Sunday

In the weeks that followed his lunch with Esther Kade, Tom read everything he could find about Nelly’s work. What began as curiosity ended as need. His book on James lacked only its conclusion, yet he neglected it, led on from catalogue to periodical to website. Obsessive as a gun dog, he tracked the glimmer of her, not caring if it led him astray.

It was easy enough to find reproductions of Nelly’s more recent work; easy to reconstitute the stages of her career. But Tom soon realised that no visual record of the Nightingale suite existed. He had a copy of the exhibition catalogue, but it reproduced none of the controversial works; as if wily Posner had anticipated the furore.

More than one critic lamented the loss of the paintings, reporting that Nelly had destroyed them as soon as the show closed. But surely, Tom thought, surely they couldn’t be gone altogether? He thought enviously of Esther, whose memory held their trace.

Five years after the Nightingale debacle, an exhibition of new work by Nelly Zhang opened at Posner’s gallery. It marked a turning point in her career.

The new show consisted of photographs of original paintings. The catalogue essay was signed by a critic called Frederick Vickery, whose crumpled jowls and rectangular, black-rimmed glasses had since enjoyed mild notoriety on a late-night television arts programme. Zhang confronts us with work that follows Barthes in presenting realism as secondary mimesis, wrote Vickery. That is, not as a copy from nature but as the copy of a copy.

The essay went on to explain that once photographed by a professional photographer, the paintings were destroyed. It struck Tom as a re-enactment of the fate of the Nightingale suite, part protest, part catharsis; the deliberate repetition that controls trauma but refuses appeasement. Or so he reasoned, while flinching at Nelly’s destruction of her paintings, at the calculated violence of the act.

He had heard Nelly and the other artists talk about Vickery. While there was a coolness between him and Posner now, the critic had once been integral to the dealer’s set. His essay had Posner’s spin all over it, decided Tom, noting its concluding sentence: Here is an artistic practice that denies the market’s lust for the original, offering an endless multiplicity of likenesses instead.

Tom examined images of freeways, multi-storey car parks, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. Nelly painted the strange, assertive beauty of constructions essential to the functioning of large cities. She painted hospitals, those non-places where modern lives begin and end. She had a fondness for changing light and liminal hours, for the theatricality of sunset and the frightening blue of certain dusks.

What was curious was the change she worked on her subjects. Inanimate things glistened and appeared to move in her pictures. The ugly musculature of an overpass or a high-rise estate turned dreamily vaporous under her hand. Hung about with the huge blackness of night, concrete and steel grew ectoplasmic. Tom clicked on a link in an online art journal and was confronted with a shining tendon that might once have been a road.

These were images that had the quality of apparitions. Others struck Tom as forensic. A deserted railway platform suggested CCTV footage; a desolate mall might have been filched from the photo-board in an incident room. He found himself looking at a city envisioned as the scene of a crime.

He made notes on technique, composition, the use of colour and space. It was a methodology that had served him well as a student, the close scrutiny and faithful recording of what was before him producing gleams of insight, bright fissures opening in his mind. Noting the featureless architecture and nondescript vistas Nelly favoured, he believed he saw why she was drawn to these anonymous elements. She lived in a city deficient in visual icons, a place without a bridge or harbour or distinctive skyline. It lacked an image. From that lack, Nelly had fashioned a style.

Tom analysed and speculated. He had been trained to perform these operations. He sat in his study before shining windows, and filled them with words. It required connective tissue, conclusions; since one thing leads to another in narrative. He was aware of a degree of wrenching entailed. But a story need not be true to be useful. He was happier in those weeks than he had been in years.

A photograph called Secured by Modern showed tramlines, a half-demolished office block, the Victoria Street neon sign that advertised Skipping Girl Vinegar.

The metal sky-sign modelled to resemble a skipping child was one of several forms in Nelly’s work that recalled the human. There were effigies in a shop window, a plastic-sheathed jacket on a dry-cleaner’s rack, shadows thrown by invisible bodies, two silhouettes entwined on a dance studio’s sign. But there were no people in Nelly’s scenes. They suggested dramas from which the actors had fl ed.

As his intimacy with her work grew, Tom noticed the evidence of decay Nelly included in her streetscapes. Rubbish overflowing a bin, weeds pushing through concrete, broken or missing tiles. The cracked, outdated faces of seventies and eighties buildings. These signs told of a city that was neither ancient nor exactly new, but mutable. Inscribed within them was the memory of the maggoty cheeses and rotten fruit once painted into still lifes as warnings against excess and reminders of the transience of earthly splendour.

The conflation of work and author is an error into which novices fall; so Tom Loxley believed, and sought to impress on recidivist students. It had the inadequacy of all law. How could his obsession with Nelly’s work be distinguished from his desire for her? He was governed by a hunger for possession, images serving to paper over a bodily absence.

It was a substitution he literalised. In one of the regular sessions he devoted to Nelly, he lay in a darkened room, gazing by the unsteady light of a tea candle at a photocopied page. When he had finished, the edifice of her imaginings was tagged with his luminous urgency.

Iris’s eyebrows, long vanished, reappeared every day as two greasy, coquettish arcs. The bronze puffs over her skull showed white at the roots. The events of Wednesday had caused her to miss her appointment at the hairdresser and she would not pay the extortionate prices of Thursday and Friday.

At the sight of Tom, her mouth unscrolled like a scarlet ribbon.

She was delivered to his door on Sunday morning by Audrey. A horn sounded and Tom went into the street with an umbrella to extract his mother from the car. As soon as he reached for her, ‘I’m falling,’ cried Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

Braced between the car door and her son’s arm, she staggered upright at last. Many of her parts still worked, but she had been obliged to renounce high heels. With her feet crammed into pink ballet shoes suitable for a six-year-old, she knew herself to have grown old.

Expertly assessing the room for recent acquisitions, Audrey declined a cup of tea. She was running late; Iris had misplaced her eyebrow pencil that morning.

Audrey patted the back of her head: ‘I can’t imagine why you use one in the first place. People should age naturally, if you ask me.’

She stood before them, the product of skilled professionals-hairdresser, manicurist, orthodontist, podiatrist-and delivered herself of this view.

Iris Loxley, née de Souza, had triumphed over pain, rain-slick pavements and the treachery of bucket seats to accomplish the repositioning of her flesh from her living room to her son’s. The successful completion of any journey represented a victory. A girl who moved like water was present in her thoughts from time to time, but in the detached way of an actress familiar from a long-running serial.