Tania was ten minutes early. She was waiting for Erick in Cantaloupe, the restaurant near the junction of Charlotte Road and Great Eastern Street. The long wooden tables were refectory-like. Fashionable so often meant uncomfortable. Tania ordered a Moscow Mule, ensuring that she articulated extra clearly so that the waiter could understand. It was hard to make out anything anyone said in here. Patrons seated opposite each other found that speech floated off, to hover under the high ceiling in and around the exposed pipework, or to drown in the aural surf from nearby tables. It was fortunate the cocktails were superior, so that after a couple of them audibility was not an issue. Erick was exactly on time, as she’d anticipated.

‘What would you like to drink?’ she asked.

‘Oh do not worry, I get one myself.’

While Erick was at the bar Tania greeted one or two acquaintances. There were several suits, too, looking askance at her crimson beehive. They were everywhere and their advance could not be halted, but Erick was a different and more welcome variety of worker ant. When he returned, he perched himself on the bench opposite her.

‘It’s good to get outside of the fucking studio for once,’ she said.

‘It is true that this studio is intense.’

‘Have you found anywhere else to live?’

‘Not yet thank you’ — he waved his cigarette back and forth — ‘I hop from settee to settee.’

‘Why don’t you come and stay at my place for a while?’

‘Thanks. You know, I am becoming interested in the way people will add themselves to one another, combine their thoughts and emotions, then sometimes create extra people.’

‘I’m only offering to put you up temporarily, you fucking little weirdo.’

Erick’s smile was a lower-case crescent of lips and teeth.

‘Will you go to Thorn’s private view tonight?’ he asked.

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘Can’t ignore the dickhead, however much I’d like to.’

‘Our experiment the other evening went extremely well.’

‘I should have told you right away. We’ve been short listed for the Shiraz.’

‘Are you bothered?’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Given the nature of the work.’

‘I discover that “box” to British people also means “vagina”.’

‘Our work is a kind of birth,’ she said. ‘Or anti-birth.’

‘This is the most exciting art I work on since I come here.’

‘I’ve never found out why you moved to London,’ said Tania. ‘All I heard was that you had problems in Germany.’

‘Ah yes, this is my Art Bus project. What I get into when the Wall came down. I obtain four old East German buses, large vehicles, and a group of us tour round Europe putting on shows, encouraging people to join in. We stage performances, we have music and poetry readings, and a fantastic light show. It is a huge success. In the East, especially, the people are ready — this is the right time.’

‘What was the problem then?’

‘Money, as usual. A couple of arts institutions say they will pay for the buses, so I put my name down on the purchase agreements. Then they back out and the vehicles have mechanical problems. The repairs cost a lot, I borrow more money, then most of the buses break down altogether after eighteen months or so and my creditors make me bankrupt. So I run away to London. I’m heavily in debt over there, even today.’

‘That was a good time for an artist to arrive here, you must admit.’

‘My work was reborn. Most of all, I was lucky to meet Alastair.’

‘You’re not serious?’

Erick lit a fresh cigarette and reflected.

‘I remember once our art bus convoy draws up in a small hamlet in Prussia. It is one of those villages where the roofs look like giant witches’ hats. There are one or two storks flying overhead; you could imagine them delivering babies to the villagers. We have painted the buses in bright colours, big swirls of Day-Glo. I suppose they look something like the subway trains in New York. We halt in the village square. A couple of the inhabitants walk up to look. Then there is a small crowd. “They’re spaceships,” someone shouted — he was drunk: there isn’t much to do in these places besides drink.’

‘Unlike here?’ said Tania, sipping her Mule.

‘Some of them touch the paint on the buses cautiously, to see if it will come off on their hands. We are the first visitation of any significance from the outside world for decades, a sign of momentous change. That evening we put on a multimedia show in the church hall. It is packed; every single resident is there, even the very old and the sick. We bring colour back into their lives.

‘Afterwards, after all of the noise and the light, it is so peaceful. There is a stillness in the village and the countryside around it. Eerie. Almost uncanny: no birdsong, even. Later we hear that the Nazis set up a concentration camp for women nearby, which the communists take from them and enlarge. The next morning we pack up our equipment and prepare to leave. As we are about to drive off, finally, a teenager — he is a skinhead with a spider’s web tattoo across all his face — walks up and says to me, “You’re not coming back, are you?”. I lie to him, tell him that, yes, we will return. Of course, we do not. We depart. We travel off, snatching away the new life we show them over a day and a half. They are probably still there trapped in their monochrome existence, waiting for late capitalism to rescue them.

‘And you know, Tania, sometimes I feel that what we are to those villagers is what Alastair is to us. He gives us new life, expands our vision, not every time in an altogether beneficial or promising way, but he helps so to show us a new world.’

‘If Alastair hadn’t been around, your art would have developed and taken off anyway.’

‘He is a benefactor for me, a benefactor for us all.’

‘If that was ever true, it’s ended now.’

‘Yes, this beginning offor our lives, this dreaming of all of the different kinds of futures we can have while we party and work on our art, soon it will all be over.’