The shop had been open an hour and a half, and there had been no customers. Zoe was just facing another blank morning, when Duncan asked her to make a delivery. This, at least, was new. A van came for deliveries in the mornings, but this piece hadn’t been ready in time and it was urgent – could she take it to Dalston in a taxi? Zoe was embarrassed by how excited she was by the prospect: fresh air, a taxi ride, an encounter. Duncan took her out to the workshop to show it to her – it was a plinth, so smooth and white and perfect that she was afraid to touch it. He wrote down the name of the customer for her – Adam Cunningham – and she wondered if he would be the man that had come into the shop a few weeks ago, who she still thought about sometimes when she heard the door go and somebody different came in.
It was bright but cold; the air was sharp on her face, exhilarating, as she handled the plinth into the back seat of the cab. The taxi dropped her on a narrow street off Kingsland Road, opposite a warehouse building with a set of bright yellow double doors. She pressed the button on the intercom, a man answered, and she looked up at the windows while she waited for him to come down. She could see pot plants, cut-out paper shapes stuck on the glass and strange plaster lumps on the windowsill.
The door opened and it was him. She felt suddenly self-conscious, as if by wanting this exact thing she had actually made it happen; as if her desire was so obvious, it had somehow brought him here. She was relieved when it became clear he didn’t remember her from the shop. He smiled and something shifted inside her.
She offered to help him carry the plinth upstairs. They eased it up the narrow concrete stairwell together, intricately synchronizing their movements as the weight passed between them. It felt like they were dancing. Two floors up, he unlocked another door, they went up one more flight of stairs together, and then they emerged into the best place Zoe had ever seen.
It was a space so vast it couldn’t properly be called a room: an entire floor of a low, wide warehouse building. In its centre, there were two giant rumpled sofas, kitchen units and a dining table, but they only dented the expanse. The rest was taken up by studios, divided by low MDF partitions. Zoe could see easels and lightboxes, fabric, desks, radios, sewing machines, printing presses, bicycles, canvas and books. It smelt of white spirit.
‘This is your studio?’
‘It’s a live/work space. My bedroom’s that way, and my studio’s just over here.’
He led her towards the back of the room and they set the plinth down in the middle of a small square area, filled with strange forms. There were some she could identify – a hunk of tarmac, a bent piece of drainpipe – and some she half recognized. There was a perfect white plaster circle with the centre pulled up and folded over the rim; it looked like a drooping witch’s hat or a used condom. A collection of rusting metal sheets stood in a washing-up bowl. There were drawings pinned on the walls, tools, pens, maquettes, notebooks, scraps of paper, diagrams. A plaid shirt and a huge navy jumper that looked like it might be handknitted hung on a hook next to goggles and gloves. A pair of trainers splashed with something thick and white sat under the desk. Zoe felt unexpectedly calm. She had the strongest sensation of being home she’d had in months.
‘God, this place is amazing.’
He looked pleased. ‘I’ll show you round if you like.’
*
He took her round the other artists’ spaces, telling her who they were and what they did: they had names like Ursula and Cora and Oscar and they made sculptures out of felt or did ‘performance stuff’ or were working on PhDs about conceptual art. She saw giant abstract paintings, boulders of paint encrusted on palettes, half-full tubs of primer. He showed her his bedroom, which had barely more than a bed and a clothes rail in it. His lack of possessions might once have made her suspect a lack of personality; now, she took it as a sign of authenticity.
Adam pointed out the remains of the building’s life as a factory: a board which still had the marks of people clocking in and out. He opened what she thought were windows but turned out not to be: they were doors opening straight out onto the sky with no barrier or balcony – ‘this was how they’d get heavy goods in.’
They stood looking out at the drop and she felt the sun on her face. He asked her how long she’d been working at the art shop.
‘Oh, couple of months? Something like that.’
‘I thought I hadn’t seen you before. Are you an artist too?’
‘No.’ She tried to say it resolutely, but it still sounded strange.
‘Oh – so how come you work there?’
She thought about evading the question, like she normally did, but she decided to be honest instead. It was worth trying, and this place felt so far away from real life, a fantasy world where people wanted to do things and just did them.
‘Well, I used to work for a charity, in communications. You know: PR, marketing campaigns, that kind of thing. It was fine, I mean, I liked it, but it was never really what I wanted to do. It wasn’t going anywhere, the job was never going to change and I used to want to be a writer, but I . . . lost sight of that some time ago. I don’t know what happened really: I just had this moment of clarity and realized that if I didn’t leave, I’d be there forever. And I didn’t want that. So I left.’
‘You just quit? That’s really brave.’
She preened involuntarily, even though it wasn’t true. Resigning hadn’t felt brave; it had felt ridiculous. She would have given anything not to do it, and had spent years trying to avoid it, finding ways to anaesthetize herself against the boredom and sense of wasted time. And if she hadn’t broken up with Rob, it might never have happened, but her life had been so bent out of shape, it felt as if one more change wouldn’t matter. She didn’t tell him that she woke up in the middle of the night, fearing that this wasn’t ‘space to figure out what she wanted to do’, it was the substance of her life and would stretch on and on with nothing to mark or coordinate it.
‘So how come you ended up working at Evering’s?’
‘Well, at first I couldn’t stand the idea of a permanent job so I temped for a bit, but for these really corporate places and I always felt a bit . . . well, like I didn’t really fit in. And then someone told me about the Evering’s job and I really loved the shop so I just went for it. I thought it would be more straightforward, and useful, I guess: selling actual things to people that wanted them instead of, I don’t know, tweeting and email-newsletters and arranging meetings and worrying about whether my boss liked me. I used to think working for a charity would feel meaningful, but I still found myself wondering whether anything ever made a difference or if it did, whether I was the best person to be doing it . . . I was still getting sucked in by it, even without particularly caring about it, and I thought if I didn’t have all that noise going on, I could find something I really did want to do. Although I haven’t yet.’ She looked down. ‘Maybe that sounds really stupid.’
‘God no, I think about this sort of stuff all the time. I’d love to do something more meaningful.’
She looked at him sceptically. She couldn’t imagine living there and feeling like that. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, definitely. I love making work, but I don’t particularly like having to explain it to curators or do funding applications or write another fucking artist’s statement. Some people really thrive on that side of things, and maybe I did too for a while, I don’t know. Now it’s just tiring, having to remind people you exist all the time. And my friends from home own houses and have kids and dogs. Sometimes I wish I had an ordinary job, then I could just make whatever art I wanted and not have to go round talking about it all the time.’
‘What sort of ordinary job would you do?’
‘I really want to do something physical.’ He made a vague wrenching mime with his hands. ‘I see those men who cut down parts of trees – you know what I mean, what are they called?’
‘Tree surgeons?’
‘Yeah, them. I see them and I’m, like, aching. That would be such an amazing job.’
She looked down at the trees lining the street, the orange leaves luminous in the sunlight. ‘Why don’t you do that then?’
‘I don’t know – it looks pretty terrifying, hanging off a tree with a fucking massive chainsaw. I think you can get quite seriously injured.’
She laughed. ‘That’s a bit pathetic.’
He looked at her and smiled. ‘Maybe I’m not as brave as you.’
‘Ha, I don’t know, I’m not really brave. It’s not exactly dangerous sitting in Evering’s. And it can get really boring.’ She could smell the grilled meat from the kebab shop opposite. She felt hungry and remembered that she would have to go back to work; she felt a depression in her stomach.
‘Do you not like it then?’
‘Bits of it. I like the space. And Duncan. And sometimes interesting people come in the shop.’ She stared straight ahead when she said it but she couldn’t stop herself smiling. She was almost certain he was too.
‘You must get more time to concentrate on writing though.’
‘I suppose, yeah . . . but I still don’t know if writing was really the thing I wanted to do either.’ She laughed, to disguise the fact that this was the most honest thing she’d said in a long time. ‘I just wanted something more, I guess. Something of my own.’
‘It sounds like you’re an artist, Zoe. We all want that. That’s why we do it. We want something of our own.’
She turned to him, inordinately, cravenly flattered. It sounds like you’re an artist: it was as though he’d said it sounds like you’re really good in bed. It was so seductive to have someone explain you to yourself. A feeling rose in her, pure and bright, and she thought she might kiss him and stay there forever. And then she thought about how kind Duncan was to her and how she couldn’t really untether herself from one of the only things keeping her in place – and then the feeling got alloyed and confused and she looked away. ‘I guess I’d better get back to the shop.’
‘OK.’ He shut and bolted the doors and they walked back towards the stairs. They stood opposite each other and she was certain that this time she wasn’t deluded or hypersensitive: there was something between them.
‘Hey, it was nice to meet you.’
‘You too. Thanks so much for showing me round. I really love it here.’
‘No problem. Come back any time.’
He paused. He tried to sound off-the-cuff, but she could tell he had prepared it.
‘We’re having a party next Friday? Just a house party. You should come? I mean, if you’re not already doing something.’
She said that that would be nice and they exchanged numbers, while she tried to hide how pleased she was. When she got out into the street, she found she was running. Her excitement had reached a pitch that was almost distressing. How was it possible to get so high on a building, on walls and ceilings and space? The sun turned everything pale gold – the tarmac, the tower blocks, the terraces – and the basement and the shop seemed sepia in comparison. She looked up at the sky: in one direction, it was white touched with the very palest blue, and in the other, there were inky grey clouds edged in light. She felt more hopeful and more unstable than she had for weeks.