The Gates of Balawat, Chapter 2
Ella spends time with fellow artist Andy, swapping career notes and dreams.
Ella didn’t go to the museum that Friday afternoon. She told herself that she wasn’t feeling well and sat at home on the sofa, eating ramen noodles that didn’t taste of anything and watching TV that she didn’t care about. She listlessly leafed through a magazine that one of her housemates had left lying about, but didn’t see the words. Eventually, she slunk away to bed and lay cold and still, unsleeping.
Monday. The little-known way in. The rarely-used corridors. The quietest galleries in the museum. The Balawat Gates. The customary pause to admire the decorative reliefs. The subsequent comfort of an empty gallery. The gratefulness for a warm, sunny day that kept the tourists outside, circling the city on open-topped buses or carving it atwain on glass-sided boats that looked as if someone had lashed a large and poorly-designed conservatory to a stubby, barely seaworthy barge.
And Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. Ella was starting to believe he had been a tourist, his brief visit over, and she no more than the victim of indiscriminate infatuation. Friday. She was done with that gallery, though not with Assyria. She took her route, but continued on past Ashurnasirpal II, whose name she could now spell from memory, and slipped into the gallery beyond. Aah, thank you, Frigga. There, sitting on the bench, he was. He looked up when he heard her bag hit the floor, fallen from her surprised hand. She smiled sheepishly and there was his grin again, open and warm, the smile of someone who might take their work seriously, but not themselves.
“Sorry,” she mouthed. He shook his head a fraction: Not to worry.
She picked up her bag, made her way to the bench, sat, fished out her book and pencil, and glanced at him once again.
He caught her gaze a moment. “Enjoy,” he said, and got back to work.
She watched for a moment and again found herself feeling a bit jealous of his comic book style. Illustrators were ten a penny, but a good comic artist could publish a webcomic, write and draw their own graphic novel, they could be independent. She’d always need to find clients, which was easier said than done these days.
Her eyes narrowed a little as she watched, puzzled. Hadn’t he been left-handed like her? Now he was quite clearly right-handed, but the quality of his sketches remained high. Could one be ambidextrous and that good? What kind of person swapped handedness for fun?
She put that odd little thought to one side and started drawing. First some warm-up exercises, some brief vignettes to get things flowing. Like a javelin thrower limbering up before a throw she rolled her shoulder to loosen it a little. She cast her glance around the room, looking for something interesting, something to capture the imagination, but came up blank.
Actually, there was one particular thing that she wanted to draw, but she couldn’t. It would seem weird. She rubbed at her eyes, frustrated.
“Not happening for you today, then,” he said.
Ella looked up and grimaced.
“Not even a little bit.”
“Me neither.” She was sure he was fibbing. “Want to grab a coffee?”
“Sure!” She said. They put their sketch books away and stood in unison, and Ella felt a burst pure excitement. Limerence surely was one of those teenaged things that you grew out of, like bad skin and a lack of impulse control. Her fluttering heart and incoherent head were symptoms of nothing more than a crush, she told herself, her hormones ganging up on her in response to a pretty smile.
“Andy,” he said, holding out his hand. Ella took it.
“Ella.” The shake was brief but electric.
“Unusual name. Pretty.”
“I’m named after a cat.”
“A cat?”
They were walking through the galleries towards the south staircase and the Great Courtyard with its cafe.
“My parents’ first cat was called Miss Ella. A dainty little black and white thing who used to sleep on Mum’s pillow all night long, apparently.”
“That’s sweet!”
“Yeah, right up to the moment when my Dad told my brother that when she’d been naughty, they called her Miss Smella.” Andy snorted with laughter.
Sunlight flooded the Great Courtyard through its geodesic glass roof, the blue sky and fluffy white clouds tessellated by struts.
“What would you like?” Andy asked, as they reached an empty table.
“Hot chocolate would be nice,” Ella replied.
“Sure. Be right back,” he said, leaving his rucksack with her. She watched him as he walked up to the counter. From this angle, he was nothing much to write home about. Jeans, T-shirt, unbranded trainers. You could pick him up and plonk him down in any café in any town or city across a dozen, two dozen countries and he wouldn’t stand out. But as soon as he turned to look at her, as soon as that gentle half-smile formed on his lips, there may as well have been no one else on the planet.
“Here you are,” he said, putting her drink down in front of her and taking a seat opposite.
“Thank you! It’s really very kind of you,” Ella said.
“Not at all. I hate to see a fellow artist suffering over a blank page.”
Ella laughed. “I hate to admit that I peeked, but I do love your style.”
“Thanks!” Andy flushed slightly pink.
“I’m more of an illustrator than a comic book artist. I think it’s a style you’ve either got or you haven’t.”
“It’s just a matter of reading a lot and practicing a lot.”
“I read a lot. I’ve a stash of graphic novels at home, but I just can’t get it right.”
“Well, I think illustration is more versatile. Gives you a lot of options. Professionally, I mean.”
“There’s a lot of competition out there.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“Do you have your own web comic? I mean, that’s the great thing about being able to draw like that: You can just do your thing online, and build up a following and then you can crowdfund your own book.”
“Yeah, I have this thing I’m working on, about a woman with feathers instead of hair.”
“What’s it called?”
“Heh. Birdgirl. Original, I know. It’s proving a bit difficult though.”
Ella snorted. “Everything worthwhile is difficult, as one of my lecturers was so fond of saying.”
“You went to art school?”
“Goldsmiths.”
“Nice.”
“You?”
“No. Would have loved to, but left school at 16 to get a job.” He winced at the memory.
“I take it that wasn’t your decision?”
“No, I would have stayed on to do sixth form, but, well, my mum died when I was little and so dad was bringing up me and my two sisters and working as a brickie and, as the only boy, he felt I ought to get a job to help support the family.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be. I don’t remember my mum. I was four when she died. And my dad, he’s a bit old-fashioned. He was brought up by his grandparents and I think he sort of missed out on a whole generation’s worth of cultural progress. He still hates to think of me as an artist. Sorry, ‘poncy artist’. I don’t really speak to him much these days.”
“I know that feeling.” Ella grimaced. “My parents split up when I was 13. My dad’s an alcoholic asshole who ran off with another woman, although she had the sense to dump him six months later. My mum’s a narcissistic diva who, frankly, probably encouraged my dad’s drinking so that she’d always have a crisis to whine about.”
“Ouch, that sounds like many shades of not fun.”
“Yeah. I’m the eldest too, but my brother is a lot younger than me, and really had no idea what was going on. Still doesn’t.”
“See much of him?”
“Nah, nothing. I think we’re down to a Christmas card once a year now. He works on the oil rigs out in the North Sea, so he’d be hard to get hold of even if we had anything to say to each other. Haven’t seen my dad in years, and I’d rather poke my own eyes out than talk to my mother.”
Ella drew breath and then drew another, trying to calm herself down a bit. It wouldn’t do to lose her composure.
“That does sound really rather awful,” Andy said.
“You get used to it, though.”
“Yeah, you do. You deal with it and try to get on with life.”
“And not let it fuck you up too much.”
Andy laughed. “Yeah, that too.”
“What do you do now? For work?”
“I’m a postie in the morning, barman in the evening. Gives me a nice chunk of time…”
“To come to the museum and draw?” Ella interrupted.
“Yes, quite!”
“I do the same, actually.”
“Really?”
“Shop in the morning, also pub in the evening.”
“It’s a lot of effort.” A statement, not a question.
“It is. I’m saving up. Though sometimes I really do wonder why I bother. Chances of buying a flat in London are essentially nil, unless you have the Bank of Mum & Dad to draw from, which I don’t, for obvious reasons.”
“Most of my friends just seem to piss their wages up the wall. I actually don’t know anyone else who has a savings account.”
“Now that I think of it, neither do I!” Ella let out a small, humourless laugh. “Credit cards, yes, plenty of those around. But then, saving money is neither cool nor does it net much in the way of a return with interest rates the way they are.”
“But it’s good to have a cushion.”
“Especially if I want to try to go freelance. I’ll need a lot of savings. But I really am getting fed up of working two jobs.”
“Yup, yup. I hear ya! It gets a bit much at times.”
Ella smiled warmly at Andy. She didn’t remember the last time she’d felt so comfortable talking with someone about such things. She couldn’t talk to Caroline, not because Caroline wouldn’t sympathise, but because she would start to mother her and try to organise her life. And if she wanted someone to tell her what to do, well, she already had a real mother for that.
As for her other friends or her housemates, she couldn’t think of one of them who was planning ahead or who would even begin to understand what she was trying to achieve. At times she wondered if she was the one in the wrong, and maybe they were right to spend their money as it came in and live in the moment. At the rate she was saving, it would be a while before she’d have enough money to focus on getting freelance work in, and in all honesty, she didn’t really know where she’d start with that. Maybe this two jobs schtick was just a form of procrastination, postponing the day when she’d have to start putting her work out there for the inevitable rejections.
“Well,” she said, “it’ll be worth it in the end. That’s what I keep telling myself.”
“It will be,” Andy agreed. “It will be.”
The conversation moved on to lighter topics until, eventually, the silent alarm buzzed in Ella’s pocket and she withdrew it to turn it off.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Andy said, getting to his feet and gesturing to the main exit.
“It’s OK, thanks,” said Ella. “What with the roadworks it’s actually quicker to go through the museum and out the back way.”
“Roadworks?”
“Yeah, y’know, the huge new Underground station? Shuts of half the roads round here.”
“Huh.” He looked puzzled, though she couldn’t think why. It wasn’t like you could miss the roadworks.
“I’ll see you again, perhaps. In the gallery.” Not quite a question. His eyes brightened as she looked at him.
“Yes, yes. I’m sure I’ll er, bump into you.”
“Have a good weekend!”
“You too!”
“Hey,” he called out as she turned to walk away. She turned back, smiling. “Hey, I was just thinking, if you really wanted to move into comics, I’d happily help you work on your style?”
“That would be awesome! Yes!”
“Let me give you my phone number, and you can text me next time you’re free?”
“That sounds like a plan!”
Andy pulled out a notebook and tore off a page, scribbling his number down for her. She read it carefully before she put it away, making sure that it was legible.
“See you soon!” he said, smiling broadly, and Ella felt elated as she walked away.
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