The Dead of August

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

Whereas most euphemisms are crude and thinly veiled instruments, easily recognized and instantly deciphered by convention, his are vastly more subtle and sophisticated one-off inventions. On Mr Linthwaite’s magical canvas, fact and complex abstract imagery blend seamlessly together, all at once to encompass and bring to the surface a deeper, more allegorical truth...

Now that my work had won through, Douglas resorted to underhand power play, a mocking, insinuating war of attrition, subtle to the core.

I saw the cab arrive, pull over. She paid the driver. Then she glanced towards the window where the bulk of my shadow pressed against the glass, and like stone she stood heavy on the pavement.

The first few moments of that crystal winter dawn cast in my memory forever the fleeting, awkward gestures of the only woman I had ever loved. A lifeless, melancholy figure, resigned, I think, as I was.

“Too many fucking French words, that’s what’s wrong with it!” A succession of minor facial earthquakes punctuated his ranting recital of several random examples, all mispronounced; had my back been as hirsute as Douglas’s, a billion cringing hairs would have bristled and punctured my shirt.

Not wishing, however, to squander my hard-earned advantage, I quickly recovered myself by using the trick of deflection: exerting acute concentration on something innately banal. In the visual equivalent of a fingertip search,

Having given me time to reflect, and now interpreting my silence as at least impressionable, Douglas judged me ripe for acquiescence. “So, James? Shall we do that?”

An intricately melancholic Persian rug, foisted on June as a family heirloom, had also been consigned to the study, and its unwanted effect was to imbue this chaotic professional mess with the warmth of its perishing reds.

It was as though, pending a move, the place had been halfway stripped of its soul - it was verging on vacant possession already.

“Don’t put that on,” I said, snapping it out of her hands, “it’s covered in blood.” Like a butcher’s apron, I felt like saying, but it would have been untrue, it was the pillow that had taken the brunt.

June put on her bathrobe instead, and then she followed me back to the scene of her crime, which she had tampered with already - the bloodstained pillowcase was gone, and the blinds were down. For that, at least, I was grateful. On this exceptional occasion, the brightness of daylight could only have heightened the gloom.

I liked him from the very beginning. An intelligent, chain-smoking, hard-drinking amalgam of incongruities and half-naked fashion anachronisms, with a plum in his mouth and a sailor’s tattoos, Max was the most hospitable semi-recluse.

“And this whole thing’s completely absurd, I know. Self-indulgent claptrap, that’s what it is, so I suppose it must be Art, mustn’t it, James!

had I been prone to jealousy, I might have thought of it as hubris. In a juicy deluge of death, as though vindictively taking advantage of my absence to avoid a fate worse than death at my ostracized hands,

and perhaps in general not quite as torn as I liked to imagine - the whiff of success makes for a gullible conscience, as I knew already from other examples).

Max was an inveterate reader, which for even a half-hearted recluse of his type must be common.