Art Students and The Real World: Chapter Seven
A story of Central Saint Martins graduates in their struggles to find success as aspiring artists in London, with new chapters published every week.
Possibly it would have been wiser of me to choose a pseudonym for the writing of this story. The greatest compromise in being a writer is the scandal; while recognition is the ultimate goal it also throws you into a spotlight of uncomfortable intimacy with countless other people. Suddenly people you know are questioning the line between fiction and reality, and suddenly the world knows your soul. Suddenly there are strangers saying, “have you read any Odette Brawling? Her stories are fantastic!” while the people who know you are emailing you in outrage asking you how you could have written them in that way. Is that really what I thought of them, they would start asking. Obviously, I’d got it all wrong — obviously it’s just fiction; obviously the characters I write are exaggerated, they would start saying to each other. The predictable line ‘it’s just fiction’ falls on muted ears that are closed to your justifications because all of a sudden the people you know feel as though this great injustice has been put upon them.
The thing you will never find happening is the people you write about calling you up to tell you their character was spot on. The thing with writing is that no three-dimensional character comes without flaws, and no one enjoys reading about their own flaws as told by someone else, especially when the flaws are exaggerated. Who am I to be writing the flaws of real people? Isn’t there a level of security in being the writer, in being the one who tells the story? Isn’t it a self-absorbed way of declaring yourself as type of god, and as the ultimate authority figure of the events?
The narrator is rarely aware that they are unreliable, so I cannot be the one to judge the accuracy of my characters. It is not in human nature to see far enough past self-interest, so I would not trust myself or any of my real-life characters to answer that question.
When you are a writer, all of a sudden there is speculation in your closest circles around whether your portrayals are fair and whether those scandalous chapters are true (in answer to that, there usually is some truth in everything that comes from a writer). Many who know me as Odette the writer will rightly question how I think I have the right to be the one telling the story. My answer is this: I am the writer, and it is my job to tell the story. It is the point of my existence. For those who do not want the story told, then… you know how that infamous sentence ends. Many of you may ask how much of my writing is imagination and how much is simply autobiography — are these anecdotes only a series of retellings of my own stories and nothing more than an inability to cast my imagination outside of my own life?
The truth is, no one ever knows the line between fiction and memoir other than the subjects of the story and the person writing, and at times, not even them. Only the stars know the truth in what I write; they saw it all happen, and they saw me write the rest.
For the moment, my mind lingers in the past. For the moment my mind is retreating from the present day of Jeremy and Bert Corker and Soho House and the resurfacing of Darren Hastings, and is instead resting in that reassuring pink cloud of a time back when Darren Hastings and I floated along in life together — before the idea of an email from him made my stomach collapse and my heart disjointed.
Not long after Jacaranda’s phone call I quit my job at Primrose Hill Books and got on a plane to Florence. I woke up one morning glazed over with something pink, and casting my mind back to my unconscious I found that it was a huge pink Italian cove I had stumbled across in the middle of Leicester Square on my way to being late for work in what had started out as a nightmare. With the heartbreak overcoming me at the realisation that this pink Italian cove had only been a dream, I made an executive decision that this had been a sign from the gods injected into my unconscious. One hour later I rang my boss, quit my job and booked a flight to Florence. I delved into my savings and bought maps and books on as many Italian cities that had books published about them, bought a new skirt and let Darren Hastings whisk me around London on another one of our afternoons that felt like home. This included dinner at our favourite place to eat: the four floor, 24 hour cramped restaurant serving large portions of British food in the City, and a series of escapades and explorations around the area featuring my camcorder. Two days after I dreamed of the pink Italian cove, I got on a plane to Florence.
I embarked on two weeks of getting lost in Italy’s most notably artistic cities, but far too early on I was hit with an uncharacteristic wavering. On only my second day in Florence, sitting on my overnight bag on those great stone steps outside the Santa Maria Novella train station, I found myself feeling quite lost already. Added to this was the disconcertion at even the presence of this feeling, because I had never felt lost abroad. I always felt that home was wherever I was. It was wherever I sat, wherever I rested my head, wherever I felt something and wherever I wrote. It was wherever there were lights. This was not my first solo adventure either; I had been at ease the year before in Rome and in Athens, and I had only been 18 and then 19 at the time of those first travels. But despite all this, only 24 hours after I arrived in Florence I was sitting on these steps with my head on my knees and my books about Italy on my lap and my phone in my hand, truly directionless.
Today I did not feel welcome in this foreign city. I had run because I felt like London did not want me, but I did not think Florence wanted me either. Foreign cities had always saved me with an inexplicable warmth and I would be wrapped up in its ancient magic and be in this temporary adventure that was home for a second, but this time I had no such feeling. When the solution stops working, where on earth next? I was stuck in this heat in this city that did not want me and was not the solution. Did I not have any place in this world? Was I just an anomaly of life that the universe had not yet succeeded in eradicating? Where does someone go who by the wish of the stars was not even supposed to exist?
Italians let you cry in public because they love emotions. I cried with my head on my knees and cried without stopping completely involuntarily. I looked up and Florence was blurry but I still could not stop crying. I had encountered this the previous September — I had had to leave work because I’d started crying and dropped to the floor and been unable to stop, even when my boss shouted at me and asked me what the hell was the problem. I did not know what the problem was — was this a breakdown? I thought I was a robust person. It scared me a lot, and here it was again.
I could not tell Darren Hastings that I was in such a state because he would surely fall out of love with me. He would think I was weakened and he would stop talking about how he was one day going to propose to me because now I was this person who cried at inopportune times and could not tell him why. Who is this woman who has no emotional control? He would think to himself over in London, the city that was now his. The city where he belonged, and I didn’t. And what am I doing loving an anomaly? He would think, who can love someone who has no place in the world, and who the stars want gone?
I sent him a text telling him I was feeling slightly homesick and that I was unsure of my next move. But I assured him it would be fine because of course I have it under control, as always. Then I put my phone down and continued trying to stop the medical fright of the uncontrollable tears.
Where was the woman who floated between dreams and stories on the back of men’s mopeds and socialised in Rome and partied with Mexicans and Canadians on the rooftops of Athens? She never cried when she was abroad; she only cried in London. Where had I gone?
The tears stopped and with my make up smudged I stared at the shabby buildings across from me for no less than an hour. There had been a field of a feeling starting in the background recently and it was looming over me on these steps; it was a feeling that life was hard and that existing was an effort. It was a feeling that breathing and seeing and talking and deciding was a considerable effort, because I was so wrong to acknowledge my own existence when I was supposed to be dead months ago. Did life not end just the other summer? Hadn’t the universe tried to get rid of me? Wasn’t I supposed to be missing, or found dead and unidentifiable? Why was I still here when the universe had so wanted me gone? My being alive felt like a nasty trick, ready to strike. It was becoming such an effort.
I missed Darren Hastings, and was instantly ashamed at how weak I had become. But I did not want to die, so what was the problem? I was happy, wasn’t I?
After a lot of staring at the shabby buildings I checked my phone and he had sent me news. ‘Well this might make you feel a bit better…’ He had booked plane tickets to fly himself to meet me in Venice at the weekend. Now euphoria overcame me instead because the love of my life was flying to surprise me in Italy — was this a dream? Now I had an essential mission; I had to see as much of Italy as I could before meeting him in Venice in a week’s time. I stood up from the steps and once again, I resumed.
That week I explored Florence, I talked to people in secluded flower-filled basilicas and lunched with creatives and walked along the Arno in the evening and across the bridges with fellow romantics as we told each other about the people we’re in love with back at home and the countries we came from. I struggled with Italian train companies and bonded with the occasional Americans en route between cities. I took pictures of Juliet’s balcony and ate strawberries while walking through Verona, and I ate boards of Parma ham and bread in the piazzas of Bologna. In that city the mere act of finding a sandwich to eat lead me to more stories; the man who ran the café told me I must be from London and that he had this feeling that I was from the same thread of thinking as him. He felt that I was one of those people who saw the world in a similar way, so he sat down with me and spilled over all of his Great Love Story, who had been a woman from London too. I reminded him of her. I ate my ham sandwich and I listened and then I divulged my own Great Love Story and I told him about London, with a sense that I was starting to love my country. Shutting down his cafe, he said goodbye with an air of wistfulness and a few vague mystical words that implied if I stayed much longer I would have been the second woman from London for him to fall in love with. With a smile I bought his last ham sandwich for the road, continued into Bologna’s evening and took film of the statue of Neptune. In Verona I bought new silk and danced around the hostel while everyone else slept, in a room lined with windows where I opened the shutters wide and danced in front of the mountains rising symmetrically just above all that terracotta and yellow and green.
I prefer not to think about the phone call with Darren Hastings the night before Venice, with me walking around in outraged tones in the large garden of the modern hostel in Treviso. I do not feel it is necessary to think about it. All it is important to know is that for a moment I worried that Venice would be derailed and was relieved to wake up in the morning with a text from Darren Hastings enthusiastically informing me that he had successfully landed at Marco Polo Airport.
It was a cold and overcast morning, and I found myself very tense when the last few hundred yards of the train journey were directly in the middle of the sea all at once, with the train tracks only bolstered up a few metres above the lucid blue sheet. The water is not blue in many places in the world, and certainly not in England. In England the sea is grey, and Venice is a grey place with mist but its water is the bluest in the world. Venice was surrounded by its own atmosphere, and as I entered it I noticed that it was mistier than I had imagined. I had been anticipating another one of those glittering cities that sparkled, but as the train lead me into those first few breaths of water-bound lands, I could see that Venice did not sparkle. It glistened vaguely at the edges, it fogged and it was overcast, but in an ancient way that meant it didn’t need to sparkle. Venice was full of its own, old magic.
I felt my stomach overturning at the prospect of Darren in the wake of The Phone Call the night before, and hoped his demeanour would be so bright-eyed and so clearly titled as ‘My Darren’ that it would not take long for me to forget and become caught up in our own pink cloud of a world again. Taking a few lucid-blue breaths above the water, I refreshed the glitter in my make up and arranged my composure with dignity and just a slight amount of disconnect. I hoped the disconnect would run away and burst back out of the atmosphere of Venice just at the sight of him.
Emerging from the train station was an event that had me immediately overcome with buildings and one large, rounded basilica in the background of what seemed to be the King’s Cross of Venice. It was all quite overwhelming and I was self-conscious (as I always am when looking for people) but then I remembered the advantage my disconnect. I positioned myself on those old and stretching stone steps on top of my bag and did not bother myself too much.
Darren rose to the challenge and materialised in front of me in the sparkly, tentative way that he always did less than a minute later. I was satisfied to realise that he had been waiting and looking for me, and the first notch of disconnect fled. I saw him, in a new grey linen suit and with his face titled as ‘My Darren’, and I lost another notch of disconnect. I stayed sitting down as he approached. He took the initiative I was aiming for with my composure and took us down to the boats, where boards of posters, ticket booths and tourists flooded the stone banks.
We re-entered our familiar pink world through our joint outrage at the endless attempt of Italian public transport to rip us off. After what was most likely an hour of attempting to understand the difference between the different boat companies on offer, we gave in to the same fate as, I expected, the majority of the rest of the tourists, and threw away the inevitable seventy-pound fare of a taxi boat.
I was warm with the old-fashioned nature of the men around me, as both Darren (with my bag lovingly over his shoulder) and the boat driver offered me a hand to step into the boat with feminine ease retained in my dress and shoes. I felt that we must have looked almost colonial on that boat journey as I sat there in my silver heels and silk dress underneath my fur coat, and with my hand in Darren’s, in his linen suit with socks adorned with the Union Jack becoming visible underneath his trousers. I am not proud to admit that a small part of me enjoyed that feeling, while the rest was just consumed with predictable liberal guilt at being driven around by a foreigner while we sat back in our luxury clothing.
I enjoyed Darren’s commitment to being the self-appointed leader of the day as he took us to the flat he had booked, refusing to reveal any information and insisting on leaving all of it to the element of surprise. The woman who handed us the keys on the adjacent street was brash and refused to make eye contact with me despite the tentative smiles I cast in her direction. She was, however, all about Darren, and when we were alone again, we both pointed out (with amusement) this tiresome piece of female politics we had just encountered, with Darren bursting out, “well what was up with her?” I laughed and loved him a lot.
The cleaner would be here soon, she told us, so we’d be best coming back in an hour or two. She lingered to imply that the moment to leave was now. We continued standing in the middle of the room. She balanced on one foot, looking at me with a passivity that still avoided eye contact. This woman was starting to get on my nerves now. “Right…” she said, “so…” she made a gesture towards the door.
“So we’re going to put our bags down first and then we’ll be off,” I said firmly. A week and a half of using Italian public transport by myself had gifted me with a new facet of impatience, and a training in a less relenting nature. I was on limited patience with Italians trying to tap into my English guilt that my language skills did not go beyond ‘ciao’.
Eventually the woman with no eye contact left, slightly cross and defeated. Such as had been her demeanour, I felt as though we were defying her fictional authority when we did not then immediately leave the flat.
We stood in the middle of a ground floor stone-paved studio flat on a dim and secret-keeping side street right next to the water. The bed was positioned in the middle of the living area and piled up on top of it were layers upon layers of those flawless white sheets of mainland Europe that poems are always written about. These were the first sheets I had seen for the best part of two weeks that were safe to sleep on. I would not have to sleep on my coat tonight; thank god for Darren. We lay down on the bed and did not talk yet. All those days apart came over us as we looked at each other, so making love was the first thing we did and then we were in our pink cloud of a world again.
We were chatting and laughing in our pink cloud in those white sheets of mainland Europe. We were secluded in our own world of magic, and we supposed that we should make ourselves decent in case that cleaner really did turn up. I rifled through my bag and put on a velvet skirt with a cream-coloured silk top of mine that tied at the front (one of my favourite items of clothing, especially in hot climates). He was buttoning up his shirt and I was tying up my top, but right in the middle of this perfect moment a key sounded in the door and our eyes snapped to each other in a panic. The white sheets were everywhere and we were still fairly tousled. There was a lot of room for us to be embarrassed, but we assumed Englishness. With Darren adjusting his cufflinks and me stepping into my shoes, we met the gaze of the cleaner confidently, as if we were completely unshaken by this inopportunely timed arrival. She surveyed us and the room (it could not have been any more obvious that were not dressing for the day but were redressing after sex) and instantly looked away.
“Oh!” She said, and then half-shut the door and erupted into a lot of Italian. I stared at Darren and his face mirrored mine, with the well-known panicked facial expression that said, ‘shit, she doesn’t speak English.’ She was accompanied by her cleaning products and her boxes as she waited for us outside. I adjusted my hair, shoved my make up in my handbag and started outside with Darren. The cleaner was on the phone speaking in a hurried Italian conversation, and I was starting to wonder if we had accidentally committed some sort of civil offence, because this run-of-the-mill awkward interaction seemed to be causing an immense panic.
“Matteo. He come here, now,” was all she managed to tell us. I looked questioningly at Darren, who explained to me that he was the owner of the flat.
“Oh shit,” I said, “are we in trouble or something?” I then whispered to him, “is this because we had sex before the cleaner got here?”
“No, no,” he said, “we’re paying guests, remember. There aren’t any rules about having sex before the cleaner gets here.” He reminded me to retain my British composure.
Matteo arrived all smiling at the other end of the street, as though he was a subject matter that had been summoned. Apparently the cleaner was under the impression that we were the previous visitors and had not yet checked out, explaining the stern demeanour. The perfect gentleman of translation, Matteo cleared up the situation, and it was made clear to us with a concurrence of smiles that we would now only come back once the cleaner had done her job an hour or two later. As Matteo spoke to us in the passive aggressive words of hospitality I was all too familiar with, Darren nudged me and surreptitiously pointed out the cleaner in the window, who had made her way inside while we were talking to Matteo and was starting to change the sheets. It was my time of the month, and it was starting to dawn on us that there was probably blood left on the sheets. Oh, the everyday undignified mortification of the situation. We scarpered once Matteo dismissed us, and we did so sharpish before we could be accused of indecent behaviour amid undignified translations. “Do you think they’ll charge us for that? Or call us about it or something?” I said, feeling very embarrassed.
“No of course not,” said Darren, “I’ll kick off if they do. The whole point of that debacle was that they hadn’t changed the previous sheets yet because the cleaner hadn’t been in, so they’ll just assume it was the last people and charge them for new sheets or something. They won’t know it was us. And, they should have had them changed before we arrived in the first place, so if they try it I won’t be having any of it.”
Amid acquainting ourselves with the area we bought a bag of food from the nearest shop to nurture our mutually exhausted forms. We walked across the many tiny bridges that populated the tiny streets of the reclusive parts of Venice and sat in a park and watched the ducks and ate the biscuits we had bought. Those dreaded two hours of waiting for the cleaner did not take as long to pass as we had expected, and we sought out the flat again where neither the cleaner, Matteo or the woman with no eye contact were anywhere to be seen, thank god. We checked the new clean sheets for blood and looked at each other with gritted teeth at the idea of the cleaner finding the old sheets and realising as she changed them what had gone on.
The moment we had been anticipating for two weeks had finally arrived. We cuddled up together and slept off the thought of the cleaner. With the gauzy curtains closed and the terracotta buildings just outside, the run-down Italian beauty surrounded us with all its green and yellow and stone, and wrapped up in the sheets, reunited, we were asleep in the misty sinking city together, at peace.
We resurfaced into conscious Venice in the early evening. It was not yet dark, but a pink was making its way into the edges of the mist that filled the streets. We walked and saw St Marc’s Square for the first time with everything lit up gold, and he smoked cigars and took photographs as we walked. There was nothing but all those deserted misty alleyways and the water and the bridges. The city was rotting and the walls were all leaking and it was all half-formed buildings and mist, and it was a glistening place.
On our last night we had dinner in a restaurant just off St Marc’s Square and ordered champagne (upsold to a full bottle, of course). When Darren briefly excused himself to the bathroom, I took the opportunity to pause the meal and pull my notebook from my bag to write down some fleeting thought. Halfway through writing down my sentence, I noticed the waiter was back at our table. He had been befriending us rather enthusiastically since picking us up from the door and placing us elegantly in our seats, and I knew we were going to have to leave him a reasonable tip when we left. Pouring me another glass of champagne as I wrote in my notebook he said to me, “so, he is your husband, yes?”
I wrote that down in my notebook too. We took the bottle of champagne and finished it off on our way back, on our final evening walk through the glistening, leaking city. I felt the stars and all the old romantics watching us as we strolled through Venice together with my arm laced through his in his grey linen.
The woman in the airport the next day told us that the plane back to London was cancelled, so we started kicking off as politely as possible, in true middle class British tourist form. “It’s just not the case that there is no way of getting from only Venice to London at some point this evening,” I said, “we both have work to go to in the morning,” (I embellished there — I had just quit my job for the sake of this trip, so it was in fact only Darren who had work to go to in the morning. But all the same, I felt the importance of his job fill me with indignation at this state of shoddy public transport) “it’s quite a normal route, and the plane is not cancelled.”
She checked again and I was right, the plane was not cancelled. A previous version of myself perhaps would have taken her first claim of cancellation at face value and run with it as a sign that the story was not over yet. But I found myself at peace with the magic and the fantasy of Venice rather than restless. This time I was ready to go home, back to London with My Darren. That’s what made Venice all so peaceful. The idea of going home did not distress me or send me into a spin; it was a welcome thought because I really felt like I was going home, and I was going home with the love of my life. We were going back to our home, together.
Darren sat me on top of our bags on the luggage trolley and made us the spectacle of the airport by wheeling me around the place as I got out my camcorder and we cracked loud jokes. We were those people who were in love. In the check in queue, he turned to me with sparkly eyes and he said to me, “you know, Odette, I do plan to be with you forever. But even if this ends one day, you’ll always have a piece of my heart.”
Slightly overwhelmed and swooning, I attempted a joke. “Well, unless I cheat on you of course,” with a small laugh.
“No,” he said instantly, “no. Obviously in that situation we wouldn’t be together, but whatever happens between us, even if we don’t end up being together forever, I will always be in love with you. Whatever you do, there is a piece of my heart that belongs to you now. It will always be yours.” And then, “there is nothing you can do that will ever change that. You will always have it, forever.”
I believed him. Back in London, two years later, I did not anymore. We should have stayed in Venice.