Letter to hope
Alex James
There are only two kinds of people: the ones that make you feel better and the ones that make you feel worse. It’s a shame, but, as far as I can tell, most people make you feel worse. Some are deliberate s***s, but most of them can’t help it. It’s important to hang on to the ones that make you feel better. That’s not always as obvious or easy as it sounds.
My favourite work of art, ancient or modern, is only my favourite because every time I look at it, it makes me feel better. I’m not kidding. It works like magic. It’s a photograph of a man in a warehouse, all in black and white apart from the big square he’s holding, which is dayglo yellow. Underneath the photograph it says, ‘When I woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there.’ I decided a while ago that it was my favourite picture. Up until then I don’t suppose I had a clear favourite.
For years it hung outside the upstairs bogs in the Groucho Club where it caught my eye. Eventually, I pointed it out to others. It had a particular resonance at the Groucho in the Nineties, where so many dreams were cast in bubbles that burst before the sun rose again, but a copy hung in Downing Street, too, and I wonder what it meant there. It’s an image that could wear more or less any room: a letter to hope.
My wife knew how much I loved the picture. As is often the case these days, it was made as an edition and the year before last, for my birthday, she got me a copy of it. It’s the only artwork I’ve ever wanted to own, so my art collection was complete, instantly. It was particularly satisfying. I could move on to other things now. Roses, as it happened. When my elation subsided, I realised we couldn’t possibly afford it. We live on a farm and have a permanently long and practical shopping list. ‘It’s a present,’ she said. ‘I know, it’s the best present I’ve ever had, but we still can’t afford it,’ I said. ‘No, it’s a present from Angus. He said he wanted you to have it.’ Angus is the artist, Angus Fairhurst. What a generous gift. What a good bloke. What a picture!
I was struggling with the seasonal jetlag this morning, unable to wake up even after being repeatedly playfully punched in the face by the four-year-old while the twins poked tiny fingers in my nose, ears, mouth and eyes. My wife came into the bedroom dressed for London and broke down. ‘Angus Fairhurst killed himself yesterday,’ she said, and I was suddenly awake. There were tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t sit down.
She’d been to a show of his a couple of weeks before and it sounded as if his career was going from strength to strength. What had driven him to despair? We’d recently invited him to come and stay for a weekend. The things that run through one’s mind. I’d said I was going to send him some cheese. I hadn’t, I realised all of a sudden.
The dreadful story has been unfolding all day. He went to Scotland alone with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself on the rope in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.
It sounds as if he’d recently sent postcards to a lot of people he knew. I don’t know if I was his friend or not. I liked him, of course, he is my favourite artist, but I wonder if I made him feel better or worse. I owed him one and I wanted to pay him back. There was a postcard. I can see it from where I’m sitting now, I suddenly realise, pinned to the wall, peaking out from behind the holiday booking confirmation.
In the picture a large comic gorilla is cradling a limp, naked Angus. It’s a funny picture, even now, a big cuddly monster and a pale skinny artist apparently in sleep, fighting the good fight. First, I look at the postmark. It says June. Can he have been considering his fate even then? I can kind of remember what the postcard said, but it’s going to read very differently now. He’d signed off with ‘You really are one Hell of a lucky bastard.’ And a kiss.
The dayglo square in the picture that says: ‘When I woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there’ reads differently now, too. Angus! You idiot. You were better than all of them.
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