Hammer - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a degree in philosophy and politics from the University of Edinburgh, an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Manchester. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR, the London Evening Standard, and Corriere della Sera. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.

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Chapter 1

1

OCTOBER LIGHT. Afternoon light. He strides back to work along Mayfair streets with his sandwich in its little triangular piece of packaging.

Summer, when it came, came late, but now the good weather is hanging on into these shortened autumnal days. He walks through Berkeley Square, across the small park in the middle of it. The plane trees rustle with a breeze unfelt at street level, shedding substantial leaves, which descend slowly enough to surprise the eye, as though through liquid. Businessmen out, eating lunches, their ties removed, collars loosened. A woman with her back against the trunk of a tree in her skirt suit, her shoes off, her feet placed together on the dry dirt beneath the spreading roots. A couple cross-legged on the grass, each on a plastic bag rent open to its maximum extent.

It is a wishful performance, Martin thinks, as if Londoners hope that the embrace of these fine days can somehow prolong them, as if the inhabitants of the city think that they can dream it southward.

At the exit of the square, a bustle of pigeons peck at crumbs beneath a bench, brazen, flapping off only as he is almost upon them, and then taking back the space with their Mick Jagger struts as soon as he has passed. He pauses at the road as a taxi accelerates to beat the lights. He crosses, heads for the auction house.

The afternoon trade is picking up in the boutiques and the art shops. He sees the assistants at work. Greeting, straining to not strain. Working to facilitate, to go unnoticed until needed. See-through men and women like him. Chameleons or shades. Some classical category of the damned or forgotten.

ONE CAN feel the imminence of the contemporary sale as soon as one is through the doors. Thronging of people taking their last looks at the lots—a few prospective buyers, and then the enthusiasts, the art students, the odd tourist wandered in. The clatter of the end of lunch service in the restaurant. The clip at which the other staff go about their tasks. The phones ringing. The clanking of the freight elevator, audible from the reception area, as tables, chairs, and pieces of camera equipment are moved for tonight’s event.

Martin climbs the crème-carpeted stairs toward the upper galleries. The first time he came to the auction house he was surprised by the homeliness of the décor—not the sterile white finish of the contemporary gallery, but something closer to a decent regional hotel. Part of the house’s ethos is expressed in this choice, Martin supposes: the assertion of its existence before the modern gallery, prior to the reverential emptiness of the contemporary space.

He passes through another door toward the offices, climbs a set of steep stairs. An anxiety has been rising through him all week, as is normal when sales approach. He sits at his desk and eats his sandwich—a damp prawn mayonnaise that clags around his gums. It is the last he will eat until after the auction is done.

He will be bidding on behalf of one of the house’s clients, and he broods on this as the afternoon stretches on. One must simply raise one’s paddle and speak clearly, and yet in such simplicity lie old anxieties: the voiceless cries of bad dreams, the wince of answering a roll call at a new school.

AT FIVE, a text from James, his housemate and childhood friend. Have you done your team yet? Martin has forgotten about fantasy football, about the midweek round of Premier League fixtures. Despite all the bustle around him, he logs onto the website for a moment, makes a couple of substitutions. James will have spent hours this morning poring over his selections, and Martin feels he must make some effort of his own.

At six, he changes in the men’s toilets with a couple of other junior specialists. The smell of hair gel and cologne. The plumbing whispering and choking. A collective giddiness as the sale approaches. He puts on a fresh shirt. He likes to dress well, a charge given to this pleasure, he feels, by the way that in the household he grew up in such care over one’s appearance was considered unnecessary, vaguely suspicious.

Martin’s parents are hippies. The home in which he was raised, in which his parents still live, is part of a Jacobean manor divided up in the seventies. Semicommunal living, they call it. “We still have normal day jobs,” Martin’s mother would say to parents of Martin’s friends, as if such a thing should even need underlining. “We still have our own units.” It’s a slightly bashful utopianism: communal garden work, meals together at the weekends, still the smell of lentils about the place, the odd beard or pair of clogs, children running free through the hall and outbuildings, half-clothed on summer days. Residents tend to leave when their kids grow up, but Martin’s mother and father have stayed, the longest-serving tenants, sources of lore, guardians of tradition.

It was a good childhood. Only occasionally embarrassing. They were ahead of the world in their environmentalism (far enough, Martin sometimes thinks, for him to have seen the ineffectiveness of it all). To not reuse a plastic bag was a cardinal sin in his childhood home. After Martin’s dad broke his wrist falling from the roof of a toolshed, Martin took his sandwiches out of his rucksack at school one day and found them wrapped in a polythene bag that read PATIENT’S BELONGINGS.

Perhaps it is reaction against this background that inclined Martin toward the auction house, with its ostentatious neatness, with the daily need to talk calmly of millions of pounds as a butcher talks of kilos of mince.

He takes some time at the mirror applying wax to his hair. Henry, another junior specialist, hums a phrase from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from one of the toilet stalls.

WHEN THE public start to arrive, Martin is up in the offices: fielding calls from clients, fetching documents on behalf of his boss, Julian, who will be conducting the sale tonight.

When he descends toward the reception area, it’s busy. Chatter rises up the stairwell, surging and then ebbing as voices compete to be heard. He pauses on the stairs and watches the crowd in the entranceway: clusters of people, growing and collapsing according to the competing gravities of the powerful and renowned. Client relations staff move between the punters, handing out bidding paddles and catalogues, greeting potential buyers, making their practiced small talk. He is not unable to see the scene as his mother might, to be nauseated by the sheer good taste of the attire, the frivolous timbre of the chatter, the whiteness of the teeth of a man who throws back his head and laughs.

Still, it’s too easy to condemn the art market with reference to its worst participants. There is the work, and then there are the people with the money necessary to buy that work, and the house has no choice in the latter. That is the realm of politics and business and financial markets. Martin is able to induce a sense of vertigo in himself by considering the manner in which money finds its way into the room. Determined by what? By stocks or oil or decisions of the Chinese treasury?

He goes down into the hubbub smiling benignly. Henry, at the foot of the stairs, speaks with a collector, snaking his arm through the air, probably talking about some powder encountered in Courchevel last winter.

Martin moves into the crowd. The smell of dry-cleaned clothes. A woman ahead steps back from a splash of wine, spilled from the glass of the...