Free Mindgame by Anthony Horowitz Page B

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    FARQUHAR: Every man has something to hide. He couldn’t be a man if he hadn’t.
    STYLER: I haven’t…
    FARQUHAR: I’ll help you.
    FARQUHAR approaches STYLER again.
    When you thought I was Dr Farquhar, you didn’t want to say that we’d been neighbours. And what was your first question? What did you want to know? What did Easterman look like? How had he changed?
    STYLER: I…
    FARQUHAR: Because you had seen me, hadn’t you. Over the garden fence. Over the wisteria that mattered more to your mother than you ever did. You’d seen me as a boy.
    STYLER: Once…
    FARQUHAR: Many times. ‘Slim. Fair hair. Blue eyes. Dressed all in white. A very beautiful boy. The face of an angel.’ You said that.
    STYLER: But that was a photograph.
    FARQUHAR: There was no photograph.
    A pause.
    STYLER: I saw you…sometimes.
    FARQUHAR: You were in love with me.
    STYLER: No.
    FARQUHAR: You were.
    STYLER: No.
    FARQUHAR: You still are.
    A long pause. The two of them are very close. Then FARQUHAR moves away.
    I will tell you what you wanted to know about me, Mark. I will tell you everything you wanted to know, everything you wanted to write about. And then, maybe you’ll find the courage to open yourself to me. You’re the writer but I’m your book. How can we have secrets from each other?
    A pause.
    I only ever killed one person in this world for anything as petty as a reason and that was my father. He was a loathsome, boorish man who when I got a place at art school sneered at me and refused to pay. So when I was sixteen, on holiday at the Chateau Mavillion in France in 1966, I ran over him in the car and killed him.
    FARQUHAR suddenly undoes one of the straps of the strait-jacket. STYLER reacts in surprise.
    Anyway, the years passed — I went to art school. I persuaded my mother despite all her misgivings to send me there and do you know what happened? I worked. I developed my technique. I started to produce portraits, animal portraits and I thought they had a certain power, an inner strength…and I reached my final year, my exams. And I failed! They told me, you see, the art school told me that in their opinion, I wasn’t actually very good. That was what they said. It’s very difficult to describe to you now, after thirty years, quite how that felt to me. I was a young man, twenty…twenty-one and I was convinced. Convinced of my own ability. So I got second opinions. I went to other art schools. I went to galleries. And they all told me the same thing. ‘Your work is crap.’ It was as if they were seeing something completely different to me. As if I had painted a snarling wolf and they were seeing a cuddly labrador pup. It was as if I was the only sane person in an insane world. I was right and they were all wrong but it doesn’t matter because like I told you at the end of the day it’s the majority that counts and if the majority thinks ‘carpet, envelope, wallpaper, cigarette, jelly’ makes sensethen I’m sorry but ‘carpet, envelope, wallpaper, cigarette, jelly’ it is.
    FARQUHAR releases a second strap .
    But that wasn’t the worst of it. Because, you see, with the passing of time, I was forced into the realisation that actually they were right. That even my father had been right. And that I was wrong. My painting was crap.
    STYLER: It wasn’t. That’s not true. I saw your work…
    FARQUHAR: And you thought it was great but I’m not sure I trust the way you see things, Mark. And anyway, it’s too late. ( Pause .) Thirty years ago I came to the realisation that I was never going to be famous. I was going to spend the rest of my life in a little wine shop in a backstreet near Bootham Gate selling cheap French wine to people who’d choose it because of the picture on the label. And that should have been the end of it. I should have just disappeared. But I didn’t.
    A pause .
    It seems to me,