Step one: Withdraw 500 pounds from the account.
Step two: Find an artist in London whose work you like, someone you think deserves a break. This is going to require some looking around on your part. Any kind of artist—a painter, a musician, a writer, an actor.
Step three: Become A MYSTERIOUS BENEFACTOR. Buy a new invisible box for a mime, get a mile’s worth of violin strings for a violinist, roll up in front of a ballet studio with a year’s supply of lettuce…whatever you want.
Now, I think I know what you’re thinking: This can’t be done in a day! You are so wrong, Gin. Those are your orders. When you’ve successfully done this, you can open the next letter.
Love,
Your Runaway Aunt
* * *
The Benefactor
The next morning, after reading her letter and splashing around in the tub, Ginny joined Richard at the kitchen table. He was loosely dressed—unbuttoned shirt, undone tie—and was roughly flipping through the sports section of the paper and shoving pieces of toast into his mouth.
“I have to find an artist today,” she said. “Someone who needs money.”
“An artist?” he said, his mouth half full. “Oh, dear. Sounds like a Peg task. I don’t really know much about that stuff.”
“Oh. That’s okay.”
“No, no,” he said. “Let me think a moment. It shouldn’t be hard. Giving people money can’t be hard.”
He munched on his toast thoughtfully for another moment.
“Hang on,” he said. “We’ll have a look in Time Out. That’s what we’ll do.”
He reached under a pile of shirts that sat on one of the kitchen chairs, felt around for a second, and produced a magazine. Ginny had a strange feeling that leaving laundry on the kitchen chairs was something Aunt Peg probably didn’t allow when she was here. For someone who lived pretty randomly, she was a bit of a neat freak.
“They list everything in here,” Richard said brightly, opening the magazine. “All kinds of movies, art events. Here’s one, and right near here. Izzy’s Café, Islington. Shelia Studies, paintings by Romily Mezogarden. And here’s another…a bit strange sounding. Harry Smalls, demolition artist. That’s just around the corner. If you’re ready, I can walk you there.”
He seemed genuinely pleased that he’d been able to come up with something.
Ginny wasn’t quite ready, but she hurriedly squeezed some water from her braids and put on her sneakers. She managed to make it to the front door just a second before he did, and they walked out into the drizzly morning together.
“I have a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll pop in with you.”
Izzy’s Café was a tiny place with a juice bar. No one was there, but the girl behind the counter was making a whole pitcher of beet juice anyway. She waved a purple-stained hand at them as they came in.
A series of paintings hung in a ring around the room, and it was immediately obvious that these were the “Shelia Studies.” As advertised, they were studies of some girl named Shelia. The background in Shelia’s world was bright blue and everything in it was flat, including Shelia. Shelia had a large, flat head with a square chunk of yellow hair sticking up out of it. Shelia usually just stood around (#4: Shelia Standing; #7: Shelia Standing in Bedroom; #18: Shelia Standing in Road). Sometimes, she would stand around and hold things (#24: Shelia with Eggbeater) or look at things (#34: Shelia Looking at Pencil), and then she would get tired and sit (#9: Shelia Sitting on Box).
“I’m rubbish at this,” Richard said, scanning the walls hopelessly. “But I’m sure you know something.”
Ginny took a closer look and discovered the little cards under the pictures. She was amazed to find that Romily Mezogarden wanted £200 for each and every one of the Shelia pictures. That seemed like a lot, considering that they were really ugly and the whole thing seemed uncomfortably stalker-like.
She didn’t know anything about art either. These could be the greatest pictures in the world. There were people who could tell these things. She was not one of them. Still, it seemed like she should have a slight air of competence. She was Aunt Peg’s niece, after all. She got the strange feeling that somehow Richard was expecting her to know something.
“Maybe not these,” she said. “I’ll look at the next one.”
He went with her to the next place, an installation by Harry Smalls, demolition artist, who Ginny quickly dubbed “The Half Guy.” He cut things in half. All kinds of things. Half a briefcase. Half a sofa. Half a mattress. Half a tube of toothpaste. Half an old car. Ginny thought this one over, then asked herself if she really wanted to give almost a thousand dollars to a guy who had a chain saw problem.
Once they were back outside, Ginny struggled to come up with another idea.
“I’m thinking maybe one of those people who perform on the street,” she said. “Where do you think I could find those?”
“Like buskers? Street musicians, people like that?”
“Right,” Ginny said. “Like that.”
“Try Covent Garden,” he said after a moment. “Middle of London. Lots of performers. All sorts of things going on, people selling things. It has its own tube stop. You can’t miss it.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll go there.”
“It’s on the way. Come on, then.”
She rode with Richard in the late morning rush until he ushered her off at her stop.
There was nothing garden-like about Covent Garden. It was a large cobblestoned plaza, jammed with tourists and stalls of knickknacks. There was also no shortage of performers. She gave it her best, spending over an hour sitting on the curb, watching. Some guys juggled knives. Several guitarists of varying quality played either acoustically or through banged-up amps. A magician pulled a duck from his coat.
All she would have to do was pull the pile of bills from her pocket and drop them into any one of these hats or guitar cases and she’d be done. She could picture the scene—the astonished knife-throwers looking at the flutter of twenty-pound notes. The thought was tempting, but something told her that this wasn’t right, either. She gripped the money in her pocket, balled it tight, then got up and started walking.
The sun was making more of an effort today, and the Londoners seemed to appreciate it. Ginny wandered around the stalls, wondering if she should buy Miriam a T-shirt. Then she was walking down a street full of bookstores. Then she was in a massive square (which, according to the tube stop there, was called Leicester Square) and it was five o’clock, and the streets were beginning to fill with people getting off work. Her chances of succeeding seemed to be rapidly dwindling. She was about to turn back and divvy up the money between all of the hats on Covent Garden when she noticed a large advertisement for something called Goldsmiths College, which claimed to be London’s premier art college. Plus, the advertisement gave directions. It seemed worth a try.
She found herself on a city street, with a few fairly modern academic buildings scattered around. Of course, she realized, it was also summer, and evening, which meant no school and no students.
She should have thought of that before she’d come all the way down here.
She wandered around, glancing at a few flyers stuck to notice boards and walls. A few protests. Yoga classes. A few album releases. She was about to turn and give up when a flapping piece of paper caught her eye. It read: STARBUCKS: THE MUSICAL. There was a cartoon of a man diving into a coffee cup. The bottom of the flyer said that the show was written, produced, directed, and designed by someone named Keith Dobson.
Something about this just sounded promising. And it was still going on—even now, in the summer. Tickets, the flyer promised, were on sale in something called the uni. She asked a girl passing by what it was.
“The uni?” (She pronounced it you-knee.) “That’s the student union. It’s just across the road.”
It took a lot of asking around to find her way through Goldsmiths’ massive student union building to where they sold tickets to the show. It was l
ike they didn’t want anyone to find it: down two sets of stairs, around a corner, left at the bucket (really) to a door at the end of a hallway, where only one of two fluorescent lights worked. There was a flyer for the show stuck to the door and a pale redheaded guy visible through the nine inches of plastic window that made this a box office and not a closet. He looked up from a copy of War and Peace.
She figured she’d have to scream to be heard, so she just held up a finger to show that she wanted one ticket. He held up his hands and indicated eight. She dug around in her pocket and found one of the tiny five-pound notes and three of the pound coins and carefully pressed these through the slot in the plastic, and he pulled a photocopied ticket from a cigar box and passed it over to her. Then he jerked his finger, pointing her toward two red double doors at the end of the hall.
Jittery Grande
She was in a big, black basement room. It was a little damp. A few fake palm trees had been pushed off to the side. The seats were mostly empty and a few people sat on the floor or on steps in the back of the room. All in all, there were only maybe ten people in the audience. Most of them were smoking and talking to one another. She was the only person here who didn’t seem to know someone else. It felt like a private party in a basement.
She was thinking about getting up and leaving just as a girl appeared in the doorway near where she had come in and flipped off the light switches. Punk music started to blast from a few scattered speakers on one side of the room. A moment later, it stopped abruptly, and a light came on in the middle of the stage.
Standing there was a guy, maybe her age or just a little older, dressed in a green kilt, a Starbucks shirt, heavy black boots, and a top hat. A fringe of light reddish hair stuck out from under the hat, brushing along the top of his shoulders. He had a wide, slightly evil grin.
“I’m Jittery Grande,” he said. “I’m your host!”
He jumped closer to the audience, practically onto Ginny’s feet, eliciting a short laugh from a girl sitting on the floor nearby.
“Do you like coffee?” he asked the audience.
A few assorted affirmatives and one “piss off!”
“Do you like Starbucks coffee?” he asked.
More insults. He seemed to like that.
“Well, then,” he said, “let’s get started!”
The show was about a Starbucks employee named Joe who developed a crush on a customer. There was a love song (“I Love You a Latte”), a breakup song (“Where Have You Bean?”), and a song that seemed to be some kind of a protest (“Beating the Daily Grind”). It ended tragically when she stopped drinking coffee, and he threw himself offstage into what was supposed to be the Main Bean Supply. All of this was somehow arranged by Jittery, who remained onstage the entire time, talking to the audience, telling Joe what to do, and holding up signs that gave statistics on how the global economy was wrecking the environment.
Ginny had seen enough shows in her lifetime to know that this wasn’t a very good show. It didn’t actually make any sense. There were a lot of random things going on, like a guy who sometimes rode through the scene on a bike for no reason that Ginny could figure. And at one point, there was a shooting in the background, but the guy who got shot just kept on singing, so his injuries obviously weren’t that bad.
Despite all of that, Ginny found herself quickly and totally engrossed—and she knew why. She had a thing for performers. She always had. It probably had something to do with all of the performances Aunt Peg had taken her to as a kid. She had always been amazed that there were people who weren’t afraid of getting up in front of crowds and just…talking. Or singing, dancing, telling jokes. Flaunting themselves with no embarrassment.
Jittery wasn’t a particularly good singer, but this didn’t stop him from belting away. He jumped around the stage. He prowled through the audience. He owned the place.
When it was all over, she picked up a program someone had left on the seat next to her and read it. Keith Dobson—director, writer, producer—also happened to play Jittery Grande.
Keith Dobson was her artist. And she had 492 little burlap sacks to give to him.
The next morning, as she made her way down the long linoleum hallway to the little ticket closet, Ginny realized that her shoes were squeaky. Really squeaky.
She stopped and looked down at her sneakers. There they were, white with pink stripes, poking out below the heavy olive drab of her cargo shorts. She remembered the exact sentence from the travel guide that had caused her to choose these shoes out of all possible shoes: “You’ll be doing a lot of walking in Europe, so make sure to bring comfortable walking shoes! Sneakers are universally acceptable, and white ones will keep you cool in the summer.”
She hated that sentence now. Hated it, and the person who wrote it. These shoes made her stand out—and not just because of the noise. White sneakers were the Official Shoe of Tourists. This was London, and the real Londoners wore skinny heels or Euroshoes in weird colors or coffee-colored leather boots….
And shorts. No one wore shorts either.
This had to be why Aunt Peg said that she couldn’t have any guidebooks. She’d looked in one, and it had made her a squeaky, white-shoed freak.
Anyway (squeak, squeak), what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just shove (squeak) the money at the ticket guy and run off. Well, she could, but then there was no way of making sure it would get to him. She could put it in an envelope and address it to Jittery (or Keith), but that didn’t seem right either.
She would just buy the tickets quickly and anonymously. It was the best way. Tickets were eight pounds. Ginny quickly did the math in her head, then strode up to the window.
“I’ll take sixty-two tickets, please,” she said.
The guy looked up from his copy of War and Peace. He had come pretty far in one day, Ginny noticed. The Simpsons shirt was the same, though.
“You what?”
He had one of those stuffed-up-nose voices, which made the question extra questioning.
“Can I have sixty-two?” she asked, her own voice inadvertently dropping.
“We only have twenty-five seats,” he said. “And that’s with people sitting on the floor.”
“Oh. Sorry. I’ll just take…what can I have?”
He lifted the lid of a cigar box on the counter and thumbed through the two stubs inside. Then he shut it decisively.
“You can have twenty-three.”
“Okay,” Ginny said, fumbling through the wad of pound notes. “I’ll take them.”
“What do you want twenty-three tickets for?” he asked as he snapped a rubber band from a pile and counted them out.
“Just, people.”
There was a dripping noise somewhere in the hall. It seemed to suddenly get very loud.
“Well, I’m not arguing,” he said after a moment. “You a student?”
“Not here.”
“Anywhere.”
“High school? In New Jersey?”
“Student discount, then. Five pounds each.” He pulled out a calculator and punched in the numbers. “That’ll be one hundred and fifteen pounds.”
This discount left Ginny with a problem. She’d need more tickets. Lots more.
“How many can I have for tomorrow?” she asked.
“What?”
“How many for tomorrow?”
“We haven’t sold any.”
“I’ll take them all.”
He eyed her as she slipped £125 through the slice in the plastic, and he slid over twenty-five tickets.
“What about the next night?”
He got up and pressed his face against the window to look at her. He was really pale. She guessed that was what happened if you spent the summer in a basement, sitting in a closet next to a bucket.
“Who are you with?” he asked.
“Just…me.”
“Is this some kind of joke, then?”
“No.”
He retracted and sat back on his stool.
“No shows Thursday,” he said, his snufflyness increasing. “The martial arts club is giving a belt test in the space.”
“Friday?”
“That’s the last show,” he said. “We’ve sold three of those. You can have the other twenty-two.”
One hundred ten pounds more passed through the cut in the plastic.
Ginny thanked him and stepped over the bucket and counted out her tickets and remaining money. Seventy tickets. One hundred forty-two more pounds to benefact.
Behind her, she heard a noise. The liberated ticket seller stepped out of his closet, nodded to her, and carried the cigar box of money down the hall, upstairs, and into the light of day. She noticed that a hastily scrawled sign had appeared in the window.
It read: SOLD OUT, FOREVER.
Bright Ideas
It was only when she was back up on the street with all of the tickets to Keith’s show in her grasp that Ginny realized that there was a flaw in her plan. Yes, she’d given him money—sort of. But now no one would see him perform, starting immediately. She’d purchased him, lock, stock, and barrel.
She went into such a panic that she forgot where the tube stop was and circled the same block three times, and when she finally did find it, there was only one place she could think to go.
Back to Harrods. Back to Richard. Back to the same chocolate counter in the food hall because at least she knew they had a phone and the guide there. Richard dutifully came down and escorted her to the Krispy Kreme. (Yes, Harrods had a Krispy Kreme. This store really did have it all.)
“If you had to give out seventy tickets to a show called Starbucks: The Musical,” Ginny began, breaking her cruller in two, “where would you go?”
Richard stopped stirring his coffee and looked up.
“I can’t say it’s ever come up,” he said.
“But if it did,” she said.
“I suppose I’d go to the place where people were waiting around trying to get into shows,” he said. “Have you actually purchased seventy tickets to something called Starbucks: The Musical?”
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