The old arts college wore within it a fading spectre of its past self. Everything was sixties, rectangular. Doorways and corridors and rooms climbed off one another at right angles.
It was all joined by a single corridor, a square skeleton which boxed in the large downstairs studio. Every staircase and doorway came off this hall.
‘I’m Aiden.’ A wiry man in his sixties with long grey hair, wearing navy dungarees, came out of the studio door. Like all the doors, it was a peculiar turquoise colour which, you could tell, had once been bright. ‘Come in. Everything’s already packed.’
The sun landed on huge boxes in the centre of the room; rows of easels leaned against one another like tripping goalposts. ‘I promised the students all an A if they packed up their own studios.’ Whiskered carp swam up both his forearms.
Each box was named. Phaedra Vanderbelt. Rose Hart. Thomas Porter-Woodsley.
‘Right then,’ Kebby said. ‘Shall we get to it?’
Those were the names of kids who’d never done a hard day’s work in their lives. Putting their own things in boxes had probably been the toughest thing they’d ever done, and now here were Samhain and Kebby, doing all of the real work.
‘Ah’ll get these.’ Aiden picked up a stack of easels. ‘Honestly, can’t believe ah’m doing this. Didn’t think ah’d be here this long.’ He spoke softly, with a Boro accent. ‘When ah first came, ah said to meself, just do a couple a’ years, then get somethin’ else.’ The easels cracked against each other gently, as they stepped outside. ‘Never did ah think ah’d still be here, thirty years later, moving things out so they can refurbish the place.’
‘I didn’t even know this place was here.’ Samhain shoved boxes onto the van back. They were lighter than they looked: it was going to be an easy day’s work.
‘Well, that’s the thing, you see. People don’t – unless they really want to study art... this is the place to come if you want to study illustration or ceramics.’ Aiden turned, and gestured at the doors. ‘See here, they’ll put new doors in – automatic ones – to make it easier to get in and out. For the students in wheelchairs, see. Or if you’re carrying a piece of artwork. And ah found this old feller in Ather’s Edge who specialises in restoration signs and lettering – that’s all he does – and he’s going to do the sign over the door. It’ll be perfect when he does it, it’ll look right bonny.’ Aiden jumped down off the truck back, and towards the college doors. ‘Ah get a bit excited when ah think about it, how good it’ll all look when it’s done.’ His voice sped up as he talked. ‘Have ya been inside an art college before? Come, ah’ll show you ‘round.’
The lower floor was all classrooms. Big things, linoleum floors. Fake tiles worn to white by hundreds of successive pairs of feet: shoe, after shoe, after shoe, after shoe. The windows were a single glaze, jittering in their cases.
‘That downstairs is the lower teaching studio,’ Aiden said. ‘Where we teach printmaking and lifedrawing and all that sort of thing – and upstairs...’
A wooden staircase at the back led to another two, maybe three, identical corridors, around similar looking classrooms, all with the same, sick tropical colour doors. ‘Print room,’ Aiden said. ‘Individual studios. Ceramics studio. Dark room...’
They passed all these rooms, with their doors partly open, and all their contents already boxed. Samhain couldn’t see what any of them were. It left him quite disoriented.
‘And there,’ Aiden said, ‘is our garden.’ A back window looked out over an interior garden. A slight square of herbs and shrubs, with cigarette butts all the way around the path.
In the upstairs room, space opened out like apartments not yet built. Glass on two sides to the north and east, with a view over the city. Marks had been left on the floor by temporary studio walls.
The whole room smelled faintly of turpentine and solvents.
‘Some view, eh?’ Aiden commented. ‘This is what’s kept me here all these years.’
‘It’s not half bad,’ Samhain agreed.
Samhain’s phone beeped; he could hear Kebby’s footsteps coming up the stairs.
The message came up as Unknown Number. Hi. Its Charley. Mart came 2 c me. thnk u 4 money. Used 2 buy Astrid shoes n coat.
Aiden strode across the long, empty floor, followed by his own blurry shadow. ‘Ah was a joiner when ah first came here. Used to make tables – cabinets – with these carvings in the edges, more for myself than anybody else. Ah was making these cabinets and they looked a bit plain, so ah said to myself, Aiden, why not carve a ladybird running up the joist? And it got to be a bit of a running joke that ah had with myself.’
Samhain stared at his phone screen, watching it fade to black. Something, he didn’t know what, had changed her mind.
‘We should have started up here,’ Kebby said. ‘We always start upstairs,’ he said to Aiden.
‘Right,’ said Aiden, moving towards the classrooms. ‘Empty this room first?’
Samhain followed, following Aiden’s faint smell of sawdust. A tiny feeling nibbled gently at him, the same feeling of calmness that came from walking out of a stuffy, beer-soaked squat, into an evening of cool air and sparkling stars.
‘You alright there, mate?’ Aiden asked. ‘This building does funny things to people. Ah know it did me, first time ah came in.’
‘I’m fine.’ Samhain grabbed a box. Crinkling with newspaper, clunking with plates.
‘Careful – that’s fragile.’
‘We always are careful,’ Kebby said.
‘He’s right, you know. We are.’
‘The stairs are quite steep–’
‘We can handle it.’ Kebby was already halfway down.
‘Anyway.’ Aiden had another of the boxes. ‘Back to my cabinets – ah wanted to know, what was the most ah could get away with before someone came back on me and said, “Here, this wardrobe’s got a mouse running along the top!”’
‘So what happened?’ Samhain felt his way down the steps, elbow to the handrail, foot tracing the stairs’ edges. ‘Did anybody ever come and ask for their money back?’
‘Naw. They got t’like it, didn’t they? Ah ended up with a waiting list six months long, just f’r fitted wardrobes.’
‘You should get into that.’ Outside, Kebby packed boxes into the van. Shoving things a little harder than was strictly necessary, and Samhain knew, even though he couldn’t see Kebby’s face, what sort of a mood he was in for having had to come upstairs looking for them. ‘Knocking bits of wood together – that’s your sort of thing, isn’t it?’
Samhain passed up the box. ‘Frankie did most of the work in our old place.’ But he had the angle slightly wrong, and sent a set of easels tumbling down towards the gate.
‘You leave this to me.’ Kebby pulled the box away, crash-quick, and straightened everything out. ‘You’re better off inside – where you can’t cause any trouble.’
‘Is he going to be ok?’ Aiden asked. ‘Ah don’t want things getting broken.’
Inside, Samhain grappled with a fake studio wall. It was nowhere near as heavy as it looked, and lifted away from the floor easily as a ballerina. The surprise lost his footing, and he stumbled back a couple of steps. ‘No. He’s fine. It’s me who’s on the wrong end of things today.’
‘Ah’d never been in an art college either, when ah started. Then the old Dean ordered a bit of furniture from me, and said, Aiden, you should come and teach at the college, these students could learn a lot from you. I said to her, Padrice, what are you talking about, ah’m no artist. And she said, well, ya just can’t stop it, can you? Carving all those little insects and mice on every bit of furniture you make. If that’s not art, ah don’t know what is.’
Kebby swept past, and picked up three walls at once. ‘We need to keep moving,’ he said.
‘I thought you were outside.’
‘Well, I was. And then I came inside.’ Kebby grunted, angling his walls out of the doorway. ‘This is a three-man job. Peter should never have sent Simon off alone on that one-man-and-van job.’ He went out, still grumbling. ‘It’s a good job we’ve got the client here to help us, otherwise we’d struggle.’
‘So you haven’t even got an art degree?’
‘Ah have now. They wouldn’t let me teach if ah hadn’t.’ Aiden wasn’t even lifting his walls. He pushed them, still on their feet, towards the exit. ‘But ah started in the seventies, and things were different then. Not like it is now.’ He reached the doorway, and pushed his walls out into the corridor. They stuck on the carpet, and, drawing his breath, he started to try and wriggle them free. ‘Well, this was a stupid way to do it,’ he said.
Kebby’s arm appeared. It reached for the edge, lifted the walls off and away and out of the door.
Outside, the air was bright with the smell of warmed sugar and marmalade, from the jam factory downwind. ‘We need to get a move on,’ he said.