In at the Deep End

by Kate Davies

  I went to her studio for the first time one hot Saturday. The entrance was behind an unmarked door off Kingsland High Street, down an alley speckled with pigeon shit. Sam led me up the concrete stairs to the large damp room she shared with Polly.

  ‘This is where the magic happens!’ Sam said, arms spread wide, turning around in the space, gazing up at the ceiling as if it was the Sistine Chapel rather than a corner of a warehouse with foam ceiling tiles and graffiti on the front door reading WEEP and Where’s the East End gone? and Hackney has cancer.

  ‘I think this is the most hipster place I have ever been,’ I said, waving to Polly, who was sitting at a slanting desk under one of the windows. ‘You could rent it out for weddings. You’d just need one of those giant LOVE signs, made out of light bulbs.’

  Polly gave me one of her half-smiles. ‘That’s not a bad idea. It’s not like I’m making any money from my paintings. Maybe I should become an events planner.’

  Sam laughed and put her hand on Polly’s shoulder. ‘Babes. You couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery. No offence.’

  I could see Sam’s point – even if Polly hadn’t been there, it would have been clear which side of the studio was hers and which side was Sam’s. Polly’s side was messy and personal and chaotic, like a teenage girl’s bedroom, with piles of magazines beneath the desk, tubes of half-used paint lying all over the place, photographs torn from magazines pinned to a board, along with photos of Jasper, and her, and Sam. Sam’s side was orderly, private, controlled. Her paints were arranged in plastic IKEA boxes. Her canvases were lined up beneath the window in size order. It looked less like an artist’s studio and more like the sort of place a psychopath might dismember you, tidily.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Polly asked, pushing her chair back from her desk.

  I started to nod, but Sam said, ‘No, thanks. We’re going out for tacos in a minute, aren’t we?’ She took my hand and led me to her side of the studio. ‘I just wanted to show Julia my paintings.’

  She turned the canvases around and spread them out so that they were lined up like suspects for a very sexy crime. I didn’t recognize any of the women, and I was glad at first. But then I wondered who they were, and when she had painted them. Had they come here and sat for her while I was at work?

  ‘I think there’s a piece missing,’ Sam said, hands on hips. ‘It’s just a collection of portraits at the moment.’

  ‘So?’ I asked, turning to look at her.

  ‘So, there’s not enough edge. I’ve had an idea. I think you’ll like it.’

  I turned back to the paintings. One of the women had an awful lot of pubic hair. Sam had painted each hair painstakingly in different shades of black and brown and red and gold.

  ‘What’s your idea?’ I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows, jogged over to a shelf and picked up another canvas to show me. It was a painting of her right fist, fluorescent pink and orange and yellow, so detailed that I recognized it instantly; there was the freckle on the knuckle on her ring finger, the sickle-shaped scar near her thumb.

  Sam was looking at me, waiting for a reaction. I felt Polly looking at me, too. ‘What do you think?’ asked Sam.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said, which it was, in a way.

  ‘Do you get it?’ she asked.

  I nodded, but I didn’t get it at all. And I didn’t really like it.

  The night before the private view, Sam and I went down to the gallery for the hanging. It was one of those large, cold East London spaces that used to be a tram shed and features a lot of concrete and corrugated iron. Sam liked the roughness of the space – it would contrast nicely with the refined, curving lines of her paintings. The show was called Women, Naked, and she had decided to hang the bare canvases on the rough walls, so that the paintings would be as naked as their subjects. That’s what she said, anyway. I think she might just have been trying to save money on frames.

  Sam put me in charge of stickering the paintings that weren’t for sale. She was pretty stressed, I could tell; her movements were quicker than usual, and she was quicker to anger, too. At one point she checked her phone and swore. ‘Fucking cunts from Creative Review aren’t coming after all.’

  ‘Bastards,’ I said, though I hadn’t known they were coming in the first place; I wasn’t really sure what Creative Review was.

  ‘Someone from Concrete Street Gallery is coming, though.’

  ‘Is that a good one?’

  ‘They represent Anna Wypych,’ said Sam, as though that would answer the question.

  ‘Would you want them to represent you, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ She put her phone away and stood back, hands on hips, to look at the paintings on the walls. She straightened one of them – a woman with her hands over her breasts, her face and pubic hair in focus, the rest of her hazy. ‘It’s not like I’m struggling without representation over here. And people in London are such wankers about figurative paintings of women. Did you hear what happened to Loretta?’

  I didn’t know who Loretta was. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘She exhibited this great painting, of her friend, a burlesque dancer, and her bush was showing. And loads of idiots complained to the gallery because they were offended by seeing a woman’s pubic hair in a sexual context, and the twats that ran the gallery took it down.’

  ‘That’s so – reactionary.’ I was pleased with myself for coming up with the word reactionary on the spot.

  ‘I know. But that’s what it’s like. People can’t handle women presented as sexual objects. Even when the person painting them is a woman.’

  ‘I bet it was a man who decided to take that painting down,’ I said.

  ‘Probably,’ Sam said. She looked over and gave me a quick smile. ‘But I bet they’d have no problem with Jane’s stupid Cunt paintings.’

  ‘Is she coming tomorrow?’

  ‘Nah. We don’t really get on,’ she said. She pointed at a painting just above my head. ‘Jasper’s buying the one of Polly.’

  I added a red dot below the painting. Polly’s nipples were very red in the painting. They looked a bit sore, actually.

  ‘The fist isn’t for sale. That’s staying in my flat. Or you can have it for yours, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, stickering it, though I wasn’t sure I wanted it in my flat – I didn’t really want to think about fisting when I was eating my Alpen, and the colours would clash with Dave’s Ercol coffee table.

  ‘Are any of your friends coming?’

  ‘Ella is,’ I said. ‘And Alice and Dave.’

  ‘Don’t hang out with them the whole night though, yeah, babes?’ Sam said, kissing me. ‘I’ll need to you mingle with the collectors. You’ll be, like, my first lady.’

  ‘I don’t want to be first lady,’ I said. ‘I want to be vice president.’

  ‘All right, babes,’ she said, ‘whatever you want,’ but she was doing something important-looking with a tape measure and I got the impression she was humouring me.

  28. A VERY ATTRACTIVE CAR CRASH

  ‘You didn’t have to get me anything!’

  We were at Sam’s, getting ready for her private view, and I’d just given her a birthday present. Choosing it had been impossible – I’d spent hours in Selfridges, picking up things like gold nail clippers and velvet bow ties before remembering she wasn’t a fifty-year-old Russian businessman and putting them down again. Her friends hadn’t been much help. ‘She’s impossible to buy for,’ Polly had said. ‘Just give her a good seeing to. She’ll like that.’

  Sam felt the parcel I’d handed her, trying to guess what was inside.

  ‘It’s really not very exciting,’ I told her.

  She started by unwrapping it slowly, but she soon grew impatient and ripped the wrapping off. She examined each present in turn, making small noises that were meant to sound like approval but which were definitely disappointment.

  ‘Novels!’ she said. ‘And prosecco! We’ll have that later. A
nd a T-shirt!’

  The T-shirt was black, and had cost £80 for no apparent reason.

  ‘You always wear black T-shirts,’ I said, by way of explanation.

  ‘I know!’

  ‘You don’t like it.’

  ‘I do. I do! It’s just – nothing, it’s great.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, crumpling the T-shirt on her knee. ‘It’s all just a bit impersonal.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to sound less crushed than I felt.

  She gave me a sad half-smile. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just you’re my girlfriend, so I thought—’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked down at the T-shirt. ‘I just thought you might make more of an effort.’

  I sat there, looking down at my hands in my lap. I had made an effort – I’d spent all of my lunch money for the month on her presents. I was going to be eating Weetabix at my desk till August. ‘Sorry,’ I said, but saying it felt wrong, like saying ‘Excuse me’ as a reflex when someone bashes into you on the Tube.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said.

  I boiled quietly, like an angry kettle.

  She opened the card I’d made for her. I’d borrowed some coloured pencils from Dave to draw a rainbow on the front. Inside I’d written, ‘This voucher entitles the bearer to a session of extremely good sex.’

  ‘Now that’s more like it,’ she said, and she kissed me. She turned to look at the front of the card again. ‘This is very sweet. It looks like a child drew it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, but she rubbed my head like a parent would, and I felt a bit better.

  That night, the air was heavy with heat. We walked through Clapton, hand in sweaty hand, until we reached the gallery. The brick walls were covered with jasmine.

  ‘Smells a bit like vagina, doesn’t it?’ Sam said.

  ‘That’s not the first thing that came to mind,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t fucked enough women yet,’ she said, and she pushed the heavy door open.

  A few people were already there, milling around, not really looking at the paintings, drinking cheap rosé from plastic cups. Friends of Sam’s I’d never heard of crowded round her to congratulate her and wish her happy birthday, mostly lesbians and other artists. I was expecting everyone to be stylish, in shapeless clothes and thick-framed glasses, but most people were dressed in paint-splattered DMs and old Barbour jackets and faded dungarees. Artists obviously washed less often than I thought they did, probably because they were too busy being inspired and creating things. Maybe if I washed my hair once a week I’d get a sudden urge to write a villanelle or take up crocheting? Might be worth a try. There were a couple of older people there who I thought might be collectors; they were studying the art and the price list more carefully. They didn’t look as rich or eccentric as I’d expected collectors to look, either. They looked like paediatricians, mostly.

  I stared at the paintings, feeling slightly out of my depth, art and socializing-wise. I looked around for my friends, but they hadn’t arrived yet. I noticed Jasper over in the makeshift bar area. Alcohol. That’s what I needed.

  I walked over to the bar, listening to other people’s conversations.

  ‘I fucked a really hot bi guy last night.’

  ‘Did you catch The Dark Wood at Transition?’

  ‘Which one’s her girlfriend?’

  I turned my head. A couple of women were studying the paintings on the wall.

  But Sam hadn’t painted me. Why hadn’t she painted me?

  I picked up a bottle of vodka and was about to pour myself a glass when I heard someone say, ‘Hey. Bring that up here.’

  Polly was standing on the mezzanine above me, beckoning me to join her.

  ‘How do I get up there?’

  She pointed at a spiral staircase in the corner of the room – a cast-iron Victorian one, fragile and out of place.

  I climbed up, almost dropping the vodka on the heads of the people below at one point as the staircase juddered under my weight. At the top, Polly took the vodka from me and swigged from the bottle. We looked down at everyone in the gallery, laughing and talking and drinking. Polly pointed out various people: a woman who was into scat, another who’d had an affair with a newsreader, a bloke who had a fetish for spanking really old people.

  We stopped speaking as we felt someone climbing the staircase to join us, the floor trembling each time they took a step. We turned to see Jasper trying to catch her breath as she heaved herself up the last few steps.

  ‘Thought that might be the end of me!’ she said, putting an arm around each of us. ‘What are you doing, gorgeous girls? Plotting the femme revolution?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you old chauvinist,’ said Polly, pulling away.

  ‘Julia,’ Jasper said, apparently unfazed, ‘we’re recording video messages for Sam’s birthday. I’m going to play them later on the projector. Do you want to make one?’ She held up her phone.

  ‘I’m a bit drunk,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be easier that way,’ Polly pointed out.

  I didn’t really want to record a message; I’ve never been much of one for public declarations of affection. But it would have been weird to say no. I followed Jasper to a blank wall – ‘Nice neutral background’ – and when she pressed record I stammered out something about how happy Sam made me. I think I might have accidentally plagiarized some Lionel Richie lyrics. it was all a bit embarrassing.

  ‘That was very sweet,’ said Jasper, playing back the video to check that it had recorded. ‘I hope Sam knows what a lucky woman she is!’

  Sam was manic that night, practically jogging between different groups of people, throwing back her head with laughter in a way I didn’t recognize. She barely seemed to see me; she kept glancing over my head in case there was someone more influential to talk to, and there always was.

  ‘The bloke she’s talking to now is from Concrete Street,’ Polly told me, when Sam was deep in conversation with a guy with dreadlocks and a mustard suit. And later: ‘That guy is a collector from China. Think he’s a bit of a creep. But still, he’s got money.’

  Alice, Dave and Ella turned up at about eight. I saw them standing in a corner, drinking their wine quickly, looking around warily at the other guests. I ran over to them and grabbed their shoulders, like I’d reached dry land. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said. ‘I keep having to pretend I know things like who Bob and Roberta Smith are.’

  ‘They’re one person, Jules,’ Dave said, bending down to kiss me on the cheek.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘It’s very exciting!’ Alice said, looking around, smiling. ‘Look at all the breasts! And the vaginas!’

  ‘It’s like being in a vagina showroom!’ said Ella. ‘I like that one over there, the one with the heart-shaped pubic hair.’

  ‘I wonder if she got it waxed like that for a special occasion, or if that’s her everyday look?’ Alice said.

  ‘Maybe she varies the shape, depending on the month. Like, maybe that was for Valentine’s Day, and she gets a Christmas tree in December,’ said Ella, and she and Alice bent double with laughter. I didn’t laugh, out of respect for Sam’s art.

  Dave gave me a sympathetic smile, which annoyed me. I didn’t want sympathy. ‘She’s very talented,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘There isn’t a painting of you here, is there?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and for once I was grateful for that; I didn’t want my friends laughing at my pubic hair.

  At nine, Sam ting-tinged her glass and stood on a chair to give a speech. She looked around the gallery, smiling everyone into silence. When the last murmurings had died down, she began to speak.

  ‘Thanks so much for coming,’ she said. ‘So. My work is all about foregrounding female desire and celebrating women’s bodies.’

  ‘Foregrounding. Good word,’ Alice whispered, nodding.

  ‘My paintings shouldn’t be radical,
’ Sam continued, ‘but in some senses they are, and I want to thank Alyssa and the Tramshed Gallery for inviting me to show here.’

  There was a round of applause, and Alyssa, a woman with an aggressively short fringe and fishnet tights, took an ironic bow. Sam made her come nine times last time she saw her, I thought, and took a deep drink of my vodka.

  ‘There are loads of other people to thank – my studio mates, for keeping me company and stopping me going insane; anyone who has ever bought my work or reviewed my work; the Arts Council, for supporting me over the past year …’ she was looking around for something or someone, and then she saw me and raised her glass. ‘And Julia, my beautiful girlfriend,’ she said, ‘for being so completely delicious and for teaching an old dog new tricks. I love you, babes.’

  Heads turned towards me. There were whoops and cheers. I covered my face, embarrassed but pleased at the same time. Had she essentially just told the room I was good in bed?

  Sam beckoned me over and hugged me. ‘I really do love you,’ she said into my hair, and I felt warm and safe and smug.

  Most of the art people drifted off before ten, when the wine ran out, around the time some of Sam’s proper friends started disappearing to the toilet to take coke. Dave went to the off-licence and came back with another bottle of vodka and some lemonade, and we drank our way through it steadily until we’d reached the ‘I love you!’ ‘No, I love you!’ stage of drunkenness. A couple of stickers had appeared on the walls next to the paintings. Some of the collectors had shaken Sam’s hand. She seemed satisfied.

  Around eleven, Sam shouted ‘Lock in!’ and shut the doors. The second part of the evening began. The Yo Majesty tunes started up on Spotify and people did shots of whatever alcohol was left on the trestle table. There was dancing. Someone ordered takeaway pizza and put a candle in the middle of a quattro formaggi for Sam to blow out.