Taste of Bitter Love

By Tara Sloane

Emma:

When I go, I go at five.

Hugh will still be sleeping, snoring (“breathing heavily,” he calls it), the corners of his mouth turned up in that content smile I’ve come to love. He wears it often, when he’s washing dishes at the coffee shop, humming along to Gladys Knight and the Pips, or to Ashford and Simpson, or to some obscure record he discovered whilst perusing a fusty old shop in North London or whilst sorting (for the thousandth time) through the myriad albums sold from crusty cardboard boxes on Portabello Road. He wears it when he’s painting, too, and when he’s visiting the Turners at the Tate Britain, and when he thinks I don’t know he’s there, watching me scour the London Evening Standard, absentmindedly stirring the next day’s batch of my specialty butternut squash soup and musing at the weight of the world (which never seems to burden his chest). Do I look at him the same way?

We alternate days opening the coffee shop — our coffee shop. Taste of Bitter Love, we named it, after the song by Gladys Knight and the Pips. Customers are always curious about the name, the story behind which we never bothered to keep secret. I should make up some wild tale someday, maybe about some tragic love affair and how I came up with it whilst crying in my soup. But the shop was a romantic idea, really: The reckless, tone-deaf musician’s daughter whose gap year had turned into an eight-year chasm of wandering, of travelling, of dabbling in this and experimenting with that, finally coming together at the doorstep of an aspiring painter and art history graduate, whose dream to open an artist’s café became our shared dream, the thing that would anchor a romance sparked (fittingly) along the shores of Brighton. He was in residency when we met; I was living with my sister — well, reassembling, I should say — after my latest public art piece on the death of childhood via modernity was less than well received, to say the least (maybe I should have built my own swing set to burn?). The art world may love controversy — just ask Andres Serrano or Damien Hirst — but it has no patience for a feeble concept. One of those things I learnt the hard way.

Taste of Bitter Love is supposed to be a place for artists to escape from all that, at least that’s what Hugh wants. After all, what place is more comfortable, more normal than a coffee shop? Hugh is rarely happier than when the studio in the basement is occupied by an up-and-coming sculptor, writer, or printmaker, and I admit, Hugh’s giddiness has always been infectious. He thinks I don’t know he coaches them, tries to cram names and dates and movements and theories into their heads when they’ve taken a break from working. “Is he always like that?” they ask me, over second helpings of butternut squash soup. Subtlety has never been Hugh’s strong suit, something I’ve always found endearing. For Hugh, the world is black and white. For Hugh, art works or it doesn’t, it’s art or it isn’t. I often find myself wishing I could see the world like that, as a place of absolutes. Or maybe I just wish I could believe as much in Hugh’s vision for this coffee shop as I believe in the aspirations of the artists who come here, in their passion, however raw, to shape the world for the better. If you ask me, art was never supposed to be comfortable. Their future is not ours for the moulding. But no one ever does.


Hugh:

When I go, I go at four.

Emma will still be sleeping, breathing softly, a tangled mass of blankets, hair, and limbs, her pillow flung halfway across the room. How anyone can sleep so tumultuously is beyond me. Sometimes I wake in wee hours to her muttering or laughing in her sleep, and once, she was actually humming. Who hums in their sleep? (She denies it, of course.) I never know what to expect with Emma, one of the reasons I love her. She’s my foil, impulsive, intuitive, charismatic, my warning nudge when I start slipping too far into my daily routine without realizing it. It’s become a bit of a private joke, really, what Hugh the Art Historian would be without his Emma: a bumbling bachelor, too intelligent to be socially adept (her words, not mine), who spends his days romancing museums and whose greatest joy in life is his record collection. The joke always ends the same: I say I’m only with her for her butternut squash soup, and, eyes ablaze, she slaps me with whatever she’s holding and we laugh and laugh and everything is right with the world.

Emma marks the point in my life where everything fell into place. Growing up, I never questioned that I would be a painter. I was a quiet child, one of those boys whose understanding of the world was entirely crafted from books devoured one after another in the public library by day, and upon the carpet of his mother’s cosy Kensington studio by night. I never knew my father. My mother, a writer, never spoke of him, save that he had left her for his real soul mate, rock and roll. I guess my own reverence for music comes from him, cliché as it may be. But it was my mother who introduced me to the world of art; so many nights of my childhood were spent thumbing through her collection of art books — Monet, Turner, Rothko, Klimt. It only made sense, then, that I try my own hand at oil on canvas. It wasn’t until my first year at uni that I realised it wasn’t enough to simply make art. I wanted to know it fully, to have an understanding of every artist, every movement, every medium. And three years later, there I was, an art history graduate with nothing better to do than a residency in Brighton, a residency that, if nothing else, compelled me to help foster the next generation of artists, if only by providing them their own cosy space to reflect, to sip cappuccinos and escape from the world. The question was, how?

And the answer was Emma. I’ve always been more of a visionary, you see. The mechanics of running a business were lost on me. But Emma makes it seem effortless. Apparently she’d helped run a restaurant in Dublin during her gap years, or was it a bike rental business in Amsterdam? The gap between Emma’s childhood and when she met me has always seemed cavernous to me. I know she’s seen half the world, but what was she doing in each new place? I’m forever trying to piece her together, and I’d be lying if I said that mysterious quality wasn’t what compelled me to her in the first place. In fact, it still does. It was her idea to have a studio in the basement. Sometimes the best thing you can do for in artist is give her space to work, was her reasoning, her solution to that powerlessness I feel when I look at the modern art world. I still don’t know if I agree with her; how can one create art if they’ve no knowledge of the world in which they are working? If you ask me, those hooligans who kill sharks to preserve in formaldehyde and call it art could benefit from a bit of aesthetics. But I’ll settle for sharing my knowledge with the artists in our studio when Emma isn’t around to shoo me away.


Emma:

It takes me seven minutes to get from my flat to Farringdon station, and twelve if I stop at the cash machine. I remember the day he added to it; people flocked Rosebery Avenue to see it, to snap a photograph or two in case it disappeared. Hugh opened the shop that morning — something I’ve always regretted, even though I had no way of knowing. I pass that cash machine every day on my way to the tube; how wonderful to have been one of the first to see it changed! But then again, would I have even stopped? Would I have taken the faster route to Farringdon station that morning, only to realise my mistake hours later when, once word had spread from passerby to passerby, some enthusiastic young art lover would flutter into the shop, breathless, eyes sparkling and cheeks glowing, the name “Banksy” on her lips?

To be honest, Banksy was my first true love. What adolescent girl doesn’t love a rebel? But whilst my friends flitted adorations from one untouchably beautiful punk-rocker to another, I didn’t need to know what Banksy looked like to adore him. How fortunate, as not even Banksy’s manager knows his true identity. Even to this day he remains anonymous, indestructible, the great mystery of my youth. I fear the day the world meets Banksy face to face, if only because the papers and the Bobbies could finally catch up with him. But the infatuation was never solely mine, you see. Even before the world had come to know him by that name, anti-establishment and anti-capitalist Banksy was the hero of my childhood neighbourhood. Maybe it was that he shared our gritty Bristol roots, or maybe it was that each new tag by freehand graffiti group DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), where Banksy got his start, felt like (a ridiculously cool) someone actually understood our angst, our discontent, but we couldn’t get enough of Banksy. When you’re sixteen and stir-crazy, few things are more satisfying than the oozing of fluorescent paint upon the sad brick buildings of your boring, oppressive hometown. That it pissed off all of our parents only made it that much more appealing.

But I loved Banksy for more than just his politics. I loved him for his anonymity, for the temporality of his work. If I’ve learnt one thing from my own artwork, however rudimentary, it’s just how much of the art world centres on immortality. It’s as maddening as it is enticing, the notion that my work could render me immortal, that the work of today’s artists could help ensure this world we’ve built is never completely forgotten. Just look at museums and the lengths to which they go to ensure the precious artworks of the world survive the decades to come! If only it were as simple as preservation, that the life of a work was not contingent upon its ability to cause viewers to feel… something. That artist’s dilemma — how to create that thing that would shake the world — still gnaws at my chest from time to time, like when I’m exhausted from a long day at the shop, or when it’s rained for days, or when Hugh is travelling. This life we’ve built has brought more colour to my cheeks than any of my artistic endeavours, but on those vulnerable days I find it nearly impossible to keep at bay the lingering fear that I’ve fallen from grace, the creeping shame of spending my days making Milky Doubles instead of art. New and better coffee shops pop up every day. What if I die and my greatest legacy is butternut squash soup?

But it was Hugh’s lips that brought the news. He had read it in the Standard, had seen people gawking at it on his way home. I could see him fuming, could feel his distaste as, hanging up his coat and umbrella, he told me that wanker Banksy had once again defaced the streets of Farringdon. This city is mad, he scoffed, London is home to some of the greatest art in the world, and yet it’s rubbish like Banksy that makes the Evening Standard every time he opens a can of spray paint. Banksy’s latest charade had produced a cash point, he ranted, out of which jutted a mechanical arm grasping a small girl. Disgusting. I didn’t mention that the cash point had already been there, that only the mechanical arm was new. Hugh had been in Japan when the cash point first appeared, and when graffiti artist D*Face had made it appear to be spewing dozens of fake tenners featuring Princess Diana’s face. “His latest effort could be a comment on high street banks making record profits or their apparent reluctance to repay customers unfair penalty charges,” Hugh read aloud from the Standard. And who’s having to pay for Banksy’s rubbish? Utter bollocks. He was still muttering about a disgrace to the art world as he filled the tea kettle with water. I had joined him for our evening cuppa, changing the subject to the new record I’d seen poking out of his briefcase. I’d long since given up arguing with the art historian on the validity of graffiti art; I would go see the cash point once he’d fallen asleep.


Hugh:

It’s Wednesday, my morning to open the shop. The tube isn’t open yet, but I prefer the bus anyways. Cleaner air, fewer people, a better view, no rats. Not even the dulcet tones of buskers or the steady page-flipping of the dailies or the drilling of my own thoughts as they bounce from worry to plan to responsibility can distract me from the rats that live in the grimy underbelly of the tube. It’s embarrassing, but even thinking of them now makes me shudder. And don’t get me started on the suicides. Every other day a line is down due to a person under the train. It’s depressing. The tube may connect every corner of London, but a double-decker bus is the only way to travel, if only for the view from the top level (Tourists aren’t the only ones who find it magical). Besides, a ride on the 55 to Leyton/Baker’s Arms has never made me blow black into my tissue.

It’s still dark when I alight the bus. Rain is pouring down in torrents. I catch myself cursing it and laugh to myself. It always rains in London, and yet, we always complain. It’s not even that I mind the rain. Thirty-one years in this city leaves you pretty used to damp feet. It’s comforting, really, falling asleep to drip drip dripping on the pavement and then waking up to spotty windowpanes and the same watery cadence that had lulled you under. Warm, dry things are more comforting, and nobody feels the need to hurry through after work pints at The Slug and Lettuce. Another Leffe is infinitely more appealing than bumping brollies (yet again) with fellow passersby and having their runoff leave polka dots on your coat sleeve. But still we complain, even louder so when it’s too hot or too cold. And don’t even get me started on London snowstorms. You’d think they cancelled the World Cup, people are so put out. The entire city is turned upside down when it snows — everything closes early, transportation becomes even more unreliable than usual, the Evening Standard has a field day. I guess Londoners just love something to complain about, if not solely for the sake of conversation. Either that, or we’re just thin-skinned.

I saw a Banksy rat once. On a derelict building in Liverpool. How could I miss it? It had to be at least two storeys high. It was holding a marker of some sort, was signing Banksy’s name or something like that. The council decided to keep it up; they wanted to encourage local graffiti artists to beautify the other rundown buildings of Liverpool. As if graffiti could ever be beautiful. I’ll never understand it, how anyone could say graffiti and art are synonymous. Graffiti is a nuisance, the stuff of hoodlums with nothing better to do than write their names in bulky fluorescent letters, over and over again, in the most inconvenient of spaces. And even if graffiti artists really are just trying to deliver a message or challenge people to ponder the error of their ways, then why would they use such a flimsy medium? All it takes is some cheeky bastard or (rightfully) angry official to come along with his paint roller, and voilà, they’ve achieved nothing. Nothing but a wall even more uninspiring than it was when they were through with it. Banksy rats pop up from time to time — Emma said there’s even one in Cuba. Apparently they inspire him. “If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model,” says a book Emma keeps in the shop. Well, you at least he got his role model right. Fucking Banksy.

The truth is, it scares me, this depreciation of what we call art. It seems the modern artist concentrates more on shock value than aesthetics. Like they’re more worried about getting their name out there than creating something that benefits people. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with fame — even Dalí had his own masquerade ball in New York City — but you have to have the talent to back it up. At least Dalí’s paintings, however controversial, required an incredible amount of technical skill. I refuse to give an artist personality points — obviously if you’re painting with your own bodily fluids you’re a bit of a character. But to impose upon the viewer a cast of your head made from your own frozen blood? These contemporary artists dream up the most revolting ideas and Charles Saatchi buys their work for millions of pounds and glorifies it in his gallery of monstrosities. But is it in the name of art, or in the name of business? Maybe I’m just not forward-thinking enough, but years of studying the most skilled artists in the world makes a person wonder where all today’s prodigies are hiding. Maybe they’re just too discouraged if all it takes is a tag on a building to draw the whole city into a frenzy.

I remember the day Banksy first rampaged our neighbourhood. It was a Friday, and I was on my way home from the shop when I heard the news. Leave it to the Evening Standard to proclaim it. Banksy graffiti makes a (cash) point. So that’s what those kids had been buzzing about in the shop earlier. What is it with teenagers and graffiti? I wouldn’t have been so aggravated had the work not been right in the middle of my walk home. In plain sight. And all those people taking pictures! Since when has vandalism been a photo op? I tried to compose myself before I got to the flat, but I was still fuming as I hung up my coat and umbrella. I could see Emma bracing herself; she could see my distaste. That wanker Banksy has once again defaced the streets of Farringdon, I told her, with more scoff than I had intended. This city is mad. London is home to some of the greatest art in the world, and yet it’s rubbish like Banksy that makes the Evening Standard every time he opens a can of spray paint. Banksy’s latest charade was a cash point, I explained, out of which jutted a mechanical arm grabbing a small girl. Disgusting. “His latest effort could be a comment on high street banks making record profits or their apparent reluctance to repay customers unfair penalty charges,” I read aloud from the Standard. And who’s having to pay for Banksy’s rubbish? Utter bollocks. While I filled the tea kettle with water, Emma, bless her, made very obvious attempts to change the subject. We listened to the new record I’d found, Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man,” over our evening cuppa, and I told her about the new shop I’d found off of Portobello Road. It had been awhile since Emma had defended graffiti to me, something I’ve always felt a little guilty about. I hated to think I’d silenced her in any way. I still do. But I didn’t let myself worry too much; if I know Emma, she’d have sneaked out that night to see the cash point.

***********************

Emma:

It is cold, rainy, and even more dark than usual when I leave my flat. It’s Thursday, my day to open the shop, and I am tired and queasy. Yesterday was a vulnerable day, and Hugh and I had spent the evening arguing. My insecurities dig into him like terrified fingernails; he doesn’t understand why he can not fix them — fix me — and to be honest, neither do I. I never could bring myself to explain to him fully the circumstances that brought me to Brighton. He paints so beautifully, so assuredly; he sleeps so soundly. And whilst he’s studied every movement under the sun, he will never see how the whims of a common vandal could ever compare to the countless hours and brushstrokes, the impeccable use of line, of colour, of form, of quality of light, the purity of vision, the sheer propensity of human talent shown so blatantly in a Monet or a Rothko or a Klimt. In fact, he finds them offensive and utterly ridiculous. And whilst I’m sure he could support me if I decided to revisit blazing swing sets (once he overcame the shock, that is), I doubt whether he could ever see my work as serious art. Painting had faded from dream to pastime with his youth, and didn’t we both want this coffee shop?

These thoughts tear holes in me as autopilot takes me to Farringdon station (I do not visit the cash point), through the turnstile, down the stairs, up the stairs, down the other stairs, to my platform, on the next train to Liverpool Street, off that train, up the escalator to the Central Line Platform, onto the next train to Epping. The voice of the tube brings me back to Earth. This station is Bethnal Green. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. The doors open, and my nostrils are flooded with the warm, stagnant air of one hundred years of dirt and sweat, of repair and disrepair, of motion and friction, of rats. Though at times repulsive and unreliable, the tube comforts me in its familiarity, in the steady way it carries me to every part of this city I call home. It’s a London constant, you could say, even if it turns your nose to charcoal. A necessary evil. Its dark tunnels connect us all.


Hugh:

Someone tagged a billboard on Old Street. I saw it from the bus window. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The letters were oozing down the billboard, an advert for a telecommunications company. Those hoodlums think they’re so witty, don’t they? So revolutionary. I make a mental note to change the quote on our specials board. The wanker has probably never even heard of Gil Scott-Heron. At least it wasn’t Banksy again, although he’s probably busy painting rats under Regent’s Canal. This city is mad. And blimey! Will it ever stop raining?

If Emma is ever up in arms about the weather, then I’d never know. She rarely complains about the trivial things. London rains, espresso machines break, ends don’t always meet. It’s amazing, really. Customers are forever complimenting her unwaveringly cheery disposition. That’s how I know when something’s eating her – she wavers. She’s been quiet for days now – not sullen, but not contemplative either. Just… quiet. Defeated, maybe. We quarrelled last night. When it rains it pours, no? How fitting. I just wanted to know what was eating her, what I could do to fix it. She’s afraid she’s not doing enough. She never imagined her life would be scrubbing dishes at a coffee shop. But what does she want, then? As always, I am met with silence.

I found a paint can in the bin outside the shop. It was fresh. I was delivering more take away cups when I saw it. We had enough to get through the day, but I guess I just wanted to check on Emma – she left an hour earlier this morning than she usually does. She was laughing with a customer when I entered. Maybe a new artist for our studio? I kiss her on the cheek, and she smiles. This is my partner, Hugh, she tells the woman, and they share that look that says they’d just been talking about me. But she just wants to know where I found “Pieces of a Man,” and I tell her, throwing in a few “I bet you didn’t know this about the artist”s (I can’t help myself, really). Emma looks tired, but there’s an unfamiliar spark in her eye. Satisfaction? Triumph? But now I’m thinking too far into things. I put on “Pieces of a Man” and check to see if Emma needs anything else before I make my way to Portabello Road. She doesn’t. I won’t tell her my suspicions, at least not now. Let her have her secret, if it’s even hers. Some things are best kept covered up.


Emma:

If Banksy has ever worried about immortality, then you’d never know. His work revolves around the present, the immediate, the temporary, and for me, it is this very quality that gives a Banksy work its magic. Museum-quality glass has never protected Banksy, and even the pieces under Perspex have spent time at the mercy of the elements, of the authourities, of the whims of other taggers, of time. As swiftly as it appeared, a Banksy stencil can fade forever into the urban landscape, and too often for my liking, it does.
In that sense, my love for Banksy has always been a desperate love. Not because I have nowhere else to direct my affections, but because those things that make it real, that make him real, could disappear at any minute, without warning. Even though Banksy has never loved me back (how could he?), it was he who made me feel, like all first loves do, that the entire world hinges upon his existence. And even now, blessed with a partner who loves me for all of my quirks and fissures, who would do anything for me, save praise the name of Banksy, it is still Banksy’s name that gives me goosebumps, and Banksy’s work that gives me hope.

Maybe that’s why I did it. Because I wanted to see what would happen, how people would react. Could my words stop someone in her tracks, or penetrate a part of his heart he never knew existed? Or maybe I simply wanted to know what it was like to be Banksy, to paint something people would notice without knowing where it came from. You see, the world may not know Banksy, but it can not ignore him. He thus succeeds where I have always failed: When Banksy speaks, the world drops everything — if just for a minute — and listens.

It is still raining when the first customer enters the shop. She glances briefly at our Daily specials board, Butternut Squash Soup and Focaccia. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Hugh’s latest obsession is Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man”). I make a mental note to tell Hugh that I was right: The reference will pass right through them. The girl will have a Milky Double. I’m halfway to the espresso machine when it hits me. I didn’t change the sign. The girl’s eyes were flashing, intense. Her rucksack boasted a collection of pins — Warhol, an anarchy symbol, “Make Art Not War” in black capitals — the kind you pick up in Camden Market, three for a quid. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s breathless; she knows. I am dizzy. Every inch of me strains from my secret. Is this what it feels like to be immortal, to have done something that shakes the world? Have I already failed at anonymity? Even my smile feels like someone else’s as I hand her the coffee, ready for the words that make it real. Then: “Did you hear what happened to Banksy’s cash point?”