Ella asks what her current title is, since this changes fairly regularly, and Caitlin says that she is a consultant at the moment, specifically a consultant dealing with the psychology of combatants and adversaries, but that for all the usual reasons this is as specific as she can get.
‘What’s the difference between a combatant and an adversary?’
‘Hmm. Well, a combatant can be friendly or hostile; there is psychology in common between the two, and a sophisticated understanding of a combat space will often need to draw a set of equivalences between them, so we use the generic term ‘combatant’. An adversary might be a hostile in the combat space, but not necessarily—we do a lot of work with future adversaries these days, and with adversaries who will never know or understand themselves as adversaries, with probabilistic modelling of potential adversaries, with the flows and pressures of adversary-ness through given populations, with their imaging and definition. This is all in contention at the moment, everyone is trying to invent or advance their own targeting and definitional system, their own complete package.’
‘Huh,’ says Ella. And then, after several seconds she asks ‘What’s your adversarial package? What are you proposing when you do this sort of work?’
But of course Caitlin can’t tell her this, much as she says she would like to. She says ‘Ask me again in twelve years!’ and grins, and then assures her friend that it’s really neither as scary or as interesting as the cloak-and-dagger NDA stuff makes it sound.
Up the other end of the table Beth asks if anyone else is hungry, and everyone murmurs that they are, so she declares that she will start making something for lunch. Simone and Michael say they will help, and the three of them troop into the kitchen together, vocally clashing as they try to decide between: big salad? Something cooked? A rice thing? Eventually they decide on big salad, and Beth tells both of them to keep out of her way as she prepares it, because having other people around in the kitchen when you have a specific vision is just so frustrating. So Michael and Simone press themselves up against the side of the counters and trade anecdotes about life in London (Simone) and Paris (Michael), about Michael’s girlfriend (yes she is doing well, she has actually just been promoted), about painting (what is it that you want to know? You have to be specific), as Beth gathers up ingredients and starts shredding them with a bright steel chef’s knife. As she chops and listens to the back and forth with a single lazy ear she is scoping out the other ingredients that she needs: the block of smoked tofu, the vinegar, the olive oil, the various loaves of bread, visually locating the toaster, making best guesses at which cupboards might house plates and glasses for everyone. Then she suddenly thinks: where is Parvel. What is going on with Parvel. And she (rather tactlessly) interrupts the other two to ask Simone to text him and just check that he is ok, because he was supposed to be here this morning and no one has heard. Simone and Michael are quiet for a bit and then Simone says yes I will, right now, one second, and she sends a message, trying to make it sounds light and breezy, but including the fact that they are all sort of worried, and that he should get back to them and let them know what’s going on. As she writes the message she narrates it to the other two out loud. Then she presses send, and watches, and sees that Parvel’s phone does not receive it. She reports this and says that she guesses that he must be on the plane, that maybe his flight got delayed. And they are all quiet for a few minutes as Beth’s big bright knife blade makes precise, dextrous movements across several different chopping boards. Then Beth tells her to keep talking about painting, and Simone says ‘Well I wasn’t talking about painting, because Michael was being vague, and I think probably just polite.’ Then she laughs loudly, and Beth smiles, and says ‘Ok, that’s fine, but tell me about your painting, what are you working on? When is your next show? How are you feeling in the studio?’ And Simone gets impatient and says ‘Still not specific enough, of course I am fine in the studio, I am working on paintings, same as ever, each of them has its own things going on, I wouldn’t even know where to start,’ and Beth rolls her eyes and says ok, that’s fine, maybe tell me what the stakes are, or what the purpose is, or what the narrative is, or what the process is with the painting you are currently most excited by.
And Simone nods and says ‘Yes that’s much better. I am making a painting that is sort of about Sal’s body, because it’s something I want to have a more specific possession of. Like, I need to map out his body for myself, need to own a copy of that specific body, something like this. It will be shown in August, with some other works which are more about architecture, and actually this one started off as a painting about our house, the floor plan, but in the end it has become a map of his body.’
‘Does he know that you’re painting him?’ Beth now cutting the tofu into cubes, turned away from both of them.
‘I’m not really painting him in that sense, it’s not that straight forward. But yes, he does know. He has been sitting for me actually. Or sometimes I ask him to talk to me about other things while I think about the painting, or while I draw for it, or even sometimes in the studio with the painting itself.’
‘What does it look like?’ Mixing a dressing, making brief eye contact with Michael, sharing a strange smile, oddly charged, nearly secret. Michael is sat up on the counter, listening to Simone but watching Beth work, smiling secret smiles of his own, which are directed at no one.
‘Another much better question. It looks like an electrical diagram, and a bit like a building’s facade, something between these. It started off flat, almost explicitly diagrammatic, but it has grown depth, since the body and the organs have depth, they must swell and shrink, pump fluids, hold and transmit information, all of these things.’
‘Does it include the brain? The cock?’ Mixing in two large salad bowls. Asking Michael to please search for the cutlery and the plates.
‘Both are included by allusion, I would say. The brain, the penis, the heart, the lungs, especially the lungs, the stomach, all of them are included. They are sites of important activity on the painting’s surface. But the more explicit focus is on the flow of electrical charge and energy, which happens only via circuits. So the circulation, the breath, the nervous system, everything that moves an electrical current.’
Beth considers disputing that the breath, as just one example, involved the flow of an electrical current. But she decides against it; ‘electrical current’ here might mean something else entirely, might stand in for energetic forces and flows without clean definition outside her friend’s specific artistic processes. Instead she asks ‘Have you got any photos?’
‘No, I haven’t taken any yet. But it will be up in August.’ She pauses as if she is about to say something, but then frowns and changes her mind and instead tells them that they should come, that it will be fun show.
Several minutes of silence, then Beth says ‘This is ready. We should take out water too, and beer? Or wine? What is the feeling?’
Michael says they should just take everything out so that people can choose, and Beth says yes, why didn’t I think of this, and so between the three of them they bring it all out, and set it down on the table, to the cheers of the others, who immediately start to pile up plates, with happy noises and ooohing and aaaahing.
They eat and drink and talk and laugh together, and they get loud, silly, carefree, and happy. All of them wind up a little drunk, or more than a little; all of them feel that they need to do this more often; all of them feel (and more than half of them remark at different points) that they really miss one another, and that it’s ridiculous how little time they are able to carve out these days; all of them feel a tender sort of nostalgia for the period in their lives when they were younger, babies really, learning who they were and how they could relate to one another, from first principles. All of them except Ella, who has a strange and uneasy blank period in her memories from this period in her life. She has pieced it together in disparate scenes from other peoples’ descriptions, and she has her own rough images of course, but when they play in sequence she finds that she can slot them in in whatever way and they make the same kind of dream sense. There is no real temporal progression.
Eventually the talk does die down. The sky is getting softer and darker. A comfortable, natural-feeling silence descends on the friends, and they watch the horizon where the sunlight is fading, and the lights of the town and the freeways. Each has been lulled into their own specific reverie. Then slowly, and softly, so softly that it is not clear who actually starts talking first—the murmuring noises bubble up as though from several throats, several mouths and several pairs of lips, indistinct in the gloom—they start talking about their early years and education: they start talking about art school. Out from the vague, undirected (and also notably drowsy or tipsy) noises of generalised nostalgia and incredulity (how extraordinary is the passage of time, how young we were, we knew nothing but we thought that we knew everything), a stronger strain of intentionality can be detected. It comes from Beth—since she was not present for those early days, she is interested in what they (the years) taught the others, the marks that they made, the shapes that they stamped onto her friends when they were all so young and impressionable. She asks Caitlin, how did she see herself when she was a young art student? And Caitlin smiles to herself in the darkness, and says that she thought of herself, insomuch as she has any sense of self at all back then, as basically a good student—better than those around her in fact (this gets a general laugh)—a serious, intelligent, motivated young woman who was capable of taking on all of the reading material that they were handed indifferently, nearly contemptuously, by their tutors, and building an informed opinion on them. She could defend that opinion, she could even relate it to the ‘works’ that she put together in the tiny cubicle that the school offered as a studio. There was no text that she felt put off by, or blindsided by, and if she didn’t understand something easily, or if it was too dense, or too nuanced, or too complexly layered, she had a nearly infinite trust in herself that she would be able to chop it to pieces and reassemble them herself, under her own power, into something that she could make use of, or hand back to the disinterested and ambivalent and perhaps even openly hostile tutors. In fact, she was not intimidated by the scholarly auras and pretensions of art school as it was fifteen years ago (they are all dimly aware that things are very different now).
Beth asks if she was working then and Caitlin is momentarily surprised by the question, and even more surprised to realise that she does not remember. After a minute of thought she says ‘No, I don’t think that I was.’ She goes on to explain that she was awarded a scholarship, or maybe several scholarships? And that she took out a loan, and had some help from people in her family. Or something like this, it was a while ago now… But she can’t remember working at all during the degree.
While she is saying this, Ella, still sitting next to her, sees something like a vision. At first it’s just a thin line of brightness in the quickly darkening sky above them, but pretty soon coalesces into a thin steel edge, like the blade of a giant chef’s knife, drawing itself across the empty sky above them, big enough to cover nearly the whole sky. Perhaps it makes a cut, she thinks — perhaps it cuts the sky and reveals what is hidden from us. How is it possible that you could not remember if you had a job? Perhaps the steel edge only threatens to cut. She thinks: this vision consists in the anxiety of the cut. Like one of those dreams where you drag yourself along a bed of nails — if you are very precise you can avoid being opened on their points but the anxiety is always there, and the dream is more about the anxiety than the nails.
It has been established that Ella has no firm memories of this period in their collective youth, but this is actually not wholly true — Ella remembers her jobs from that time just fine, even with (a frantic) clarity. It is the actual classes, the relationships with the tutors (what relationships? She nearly laughs out loud), the codes and shibboleths of the gallery and studios spaces, that the others seemed to pick up with such ease, that she cannot remember at all.
But her memories of the labour are absolutely clear. She remembers sitting in a booth with a autodialler and a headset, trying to get random members of the public to consent to research questionnaires — remembers sucking sweets with anaesthetics in them so that she could deaden the rawness in her throat and talk to people on the telephone on twelve-hour shifts. Remembers working nights and speaking bad French to people in Canada for an extra one dollar fifty per hour. Remembers her colleagues and supervisors trying to be nice to one another in the most disgusting circumstances imaginable. How can you be nice to someone when your job is to keep data collection metrics above a certain threshold? Remembers being told how to make her voice engaging and even alluring, being given a script, being punished for not adhering to it. Remembers the workers who formed into couples while working at the centre. Remembers the other workers who had other jobs in addition — some of them security work, or sex work, or carer work, or supermarket work — which seemed absolutely unaccountable to her looking at her own twelve hour shifts; impossible, even actually suicidal. Remembers her supervisors: a tall, heavy man, who had apparently been a successful script writer, but who had had a breakdown and lost his relationship and now couldn’t write; remembers him trying to be friendly as he walked her through her quotas, and what she could do about keeping them up. A tall woman with very long black hair (down to her buttocks), friendly and patient and occasionally gratuitously and extravagantly cruel. The woman would get very drunk and hook up with callers sometimes after work, and then swear them to secrecy. She remembers that this manager was absolutely precise in her threats about what would happen if word about these sexual escapades got out into the workplace, even when she was so drunk she could barely order a taxi.
They were unionised, so they got a better rate than the call centre down the road. One of the union organisers (one of the callers who had signed up to do the work volunteer, not an actual union employee) was fired for trying to organise a strike and secure better conditions. He would come back to the centre after this, just to hang around with people, to avoid loneliness. She asked him once how he was and he told her that he did not have other friends really, and that she should be careful not to let this happen to her, because it was miserable. One or two of her colleagues from the centre would kill themselves later on — not while they were all working together, she would hear about it years later. She passed her days there by reading the same copy of the same art magazine, Texte Zur Kunst: Fashion, cover to cover (she was happy to have picked up something of the right sensibility at school, and liked the cover, and found the articles mostly quite interesting, with one or two exceptions), and by flirting with colleagues without any clear plan in mind, and doodling little pen drawings, and fantasising about economic freedom. The wage paid her rent on a one bedroom apartment (things were very different then), and she worked in her studio on the weekends, and made hundreds of paintings that no one ever saw, huge paintings on walls and sheets of timber and sheetrock and any other architectural surface she could move by hand. Back then she was physically very strong — she smiles as she remember it — but even with her strength, she nearly killed herself a couple of times trying to move sections of masonry back into her studio to paint with tar, or with dust, or with plastic sheeting, or with clay, or with acrylics. She knocked her head open once on a tiled corner, and painted with the blood, but this unsuccessful (she knew immediately). She planned a series of sculptures that were to be displayed in glass tanks of boiling water, and she dreamed, and then hallucinated, pouring the steaming, scalding liquid over her face and chest. After about a year she realised that she could not endure the call centre.
She remembers the restaurant in the arts sector, next to the opera house — overpriced, saturated in aspirational delusions, the delusion of class mobility, the delusion of access to taste, a refined taste, even a gourmet’s taste. The owner of this shithole restaurant was addicted to amphetamines and wore expensive suits and cheap scent that made her physically ill when he was around. He talked often about the importance of quality ingredients, and flew into a rage if he felt that people were undermining him. He bullied the wait staff in a scattered, unfocused way, but not the chefs, who she realised after a week or two he was actually scared of, probably because he new that the chefs could beat the shit out of him. The chefs were also users, but in a vastly more controlled and focused way; they were nastier, and more intelligent, and also under more day-to-day stress. If the owner was a bad drunk, the chefs were the type of men who would patiently, comprehensively, systematically strip their romantic partners of access to finances or friend networks. She was terrified of the chefs. She worked as a waiter, and was very bad at it. The manager — a very tall, very heavy (not fat but dense, curvaceous, proportions something like a weightlifter or an amazon) woman with long blonde hair and the weary, breezy, ruthless competence of the hospitality professional — took a strange and almost maternal liking to her, and tried to keep her employed even though she was mostly a useless restaurant worker. It didn’t work out as a waiter, maybe she could mix drinks and serve the bar? Or if not that (after two weeks of frustrations), perhaps she could wash dishes in the kitchen? And maybe do some of the easier prep work, perhaps transition into kitchen work, and, who knows, maybe eventually sous cheffing? The manager was concerned that Ella should have keep open the option to pursue a serious career in hospitality, and was very worried about her apparently blasé attitude towards money and employment. So she was moved through these various postings in this terrible restaurant, which she ended up hating even more than the call centre, and eventually ended up in the kitchens, under the eye of the chefs. She is not sure now if they were actually as actively psychotic as she remembers them, or if her general fear and anxiety from the time period is colouring her memories of the time she spent there, which actually are not entirely negative — she loved, for instance, the basically procedural feeling of watching a large stack of dirty pans and trays cycle through the various sinks and scouring and soap processes, and then get dried and stacked up neatly for collection. The psychotic chefs enjoyed that she was good at this, or respected it, or something, and she mostly didn’t have to deal with much violence from them after the first few days. She noticed that the worst of it went to the immigrant prep workers and cleaners, but was far too fearful to confront anyone about this. She found herself in an odd position socially at the restaurant. She looked like a waiter; a young woman in vaguely fashionable clothing (although, it is true, not nearly as invulnerable and bustling as the actual wait staff), but was firmly outer to their clique, as a kitchen menial. Nonetheless they brought her out to parties. One night she had sex with one of other waiters and was so drunk that she forgot the other woman’s name during the act — after this got around even the maternal manager couldn’t protect her (or lost interest in trying), and she was quietly fired. One of the chefs asked her out when he found out, and, even when she lied about having a partner, tried to get her to do lines with him in his car after her last shift.
Her next gig, after a few months of eating less while she watched her meagre savings dwindle, was as an invigilator in a museum. She was brought on in a large influx of additional invigilation staff for a new show that was projected to be the busiest that the museum had ever put on. She and sixty other new hires were walked around the museum spaces, given talks on each of the exhibits by a nervous and blushing curator, and then walked through the fire escape plans and emergency procedures, which memorably included extensive advice on how to deal with active shooters and terrorist attacks, and then a long video of a club burning down with three hundred people inside, which was the single most horrific thing she had ever seen in her young life, and which resurfaced in her brain unbidden for years afterwards and gave her panic attacks when it did.
The show itself was a collection of hundreds of famous couture and costume pieces, mostly from the history of popular film, but also some interest pieces from other places: some of Princess Diana’s dresses for example, early Chanel suits worn by Coco herself; in essence, beautiful garments for a mass popular audience. She was assigned a guard detail at Sharon Stone’s white outfit from Basic Instinct, on loan, like most of the collection, from a private collector; her job was to stop people taking photos, and to stop anyone getting close enough to touch the vitrine that sheltered it. Her main memories are of striking up a few desultory friendships with the other invigilators, many of whom were also studying art or fashion or writing or critical theory or other cheap and reasonably well-respected middle-class degrees of the era (things were very different then), and of great shuffling lines of crowds (the museum was correct, the show sold unbelievably well and was constantly crammed full), and the nearly unbelievable volume of the soundtrack that the institution pumped through the space. The soundtrack was on a loop exactly two minutes and thirty four seconds long, and blasted from hidden speakers throughout. It scored itself into her brain with such violence that she dreamed about it for nearly a year after she got out.
After a few months she tried to quit, and was instead talked into (by that same nervous and blushing curator) running a champagne trolley for the museums VIP donors and board members. She was weirdly good at this, and this was a first for her. She enjoyed being good at it. She learned how to pour properly, how to manage large numbers of flutes, how to talk to the VIPs, how to secure tips, and all the other necessary skills. She wore a cheap polyester waistcoat and bowtie over equally cheap dress pants and shirts, and, without worrying about their cheapness, and to the great amusement of the alteration shop, had these tailored, and admired herself in them. She was well-liked by the VIPs, such that eventually the museum was shipping her out to private apartments to do services there. They tipped her well and she felt like she was making good money during this period because she didn’t know any better. One thing she noticed: she was not good at washing her uniforms regularly. This came as a bit of a shock, she had never had similar problem washing her day-to-day clothes, and she could not figure out where the issue was with this more formal wear. Somehow things got away from her, and more than once she felt that she smelled too strongly to go to work, and had to anyway, pretending that nothing was wrong. The VIPs never seemed to mind, or even notice, but she would notice her own smells of sweat and anxiety, rancid as she moved around the plastic cart, bent over the ice trays, unstoppering the bottles.
She developed an odd anxious relationship with the smells. Days when she had managed to wash her clothing felt like brief reprieves in the stronger and more hopeless pattern of uncleanness. The energy that she spent trying to convince herself to deal with it rationally began to savour increasingly of the self-bargaining of an addict. It was very unsettling. One day it was really bad and the older man whose apartment she was working in took her aside after the event and told her that she had done a good job as usual, but that she really needed to make sure that she was washing her clothes. She had a sort of out of body experience in the elevator on the way down — she saw herself dressed in a waistcoat and bowtie that cost about fourteen dollars, saw the plastic tray with its wheels that stuck or squealed or broke, saw the empty bottles in their aluminium ice buckets, saw the tips in her pocket, saw the calm discretion of the employer, even saw the worthless, spineless curator back at the museum; saw all of this in absolutely pitiless clarity. She never went back to work, and ignored all attempts by the museum to contact her regarding her absence. Then came another long period of not working, and eating less. She began drinking to manage the stress of not being able to afford groceries, and swiftly became very ill, so she stopped, aware that at the end of that illness there was nothing but an early death. The death wore her own face, with a strange expression of triumph. She looked at herself looking back at her that way, and she stopped drinking to kill herself; drinking as though dragging her sensitive body across the blade of the giant’s chef knife in the sky; instead she got a different job, with the help of a girlfriend whose face and name she cannot now even bring to mind.
She started working as a gallery technician, which she was not qualified to do — the nameless and faceless girlfriend, who she broke things off with after less than a year, lied on her behalf — but which she picked up pretty quickly. She installed paintings and painted walls and generally saw to the needs of one of the well-funded public spaces outside the municipal bounds of the city; one of those buildings envisioned as a hub for local communities, as a locus of regeneration and public pedagogy, and as such incorporating a childcare centre, a library, a space where the local youths could skateboard, public computer stations, public sculpture commissions, etc., and pumped full of money from the great and magnanimous and inviolable art sector bureaucrats of the capital. This meant that her wage was nearly absurdly high, and also that the gallery space was overstaffed, and the hours and work passed easily and in good company. She no longer worried about how she smelled, and seemed to have no issue at all keeping her clothing clean.
As she worked in the gallery she found that she had more and more time to spend in her studio; and over time also that scale and complexity the paintings that she was working on was decreasing, subtly but surely, as she developed her ideas about the surface and the application her chosen materials. She no longer needed to carry sections of wall back to the space with her for example — buying sheet materials and having them delivered was sufficient. She could also work into a surface with only two or three (sometime even only one) material, and she found that this relative simplicity actually allowed the compositions to more confidently work their own addresses back to her. She was happy, and actually she was happy for a long time, without interruption. She began drinking again, for fun, without fear, with the whole gang of other gallery techs, who of course were also artists, and who she could talk about painting with in an unconcerned way. Most of them didn’t have much to say really (mostly what she understood was that they wanted to express themselves, that they had realised over time that their arts education had sold them a lie, that they were bitter but determined to live good lives and to keep their high-handed bitterness intact), but one in particular, a young guy with a shaved head and a tooth missing, she found very interesting. Not because he had much to say about painting or his process, but because his paintings were wild and vivid and strange and seemed to her almost impossibly easy, impossibly effortless, as though this young man with the shaved head and the rotting teeth had been able to simply flick or gesture or will the compositions into the world fully formed. He didn’t talk much and she thought that she knew that he didn’t think much either (an overreach on her part, certainly), and that this non-thinking was the secret to his incredible paintings. The one interruption in her happiness in this period was when she asked the shaved-hair artist if he would be interested in doing a swap of paintings and he grinned, embarrassed, and told her that his gallery handled his sales and that sadly he didn’t really have anything at the moment that wasn’t already sold in advance. The shame that she felt on hearing his reply hit her like a sledgehammer and she almost quit this job too, on the spot, but something, some guardian spirit, whispered her recent happiness into her conscious mind, and she was able to contain herself, and shrug it off.
Still, the encounter with the other painter had a profound effect on her. She was now in her final year, and was, in theory, preparing a degree show. She had never spoken to a tutor on the course outside of their mandated visits, in which they let her know by every vehicle except language that they would rather be talking to literally any other student. So mostly her ‘preparations’ where made in a strange state of innocence and naiveté which she herself was unaware of, but which the tutors and perhaps also the other students (she was never fully sure) would mark on her, the way the champagne VIPs had eventually deigned to tell her that she smelled bad.
This was also around the time that she had met the others properly. Caitlin had been watching her newer paintings appear in her studio, and stopped by one day to talk to her about them. And then the next week she (Caitlin) had invited her (Ella) out to the pub with all the others, and they quickly became friends and confidents. It was the friends who had actually let Ella know the details of what she would need to prepare for assessment and installation in the upcoming show, and after this she became quietly but intensely grateful for and protective of her new friends. Caitlin also started lending her money when she needed it, and she somehow (probably it was an act of pure will) avoided the burying shame of these transactions. Maybe because Caitlin was kind, serious, transparent, and no-nonsense in all of her dealings. Ella felt that she had found a foundation on which she could anchor herself. It is around this time that her memories start to take on a stable and properly temporal and indexical pattern.
She said none of this to the friends sitting around the table, but the thousands of painful and beautiful (she still finds them beautiful) images bubbled through her at light speed as she listened to them talk about whether or not they remembered what they did for money in those early days. Caitlin and Sally say they do not remember at all — true in Caitlin’s case, not true in Sally’s. Michael says he was an intern and then a junior editor, which is true. Beth says she worked in a theatre, which is true. Simone says that she didn’t need to work then because she was on an allowance and staying in place owned by her family, which is true.
We will run through each in turn.
