Hidden gargoyle

The tea was refreshing and bitter, and Geraldinium stared out at the sunset.  Her studio was the attic rooms of an entire row of terraced houses, whose occupants were unaware that they had even had attics once.  The view of the sunset was through a huge window that was the width of number 17 in the terrace, slightly angled because of the slope of the roof and was soul-shiftingly vivid.  There was a storm on the way and the saccharine colours that reminded her of the kind of cheap paintings you could find in pound-shops, all horses on the beach and unicorns shedding tears for sleeping teenage girls, but at the edges there were hints of darkness, clouds that edges themselves with hate rather than silver.  It seemed like an auspicious night for her sculpting.

When she set the tea-cup down on the scarred wooden table in front of the window she picked her hammer and chisel back up again.  The noise of her sculpting would undoubtedly cause worry to the Daily Mail reader in the house below where she sculpted, but she considered that to be something readers of that vile rag to deserve.  She crossed to the keystone, and paused.  While she’d been drinking her tea and watching the sunset, surely no more than half-an-hour, three spiders had emerged from somewhere and built webs on and across the stone.  The webs covered the gargoyle’s lumpy, sketched-in head, and two of the spiders were sat, staring malignly at her, right where she’d intended the gargoyle’s main eyes to be.  The third spider scuttered away at her approach and had disappeared down the side of the stone.  She regarded them for a moment, and then picked up a rough cloth from her work desk and wiped the webs and spiders away.  They were too early; they could come and contribute to the project when she was done with the carving.

The rhythmic tap of the hammer on the chisel, and the steady work of looking at what had been removed and what had been discovered as a result of that was soothing work, and as she steadily brought the gargoyle out of hiding and into the light her mind wandered back to the records from the Orphanage.

The Orphanage had originally been called the Home for Wastrels and Waifs and had been founded by a Mr. and Mrs. Gentlescot in the early 1800s.  The founding date wasn’t written down anywhere that Geraldinium had been able to find, but allusions to various events in the records suggested that it was probably somewhere between 1810 and 1816.  He had been a butcher, and she appeared to have been a monster hiding in human skin.  There were a number of letters written by her, in a crabbed hand that needed careful study, to various dignitaries and philanthropists of the time, which had been returned with responses to her pleas for money (and occasionally unwanted children).  The letters revealed that she viewed the children essentially as a cash-crop, a way of extorting money from people with either principles or emotions or both, and she would describe their piteous states in elaborate detail in an attempt to ensure a cheque by return of post.  Reading through these descriptions Geraldinium had been struck by the unneccessity of them: if this woman had spent more time (and money) looking after the children then they wouldn’t have been in this state yet.  When she described the four-year old being washed in cold water by a one-armed girl and a blind boy Geraldinium noted that two paragraphs earlier there had been mention of children far more able to look after ablutions.  The accident that had caused the girl to become one-armed sounded contrived to her as well.  There was, to her mind, a definite whiff of unpleasantness around the butcher’s wife.  The implicit threats in her letters, too, “Please send money as it seems unlikely that poor Clara will last the night without it; rest assured I shall keep you abreast of her progress…”.  There had never been any hope for these poor children.

She tapped a new part of the keystone sharply, and with a sudden crack a thin rectangular piece of stone broke free and fell to the floor, smashing.  Geraldinium cursed, and then paused.  The piece of stone had revealed a date incised into the keystone, and she realised that the rectangular piece must have been added later on to cover up the date.  This had to be the founding date that wasn’t written down anywhere, but… it said 1618.  For a moment her skin crawled and she wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake in choosing this stone.  Then she looked at the gargoyle, now appearing almost to be clawing its own way out of the stone and knew that this creature needed to be on display and not hidden any longer.

Sad sculpture

Geraldinium Holmes lifted her hammer and regarded the stone with a critical eye.  It had been a keystone for the entrance to an orphanage and so was about the size of a man’s torso and wedge shaped.  It had maintained the integrity of the arch of a huge doorway through which hundreds of children had passed.  According to the records – which were sporadic, and rather ashy from where they’d been rescued from fire at least twice – this had been a Victorian orphanage where the ideals had been rather higher than the reality.  There had been several owners; Geraldinium had been fascinated to learn that the second owner, a Mr. Walscotte, had viewed it as a profit-making venture and had actually been selling a number of the children to the poor-house and various unscrupulous factory owners when he felt that there was little hope of getting them adopted out.  Two owners later there was a possession by the church which had resulted in sixteen exorcisms being performed, three deaths, and the defrocking of a priest.  Geraldinium couldn’t begin to imagine what the priest could have done that was more hideous than performing exorcisms and killing children, but apparently he’d found something and had been expelled from the church.  When it was finally turned over to the newly formed Council for the area, the children in it were downtrodden, browbeaten, and generally unhealthy and desperately unhappy.  The Council hadn’t bothered trying to run it, they’d simply shipped the children out to other places and closed the building down.

Geraldinium had taken the keystone by the simple expedient of breaking into the grounds of the Orphanage with a hammer, chisel, large square of heavy tarpaulin and a frame and chiselling it out.  The arch had been holding still as she dragged the keystone down the stairs and back to the hole she’d made in the walls, and for all she knew it might still be holding now.  She rather hoped it wasn’t.  The place had felt unhappy to the core.

She laid the blade of the chisel at the top of the stone and tapped gently, experimentally, with the hammer.  The chisel rang, and the stone cracked a little, splintering as she’d hoped for.  It was solid, good quality stone.  It would definitely do for sculpture.

She worked quickly and crudely initially.  It had been obvious to her when she saw the stone that there was  gargoyle hiding in there, waiting to come out.  A gargoyle that had been hiding, always sitting above the door to the Orphanage, counting the children as they went in, and feeding on the misery that the Orphanage created, like some huge, edificial engine of torment.  A gargoyle with curling ram’s horns, with six legs and two arms that had fourteen fingers on each hand.  A gargoyle with hidden, secret eyes in folds of stone flesh, under arms and hiding between toes.  A vigilant gargoyle, in league with the forces that turned neglect in to malice, that turned unconcern into acts of violence in dark, basement rooms to preserve a crumbling façade of rightness.  A gargoyle that held together black webs of grey actions and unwashed thoughts, trapping evil in the interstices and letting it drip like poisonous venom from its fangs until it had polluted every soul that breathed its tainted air.

The hammer tapped and the chisel sang, and the percussion was the noise of hate pounding on the walls of its cell, demanding its freedom once again.

Four hours later, Geraldinium laid down the hammer and looked.  The gargoyle was roughed out now, but there was much more to do to bring it fully out of the stone, uncover its lines and creases, its folds and its misshapes.  She allowed herself a thin smile; this was bringing back too many memories for now.  She would allow herself a small break and then return to it.

Interactive art

Geraldinium Holmes picked up her welding mask and put it on.  Then she picked up the welding torch and turned that on.  The actinic blast of light illuminated the scorched and twisted metal beneath her arms and chased the shadows the periphery of the room.  In the next room a young girl sobbed and strained at the restraints that kept her affixed to a wooden bed, and below them both, in a suburban bedroom decorated with too much chintz and pink fur, a middle aged man paused in his reading of the Daily Mail and wondered what the noise was.

The scrap metal had come from the wreckage of a helicopter crash via a contact who refused to meet Geraldinium in person.  She’d spent several weeks on Craigslist hunting for suitable scrap for the sculpture she wanted to create, and just when she was beginning to think that she was going to have to go accident hunting in order to obtain it, she’d received the kind of ill-spelled, semi-illiterate email that most people consign to the spam folder.  She’d assigned it to her assistant, the orphan girl, to follow up, reasoning that if anything happened to her then at least she had no family to worry about her or miss her, and that the orphan girl was quite mad enough to be a danger to the writer of the email anyway.  Two days later, the orphan girl turned up at Geraldinium’s street-long attic studio with a flat-bed truck with the wreckage atop it, and apparently a boyfriend in the truck-driver.  Geraldinium had wished them both luck and starting unloading the truck.

She lowered the torch to the metal and listened as the hiss of the acetylene changed tone.  In the bright, retina-searing whiteness of the flame she felt a purity and cleansing that was almost religious, and reminded her of her Pope period during which she’d created life-size images of thirty-one of the longest serving Catholic popes.  In exhibition they were hung in a large circle and the viewer invited to sit in a wooden chair in the centre of them all, on a dais that slowly rotated.  She’d been forced to discontinue the exhibition because of the high incidence of mental illness in the viewers.

The metal softened and yielded as it heated, and she used rusted iron tongs to seize it and mould it against and into other parts of the metal.  Slowly, painstakingly, the helicopter wreckage began to resemble a trapped giant, a man or woman trying to pull themselves free of the grasping machine.  As the gas hissed and the metal spoke in its own soft, tortured way, she could almost believe that it was talking to her.

In the bedroom below the man in the bed with the paper frowned at the quilt.  Something hot and metallic appeared to have dripped from the ceiling and had burned a hole both through the duvet and, by the looks of things, into the mattress.

“Acid rain?” he muttered, and reached for his writing pad.  The paper would have to hear about this!

On her bed, the orphan girl screamed again and writhed against her bonds.  Geraldinium had tied her down when she’d told her that she wanted to elope with the truck-driver.

Geraldinium turned the acetylene supply off and the flame extinguished like life cut short.  Afterimages danced in front of her eyes despite the smoked glass of the mask, and she sat back on her heels for a minute, letting her eyes recover and re-adjust.  Then she took the mask off and looked at the sculpture.

“Rust,” she said softly.  “That’s what it needs now.  Rust.”

UrbEx part III

Geraldinium’s footsteps were squelches on the concrete floor and even tiptoeing didn’t help, so she walked normally and listened hard in case there was anyone else in there.  There were doors at regular intervals; some plain wooden doors with blistered round handles, some had frosted glass windows through which dim light fell, and some were made of metal.  Geraldinium tried the handle of the first metal door she came to, but the door was locked again.  She rattled it a little against the frame, wondering if she should try to force it open, and decided she would only if she couldn’t find anything to inspire her elsewhere.  She walked further along the corridor until she saw a door with frosted windows that was already ajar, and she pushed it further open and went inside.

The room was mostly empty save for a padded plastic couch on a thin metal frame pushed up against a wall.  There were deep rips in the padding exposing yellowing foam that spilled out like pus infecting a wound.  Against the other wall was a rotting wooden leg, seemingly all that remained of a desk that had been there at sometime.  Geraldinium pulled her camera free again, and snapped a couple of pictures, moving around the room to vary her angles.  The lack of a desk intrigued her more than the examination couch, but she took pictures of both.

Further along the corridor she found another door ajar, and stepping through this one found herself in another, shorter corridor that opened out into a lobby where the lifts where.  There were four sets of doors all in the one wall, and each of them had long black streaks running down.  Looking up, Geraldinium saw holes in the ceiling where lumps of plaster had dropped out, and that the black streaks all started there.  Staring for a moment she thought the streaks were moving, writhing, and then her vision resolved like staring at an optical illusion and she realised that the rainwater from outside was running down the walls and doors now, carrying the black muck from the ceiling to the floor.  Her camera was back out again, and she snapped more shots, smiling to herself as she did so.  Assigning a name to this room and creating a history for it would be easy.

She couldn’t resist pushing the lift-call button, but nothing responded, as she’d expected.  There was another way out of the lift-lobby so she walked that way.  The lumps of plaster that must have fallen from the ceiling were scattered on the floor of the corridor that way, which puzzled her slightly.  Why would anyone move them?  Another short corridor opened out into a long corridor running at right-angles, and she realised that the basic layout of the hospital must be roughly H-shaped.  She turned right, heading back the way she’d come but on the new corridor, and this time tried the handle of the first door she came to.  Slightly to her surprise it opened at a touch, revealing what was once a private room.

The wallpaper was peeling off from the bottom of the wall and there was a musty, mouldy smell like the room hadn’t been aired.  Which, Geraldinium thought, was probably true.  The bed frame, a white-painted metal contraption that looked more like it was for confinement than rest, was underneath a barred window.  It was divided into several small squares, three of which were broken.  The plaster around an electrical socket was exposed and gouged as though something had been dragged from it,  Pages from a magazine, yellowing and torn, were scattered beneath the bed frame, growing steadily damper from the rain blown in through the broken window.  Geraldinium hissed with delight, taking more pictures again, the digital clicking of the imaginary shutter a counterpoint to her joy.

UrbEx part II

It was raining gently; the sky was a dark grey promising heavier rain to come.  Geraldinium ignored it and concentrated on the high walls surrounding the hospital.  Traffic was quiet on the road that ran around it, but there was still a car coming by every minute or so, making it difficult to scale a nine-foot high wall unseen.  She carried on walking, paying close attention to the wall, looking for footholds or handholds, or even a convenient tree or post-box that she could use to gain some height.  She wondered briefly if she should have brought the orphan-girl along to use as a step up, but then dismissed the idea.  Far better to have made the orphan-girl bring a step-ladder along and then take it away again.

She stopped at last at a green-painted, slightly rusted junction box, the kind the telecoms companies used to route cables and wires to provide internet and phone connections to the street.  It seemed a little out of place on this side of the road, but it gave her four feet off the ground, and that would be enough for her to get her hands to the top of the wall.  She looked around: there were actually three cars coming, two from one direction and the third from the other.  She frowned and glared at the traffic until it went past, oblivious to her anger.  Then she leapt athletically up onto the junction box, discovering at that moment that the top wasn’t flat but was angled.  Clearly the engineers didn’t want people standing on it.  Ignoring that, she jumped at the wall and grabbed the top of it easily, then flexed her arms and shoulders and pulled herself up.  Swinging her hips, she pulled her legs over, and let herself drop over the other side, pleased that no cars had gone past while she was climbing the wall, and a second later let out a hiss of breath as she hit the ground.  She looked up: the wall was nearly eleven feet high on this side.  Perhaps the landscapers had dug the ground out to make the wall more of a challenge.

As she climbed a wet, slippery slope to a lawn that approached the hospital she realised that that was exactly what had happened.  The lawn was, if anything, more slippery still, and there were patches that had succumbed to the invasion of clover and other ground cover which shed water from its leaves onto her feet and made her shoes wetter still.  As she slipped and slid her way across, she looked over at the hospital, and suddenly realised that she was clearly visible to anyone inside.  Was there security in this place?  She didn’t recall reading about any, but she wasn’t being cautious enough.  Without another thought she dropped to the ground, and slithered along like a snake instead.

The hospital was a pre-war construction, faced with a yellow-brown stone and ornamented with towers at either end and a clock-tower above the main hall in the middle.  The clock-tower was built in three stages, with the main hall building being the first, then an octagonal room above that being the second.  The third stage was the actual tower surmounted by a clock and stretched fifteen feet up in its own right.  Looking up at it, and blinking every few seconds as another cold raindrop landed in her eye, Geraldinium wondered if there was art to be made from that view.  She felt for her camera, and took a few shots, the digital clicking sounding loud despite the patter of the rain.  Then she looked at the doors to the main hall.  They were closed, and looked locked.

Geraldinium stood up again now that she was near the building, and checked around her.  There was no-one in sight, and by hugging the walls she could stay relatively hidden.  Her clothes, now wet through, stuck to her and were cold, but she decided that she could ignore that in the interests of finding something for her next exhibition piece.  She tried the main doors without much hope, and was rewarded with the dull clunk of a lock preventing the door knobs from turning.  She shrugged and started walking around the walls, her shoes squelching now with each step.

The windows on the ground floor had already been panelled over with sheet steel so there was no way in that way, though Geraldinium did notice that what she’d first thought was graffiti was in fact the signatures of previous UrbExers.  She snapped a picture of that too, a half-thought in her mind about connecting each name with a room in the hospital and creating a fictional life of people in there after the hospital closed.  About a third of the way round she found a stone urn, a planter now empty of everything save for smears of moss, standing a little way away from the building, and scratches on the paving flags nearby that suggested it had been moved at some point.  She almost walked past, then she looked up.  A little above her a first-floor window was very slightly open; if she’d not been stood in the right place she wouldn’t even have noticed it.  She wiped the rain off her face, and dragged the planter over.

The window was easier to get through than the wall had been to get over, and Geraldinium remembered to bend her knees this time as she dropped over the windowsill.  The floor was a far more reasonable foot and a half below the window.  She straightened and looked about.  She was in a corridor that stretched away into the distance in both directions, reminding her of her attic studio only shorter and smaller.  The walls were a mint-green colour that she remembered from her childhood, and she felt disoriented for a moment until she realised that she was expecting to smell disinfectant and instead she had only the damp, impersonal smell of wet concrete and undertones of mildew.  She took a step, and started giggling, the sudden euphoria of knowing that she’d successfully broken into this abandoned hospital and was now stepping where only a small army of UrbExers had stepped before her.

UrbEx part I

The orphan girl was sat at a table eating porridge.  Her grubby, thin ankles were manacled to black iron rings set into the floorboards, and though she could stand up and move a little way away, she was restricted to an ellipse with a major axis of about six feet.  Her hair was limp, grey, and hadn’t been washed for over two weeks, and her face had little dried patches of porridge spotted here and there.  The porridge she was eating now was cold, as Geraldinium was worried about her trying to wear hot porridge and burning herself.  The orphan finished eating, put the spoon down, and put the bowl on her head.  A small amount of beige porridge dribbled down her temples.

Geraldinium came out of her enrobing room and saw the orphan sitting there, porridge-bowl-bedecked and staring vacantly into the long space of the attic room and sighed very faintly.  She’d only taken the girl back under pressure from the courts who had insisted that she was the closest thing the girl had to a real guardian.  There was now a social-worker who came round twice a week to check on the orphan, and Geraldinium suspected the pretty young woman with the earnest demeanour and arthritic fingers of having her own agenda.

“Take the bowl off your head,” she said, snapping her fingers to make sure that she got the orphan’s attention.  For a moment there was no reaction, and then her eyes slowly slid inwards and she blinked.

“But it’s art,” she said, her voice whiny and slightly nasal.

“It isn’t,” said Geraldinium.  “I should know.  I did something similar, but more original, for my A-level art studies and photographed it.  I had a row of my teachers lined up wearing bowls of custard, porridge, tapioca and wallpaper paste.  The bowls were all copper, and had cables running from them, as though there were hooked up to an electric chair.  I called it Does justice require intelligence? and my examiners wept when they saw the picture.  That was art.  What you are doing is retarded.”

“My hat is cold,” said the orphan, her voice sing-song and her eyes starting to diverge again.  Geraldinium snapped her fingers at her, and the orphan’s eyes stopped moving.

“Take the bowl off,” she said.  “I am going out, and you can either have crayons and paper circles while I’m gone, or you can be tied back down to the bed of your own making.”

The orphan shuddered a little, and as she pulled the bowl from her head with shaking hands her head turned slowly so that she could see the bed in the far corner.  “Not the bed,” she whispered, and Geraldinium wasn’t completely certain that she’d heard her.  “Where are you going?” she asked in a slightly louder voice.

“Out,” said Geraldinium.  She adjusted her straps: she was wearing a blue denim shirt and jeans with a utility tool belt strapped around her waist.  Her brown jacket was canvas and covered in pockets and straps.  Out of a side pocket poked an A-Z of London, and on the other side balancing that was an A5 sketchbook and a couple of pencils.  A tiny camera dangled from one strap and a water-bottle was held firmly in webbing at the back of the jacket.  She looked a little like a survivalist caught out in the city.  “I have a mausoleum-hospital to photograph.”

The mausoleum-hospital was in fact an abandoned hospital out in the East of London, slowly falling apart behind the high walls that had once made sure that the patients were kept in, but to Geraldinium’s mind its steady architectural senescence made it tomb-like, a mausoleum for the ghosts of lives that had been lived there.  She had stumbled across it mostly accidentally while researching UrbEx, wondering if there was art to be made out of the assault on the dangerously-abandoned and things only interesting because they were forbidden.  When she’d seen the first pictures on the website, taken by a 14-year old UrbEx – Urban Explorer – her imagination had been captivated.

She grabbed a slim transparent plastic wallet from a wormy dresser and dumped in on the table in front of the orphan.  Inside were white circles of soft paper and some crayons.  The primary colours looked almost new, while the autumnal colours were worn over half-way down, in some cases almost to stubs.

“And no more self-portraits,” she said.  “You’re not Batman, and drawing yourself as such is pure cargo cult.”  The expression on the orphan’s face was so blank Geraldinium found herself expecting the girl to moo.  “I’ll be back,” she said.  “Try not to get hungry before then.”

Angst

“But is it art?”  Geraldinium screamed at the top of her lungs.  Her chest heaved as though she’d been running a marathon, and the three sets of pearl-strands she was wearing clattered and shivered as they were thrown around.  “Is it ART?  IS.  IT.  ART?”  Her voice echoed around the workshop, a vast attic space that ran the length of an entire terrace of houses, coming back to her at different times from different angles until it seemed as though there were a chorus of sycophants questioning right alongside her.

The orphan, released from hospital into Geraldinium’s very reluctant care, was tied by her ankles and wrists to a sheetless bed in the corner of the attic.  Her head turned from side to side, almost as though she was trying to escape the myriad mingling of voice and echoes.  Geraldinium ignored her though, as she’d ignored her mewling cries and her pleading for food.  A camera on a tripod was set up at the foot of the bed, and a silver reflector sat like an umbrella left out to dry nearby.

“Is it art?” said Geraldinium, much more quietly now.  She looked along the attic to her sculpture park wondering for a moment if she should go and rage at the unfeeling stone, but the thought of walking that far deterred her.  She loved the space, for all that she had no idea how anyone could think that a room the length of a street was a good idea.  It took four minutes to walk from one end to the other and she’d been able to set up areas dedicated to most contemporary art forms and still have space for the kitten-press, three-hundred china cups of undrunk tea, and a small still cunningly disguised as a tailor’s dummy.  The exact locations weren’t based on availability of light, relative heating or even how often she used them; instead she put them over the houses of her downstairs neighbours who’d done things to annoy her.  Right at the moment the sculpture park was making her floorboards (and hence his ceiling) groan intermittently over number 35, whose owner had asked her three days ago about the orphan.

“Are you a paedophile, then?” he’d said, inwardly telling himself that he was the kind of a man who called a spade a spade.  Geraldinium, who was the kind of woman who called men like him bigoted racists half-smiled and told him that the Daily Mail depended on his readership.

“Is that a yes then?” he’d demanded, his little, piggish eyes screwing up tightly in his sweaty, shiny face.

“No,” said Geraldinium.  “She’s an orphan, remanded into my care by the courts.  I’m her saviour, in a very real way.  So keep away from her, or I’ll have the police round and your picture in your favourite newspaper before you can pronounce my name properly.”

The orphan’s bed was over number 72 because the couple who lived there were both stone-deaf and shouted a lot at each other.  Geraldinium would sometimes sit on the floor above them and listen to their conversations, lines of thought bedevilled by their joint inability to hear what the other was saying.   She wrote down what they said, gathering the most interesting pieces together for an exhibition: she planned to write them out calligraphically on parchment ribbons and hang from the ceiling as guide-points through an ill-lit maze.  At the centre of the maze would be ancient and modern hearing-aids in a glass case polished to the point of invisibility so that the audience could reach for them but not touch.  Finally, the exit from the maze would be short, a brisk walk through a corridor lined with the accoutrements of the grave.

The ant farm, which she’d been preparing for an exhibition on the worthlessness of indentured labour, was on the floor over number 2, but the ants had all escaped last week and were probably ruining either a home or a garden.  Geraldinium just set up an easel and started to paint the scene, seeing a perfect continuation of her theme in the departure of the slave labour for more hospitable climes.

“It is art,” she said, nodding her head.  She turned to look at the orphan, whose heavy-lidded eyes rolled a little in her direction.  “You are art,” she said.  “You suffer, and that is just because art is all about suffering.  You mostly suffer because you are deluded and believe that you are Batman, despite the obvious gender discrepancy and your plummet from the roof of this building three months earlier.  But you also suffer because you are tied to this bed, which you constructed from an IKEA flatpack during your first morning back here so that I can legitimately say that it is a bed of your own making, without food or succour so that I may photograph you over a three day period and showcase the folding-in of the human soul on itself.”

The orphan whimpered a little, but in her tiny, mad mind where her thoughts fizzed like sodium cast carelessly into water she barely heard a word Geraldinium said.  She was, in her dreams, prowling darkened rooftops dressed in too much leather and not enough warm clothes, hunting for imbalances to redress.

“This, too, is art,” she said, her arm describing cavernous attic around them.  Everything I do is art, everything has worth, and nothing exists until I show it.  What kind of life is led, unlived until the spotlight falls upon it, then only to be scrutinised by people who envy and fear it?  What life is this the artist conveys, suffering in silence, brought to animation in brief bursts like angels caught in strobe lights?  Is this art?”

The orphan whimpered again, her wide-pupilled eyes blind to everything but the images of violent, blood-stained retribution playing on the inner cinema of her mind.  Geraldinium stared at her for a moment, then ran to the camera and took a staccato burst of photographs.  Behind her, the floor creaked beneath the sculptures, and fine plaster dust rained down from the ceiling beneath onto a middle-aged man sitting up in bed, the Daily Mail crossword in his lap.

Rainclouds

The plastic bag popped as he picked it up, showering him in lukewarm water.  His eyes closed reflexively and he gasped as though he'd been dropped into water from a height, and he took two steps back.  Two steps which moved him away from the soft-grey plastic bags but moved him dangerously close to the precariously balanced china plates.  For a moment the entire audience for the exhibition held their breaths, waiting to see if he was about to destroy the most interesting exhibit in the entire Freda Street art-festival.  He stopped.  A foot lifted off the ground, and almost, almost moved backwards.  Then his toes touched the floor again and his foot slid forward and rested down.
The sigh as the audience exhaled at once was like a warm, cabbage-smelling wind that rocked the plates on their tiny, thin stick-like stands.  Madame Delphine, the curator, hurried forwards and took hold of his hand and led him forwards, away from the exhibit.
"What was that?" he said, his hands rubbing his eyes.  His face seemed oddly sticky.
"A raincloud," said Madame Delphine, producing a thin white hand-towel seemingly from nowhere.  She handed it to him, and he noticed that it was hot, as though it had been freshly microwaved.  "You were asked when you came in, not to touch any of the exhibits."
He looked at her: she was short, petite, dark-haired.  She looked like she might be Vietnamese or Laotian, and her eyes were a deep azure.  There were wrinkles around them that suggested age, but the skin of her face was as smooth and perfect as a photoshop.  She was wearing a dress done in black-and-white panels that made him think of a piano keyboard.
"The exhibit specifically says its interactive," he said, rubbing the towel over his face.  "It invites you to pick the bags up."
"The clouds," said Madame Delphine holding out a hand.  He checked it quickly, it looked as smooth and soft as her face.  "They're rainclouds, and yes, they do invite you to touch them.  Then they release their rain on to you, as that one just did.  Think of them as a little trap."
He put the used towel in her hand, and then started, seeing the red smears all over the towel.  His hands went back up to his face.
"What was in those bags?" he said.  His face felt normal and wasn't sticky now.
"I think," said Madame Delphine, her voice as delicate as the fall of a petal, but with emphasis on the word think, "that Geraldinium mixed urine and menstrual blood together for the 'rainwater'."  She waited patiently while he tried not to throw up, and when he was standing mostly upright again she handed him another hot towel.  He scrubbed at his face more vigorously this time, ignoring that it hurt.
"Geraldine?" he said, his voice made indistinct by the towel frantically rubbing over his face.  It kept catching on his day-old stubble and little strands of white cotton drifted free and fell to the floor.
"Geraldinium Holmes."  Madame Delphine sounded genuinely surprised.  "Are you really at this exhibit without knowing who the artist is?"
"Well, that's normal isn't it?" he said.  He checked the towel carefully now he'd finished rubbing his face, scrutinising it for any sign of red.  There were none, but he couldn't stop himself from rubbing all over his face again, just one more time.  "Surely there are only a few art critics and journalists here who actually know the artist before they come in?"
"Not when it's a Geraldinium Holmes exhibit," said Madame Delphine.  Her voice might be as soft as the wind, but when she spoke he was forcibly reminded that the wind could, under the right circumstances, rip up farmhouses and carry them out of Kansas and drop them on wicked witches.  "You are probably the only person in here who has no idea what he's actually looking at.  Or, probably, how much danger he's in."
He stared at her now, the towel falling from his fingers and his eyes so wide he could feel his eyeballs drying out.  "Danger?"
"Mr Whoever-you-are," said Madame Delphine, "if you had taken three steps back instead of two when the raincloud burst on you, you would have knocked the china plates behind you off their precarious little stands.  Not only would that have ruined the Morning Wind exhibit and cost you quite a lot of money, but Geraldinium has perfected the china grenade.  I completely expect those plates to explode and blast the place with china shrapnel.  It's why the screens around the exhibit, though not advertised as such, are blast screens.  You might have been better off not surviving given the value of the exhibition, and the fact that Geraldinium is reported to be selling it to a North African nation."
"I... I had no idea..," he said.  "And my name's Entsted."
"Well Entsted, perhaps I should show you round the rest of the exhibition personally.  I am Madame Delphine.  Would you care for an appetiser?  Cabbage and pork pot-stickers, as requested by Geraldinium personally."
"Thank-you, that sounds nice," he said.  He paused.  "Is there a reason she asked for them?" he said carefully.
"Not that I'm aware of," said Madame Delphine, "and everyone here seems to be enjoying them.  Personally I think she's gone rather heavy on the cabbage, but that may be a matter of personal taste."
"Is she here?"
"Why no," said Madame Delphine looking even more surprised.  "She's at the police station answering questions about animal cruelty.  Something to do with a kitten-press I've been told."

China

The market was in full swing; it was nearly 11am and most of the stall-holders had been there setting up from seven, ready to open at nine.  The locals knew the place well, and many of them shopped there regularly, enjoying the fresh produce from the food side, the decorative arts and crafts in the centre, and the flowers, plants, and horticultural products from the west side.  And, of course, the sense of camaraderie and friendliness that that the stall-holders had for their regulars, providing advice on how to plant things, use things, display things to their best advantage, or offering little treats, rarities and hard-to-come by ingredients.  The market hummed with a friendly, happy energy that only dimmed a little by eleven when the tourists started to arrive, poking and prodding at things, with much interest but little purchasing power.  The smiles faded a little then, and wore steadily thinner through the day, but the stall-holders kept smiling nonetheless and occasionally made a sale.
Geraldinium Holmes had a stall in the middle of the market, a relative novelty for her as previously her art had been mostly sold through exhibition or commission.  Her new line in pottery and elaborate ceramics though, she felt deserved a wider audience, and so she'd found a stall in the marketplace and turned up at seven with her cardboard boxes of chinaware, and looked askance at the stall in its disassembled state.
"Excuse me," she said, sticking an arm out and catching a young, slightly pimply youth as he tried to walk past with arms full of lettuce.  "What is this?"
"Looks like a stall, don't it?" he retorted, backing up a little and trying to get past her.
"No," she said.  "It doesn't.  Stalls are like little tables with awnings over the top and chairs behind them for people to sit on.  There's nothing here I can display my chinaware on.  This is a pile of wood and metal and... and... and whatever that green-and-white stripey stuff is.  This is not a stall."
"Right, yeah.  You have to build it yerself, innit?"
"Innit?"  Geraldinium dropped her arm and the youth promptly scuttled off.  She stared at the stall's framework, neatly stacked in piles according to the length of the struts, and sighed.  She couldn't see assembly instructions anywhere, and her assistant was still in hospital after her bout of unfortunate mental illness that had lead her to believe that she a superheroine capable of flight.
She finally located one of the market organisers in a small grey office up an ill-lit flight of stairs.  The office was situated between railway lines and the frequency of the trains meant that the office trembled almost constantly and conversations had to be either shouted out, or held elsewhere.  The organiser was a small woman with skin like the bark of a beech tree and hair that appeared to be coming out in clumps.
"HOW DO I SET THE STALL UP?" howled Geraldinium at the top of her voice.
"BY HAND," yelled the organiser back
"WHERE ARE THE INSTRUCTIONS?"
"OH!  YOU'RE NEW?"
"Yes," said Geraldinium into the momentary silence from the trains stopping passing.  "Yes, and all I have is an advanced jigsaw puzzle and no instructions."
The organiser, whose little grey name badge declared herself to be Emily, rummaged in a tea-chest that supported the couple of planks of wood that formed her desk, and pulled out a tatty, holey piece of paper.
"THERE YOU GO!" she yelled, the trains going past again.  "HAVE FUN!"  Geraldinium cursed her all the way down the stairs.
The stall set-up proved to be fairly straightforward when Geraldinium had the instructions in front of her, despite the fact that the second page appeared to be entirely in French for some reason, and she managed to get set-up and all her stuff laid out by half-past eight.  There was no chair though; it looked like she'd been expected to bring her own.  She sighed and cursed a blue streak, causing nearby stall-holders to look over in consternation.  Once they'd looked over, they came over for a better look.
"Is this...?" said Hettie, who ran a watercolour-supply stall and usually had a few slightly drippy, sub-Monet pictures that she'd done recently hung up at the back.
"A sub-machine-gun made from china, yes," said Geraldinium.
"Oh.  Does it...?"
"Work?  Yes, but it'll need repairs after you're done firing it."
"Oh.  Is that...?"
"Don't you ever ask a complete question?"  Geraldinium glared at Hettie, who flinched and backed away a little.
"Now then, Hettie's just a bit highly strung," said Mortadella, who didn't appear to know that her pseudonym was actually a type of sausage, and who ran the typography stall next to Hettie's.  You're never telling me that this is a grenade made from china are you?"
"I wasn't, but I am now," said Geraldinium.  "I realised that given the fragility of the material it made more sense to make things that were inherently single-use."
"How much damage does one of these do?"
"Well, I threw one out of the window a few days ago, and it pretty much pollarded five trees when it exploded."
"Oh, pollarded," said Mortadella, nodding in an attempt to pretend she understood the word.  Geraldinium, who'd been trying to destroy her neighbours ornamental fishpond with the grenade said nothing.  The collapse of the crowns of five trees into the pond had achieved her aims, but she'd been surprised both by the damage the grenade did and how short the fuse appeared to be.
"So... who's you're target market?" said someone else, possibly the spotty youth who'd been carrying lettuces earlier.
"Everyone," said Geraldinium.

Art and business

Manguy steepled his fingers together and tapped his index fingers against his lips.  His bright eyes darted from side to side, though his besuited body remained perfectly still in his black leather office chair.  For a moment he seemed tense, then he seemed perfectly at ease again.  It was exactly the kind of stillness that Zen monks attain after a decade of study in a remote temple on the roof of the world.  The woman sat in the chair on the opposite side of the desk tried to wait him out.
Forty-five minutes later her bladder was complaining noisily, which she was finding mildly embarrassing, and Manguy still hadn't moved.  She wasn't sure if he'd ever blinked, or if he'd somehow conspired to only blink when she did.  She didn't think that was possible, but then she'd never thought that someone could sit that still for that long either.  She stretched her arms above her head, knowing that this presented her breasts in a rather attractive light, and yawned noisily.
"Look," she said, her voice raucous to both their ears after the prolonged silence.  "I won't pretend that this is fun, though it is relaxing.  I've been to Yoga that was far worse that this, and in dim light you'd pass for the teacher too.  She was a woman by the way."  She paused, lowering her arms as an excuse for not talking, studying Manguy.  He never moved, not even a blink.  "But you asked me to come here, and here I am.  Was it really just so you could hold a staring contest with me?"
"Do you know where here is?"  His voice was low, musical, and far clearer than anyone who'd apparently not swallowed for forty-five minutes should be able to manage.
"Yeah, sort of."   Geraldinium frowned as she tried to remember.  The name of the organisation had been written at the foot of the email in small type but all she could remember was the postcode, which she'd had to look up in a 1970's edition of the London A-Z.  "I know your postcode."
"Here is Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations," said Manguy.  "We specialise in... specialising in things, and we're very good at it.  My colleagues arrange for people and organisations to make headway in the often conflicting environments that the modern world disports around us.  The incredibly tall and high-heeled lady you passed on the way to my office is Jeronica, and she looks after soft-power in the Northern Hemisphere.  Even if she didn't tower over you and intimidate you she could sit down with you and show you how to become the most exhibited artist in London.  In about twenty minutes."
"She's agreed to sit for a portrait," said Geraldinium, nodding.  To her great delight Manguy looked suddenly surprised, though he quickly controlled himself and his face firmed back into boredom.  "I'm doing an homage to Dali and his Temptation."
"The one with the Elephants?" asked Manguy, though his voice changed half-way through the question so that it became more of a statement.  "I wonder if Jeronica is aware of your intentions."
"I wonder if I'm aware of your intentions," retorted Geraldinium.  She lifted a leg and slung it over the arm of her chair, slumping towards her left to get more comfortable.  "You've told me who you are and I don't care.  You've told me what you do, and I don't understand, and I think I wasn't supposed to.  You've told me about your colleague, but nothing about you.  Why?  Why?  Why?"
"I'm Manguy," said Manguy.  "Can we pretend I offered you my hand and you declined to shake it on artistic grounds?"
Geraldinium shrugged.  "Or we can pretend I offered you my hand and you declined because you thought you might catch something."
"We wish to purchase your next year's output of art," said Manguy, controlling a shudder and the urge to call for the cleaners.  "We have a list of paintings that we'd like to commission from you.  To an extent, there is a lot of creative freedom, but there must be certain elements conveyed in the paintings, exactly as we define."
"Steganography?" said Geraldinium.  "Again?"
"Rather, still," said Manguy, allowing himself a small smile.  "May I take that as acceptance?"
"No," said Geraldinium.  "We haven't discussed my fee yet.  Shall we start by pretending that I've named something astronomical and you're so thrilled that it's me doing the work that you're going to pay it anyway?"
"Ah," said Manguy.  "I was hoping that we could start by looking at these pictures of your cat-press."  He didn't move, but somehow conveyed the impression that there might be a drawer on his side of the desk that might contain something interesting.
"Did you know," said Geraldinium sounding conversational, "that you can fit a person in a cat-press?  Not many people know that."
There was another momentary pause and then the staring competition resumed.

Innocence

Light fell through the skylight and struck the shattered mirror on the floor.  Rays lanced out in myriad directions, illuminating motes of dust as they lingered in the air, unwilling to descend to the floor below and wait to be trodden on, and finally striking the painted faces of Popes.  Popes Innocent I through to Innocent XIII, collectively entitled Innocence.
Each Pope had been painted on a large canvas so that they were about 80% of life-size, and each had been painted as accurately as sources would allow.  Most of them were from writings, as Pope Innocent XIII had died in the early 1700s and the first Innocent had lived sometime around the fifth century, but now and then there had been other paintings available for study too.  Geraldinium Holmes had done her best with the material available, but in some cases had made up much of the image from her own imagination.  She'd been quite pleased to discover that there were thirteen Popes Innocent, as it allowed her to set the exhibition up in a circle and tell people that there was a Pope for every hour of the clock-face, and then see their confusion as they tried to work out why they didn't leave the circle when they subconsciously expected to.
  As the light faded through the skylight, because dark clouds were filling the sky and louring with the promise of rain, the artist Geraldinium Holmes opened a small door in the corner of the room and came in.  She was limping; after drinking heavily in a underground bar one evening she'd left, and reached the top of the flight of narrow iron stairs before losing her balance and common sense and falling backwards.  She'd crushed two other people who were also trying to leave, but had come away from it with a sprained ankle and an odd, but mild, fear of iron fire-escapes.  She leant heavily on a walking stick to help her manage her ankle, and she limped across the room to the shattered mirror on the floor.  She peered at it for a little while, and decided that it was right after all, and turned to leave again.  As she did so, Pope Innocent X caught her eye, and she paused to examine his picture again.
Innocent X was considered to be one of the more evil Popes, who had had interests in prolonging wars that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and of supporting Civil Wars in European countries.  She looked at his face: long, thin, slightly rat-like, and wondered if she should have emphasized the evil a little more.  Did it contradict the collection's title of Innocence, or could evil be just as innocent in its own way.  She had perched ravens on both of his shoulders, but was that enough?  Perhaps she could add a fly or two, possibly crawling across his robe, or on his hand as it clutched one of his Bulls, the Zelo Domus Dei?  She stood, thinking for a while, and then decided not to.  It had taken her nearly a year to put the collection together, and if she started changing things around now it would be another year before she'd be satisfied again.
She leaned back on her stick again, and limped, a little melodramatically, out of the room, locking the door behind her.  Something about all those Popes together was disturbing.

Reporting from the trial

There has been mild excitement in London today as the artist Geraldinium Holmes entered court to stand trial. At least part of the excitement stems from the fact that few people seem to know what she's on trial for, despite the terms of her arrest and the charges being laid out in uncharacteristically clear fashion by the prosecution (Charmley and Inte-State, whose last case presentation confused the presiding Judge so badly that he finally sentenced their attending clerks to a six week intensive English course. This appears to have produced welcome improvements). Outside the court a small crowd had gathered, some artists, many purchasers of paintings by Geraldinium, and a small contingent of protestors for animal rights. The artists appeared to believe that Geraldinium was representing Art and that somehow they were all on trial with her as their proxy. The purchasers had a number of different opinions, ranging from this being a publicity stunt to the wild claim that she was on trial for actually being Muammar Ghaddafi (the person making this claim, an obese elderly woman smelling of turpentine, also appeared to think that Geraldinium was a man). The protestors were adamant that the trail should be about her dedication to the cause of animal cruelty and showed little interest in what the trial was actually about.
Inside the court, the trial was sparsely attended, with a few scattered journalists and some law students.  At the back of the room was a man who smelled and looked homeless, but who managed to persuade the court stewards that he should be allowed to stay.
After the initial statements of what the trial was about (the claim that Geraldinium Holmes either caused her assistant orphan-girl to kill herself, or was aware that she would make the attempt and did nothing to stop her, electing instead to photograph it for the purposes of creating commercial work from it), Geraldinium was called to the stand, and Mr. Charmley questioned her.
After twenty minutes, he gave up attempting to find out what her name was and why it was so unusual, and moved on to the details of the case.
"Miss Holmes," he said in an operatic baritone, "How did you come to take this photograph?" (Exhibit A, currently on display at the Walham Road Art Gallery, E1).
"I didn't," said Miss Holmes.  "It was taken by a motion-sensing camera that's set-up in a room on the third floor of my house."
"The picture is surely too well-focused and clear for that to be true!"  Mr. Charmley looked a little non-plussed but rallied well.
"It's one of seventy-six that were taken in the space of a single second," replied Miss Holmes.  "The others are not such good quality.  Which is why this one was chosen."
"And where are the other photographs, to substantiate your claim?"  Mr. Charmley was smiling at this point, in a way which, in other cases, has indicated that he is about to reveal a devastating truth.
"The police took them away," said Miss Holmes.  "I have a receipt, see?"  At this point she produced a receipt from her handbag, and Mr. Charmley looked as though he were about to kill someone.  His clerks edged away from him.
"Actually," he said, his words leaden and precise, "you send them out to seventy-five other people, didn't you?  With the message printed on the bottom, 'it could be you next'.  Didn't you?"
"No," said Geraldinium, yawning.  "I have the receipt here that shows the police took them away from me.  I don't know what happened to them after that."
There was much discussion and shouting at this point, until the Judge restored order and requested a viewing of the receipt.  He then retired for thirty minutes, and upon his return dismissed the case on the grounds that the prosecution had inadequate evidence to pursue it.  Mr. Charmley appeared apoplectic, and Miss Holmes had to be woken up from where she was sleeping on the floor in the ante-chamber to the court.
Outside the court there was a mixed reaction to the verdict, not helped by the artists and protestors both having gotten drunk and having a small battle involving the throwing of paint over each other.

Continuations

The gallery was half-full, which was several more people than were usually seen at an exhibition at this end of the city. The opening had been two days earlier, so there wasn't even any free food or wine to tempt people in. They were coming in, it seemed, because they knew who the exhibiting artist was: Geraldinium Holmes.
A young man hovered near her, looking hopeful. She was unscrewing a flower press, her concentration on it suggesting that she was hoping the young man would go away and stop trying to catch her eye.
"Er, Miss Holmes?" said the young man. He sounded nervous, and he started shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
"That's Mr. Holmes, actually," said an obese woman with flaking skin making her face look like she'd been snorkelling in parmesan. "I don't know why people can't tell she's a man."
Geraldinium looked up at that, and caught the young man's eye unexpected. She sighed.
"That's my old landlady," she said, gesturing at the fat, flaky woman. I've no idea what she's doing here, she used to regularly wash my canvases with turpentine and tell me that she was just keeping things clean. What do you want?"
"Um, I'm a reporter, with the Daily Meteor," said the young man. He shifted his weight again, and then seemed to be inspired. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a flimsy paper rectangle which he handed to Geraldinium. "My card!"
"It looks like a taxi-receipt," said Geraldium, reading it. "Thank-you. Have a good day, don't let me keep you."
"Oh, no, you're not keeping me," said the young man, failing to stop Geraldinium from interrupting.
"I'm so glad, thank-you for coming."
"No, you see, my paper would like to do an article on you. And… and could I have my receipt back please? It's for my expenses."
"I don't like interviews," said Geraldinium handing the receipt over. "Why would yours be any different?"
"I only want to talk about your work. I think everyone knows about your private life now."
"What?"
"Well, your twitter feed has been very explicit."
As the young man saw anger rise on Geraldinium's face like a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll, he realised that he should have asked about the twitter feed instead of making assumptions.
"Twitter feed? Is this some kind of bird joke I don't get? Because it had better be." Geraldinium's voice was grim and held the promise of pain for somebody. The young man handed his phone over wordlessly, the twitter app opened to Geraldinimum's alleged tweets. She scanned down them, her face turning thunderous.
"Who is Lady GaGa?" she asked at the end. "And why would I compare myself to her?"
"She wore a dress made of bacon," said the young man, "and she's very… herself."
"I see. Fine, ask your questions and quickly. I can see I have a twit to hunt down."
"They call themselves twitterers," said the young man, and hastily added, "but yours is probably more accurate in this case."
"Questions?"
"What's this exhibit all about, really?" The young man had flushed and was almost stumbling over his words in an effort to finish and get away without causing any more trouble.
"Continuations."
"Continuations of what?" The young man noticed that Geraldinium was opening the press at last.
"Previous works. For example, this piece here, Persephone in Decay, continues on from my previous exhibit Cheeseburgher."
"But this is a painting!"
"So?"
"Cheeseburgher was a rat rotting in a jar of old cheese. How a painting continue a dynamic sculpture like that?"
Geraldinium smiled for the first time. "You actually do know my work! Well, this painting was made using only the contents on the jar from Cheeseburgher," she said.
The press opened at last, and inside was revealed a flat kitten.
"What is that?!" The young man sounded both intrigued and horrified.
"I call it Flat 31," said Geraldinium. "Flat 30 was where I lived with my ex-landlady and her pet."

Burnt potatoes

Geraldinium Holmes crunched a potato crisp thoughtfully. Her hand reached out without looking for another, and her fingers dipped neatly into a freshly-made cup of coffee. She pulled them out, and looked round. The newspaper reporter whose drink she'd just turned into a finger-bowl tried not to look reproachful.
"You?" she said, contriving to suggest that she was taller than him and looking down dismissively, despite the fact she was at least three inches shorter. In her heels.
"Miss Holmes, it's a pleasure to meet you again!"
"You sound desperate."
"No! No, I just didn't want you to think you might have offended me by putting your fingers in my drink...."
"I didn't think that. Why are you here? Why do I keep finding you under my feet whenever I turn round?"
The reporter shuffled back a little, as though apprehensive that she might attempt to trample him, but kept smiling. It was a little manic, thought Geraldinium. If he could keep it up for the whole conversation she might have to photograph it and use it as the basis of a painting. Something with clowns.... Abruptly she realised that he'd stopped talking and she'd not heard him start.
"I wasn't listening," she said, opting for honesty. "I doubt it was worth listening to."
"I came to view your exhibition," repeated the reporter. "I didn't actually think you'd attend."
"He ain't got no choice, 'as 'e?" said an elderly, obese woman who was rubbing vigorously at a canvas with a cloth that smelled of turpentine. "He's under contract to appear with all 'is paintings at this gallery." She darted off with surprising agility as two security guards raced towards her.
"Your landlady?" asked the reporter politely, and Geraldinium just nodded. "I mean, ex-landlady, of course," he added. "You're contractually obliged to appear here?"
"No," sighed Geraldinium. "She's just insane. That painting she was trying to deface? It has a herbal varnish on it, to protect it from just that kind of attack. The little plaque beneath the painting even explains it, because it gives the painting a special kind of smell."
"Burnt potatoes," said the reporter smiling.
"What?" Geraldinium looked mystified.
"I've been smelling burnt potatoes all round the exhibit," said the reporter. "I thought that must be the herbal varnish."
"No. That's the sculpture made from burnt potato crisps," said Geraldinium. "Be careful with it though, I had to use an arsenic-based glue to hold them together with enough structure soundness."
"Isn't that sculpture being installed in an infant school?" The reporter looked shocked.
"I believe so," said Geraldinium. "I can't imagine why, though. What child understands art, really? Just look at their television programmes, they're devoid of any intellectual creativity!"
"Is that why one of your paintings depicts the Teletubbies being hanged?"
"You spotted that one?" Geraldinium looked pleased.
"Yes, even though it's the size of a postage stamp."
Geraldinium's smile got broader. "I had to make a brush out of ant-hair to paint that," she said.
"Ants don't have hair." The reporter realised what he'd said, and went bright red, but Geraldinium ignored him. "Any others you spotted?"
"Um, well, yes, but I think the police have spotted it too."
"Which one?"
"The one that's your orphan servant girl leaping off the roof in that bizarre Batman costume."
"Why would the police be interested?"
"You noted it was painted from a photograph, and that suggests you knew it was going to happen...."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"I'm the distraction." The reporter hung his head, looking thoroughly miserable, as two burly police officers stepped silently up behind Geraldinium and seized an arm each.

Superheroine

Geraldinium Holmes hummed quietly to herself. She was past her kitten phase, as she now liked to think of it, and the hate mail was dying down to just one or two sacks a week. On her desk, next to a stack of hate-mail she was replying to, was a cup of herbal tea that she had the orphan-girl make for her hourly. It was a simple tisane with an herbal extract added; Geraldinium made the extract herself using ethanol and window-box-grown herbs. It was both delicious and refreshing, but she found that she wasn't get a whole lot of work done after mid-afternoon and was considering going back to coffee. She rubbed the inside of her elbow absently as she thought that.
She picked up a strip of synthetic cat fur, dipped it in the bloody juices from a slice of freshly-cut liver and put it in an envelope to send to the next hate-mailer in the pile. Then she put a slip of paper in there with it, on which she'd neatly written "Adolphus, aged 3. Bled out." She had plans for making a collage of any replies she got.
"Miss Holmes?" The orphan-girl behind her sounded sad and plaintive. Geraldinium sighed.
"Orphan-girl," she said firmly without looking round. "What have I told you about speaking?"
"Er, there's been a couple of things actually," said the orphan-girl. "You've told me only to speak when you've said something interesting that needs acknowledging, not to speak unless the pan's about to boil dry and ruin a new artwork, and if I have to speak then always to sound so happy that people want to kill me."
"The last one," said Geraldinium licking the envelope and sealing it. She licked her lips and made a moue, liver juice had dripped on the glue-strip.
"Miss Holmes!" The orphan-girl sounded bright and lively, the kind of person who's enthusiastic at stupid-o'clock and trying to be helpful to people who are just feeling murderous.
"Yes... oh, my." Geraldinium turned round this time, and her words died on her lips. The orphan-girl had found some leather and plastic from somewhere and put together what she could only hope was supposed to be a super-hero costume. It didn't fit well, and generally covered those parts that super-heros traditionally exposed while not covering those parts that any decent person would want covered up.
"Oh... my." said Geraldinium again, wondering if English actually had any words suitable for this occasion.
"I'm Batman," said the orphan-girl. "I'm going to be a superheroine."
"Bats...," said Geraldinium slowly. "How? I mean... how?"
"Well, Batman's parents were killed when he was young," said the orphan girl, a leather strip uncoiling around her leg and falling around her ankle. "And he lived a strange life alone except for the help and was incredibly clever, and when I thought about it, that's just like me."
"You thought?" murmured Geraldinium who had killed the orphan-girl's parents in order to acquire an orphaned servant girl.
"I've put together the costume, and now I'm going to go around saving animals and avenging them!"
"And who am I in all of this?" said Geraldinium.
"The help, silly! You're Alfred, Alfred."
"I think you should go and check on the animal cages in case there are any trapped animals," said Geraldinium, still mesmerized by seeing all the wrong bits of her servant girl.
"Oh!" The orphan girl turned and tried to run, tripping over the loose leather strap, getting tangled up in the rest of her mess of a costume, and banging her head on the floor.
"Some Batman," said Geraldinium, not unkindly. Then, remembering that she was supposed to be Alfred, she got up and kicked the girl in the kidneys.

Anti-Cat

The reporter found Geraldinium Holmes in her new studio. She was sitting at a table gazing out of a window that looked over the sewage recycling plant. In front of her was a cup of tea, smelling strongly of Chamomile.
"Miss Holmes?" said the reporter tentatively. The artist didn't respond, so he looked around for the girl-waif who had shown him in, but she had disappeared. "Miss Holmes?" he tried again.
Geraldinium stirred slightly, and picked up her cup of tea by the handle. She sipped from it, and put the cup down with a look of disgust.
"This is dreadful," she said, and the reporter looked around to see who she was talking to. "Fix it."
"Er, are you talking to me?" he asked, his hand already half-way to the cup. "What's wrong with it?"
Geraldinium turned round and saw him for the first time.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I spoke to you at the art exhibition a week ago; I was hoping I could get another interview with you. A girl let me in…."
"The orphan, yes. She has difficulty telling who is a visitor and who should have a bucket of water thrown over them."
"Well, she let me in…."
"So you think that entitles you to an interview, do you? I am busy you know. I have a new installation to create, and hate-mail to answer, and that's even before I go and punish the orphan until she learns how to make tea."
"Hate mail?"
"For Flat 31."
"The flattened kitten?"
Geraldinium shrugged her shoulders and stood up, picking her cup up as an afterthought. "I think 'pressed kitten' sounds better. Flattened makes it sound like I just dropped something heavy on it, whereas pressed sounds more artistic."
"Either way, you did kill a kitten."
"It's art. Although the people writing the hate mail seem to agree with you, so there's a lot of uneducated people out there still. You should see the letters they send me: crayons, chalks, letters written on the backs of recent bills, they're all insane. And none of them can spell!"
"Perhaps they're just getting a little excited when they write to you--"
"I've had evidence of that in the letters too. I have to burn some of them."
The pause turned into a silence that finally the reporter felt he had to break.
"What's the new project called again?"
"Anti-cat."
"Aunty Cat? Is this making up somehow for the squash-- I mean, pressed, kitten?"
"Not Aunty as in your mother's sister, you ninny. Anti-cat. The opposite of a cat."
"What, like a dog?"
"That's a different species altogether. No, a collection of anti-elements held in a magnetic holding bottle shaped like a cat. If you brought it together with a real cat the two would annihilate causing an explosion, much like when you bring two angry, hungry cats together over a small fish."
"Um, is it wise to create art that appears to be encouraging the wholesale destruction of cats?"
"Was it wise to make my own orphan and then employ her? Probably not, but it wouldn't be art if I didn't do it!"

Continuations

The gallery was half-full, which was several more people than were usually seen at an exhibition at this end of the city. The opening had been two days earlier, so there wasn't even any free food or wine to tempt people in. They were coming in, it seemed, because they knew who the exhibiting artist was: Geraldinium Holmes.
A young man hovered near her, looking hopeful. She was unscrewing a flower press, her concentration on it suggesting that she was hoping the young man would go away and stop trying to catch her eye.
"Er, Miss Holmes?" said the young man. He sounded nervous, and he started shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
"That's Mr. Holmes, actually," said an obese woman with flaking skin making her face look like she'd been snorkelling in parmesan. "I don't know why people can't tell she's a man."
Geraldinium looked up at that, and caught the young man's eye unexpected. She sighed.
"That's my old landlady," she said, gesturing at the fat, flaky woman. I've no idea what she's doing here, she used to regularly wash my canvases with turpentine and tell me that she was just keeping things clean. What do you want?"
"Um, I'm a reporter, with the Daily Meteor," said the young man. He shifted his weight again, and then seemed to be inspired. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a flimsy paper rectangle which he handed to Geraldinium. "My card!"
"It looks like a taxi-receipt," said Geraldium, reading it. "Thank-you. Have a good day, don't let me keep you."
"Oh, no, you're not keeping me," said the young man, failing to stop Geraldinium from interrupting.
"I'm so glad, thank-you for coming."
"No, you see, my paper would like to do an article on you. And… and could I have my receipt back please? It's for my expenses."
"I don't like interviews," said Geraldinium handing the receipt over. "Why would yours be any different?"
"I only want to talk about your work. I think everyone knows about your private life now."
"What?"
"Well, your twitter feed has been very explicit."
As the young man saw anger rise on Geraldinium's face like a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll, he realised that he should have asked about the twitter feed instead of making assumptions.
"Twitter feed? Is this some kind of bird joke I don't get? Because it had better be." Geraldinium's voice was grim and held the promise of pain for somebody. The young man handed his phone over wordlessly, the twitter app opened to Geraldinimum's alleged tweets. She scanned down them, her face turning thunderous.
"Who is Lady GaGa?" she asked at the end. "And why would I compare myself to her?"
"She wore a dress made of bacon," said the young man, "and she's very… herself."
"I see. Fine, ask your questions and quickly. I can see I have a twit to hunt down."
"They call themselves twitterers," said the young man, and hastily added, "but yours is probably more accurate in this case."
"Questions?"
"What's this exhibit all about, really?" The young man had flushed and was almost stumbling over his words in an effort to finish and get away without causing any more trouble.
"Continuations."
"Continuations of what?" The young man noticed that Geraldinium was opening the press at last.
"Previous works. For example, this piece here, Persephone in Decay, continues on from my previous exhibit Cheeseburgher."
"But this is a painting!"
"So?"
"Cheeseburgher was a rat rotting in a jar of old cheese. How a painting continue a dynamic sculpture like that?"
Geraldinium smiled for the first time. "You actually do know my work! Well, this painting was made using only the contents on the jar from Cheeseburgher," she said.
The press opened at last, and inside was revealed a flat kitten.
"What is that?!" The young man sounded both intrigued and horrified.
"I call it Flat 31," said Geraldinium. "Flat 30 was where I lived with my ex-landlady and her pet."

English Breakfast

"The artist, Geraldinium, has installed an electric kettle and a large teapot..." began the opening sentence of the codebook. Emma, head of the Secure Service, looked up at her codemaster and frowned.
"How is this supposed to work?" she said, raising pencilled-in eyebrows and pushing mousy-brown hair back with a freckled hand. "Do these words all mean something special, and the order they go in then conveys the message?"
"No." The codemaster, who referred to himself as Alpha, shook his head for emphasis. "This is a multi-stage polyalphabetic quasi-Playfair cypher, which we then embed steganographically in artwork, typically that created by Geraldinium Holmes, and export back to the Sisterland. It's not for emergency messages, we use standard quantum cryptographic algorithms and secure channels of communication for that, but for ordinary messages we seek ways of passing them back that aren't even suspected as being such."
"So is this part of the code, or just background information?"
"Both." Alpha smiled thinly, his teeth just visible behind stretched red lips. "Use the first four words to set...." His voice droned on, and at one point he started drawing a geometric diagram on a napkin he must have brought into the office with him. Emma let her eyes rest on him, but she wasn't listening anymore. Hanging above her desk, behind Alpha, was a painting by Geraldinium Holmes entitled "Chihuahua reaching for cake", and Emma dearly wanted to know if there was a hidden message in it now.
"...eighty-eight miles an hour," said Alpha, and stopped talking.
"Right, that's good then," said Emma. She pointed at her painting. "Is that a steganographical message then?"
"You weren't listening," said Alpha reproachfully. His eyes seemed to dull slightly. "I just quoted three minutes of Back to the Future, and you didn't notice."
"Right," said Emma. "But the painting behind you?"
Alpha turned to look at it. "Is just a painting," he said. "Geraldinium does produce some original artworks, you can usually tell them because they're execrable."
"I rather liked it," said Emma, who'd paid for it herself. "Not a coded message then?"
"No," said Alpha. "I could have it checked for you though, but you wouldn't get it back. In one piece."
"Right, that's a no, then, thankyou," said Emma. "Now, tell me again what I'm supposed to do when Geraldinium, in this little story here, discovers that there's no hot water in the kettle because the chihuahua had drunk it all?"

Chihuahua reaching for cake

The picture hangs in the Hanson Portrait Gallery, and is entitled Chihuahua reaching for cake. As many critics have pointed out, the chihuahua is actually reaching for a muffin -- a chocolate chip banana espresso muffin, in fact -- which the artist acknowledges.
The artist in question is Geraldinium Holmes, and all interviews with her to date have started off with questions about her name. She recounts,
"My mother was very much a product of her era, which was the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties. She'd thrown off repression in a big way, would have burned her bra if she hadn't felt that wearing one was also repressive, and was taking anything and everything she could get her hands on that was called a drug. When she came to have me christened, she thinks she was on horse tranquilisers, though from her description it could have easily been powdered bleach. The vicar rejected out of hand her first three choices of names: Bitchface, bitchslap, and Thingummyjig He insisted that any child born had a right to life, no matter the mother's opinion. So my mother cast about for another name, and thinks she started with Germaine, got side-tracked by Geranium, and ended up trying for Geraldine. So I got lumbered with Geraldinium."
The painting was produced during Geraldinium's Blue period, or as she puts it, "most of my life so far". It is simple enough: it shows a small chihuahua reaching for a muffin sitting on a plate. It is unknown if the chihuahua actually got any of the muffin.
"It's a figment of his imagination," says Geraldinium's landlady at the time (Geraldinium has since become homeless) who is insistent that Geraldinium is male, despite having met her many times. "There's no way I'd allow muffins in my boarding house and he knows that."
The identity of the chihuahua, if it really exists, remains a mystery. Attempts to find Geraldinium to ask further questions about the painting meet dead ends and blank walls. Geraldinium has disappeared into the seedy underbelly of the dispossessed of the city, and we the critics are left hoping that out of this will come a new work, of similar power and artistic integrity to Chihuahua reaching for cake