Too Cold For Snow

from the door: his creditors. He was not exactly managing his finances well. The gas threatened cut-off. The electricity gave him ten days to devise a repayment plan. The sofa company had taken the sofa and the matching pouffe and the men who took it seemed gleeful in their work. Being a conceptual artist in south Wales in the new millennium was a vicious kind of pauperism.
    He was also overdrawn on inspiration. If inspiration is like seeing a film you haven’t seen, he was nowhere near a cinema. If it’s like a story that falls from the sky, the sky above was bankrupt. No phosphorus moments, no Damascene insight.
    At the start of May he’d got an Arts Council grant and started a series of what he called Soft Architectures. The money had helped him pay off one of his credit cards. In the foyer of the Taliesin arts centre in Swansea, Louis had made a series of skyscrapers  using tufts of moss which he’d moulded in a press to make little green bricks, challenging the old saw that you can’t ever make a multi-storey building out of sphagnum.
    As part of a short tour of his work he exhibited his soft architecture in a park in Aberdare and at the National Botanic Gardens at Middleton Hall. A critic from the Observer travelled down to see them and wrote a positive and lyrical piece under the heading ‘Frozen Music’. A German, probably Goethe, once described architecture as frozen music to which the Observer guy had replied by suggesting that, therefore, music might be defrosted architecture. Louis also had a three page spread in the Telegraph magazine and a four minute piece filmed about him on ‘The Culture Show’.
    His cash flow was less of a sluggish stream in June as he’d been commissioned to arrange a civic pyrotechnics show for Fife Council. After a gruelling bus journey to Scotland, he met the alderman of the council, a boozy-looking man who had jowls like a very ancient orang-utan, who said ‘they don’t want art, son, so concentrate on big bangs. They like flash and bang, flash and bang. Clear?’
    Morris had made an extraordinary series of fireworks where the fuse wasn’t a flame hissing trail of nitrate cord but rather a blend of powdered aluminium and iodine. The components of this cocktail remained inert until water was added as a catalyst and the whole shebang went kapow! In the construction of his ingenious fuse, water was added, drip by drip, from a strategically positioned pipette. He imagined the alderman’s face turning puce with delight: two kilos of aluminium dust and the same amount of iodine, all packed tightly into a container. Kaboom! There were purple clouds over the East Fife hills that night, a toxic sunset painted by Turner.
    Louis Morris was anything if not a hard worker. He was no scrounger on the state: he worked for the good of his soul and seldom asked for grants. It was just that Louis was at the mercy of the art-economy in a poor country. To compound the problem he gave a hell of a lot of work away for free. It didn’t happen to plumbers, or radiographers. They weren’t asked to do stuff for fuck all.
    In his last year at art school, being taught by razzled old soaks who still thought the future belonged to the Vorticists, he knew that there was no other furrow to follow. He did various jobs to pay his student way and later on to shore up his ambitions. He did zombie shifts as a night watchman. One night his eyelids grew heavy and he completely missed a lorry pulling into the yard, hitching up to a trailer full of deep freezes before skedaddling. He was given the sack, but not before a Hollywood grilling by a CID man with bad breath like peat bog methane and an attitude that rolled good-cop, bad-cop all into one.
    Louis desperately needed a new idea, something like Damien Hirst’s diamond skull. He strolled down to the art school library and ambled through their holdings of books and video. He liked Robert Wilson’s high definition television portraits of Hollywood stars and Bill Viola’s video work. He leafed through Sam Taylor-Wood’s book of portraits in which she restaged famous paintings. Then it came to him: a moment when the mind’s pinball machine lights up like a miniature Vegas.
    Ten minutes later he made a call to the Commissioning Editor for Wales Channel One programmes and booked himself an appointment for the following Monday. Louis bought a bottle of Beringer 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon to celebrate and sat on his stool – his only remaining stick of