‘It is,’ I say, pulling on my trousers. ‘It really is.’
On the way out, the hipster stops me, holding up his phone. ‘Filmed it, bruh,’ he says. ‘You mind it on the Gram?’
‘Sure,’ I say, blowing the scowling manager a kiss. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’
7
My two favourite people, apart from my children, are Susie and Robbie. Quirks of fate in the meeting of both. I met Robbie when I was a floundering twenty-seven-year-old, a newly promoted assistant producer who’d graduated to a flat above ground level and was struggling to meet the astronomical rent. I was recceing a ruined priory outside Northallerton to check out the monks’ cells, and he’d gone there to scratch his antiquity itch. Robbie really loves relics and is never happier than when he’s poking at some old rubble in his spare time, imagining the ancients who inhabited it. I didn’t know that then, of course, just wondered why this odd bloke was following me round. I was a bit of a ruin at that time myself, so maybe he sensed it. After tailing me along a ditch for a while, he pointed at it and said:
‘That’s an old sewage system.’
I looked at the trench, picturing the effluence that must have run down it long ago. ‘Oh right.’
‘The monks were very hygienic. Well, by their contemporaries’ standards, at least.’ He toed a rock that was probably once part of a priory privy. ‘Are you interested in the Dissolution?’
I wasn’t, particularly, but didn’t want to seem rude, and also, he was tall, dark and handsome – elegant, like a Tudor courtier. ‘I love it.’
He frowned, so I hastily clarified. ‘I mean, it’s such an interesting period. All that . . . reforming.’ Faced with a proper history-nerd, my flimsy grasp of sixteenth-century religion and politics crumbled like centuries-old mortar. Desperately, I groped for a detail. ‘All for Anne . . .’ Was it ‘Boleyn’ or ‘of Cleves’? ‘The six-fingered witch.’
He laughed. ‘The Cromwellian take on Nan Bullen!’
I laughed too though I had no idea what he meant, just knew that I liked him very much because his eyes were so kind, and he’d assumed I was making a knowing joke when in fact I was a fool.
‘I’m actually here for work.’
I said it to make myself seem more important, and his whole face lit up. It was clear he’d decided I was some sort of archaeologist with an interest in the suppression of the monasteries, and therefore his ideal woman, rather than an idiot-box idiot who wanted to see if there was a suitable place where Richard Madeley could do a sleepover so he could find out what it was like being a Carthusian monk. I decided he must never find out my true profession; I would just have to fake it as a dedicated antiquarian until he was too in love with me to care.
‘I’m Robbie,’ he said, holding out his hand. It seemed like a very old-fashioned thing for him to do, but when I took it, it felt like a consecration. There we were, kindred spirits meeting on sacred ground.
‘I’m Clover.’ We beamed at each other, not letting go.
‘My day job is at a law firm, but by night I’m an amateur archaeologist. Like Indiana Jones, but without all the fighting and Nazis.’ He tipped an imaginary hat to me and my legs felt weak.
‘Did you find the Headpiece to the Staff of Ra in Nepal?’
‘No, but I once found a Bronze Age bead on the Isle of Man.’
‘Sexy.’
We went to the cell to have a look around, and he told me about the monks being hermits, and mostly silent except for singing, and I said that didn’t sound like much fun, and he said very little was in those days, unless you were a king, and even that soured in the end. He described Henry’s ulcer, how putrid it was, and then we talked about the plague, and pus-filled boils, and smallpox, and it was the sweetest, most romantic conversation of my life. I was a crumbling ruin, bearing the scars and pockmarks of my previous encounters, but here he was, applying a compress, taking away my pain with a posset of herbs.
We went to the little café and had a pot of tea and, again, it felt gloriously quaint, like two wartime lovers canoodling. This was before the days of Tinder, but most of my friends were meeting guys in clubs, yelling their flirtations over the relentless thump of ‘Luv 4 Luv’, which really didn’t feel like a desirable way to conduct a courtship. Instead, we sat across a dinky round table, earnestly discussing sixteenth-century maladies, our eyes telling a different story. I wanted to stay there forever, letting empires and dynasties disintegrate around us.
After over an hour of pus-chat, he looked at his watch and said he’d have to get the train back as he’d taken the day off to come up from London. I said I was staying in a B&B in town, but would be travelling back to Herne Hill in South London tomorrow, then looked at him, trying not to let the hope show on my face.
‘I’m in London too,’ he said. ‘West Hampstead, north of the river. But I could get the train down and we could go for a drink when you’re back. Or not, if you don’t want to.’
The strength and simplicity of those words were breathtaking. It was up to me, my choice, my say-so. He didn’t know it, but he was tearing down edifices and rebuilding them right before my eyes. I couldn’t tell him then because it was too much to load on one young man of slender acquaintance. But I said I’d like to meet him for a drink, he took my number, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I never told Robbie, but I find ruins quite depressing. To me, they represent something not working out, a failure left to fester. If it was worth it, you’d make the effort on the upkeep, wouldn’t you? Or repurpose it, like the abandoned hospitals and tobacco factories in Bristol. I feel sad for buildings that fall into disrepair, reclaimed by nature because they’re irrelevant, past it, no longer useful. Maybe because, nowadays, I tend to feel like that myself. The priory had a certain decaying beauty, but I couldn’t help thinking it would have looked better in its former glory, gaping holes filled in, repointed and resplendent, young once more. But I kept that to myself. After Robbie left, I went round the whole place again with my camera, doing the recce. It was nearly dark when I finished and then I had to wait forty minutes for a cab to turn up to take me back to Northallerton. The show didn’t get made, of course – they almost never do. But I think the trip was worth it, all the same. Something beautiful emerging from the rubble, banishing the ghosts.
8
The art exhibition is in some sort of big disused garage down a quiet lane off Clifton Hill. Bristol is really arty, maybe because of Banksy, one of its most famous citizens, or maybe because there are a lot of old factories and warehouses that can be converted to display installations. As I go in, there’s a neon sign above the door that says ‘IS IT ART?’, which bodes well.
I love this stuff. When I was having my quarter-life crisis, I used to go to London’s Portrait Gallery to visit a painting of Germaine Greer. She’s doing a sort of squatting sit with her head on one side, like a therapist, so I used to tell her my problems, even though in real life she’d probably be really brutal and tell me to get a grip. But I started to associate looking at paintings with some sort of soothing, unburdening process – when I see the Leonardo da Vincis in the National Gallery I well up and spill over in blessed release, and there are Rembrandts that give me a sore throat from trying not to cry. Sometimes I wonder if I have Stendhal syndrome, a condition where you become highly emotional and panicky in the presence of great art. Or possibly I was just reacting to life generally.
We used to try to take the kids to galleries, but they only wanted to go to the shop and argue about whether to buy a fridge magnet or a pin brooch. Once, at the Bristol Museum, Hazel gazed around disdainfully before loudly announcing ‘ALL THE PEOPLE HERE ARE DEAD,’ as Ethan tried to wipe one of his bogeys on Alfred the Gorilla’s glass case. Children are philistines, so I stopped trying to educate them, missed all the showcases and light installations and masterpieces I wanted to see. Now I intend to walk round incredibly slowly, reading all the little cards, then walk round again and maybe even listen to an audio tour. I want to steep myself. I want to be one with the art. Then I’m going to have a lovely lunch.
The first room is large and very bright, painted white, even the concrete floors, which are lightly caked in the summer dust of a thousand shoes. Is it art? First up is a sculpture of a vast beach ball resting on a bed of sand. I don’t know what I think about it at all, and I like that; to look at something and think . . . nothing. My head is empty, which is what I crave. Having banished the usual hubbub of my brain, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. Walking around the ball, I find a card that says ‘All A Round’. Marvellous. The room is hushed apart from footsteps, the rustle of leaflets, murmuring. I move on to a giant shell. Another card encourages you to walk inside the shell, so I do, and there’s the sound of the sea, which has been piped in somehow. It’s Thursday morning and I’m standing inside a fibreglass conch listening to artificial waves – it really couldn’t be better.
The next piece in the room is an enormous deck chair with a book splayed open on it. It’s an upsized edition of Crime and Punishment, which seems a bit unlikely. By no stretch of the imagination could it be described as a beach read. The card at the side reads ‘Culture Clash’. Ah, I see. Someone who sits on a deck chair wouldn’t read Dostoevsky. Now, despite my own judgement, I’m irked, which gives me a pleasurable frisson. Thursday morning, and I’m being kindled by a sculpture. I’m not sitting in a meeting room listening to someone drone on about the problems of an online edit, or telling a presenter they can’t send the cameraman on a coffee run, or getting a call from my kids’ school during a shoot because Ethan lost his three-in-one booster form. I am free; free to be culturally irked.
Just as I’m breathing in the heady fumes of personal liberty, my viewing benefit is violated by a small boy who squeezes in front of me, picks up the huge book and staggers off with it. Is this art too? I look around for a parent but can’t see anyone looking remotely responsible or bothered. Deciding to ignore him, I move on to the next seashore offering, which is a massive dead jellyfish, splayed on the floor like a transparent rug. Reaching out a tentative finger, I prod it, and it judders satisfyingly. It’s very clever. As I’m studying the watery corpse, the boy scampers across it, his trainers leaving a huge dent in its glutinous centre. This is an interactive exhibition, but not that interactive. I wish it had stung him.
‘Hey, you!’
There’s now a cross-looking woman bearing down on me. She’s wearing a lanyard so I guess she works here.
‘Hello?’
‘Can you control your child, please? He’s just tried to kick the beach ball.’
‘He’s not my child.’
But I’m drowned out by the child himself, who tears between us, shrieking, holding a handful of sand, which he flings over the man o’ war. He must be about four years old and clearly has the devil’s light in his eye. I’ve seen this light many a time, on dreaded playdates when Ethan would bring home one of his class’s chief marauders. These monsters live to destroy, to create chaos and havoc, to piss you off and terrify you. And you have to accept it meekly, because other parents can be funny about you disciplining their darlings, and you don’t want little Archie sobbing and yelping ‘She shouted at me!’ as he’s led away. I once hid in the bathroom during a particularly noisy and destructive afternoon which resulted in our Christmas tree being knocked over and excrement being liberally rubbed into the landing rug. When the mother arrived to pick him up, I just avoided her eyes and said ‘Yes, fine!’ But I learned to recognize that martial light, and move heaven and earth to make sure it didn’t cross our threshold.
‘I’m not your mummy,’ I say to the demon child, feeling like I have to say it for the benefit of the woman with the lanyard, who seems to be conferring parental responsibility on me.
