Chapter 24
Buoyant and caffeinated from our stop at the bar, Amy came to life a little more and we wandered a few of the newer galleries.
I still didn’t see what she did in the art, but it was nice to see her looking a little happier.
We’d just met up with Noah and Paul on a landing, and were waiting for Caz to find us.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I think I came up a different lift system.’
‘Did you have some good thinking time?’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘Um, yeah, but actually Nick texted and asked if I could meet him for a coffee now. Do you mind if I catch up with you after?’ She gestured towards the outside of the building. ‘I’ll be back for dinner.’
‘Of course, go,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’ She leaned over and gave me a hug before she went. Her face was full of nerves.
‘It’s just the four of us then,’ said Paul.
I looked up at Noah and he smiled at me, but I only half smiled back. It stung that we were no longer as close as we used to be. Not close enough to be told his marriage was ending.
Paul reached over and took Amy’s hand. I braced myself for the fallout if she pulled away, but she didn’t; she let him take it and he looked relieved.
‘Shall we head off and go and see Performance and Participant?’ asked Amy, reading off her floor plan.
Noah winced and I couldn’t help but smirk as that would have been my reaction too.
‘Actually, I think I might go see some of the older stuff,’ I said, taking a leaf out of Caz’s book to have some thinking time.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Noah.
‘Great.’ I tried to add a little enthusiasm to my voice, but part of me wanted to be alone with my thoughts.
We arranged to meet them in an hour and we headed in two separate directions.
‘I thought you would have gone to see performance stuff with Paul.’ We drifted towards the nearest gallery.
‘It isn’t really my type of thing.’
‘Huh, that surprises me, as Mr Gadget Man; I’d thought you’d be all over the tech stuff.’
‘Well, unlike most gadgets, art doesn’t come with an instruction manual.’
‘Would it matter if it did? I doubt you’d read it any more than you read other instructions.’
‘I’ll have you know that they’d pre-drilled the holes in the wrong place.’
I was never going to let him live down the time he built a wardrobe for me in my first flat in London.
‘Uh-huh. And they’d made it so the door hung wonkily. I bet even after that experience you still don’t read them.’
‘You know me so well.’ He laughed.
Not well enough, I silently added in my head.
‘So what do we have here?’ he said, leaning over to read the text panel. ‘Dada. What’s that?’
‘No clue.’ I shrugged back.
We walked around the exhibit to what looked like an old-fashioned urinal mounted on a plinth. I stared at it, tilted my head, and moved slightly to examine it on an angle, just in case.
‘Any ideas?’ asked Noah.
We stood back to let other people look, watching as another couple whispered and pointed at it, nodding their heads in agreement of their clever observations.
I couldn’t help but get the giggles and Noah did too.
‘I don’t get it,’ I whispered.
‘Me neither,’ he said, with relief. ‘Oh, thank god, I thought it was just me that was a philistine.’
‘No, me too. If I’m honest, I think that’s a bit of an anticlimax.’
‘Much like life in general,’ he said.
It was far from the glass-is-half-full Noah that I was used to.
‘That’s the kind of thing I’d say.’
‘It’s true though, isn’t it? I mean, look at us now. We’re almost forty.’
‘What, we’re really not. We’re only thirty-six, still mid-thirties.’
‘Approaching late thirties.’
We walked out of the gallery we’d not long entered, fighting against the heavy tide of visitors who hopefully would get it more than us.
‘We could always cling on to the fact that technically we’re only nine,’ I said.
‘But if you were really nine, you’d have to go through the teenage years again.’ He shuddered.
‘I can’t imagine you as a teenager.’
‘What do you mean? I was practically a teenager when we met.’ He furrowed his brows and I noticed there was a hint of salt and pepper creeping into the sides of his hairline.
‘You were twenty.’
‘That day, but the day before I’d been nineteen.’
‘Well, I guess that’s true. I meant like a fifteen year old.’
He nodded. ‘I know what you mean. But, to be honest, although I would have liked to have thought I was far more grown up and sophisticated when I met you, I was probably just as wildly immature.’
‘You say that like you’ve grown up now?’
‘Oh no, I’m still wildly immature. I’ve just got a new level of cynicism to go with it,’ he said, shoving his hands into his hoodie pocket.
‘Nice addition.’
‘I thought so.’
We walked around a few of the galleries mostly in muted silence, but we drifted around, unable to connect with the art, and judging by our stilted conversation, unable to connect with each other either.
We covered the very basics – how my mum was; what we were doing workwise – but all the while it felt like we were both ignoring the elephant in the room. In the end we fell back into the silence until we walked into the Rothko room. Instantly it was as if the light had been sucked out.
‘Fuck,’ whispered Noah. ‘This is moody.’
We shuffled into the space and I walked around, trying to take in the paintings.
They were hung close together and their block colour of maroons and black created an atmosphere unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a gallery before.
There was a reverent silence in the room, as if everyone could feel what I did.
I sat on the wooden bench in the centre of the room and gazed at the painting in front of me. The colour seemed to grow in intensity the more that I stared at it.
‘I think I get this,’ said Noah, as he sat down next to me on the other side of the bench so that he was facing the opposite way. We looked at each other and, in that split second, I felt a jolt.
‘Me too.’ I turned back to the painting in front of me, getting lost in the colour.
I don’t know how long we sat in those spots; it was one of those times in your life where it could be seconds or it could be hours. Eventually the room started to fill up with a group of people talking loudly and the spell was broken.
‘Do you want to get some air?’ Noah tugged at the collar of his hoodie.
I nodded. I needed it too. ‘Did you want to go to the viewing platform?’
‘Can we just go all the way outside?’ he said, picking up the pace towards the stairs. ‘That was so intense.’
‘Sure.’ We started down the stairs. We might have left the room but its effect hadn’t left me. ‘I had no idea art could make you feel like that.’
‘Me neither. Do you think that means we got it?’ Noah puffed his chest out a little and gave a bit of fake swagger.
‘Do you know, I think we did? I could have stayed looking at that all day.’
Noah shook his head. ‘I don’t know if I could. It felt like I was looking into my soul on a dark day and I’m doing too much of that at the moment as it is.’
A tone crept into his voice and I could hear the pain.
I didn’t want to tell him that I knew about Mags; I didn’t want him to feel like we’d been gossiping behind his back.
But I wanted him to know I was there for him.
I reached out my fingers to find his, and I took hold of his hand.
He squeezed mine back and neither of us acknowledged it.
We walked out like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. And it felt like it was.