The Persistence of Memory

Chapter One

I don't want to be here.

Why does he do this to me? Why does he always insist I come to these things? He knows how I feel about pretentious art, yet he drags me along all the same, warning me with his eyes to smile and be sociable. Even now.

I'm not even convinced Oliver knows what this kind of crap is about. In fact, I'm convinced that even the person who made it has no idea what it's about. I'm convinced they create something so meaningless and puerile for the sole purpose of laughing to themselves as critics fawn over it with enough sycophantic phrases to choke a horse.

It's so evocative of the darkness that dwells within the human psyche and the deep division of the soul between the morality and mortality of being.

No, it's a bloody fruit bowl. Honestly.

To be fair, this exhibition isn't as impenetrable as some of the others he's dragged me to. I can see some photos on the far side of the room, just beyond where the wide, white, wall on wheels is displaying several abstract colourful paintings. The artist seems to paint in bold brash colours, but photograph in dark monotones. I'm not sure if this is his style or if it's just coincidence. I've no clue about this artist whatsoever. Some up and comer apparently. Morely Prize winner. New York Debut. Blah blah blah.

Alone, far from the paintings and photos, is the award-winning focal point. A looped video installation being projected onto a large space partially cordoned off from the rest of the gallery. It looks like this guy can't even decide what sort of pretentious crap he wants to torture us with so he's covering all bases. Lucky us. Luckier me.

With a loud sigh, I move to try and get a better view of the film beaming at us from the fifty-inch screen. It's not a fruit-bowl. It looks like an image of the sea, but the film is fuzzy and looks deliberately aged so it could easily be a close-up shot of genitalia for all I know. The picture dissolves and becomes a rusty gate, swinging open and closed in the wind, beyond which lies a run-down garden shed crumbling on all sides. It's the most pitiful, lonely-looking shed I've ever seen. It makes me feel even more depressed. How on earth does a shed have the ability to depress?

I close my eyes and try harder to not think about the thing that Dr Cohen told me I need to think about and should think about. The thing I shouldn't be afraid of thinking about. The thing I needed to stop hiding from. Oh, if only I could bloody hide from it.

Ignoring all of her advice, I push it from my mind and look back at the film. I could be at home not writing instead of being here. I could be watching the entire boxed-set of Downton Abbey or Sherlock instead of being here - anything to convince myself that if I block out the area surrounding the TV I could be on the couch in our house in London.

Suddenly I feel eyes on me and I turn around to look at him standing twenty feet away. My husband. My smart, handsome, successful husband. His eyes aren't on me though, they're on Nicole who runs the gallery, and her short husband Jordan (The fact that we now know a grown man called Jordan amuses me. You couldn't write this kind of stuff - well, I suppose I could. Once I would have been able to.  But I seem to have forgotten how to write entirely these days so maybe even I might struggle) Yes, our new best friends were the reason he'd dragged me here tonight. They invited us.

Ellie, we can't not go... he's a Morley prize-winning artist... you know you'll feel better once you get dressed up...

In other words: you look like shit Eloise, get your act together and get out of the bloody apartment. Oliver had started calling our flat an apartment. Even though if we were in London it would be our flat. But we weren't in London, we were in New York, and in New York Oliver called flats 'apartments' and more recently, lifts 'elevators'. When I caught him doing it the other day I'd just stared at him open-mouthed. He didn't know why I was staring.