01. The Painter

To keep from going crazy, I found two uses for my time: assisting Uncle Stern as best I could, and memorising the room in which he’d kill me.

Greg Corcoran

On the ninth day he put a bullet in my chest. So as I lay there, dying in a cupboard, I remembered every detail of the painter’s house.

He’d moved to Venice five years ago, after dumping my aunt, and bought this place to continue his painting. Don’t get excited — he was a shit artist. The man had never sold a picture in his life. Stern liked to add things to his paint like cat vomit and mucus, and the few sick-fuck European markets that might have gone for that didn’t have a chance before the canvas was rotten and fly-swarmed. Stern was the maddest of my family members. Even before he locked me up and shot me.

Spoiler alert: he had a good reason. I didn’t know it at the time.

Anyway, back to the house. When I arrived the week before, I found a shithole on three levels with water stains and peeling paintwork. It looked ready to fall in the canal and for a moment I thought it had when I saw the ground floor missing. The studio was built over an inlet where a speedboat had capsized. Its half-submerged peak stuck up through the hollow. I had to climb a staircase on one side before knocking.

Everything was fine for a few minutes. My uncle opened the door in a ‘mad monk’ look: dirty bathrobe, tangled hair, food in his beard and a smell of sweat that came in waves. I should have guessed right then that something was wrong. But I’m not the kind of kid to suspect my uncle of psychosis. He’d always been nice to me when we lived back home. A little on the quiet side, sure. But he’d buy me books for Christmas and show me magic tricks; even slapped me once when I raided the cookie jar. A standard kind of uncle.

After smiling like I was Ghandi with a crack pipe, he invited me in, and I realised that between him and the apartment he was the better-smelling one. The floorboards were warped and the sofas crawled with fleas. Earthenware pots cluttered one wall and a chair by the fireplace was ringed with buckets. My gaze was a masochist. It leapt to my uncle’s diet: a plate of half-cooked egg whites with shells floating in them; a bowl of rice congealed like Styrofoam; a platter of stuff that looked like cheese but wasn’t cheese. There was even a pig’s trotter, charbroiled and left on the mantelpiece.

I should have gotten out right then. But Stern offered me coffee and sat me in an armchair before vanishing into the kitchen. As he rummaged through stacks of unwashed plates I distracted myself from throwing up. I told him about my school trip so far: which museums we’d visited, which kids had freaked out on the flight, which kids I wanted to stab and toss from a gondola, and what Italian phrases I’d learned. Stern had never been one to judge. He wouldn’t tell on me for going AWOL from the school group. After all, we hadn’t seen each other in half a decade.

Then my few minutes of sanity were up. My uncle returned from the kitchen and plunged a needle in my neck. I managed half a scream, passed out, then woke inside a cupboard that would be my home for the next nine days.

I spent the first two screaming, like you would if you were locked in a cupboard.

By the second night my throat was sore and my knuckles bled from where I’d tried to punch my way out. I’ll say one thing for Venetians: they build their furniture strong. The left side was latticed and through the holes I saw Uncle Stern moving around, stooping and wheezing as he painted on this big-ass canvas.

I hadn’t noticed it when I came in, just like I hadn’t noticed the things on the other side of the apartment. There were dead birds, cats hanging from rafters, buckets of vomit, blood and piss. My uncle was using grosser ingredients than usual. I threw up from the smell, which isn’t a smart move in a two foot square cupboard.

On the fourth day the door opened.

I staggered for the light, with a mouth like sandpaper, but Uncle Stern just punched me back inside. Then he put another needle in me — my wrist this time — and drew out blood. It was a dull kind of pain, like when you get spanked and are throbbing afterwards. Then he locked the door and through the lattice I saw him empty that same syringe into his pots.

The bastard was painting with me.

Over the next couple of days Stern returned to collect vomit, tears, more blood and… other things I don’t want to write about just now. And it all went to the same place: onto that stinking canvas.

By the seventh day I was blacking out.

Sometimes I’d see him mixing entrails to make new shades and throwing whole buckets of piss on the paper. Sometimes he’d scream and kick his pots or beat the carcasses; other times he’d laugh and write things in a notebook. I never saw him eat or go outside. I guess crazy people don’t do that.

By the ninth day I figured I was a dead man.

He was taking more blood, keeping me alive on water and bread crusts. But that particular morning there was something new; something that made my eyes open.

A cell phone rang.

My uncle stopped painting, stepped over his buckets, and fished out this little phone from under a sofa cushion. There was a conversation, and my uncle shouted through most of it. I couldn’t make out the words — only that he was upset. He went into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and I heard a click then a snap.

But I didn’t know what that meant until he came back with a gun in his hand.

Ever had a gun pointed at you? If you have you’ll understand why I started crying. It wasn’t something I did often, but this wasn’t an average morning. My uncle approached with the phone to his ear and opened the cupboard door. There was a voice on the line: a man shouting as loud as I was screaming.

Stern’s eyes were small and dark. I saw tears. His hand trembled and for a moment I thought I had a chance to reason with him. But he pulled the trigger all the same, and every sound went out of the world. I dropped like a rock with a fire in my chest. All that followed was the sound of the cupboard closing, paper rustling and my uncle rushing down the stairs from the house.

Then I died.

Next

Colour Blind, a novel by Greg Corcoran, is a story about colours and their abuses.

Leon is left for dead by his uncle, an insane artist in the medium of bodily fluids. But when the boy is found by Khromas, creatures of living colour, his adventures begin. With Rosa the Pink and Ivorene the White, and the monstrous Aldak by his side, Leon embarks upon a chase to the ends of the earth and the borders of consciousness.

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