louis's expenses, and not contributing to the flow of hateful rumors about
their colleagues, most notably the senior sculptor.

Okay, let them go out for a few drinks together,
participate in ritual excesses at the annual Christmas office party, and fuck
the asses off each other once a year, that is the way life should be lived, but
why did they have to start taking themselves seriously, falling in love,
getting jealous, screwing up a good business because they had taken their eye off
the ball?

You had told Jean-Louis, on numerous occasions, that
you could not suffer employees who let computers think for them, especially
when they then expected you, Patsy, to praise mediocre, glossily printed and
lavishly colored three dimensional bar charts produced by the technology. What
would happen to the gallery if you suddenly decided that you weren't going to
sculpt with your own two hands but turn the work over to a fucking piece of
software, for God's sake?

You told the two women that even in your fighting you
had always been straightforward, and never racist. As a person who had been
ostracized yourself, how could you hate a man because of his religion or the
color of his skin? The only reason you had ever hit an African or a Chinese was
because you needed to hit someone, and a black man or a yellow person was the human
being most available. Until you were about twenty-five, you barely stopped to
even study the nose on a hostile face, never mind the color, before you
attempted to smash it. You never gave a damn about the eye-turning fear, or the
pain or the battered emotions of anyone you hit, and, to your credit, you never
had a feeling of revenge against any man who bettered you. The important thing
was to thrash the other man before he could thrash you, whatever his color or
religion, to get the jump on him through the element of surprise, and to throw
yourself at him with both boots before the bastard could make use of his fists.
What was wrong with that?"






My novels,  The Imitation of Patsy Burke  and  Another Life , can be purchased from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de, in either print or electronic versions. You can find them by following any of the links below:

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