went into Tiernan’s office without knocking, one afternoon, and found him crouched on the floor touching up the detail on Gouger’s latest masterwork.
After the first stunned second I started to laugh. Partly it was the look on Tiernan’s face, the mixture of scarlet guilt and puffy defensiveness as he flailed for a plausible excuse; partly it was at myself, for having bounced cheerfully along through all of this without a single suspicion, when of course I should have copped months earlier (since when were underprivileged youths even on Tiernan’s horizon?). “Well well well,” I said, still laughing. “Look at you.”
“Shhh,” Tiernan hissed, hands coming up, darting his eyes at the door.
“My man Gouger. In the flesh.”
“Jesus shut up, please, Richard’s—”
“You’re better-looking than I expected.”
“Toby. Listen. No no listen—” He had his arms half-spread in front of the painting so that it looked ridiculously as if he was trying to hide it, painting? what painting? “If this gets out, I’m dead, I’m, no one will ever—”
“Jesus,” I said. “Tiernan. Calm down.”
“The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school—”
“Is it just the Gouger stuff? Or more of them?”
“Just Gouger. I swear.”
“Huh,” I said, peering over his shoulder. The picture was classic Gouger, a thick layer of black paint with two savagely grappling boys sgraffitoed into it, through them a wall of minutely penciled balconies with a tiny vivid scene unfolding on each one. It must have taken forever. “How long have you been planning this?”
“A while, I don’t—” Tiernan blinked at me. He was very agitated. “What are you going to do? Are you . . . ?”
Presumably I should have gone straight to Richard and told him the whole story, or at least found an excuse to pull Gouger’s work from the show (his enemies were on his trail, something like that—giving him an OD would just have made him even more of a draw). To be honest, I didn’t even consider it. Everything was going beautifully, everyone involved was happy as a clam; pulling the plug would have ruined a lot of people’s day for, as far as I could see, no good reason at all. Even if you wanted to get into the ethics of it, I was basically on Tiernan’s side: I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real. As far as I was concerned, the exhibition was exactly the same as it had been ten minutes ago; if people wanted to ignore the perfectly good pictures right in front of their eyes and focus instead on the gratifying illusion somewhere behind them, that was their problem, not mine.
“Relax,” I said—Tiernan was in such a state that leaving him there any longer would have been cruelty. “I’m not going to do anything.”
“You’re not?”
“Cross my heart.”
Tiernan blew out a long, shaky breath. “OK. OK. Wow. Got a fright there.” He straightened up and surveyed the painting, patting the top edge of it as if he were soothing a spooked animal. “They are good,” he said. “They are, aren’t they?”
“You know what you should do,” I said. “Do more of the bonfire ones. Make it a series.”
Tiernan’s eyes lit up. “I could,” he said. “That’s not a bad idea, you know, from the building of the bonfire right up to the, when it’s going down to ashes, dawn—” and he turned to his desk, fumbling for paper and pencil, his mind already brushing the whole episode away. I left him to it.
After that little wobble, the show went back to rolling smoothly towards its opening. Tiernan worked flat out on Gouger’s bonfire series, to the point where I was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping more than a couple of hours a night, but if anyone noticed his dazed, grimy look and constant yawning, they had no reason to connect them with the pictures that he lugged in with triumphant regularity. I spun Gouger’s anonymity into a sub-Banksy enigma, with plenty of fake Twitter accounts arguing in semiliterate textspeak over whether he was your man from down the flats who had stabbed Mixie that time, because if so Mixie was looking for him; the media dived on it and our followers skyrocketed. Tiernan and I did discuss, semi-seriously, getting an authentic skanger to be the face