All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Ayesha's POVThe building in the north of the city was exactly what it had been when we chose it and exactly what we needed it to be on the day itself, which was the most you could ask of any space and which this one delivered without effort. The April light was coming through the tall windows at the specific angle that turned the bare brick warm, and the flowers that Diana's recommended person had arranged were doing what Diana had specified, which was appearing to have arrived naturally rather than been deployed, distributed through the room in a way that suggested intention without advertising it.I stood in the small room off the main space where the coordinator had directed me to wait while the guests settled, and I listened to the sound of people finding their seats in the room beyond, the specific hum of a gathering that was full of people who knew each other and were glad to be together. I could hear my mother's voice at one point, low and warm, talking to someone I could not

Ayesha's POVThe new house was in a neighbourhood fifteen minutes from the gallery, which meant my morning walk was longer but still walkable, still the specific unhurried rhythm of a person moving through a city on foot that I had come to understand as essential to how I began my days. The street it was on had old trees that would be beautiful in summer and that in the April of our arrival were beginning the tentative work of producing new leaves, the cautious green of early spring that always looked slightly surprised to find itself alive again.The house had a garden, which was the thing Ken had cared most about in the searching, a proper garden with a wall along the back and enough space for Iris to run in and enough quietness to be something different from the street. He had said when we first saw it that the garden would be the room they used most and he had said it with the architectural understanding of someone who knew that the relationship between interior and exterior space

Ayesha's POVTwo years after the wedding, the gallery had a show that I considered the finest thing it had mounted since Diana's Fault Lines, and the artist was someone I had found through Lena, who had mentioned a name in passing during a studio visit and described the work with the specific restrained enthusiasm she used when she thought something was genuinely extraordinary and did not want to oversell it.The artist's name was Clem, and she was twenty-four years old and she painted the kind of work that made you feel, while standing in front of it, that you had been let into something private without violating anyone's privacy, the specific achievement of intimacy at a distance that the best art managed and that the vast majority of work attempted and did not reach.I had gone to her studio three times before approaching her about a show, because I had learned from the years of running the gallery that the right approach to extraordinary work was patience, the specific patience of

Ayesha's POVClem's second show opened in October, six months into the pregnancy that was now visible enough that certain customers at the gallery made the specific face people make when they are deciding whether to comment and that I had learned to pre-empt by mentioning it directly so that the conversation could be about the work on the walls rather than about my body, which was where it belonged.The show was called Interior Time and it was the most ambitious thing Clem had done yet, which was saying something given that her first show had already established her as someone whose ambitions were worth taking seriously. She had spent eight months on the twelve pieces that constituted the show, which meant an average of three weeks per piece, which for Clem who worked slowly and with total commitment was about right, each piece requiring the time it required and no less.I had seen the work develop over the eight months in the specific way I saw the development of work by artists I wa

Ayesha's POVThe filming of Marlene's documentary began in March when Rosa was six weeks old and had settled from the specific intensity of the first weeks into something more manageable, which was still considerable but was at least predictable in its rhythms in a way that the first weeks had not been. I had a system, which was the word Ken used when he described the way I organised things that needed organisation, and the system for these weeks involved the gallery's expanded team handling the operational mornings while I came in for the afternoons and the filming happened around both.The documentary crew was four people, the director whose name was Bea and who had the specific quality of someone who knew exactly what she was looking for and was patient in the search for it, and three others whose presence in the gallery over the filming weeks became so familiar that they ceased to be visitors and became simply part of the space's population for the duration. Bea had worked with Ma