p78. On the overnight train down the length of Italy we take down the luggage and Simon and I use the netting racks as hammocks, leaving more sleeping space for the others. I look down at Jacks sleeping, sprawled and open-mouthed, then I’m rocked to sleep.

I wake to a red dawn, the air already hot, peep out at a bleached, parched worn-out landscape, dusty and blurred, with none of the measured order of Provence. I’m much further south, pushing deep into the Mediterranean world. I imagine Hannibal marching his army back and forth across this landscape, for fifteen years, not daring to attack Rome itself, unable to provoke them into attacking him, winning every battle but losing the war, because Rome simply refused to acknowledge defeat. A red dust, carried by a hot wind, coats us as we struggle into the second day.

There is little relief at Brindisi, an oven of a port town. There is a mosaic of the Cretan labyrinth, complete with Minotaur. A column marking the beginning of the Appian Way. And a monument to Virgil, who died here on his way back from Athens.

Brundisium was Rome’s main port on “The Superior Sea,” their gateway to the Greek world, their Staten Island, sucking in slaves and tribute, as well as ideas, art, thinkers, a whole culture; from here, having learned what they wanted, they sent their colonizing armies to possess.

It was connected to Rome by “the Queen of Long Roads,” the Appian Way, along the narrow, paved surface of which carts rumbled, soldiers marched, travellers rode. From 71BC they would have passed, for the 132 miles from Capua to Rome (six, seven days’ journey? On a road six feet wide), a crucified man every forty yards, the 6,000 survivors of Spartacus’ army, nailed up alive, dying, dead, left until they rotted off from around the nails, fell. Welcome to Rome.

The Superior Sea opens invitingly to the East, and to the South; but we must wait for the night ferry. We take the short boat ride to the scrap of beach by the industrial zone, where I swim for the first time in the Adriatic, another name, another step into the dreamed world.

The sea is dark blue, the water soft, the sun hot: bathe, bake, bathe, bake, oiling assiduously, darkening the northern skin, drying out the northern phlegm, the magic beginning to work.

Jacks relaxes in the sun, stretches, becomes nonchalant, talks.

She was at art school. But she’d left after a couple of years. Not because she was a failure but because she was a success. While there she was hardworking, contemptuous of the idleness and lack of seriousness of the ordinary students as they wallowed in pleasure or followed the trends. But also despising the careerism and opportunism of those who would be the successes. And she produced a work that caused a stir, and would have made her career.

Lying face down, bikini strap undone, her back glistening and fragrant from the suntan oil, relaxed after an energetic swim, dissolving into the fine sand, she tells me about it, her voice muffled, dreamy, as she recalls. I lie propped up on an elbow, my hand alive with the feel of her back, the movement of her flesh under her skin as I applied the oil, looking alternately down at her, trying to avoid the sideways bulge of her breast, and across at the scene before me. Young men with oiled hair pose nonchalantly in brief, pouched trunks, eyes roving, alert to the briefest eye contact with a girl that would have them descending like raptors. Lovers walk hand in hand along the water’s surf edge, floating in their own world. Speedboats cut the blue into arching bow waves of snow.

‘It was called One Song Jukebox Number 1: Absolutely, Sweet Marie, and it was all about the Dylan song. It was an animated juke box with just one record.

‘It was really complicated at the back, inside – it took a lot of making, woodwork, electrics, electronics, practical stuff. I enjoyed that. There was a record deck, on it the acetate I’d had made of the song, and loads of levers, cogs and cams that were needed to create all the movements from the spindle of the electric motor. I liked that, all those movements coming from one fixed, spinning point.

‘The “art stuff” was at the front. The lyrics scrolled past a speech-bubble shaped hole. A 16 mm film I’d made, riffing on the lyrics, scrolled past a light. I worked hard on the film, allusive, carrying other stories – a man masturbating for “beating on my trumpet,” a bit out of a Saturday-morning pictures B western for “six white horses,” that sort of thing. It was a film collage, clever stuff, worth seeing on its own.

‘The speech bubble came from the mouth of a life-size portrait I painted of Dylan that really caught him – Peter Blake would have been envious. He was holding an opened packet of Sweet Marie biscuits, natch, which I painted hyper-real, very Wesselman.

‘There was a neon sign “To Live Outside The Law, You Must Be Honest,” flashing on and off. A string puppet of BD in his sharp suit and shades period, the song and dance man, jigging around on a supine Pete Seeger who waved an axe ineffectually.

‘I covered the rest of the front with Rauschenberg lighter-fuel transfers from newspapers, magazines, lyric sheets. Close to, it was a collage of the man’s life and times. But when you stepped back, it gradually resolved into the ghostly image of a woman’s face, looking at you, under it: “where are you tonight, sweet Marie?”

‘The record, the lyrics, the film all synchronized: you put in a coin, the record played, the lights went on, it came to life, did its thing, stopped.’ She’s seeing it in her mind’s eye, her eyes flickering under eyelids, hands moving, remembering the making, remembering it coming into being, coming alive.

‘And, d’you know, I didn’t even know why I’d made it, until I heard “I’m Not There (1956).” So ghostly. It sent shivers up my spine.’ She is silent. A water skier skims past behind a noisy speedboat, is soon gone. I say, unnecessarily:
‘It sounds great.’
‘Oh, it was, is. The first thing I made, as an artist, and the last.’
‘Why? Was it the thing done perfectly, the thing done once?’
‘How sweet,’ she smiles dreamily, ‘to give it an art-history reference – Duchamp, wasn’t it? No. It was me.’

She’s silent again. This time I keep quiet. When she resumes there’s an edge to her voice:‘The course tutor’s first words, on our first day at college were: “If you want to be successful – make yourself visible.”

‘And at the end-of-year show, the agents and gallery owners came in, not looking at the work so such, but at the students – can we build his or her career? I could see the words in thought-bubbles above their heads: she’s a girl, she’s “with it” – I’d be the miniskirted redhead in the pop documentary – the work’s different, there’s a market in the “happening pop world,” she has her thing, she’s the one song juke box girl, imagine all the others she could do …

‘I’d loved doing it, but actually I’d made a piece of art that was about a piece of art, full of references to, stealings from, other pieces of art. And where’s the life in that? And the whole art business thing – I could either be a successful operator or, if I turn my back on the business, I’d be doing art just for me, which is just self-indulgence, and where’s the Life in that?’ She rears up as if stricken, her top falls off, I look away, she flops down heavily, defeated, says:

‘I’d gone to art school because I didn’t want my parents’ life of fitting themselves into a given bourgeois world. And that was what I was faced with doing. That or failure. I could locate myself in art, but I couldn’t locate art in myself.

‘So, I left, walked out, simple as that. I got a job in a canning factory, noisy, buzzy, hard work: you pull a lever, something happens, you’ve done something, that’s all there is; then you’re faced with real thought problems, how to survive eight hours of boredom, how to live when your life’s intrinsically meaningless. Hard, and yet a relief after all that self-regarding preciousness.

‘I drank in pubs, sang in pubs, hung out with the factory girls – they’ve got so much energy, and they’re so circumscribed, in a bubble, the world beyond the little world that they make for themselves alien and airless. They have a few years, between school and marriage, when they have money and freedom, to have fun, to be themselves, but no chance of getting anywhere, anywhere else. They’re matey, funny, ruthless, desperate, because they know at some point they’ll have to walk voluntarily – if they avoid being got pregnant by some persuasive or drunk twat – into the trap called marriage, where they finally give away their lives. Another option I refused.

‘While all this was going on, it was there in my little room, my one work of art, the neon sign “To Live Outside The Law, You Must Be Honest”, changing from an easy slogan to a Zen koan, with me looking at it, saying – but you forgot to leave me with the key.

‘Then one night, drunk, after a scary thing with a bloke, I found myself drawn to the tiny convex mirror I’d placed in the woman’s eye, me, looking at me, saying, where are you tonight, sweet Marie? And suddenly I knew what I had to do.

‘So, I sold it, for a good price, and I took off.

‘I’ll keep going,’ her voice low, determined, speaking to herself as much as to me, ‘to where I am when the money’s gone, the lights go out, the record stops. And I’ll be there.’