Scarborough Baby – Chapter 2

In Chapter 1 of this exciting first novel, we were introduced to the main character, Harv, a 24-year-old English girl who has never known who her biological father was. She is now financially independent, with a rather indifferent job, renting one floor of a lovely house from a gay friend. Her mother married her stepfather when she was a mere year old and he, the only father she has ever known, adopted her.
This week, we present Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 2

Home for now was York where I rented what should have been an unaffordable flat from Philip Sanderson, who owned the big Georgian house in which I had lived for the past twelve months. Handsome red brick houses perfect but blank in their symmetry, ran the tree-lined length of the street down to a small, dark, grassy square surrounded by railings and tall, stone terraces.
Philip lived on the two top floors, I had half of the second and on the ground floor lived Part Time Pete, who worked and lived lavishly in York through the week and went home to his wife and kids in London at weekends.
“Hi,” was about the extent of my conversation with Pete.  Occasionally I would bump into him either coming home late or leaving early with the kind of women whose attributes could undoubtedly offer warm and hearty solace to a man away from home and missing his wife and children. I would act like they were invisible.
It was a Monday morning and I was basking in great shafts of dazzling light in Philip’s flat; there was a sublime sense of cheating to be still in a dressing gown at ten a.m. when the rest of the working world was be-suited, be-frocked and behind a desk.
“So. Where have you been?”  Philip slumped down on the sofa next to me and plumped a cushion over his stomach, holding it tight like a security blanket.
“Scarborough.”
He waited. “And?”
“Saw some old friends on Saturday night, which was slightly less than O.K.  Fell out with Angie, sorry, I’ll rephrase that, really fell out with Angie, came back, did my shift at the Bar. That’s about it.  Oh, I bought you a crab. It’s in the fridge downstairs.”
Philip worked in the arts, mainly in London, connecting people and organising events. Our mutual passion for painting had begun and then lubricated our friendship.  We made each other laugh, I looked after his cats, Kipper and Morris, and his flat when he was away and went with him to show previews and openings; we were comfortable with each other.
“So what did you really fall out about?“
“Oh, just about which one of us is the real bastard,” I said cryptically, “but I don’t want to talk about it.”  I never talked about it.
“Fair enough,” He looked toward the window and mumbled “but I think I know the answer.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
He was laughing and cringing away, holding the cushion in front of him to deflect my blows. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.” We sat back, both smiling.
“Harv, when are you going to get a proper job?” He knew that this would irritate me.
“The Arts Bar is a proper job, I just never meant to be there this long, but I like it, it gives me free time to do other things, like paint.  Besides which, I like Johnny and I like living here and if I did something else, I might have to move on. Then who’d look after your extras?”
I had met Philip at the Arts bar where I had, at the time, hung a small exhibition of my work. He had admired one of my canvasses and Johnny, Philip’s friend and the owner of the bar, had introduced us, leading me in a fluster of embarrassment from the kitchen. Later, Philip bought the picture.
He had asked where I lived and about my studio space and when I explained that I was flat sharing with a girl I barely knew, our conflicting shifts giving neither of us space or privacy, Philip had said that he had a flat to rent in his house and I had laughed, safe in the knowledge that I could never afford the kind of flat that he would have on offer.
“Would two hundred quid a month mean that Johnny would need to give you a pay rise?” Johnny told him to go to hell and I went along with the joke. Then he had said, “Seriously. Two hundred quid plus extras.” And he had winked.
I had already guessed he was gay, so I was certain they weren’t the kind of extras that I would have to dress up or lie down for, so with half an idea that I was wasting my time but reassured by Johnny that I should go and see, I agreed to have a look.
I had wandered, excited and bemused through a big white sitting room, two big white bedrooms all with wooden floors, a stark, sexy bathroom and a steely kitchen with huge sash windows in every room, certain that, if the rent for this was only two hundred quid, the extras must come expensive.
The extras, as it turned out, were to look after his flat when he was away – which was often, feeding his cats, watering his rooftop conservatory plants, sorting his mail and making sure that there was milk and bread for him when he got home, none of which were in the least onerous as far as I was concerned.  Spending time with the cats meant spending time in Philip’s flat, which covered two floors and was an architectural ballet in white and sunshine with a splash of gin and tonic colonial
cool.
The huge sitting room, where we now sat, had been created from roof space, a whole wall turned over to glass. We gazed out across the early haze of the already hot city and over the clutter of red tiled Georgian rooftops toward the golden stone pinnacles and spires of The Minster.
He took another swipe. “Come on, you ought to get a proper job? You’ve got a degree.” Philip was needling me, but gently. Sometimes I wondered whether this line of questioning was his way of checking, without asking directly, that I wasn’t thinking of leaving,
“Yes, I’ve got a degree, so, that’s a job in a call centre then or another load of studying to become an English teacher. A bloody English teacher. I’d rather drink bleach.”
“Well what else would you like to do? There must be loads of things.”  He riffled his fingers through a silky tassel on the corner of the cushion.
“My problem Philipo, isn’t that I don’t know what I want to do, it’s that I want to do everything. However, I’m a brilliant starter and a very poor finisher.” I smiled sardonically.
I had toyed with all kinds of ideas after university, all of them seeming so absolutely achievable in my head. I had made tangible stabs at some of them with huge energy, loving the freshness of the new and the super propelled, self infecting tide which swept me to heights of giddy enthusiasm only to find my euphoria fizzling back to zero just as quickly, with me always thinking about the end result rather than learning to enjoy the process.  The only thing for which I had maintained enthusiasm was painting and I wasn’t sure that it would ever keep me.
As if he’d read my thoughts Philip slapped my thigh and sat up, “Well, what about the painting? You could develop that you know. You’ve got the talent; you just need to apply yourself. I could give you a leg up.”
“You can give me a leg up when I feel ready.  I haven’t got the confidence to show my pants and call myself an artist yet. I wouldn’t know how to put enough good stuff together to make an exhibition. Especially one that you’d be prepared to put your name to.”  I knew I was good; I just didn’t know if I was good enough.
“Well, let me know when you’re ready. Do you want some coffee?” He disappeared into the kitchen.
Despite the low level guilt I sometimes felt at the lack of achievement in a career, I genuinely enjoyed my un-loaded lifestyle. I liked the bar and largely the customers and, because of my shifts, I got blocks of time where I was free to paint; all the time I was getting better and I was selling, not the stuff that I really wanted to paint, but I was still selling.
I had always liked watercolours and the fine detail of still life but had, more recently, swapped paper for canvas, loving the invitation and challenge of the stretched expanse of white, the hefty brushes and the satisfying, greedy slarps of thick, forgiving, plasticy paint.  Mainly though, because it made me extra money, I painted pale York scenes for two local galleries, the Minster and the city walls keeping me busy for much of the summer and for a while at Christmas.
Letters which I wrote to Sarah, my closest friend from university, in which I saw a months worth of my news committed to paper, confirmed and crystallised my lack of achievement. In my own handwriting, laid out like an admission of guilt or idleness, I was forced to acknowledge the absence of anything exciting, exotic or dynamic in my life.  I could have almost sent the same letter month after month, just changing the date at the top.  At the age of twenty-four, it didn’t yet feel like an unsalvageable slide into the pit of a squandered life and an intellect wasted but I did see my friends from university in the heady ascent of career success, with me increasingly unable, or unwilling, to talk the talk or walk the walk.
Sarah was working for a multi-national, something to do with marketing, flying between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur with the kind of casual ease that I travelled on the bus between home and work. James, my very ex boyfriend from university was working for the foreign office in London and I was working in a bar in York, twenty miles from where I was raised and twenty miles from where I had gone to university; forty miles – for a Thursday’s child, I hadn’t come far.
Philip came back with two mugs of coffee and two sturdy cakes; great slabs of scone with crystallised fruit and nuts and slumped down heavily next to me.
“Don’t you get bored?” He asked. ”I mean, you work, you see me, you see that Eva girl who incidentally, I‘ve never been introduced to and you lock yourself up and paint. What about rumpy pumpy?  Here, have half of this: I don’t know why I bought us one each, they could choke a goat.”  I took the half cake, brushing crumbs from the front of my dressing gown.
“Well, it’s not always easy when you work in a bar. It’s not that I don’t get hit on but you have to remember Johnny’s hard and fast rule.”
“What’s that then?” Philip took a slug of coffee.
“Don’t poke the payroll.”  We both laughed a flurry of crumbs, Phillip nearly choking, and then we fell quiet for a moment, both smiling.
“Look at you, all curvy and sunny, most blokes will have you down as some sort of sexual athlete.”
“Oh yeah.” I felt embarrassed at the suggestion. I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since university, despite a whole series of hugely embarrassing attempted interventions by Angie. She had once asked me if I’d ‘turned’.
For me, meeting people wasn’t that easy and some sweaty and uncomplicated fun would have been a bonus, but when you worked in a bar, the last place you wanted to spend time when you weren’t working was in another bar.  I did get asked out, quite often, but Johnny frowned on anything more than what he called professional flirting, so we, his staff, became masters of the gentle knock back, aware that rejection and alcohol made a nasty cocktail, so we played by Johnny’s rules or didn’t last long.  Beer generated compliments and offers were what we laughed about after hours, cackling and squirming over the worst and most clichéd chat-up lines of the evening.
“Does that gallery on Gillygate take anything?”  Philip was now picking the cherries out of his cake and sticking them onto mine.  “Give me that almond.”
”Get lost, the nuts are my favourite bit.  Yes, they do, but they’re only interested in the York scenes which I could do with my eyes closed. I’m so bored of them but they’re bread and butter so I have to keep on churning them out.  I ought to find another couple of shops, offer them something different. There’s plenty to go at, I’m just lazy.”
“So you’re not thinking of leaving me then?” His voice was small and he tugged at a length of my hair without looking at me as we sat shoulder to shoulder on the big white sofa.  In a photo, we would have looked like lovers.
“Are you feeling insecure?” I turned to face him, my eyes mocking but fretful, liking that he cared that I was there.
“Like Hell, I just need you to feed the cats next week, that’s all.” He beamed.
“Bastard.” I thumped his shoulder. “I’ll never leave you? We’re like parasites you and me.”
“Go on.” Philip at forty five was still boyish and well set with thick dark hair and a friendly, handsome face.
“Well,” I sucked in my cheeks and counted off on my fingers “You’re wealthy, gay, handsome and pretty cheap for a slum landlord.  You have a valuable and eclectic collection of art which I might stand a chance of inheriting and you don’t want fiddling with or polishing by a nosy cleaner or unknown cat sitter.  I don’t steam open your letters and if I do, I make sure you don’t find out. I muse correctly over your art and if I don’t get it, I don’t pretend that I do. I’m not a star fucker when you take me to openings; I act smiley, yet cool and I never kiss ass.”
“That’s true.”
“And, because I’m gorgeous in that long tall arty kind of way, it always leaves people wondering which end of the ballroom you really dance at.”
“Bitch.” He threw the remains of his cake at me. I caught it and ate it.
“So where have you been? What’s happening?”  I asked.  Philip always had the inside track on new exhibitions; those who were seeking funding and the, as yet, unknown artists who were up and coming. I loved his stories of how the London art scene worked and the people and politics that made it so mad.  He knew about paintings which were coming up for auction, the crazy amounts they would sell for, and the people who would be bidding.
He took a breath. “Well, I’ve been in London, I’ve been to two parties, three openings, four, no, five meetings and spent a day with my mother, some of it astonishing, some of it moribund and little of it interesting.  I met a Scandinavian who is hoping to get money for, what I would consider, an offensive installation involving animals and sweets; ‘The Confectionary of Life’ or ‘Living Confectionary’ or something like that.  I met a nice woman who produces these huge pastels of fruit and oriental rugs and I put up with a day of my mother’s extravagant smoking and swearing”.  He looked at me in a ‘how’s that for starters‘ way and poured himself another cup of coffee, proffering the pot at me. I shook my head and put my hand over my mug, too much of Philip’s strong coffee could leave me jangly for hours
“So how is your mother?” I lit the touch paper and waited.
“What do you want to know about, the pole dancing lessons or how she’s scared off the gardener it took me six months to find because she, and I quote, ‘was sexually harassing me’. I don’t want to talk about her.”
Philip’s mother, Stella, was loud, effected, over embellished and grand.  She dressed like a wedding marquee; all swags and swathes in hot North African colours. She smoked heavily and dirtily, pastel Sobranis through a ridiculous and extravagantly long holder and coughed like a consumptive.
Stella was a woman of huge impatience who, I suspected, spent a lot of time bellowing at, and breaking, inanimate objects and she never remembered my name.
She was both hideous and hilarious and Philip kept her downstairs because she made him want to kill her and he couldn’t stand the ashtrays, or the stink of her cigarettes and strident perfume.
“Never mind, she’ll die soon”, I comforted. “What about work?”
“It’s all a bit quiet at the moment but I had a meeting with Jonjo Porter from The Carling Porter Gallery, who’s interested in organising a sort of North and South divide exhibition. He wants industrial paintings and sculpture by southern and northern artists to make comparisons of how where they come from effects how and what they paint, that kind of stuff. They want to intersperse it with photographs of different kinds of factories and people working in them.  Might be interesting, so I need to start gathering some images and ideas, I feel a trip to some northern archives and museums coming on if you fancy it?”
“My dad had some old photographs like that in the attic at home. I haven’t looked at them for years, but I think there’s a box full of them and some albums which belonged to my granddad.  I could ask if I could borrow them. They might be O.K.”
“Yeah, bring them next time you go, it might fire my imagination and, you never know, they might be the very thing”

Stay tuned next Wednesday for Chapter 3. If you missed Chapter 1, go to the Series page and look for the Scarborough Baby series.

If you enjoyed this post, this is the perfect time to sign up for free updates via RSS or via email and while you're at it, sign up for our free Newsletter.

Tagged as: London, Painting, Renting