Notes on a Bruise

Extract from “Notes on a Bruise” published in The Southern Review

“I elected instead, not rootlessness, since that implies a lack, a degree of unanchored attention, but a deliberate chosen strangeness.”—Alastair Reid.

I rocked from foot to foot in the middle of the Widows of Culloden collection, transfixed by a tartan dress nipped at the waist by a leather belt with a Celtic filigree buckle. Black lace appliquéd on its nude silk décolletage gave the effect of bare skin tangled in muddy bracken. My guts skirled. The crowd eddied around me.

            It was June 2011, and the hottest day of the year, and I’d come to New York to see Savage Beauty, a retrospective of the fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, less than eighteen months after he committed suicide on the eve of his mother’s funeral. Leather, wool, felt, lace, balsa, latex, shells, medical slides, brass, locusts, copper, feathers, antlers, hair, blood: there had been no limit to what McQueen could transform. The effect was brutal, baroque, claustrophobic.

            “Scotland for me is a harsh, cold, bitter place,” read a card beside the mannequin, “it’s been dealt a really hard hand…But no-one ever puts anything back into it.” A man beside me pointed at this, at McQueen’s refusal to wax sentimental about his father’s country, and then turned to his companion.

            “I didn’t know he was Scotch, did you?” he said.

            He’s not—he wasn’t!  I seethed like a pedantic dingbat desperate to parse the difference between ancestry and birth. And Scotch is a drink, by the way, no a nationality, ye plonker.  Thankfully I kept my mouth shut. Instead I stumbled past the ravaged lace and slashed plaid, the bugle beads and the stiletto-heel gillies over cable-knit socks (not the best look, all told), of McQueen’s homage to the Highland Clearances and the failed Jacobite rebellion, before escaping into the unforgiving glare of Fifth Avenue. I needed to tell someone about the dress, but my mother had died two years before. I slumped down on the museum steps, and something inside me jack-knifed.