Page 1 of Matilda’s Summer of New Beginnings

Chapter One

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March

It seemed like a good idea at the time — the “time” being in the spring, just after Damien threw a curveball at me and said he’d snagged a “really cool exhibition” in a “really cool gallery”. A “really cool gallery” he’d blown me off for.

‘Matilda,’ he said when he made his Grand Announcement, ‘you knew it was going to happen eventually. I’m destined for great things. I mean—’ he pointed to himself and grinned. ‘I was named after Damien Hirst, after all.’

‘You were not,’ I told him. ‘You were not named after Damien Hirst. You were named after your Irish great-grandad. Your mum regrets naming you Damien — even though she named you Damian with an “an”, not Damien, with an “en” — because she hates the fact you go around telling people she named you after Damien Hirst, when she totally hates the stuff he’s famous for.’

Damian/en is actually a good friend of mine from forever ago. We grew up together, and ended up at uni together. We have always had this one-upmanship game going on. For example:

Damien, aged five: ‘I can stay up until eleven o’clock. You have to go to bed at six like a baby ha ha.’

Matilda, aged ten: ‘I’ve got five red fruit pastilles, you’ve only got four, ha ha.’

Damien, aged sixteen: ‘I got four As for my GCSES. You got three ha ha.’

Matilda, aged eighteen: ‘I got three As for my A-levels.’

Damien, aged eighteen: ‘So what — so did I.’

Matilda, aged eighteen: ‘Oh.’

But today, I really wasn’t in the mood for his banter. It had gone to his head a little that he had come out with a higher degree than me (‘I got a First, ha ha. You got nowhere near that ha ha’), and the cheerful, caring boy I’d grown up with, shared ice cream with and whose mum I’d called “Aunty” was lost somewhere in this up-and-coming, moody, careless, artistic persona he was apparently cultivating.

Also, I’d just been dumped — via text — by Gorgeous Glen. Glen had been so gorgeous, he’d met a woman at his gym and felt they had more in common than he had with squishy old me. Ergo, I was currently under my duvet on the sofa with a pile of snacks feeling worthless, and the last thing I wanted to hear was how successful my oldest friend had been.

‘Well isn’t it just as well I’m the one who has the say in what goes in the exhibition catalogue, and not my mum.’ He grinned again. ‘You must admit, this is the chance of a lifetime. High five, Tilds.’

‘I am not high fiving you, Damian. I’ve just been dumped for a gym-bunny. I’m not sure if I’m angrier with you for your lack of empathy, or with Glen, or with her.’ Indeed, the upset of the dumping had metamorphosed by now, and, at this point, I was absolutely enraged, fizzing with anger like the very fizziest bath fizzer of fizzerdom.

Instead of sympathizing with me, and telling me how he’d never liked Glen anyway, Damian/en had muttered something like “you’ll get over it, you always do”, taken his portfolio, and waltzed off to visit some small galleries in London.

He didn’t seem to get the fact that I needed my friend and I needed to vent. To me, it was a particularly harsh dumping, and what difference would an hour have made to his day out? It wasn’t like he had an appointment — he was just going on the off chance. I’d always been there for him, when he’d faced similar dumping situations, and never once had I ran out of the door, tossing a meaningless comment over my shoulder, leaving him to fester alone with a sharing bag of tortilla chips and a family-sized bar of chocolate.

And to rub salt into my wounds, the story Damian/en insisted on telling me was that, unfortunately, it was rather pointless for me to approach the gallery at all. The gallery — that was up a side street in the South Bank area — was small and exclusive. Sadly, as he informed me — and didn’t look at all sad about it — it was so small and so exclusive that it only had space for one new artist at a time. And also: ‘It’s not worth you asking them for space, to be honest, Tilds. They’re a bit . . . misogynistic.’ He pulled his very saddest face. ‘Don’t take kindly to women. They say there’s too much of a swing towards feminism and giving women their own exhibitions and things, so they are trying to redress the balance.’

He paused and then added: ‘And let’s face it, not only are you a woman, but you did get a lower grade than me in the degree. And your work isn’t really appropriate for contemporary galleries like that one, is it?’

Wow. So that’s what he thought of my work then?

Well, on top of Glen dumping me, and how crap that had made me feel about myself, this almost made me explode with anger. But he was so very convincing that I gave up.

‘I’ll find my own gallery,’ I growled mostly to myself. I had a degree in Fine Art, after all, if you disregarded the rather shoddy grade, and it was from one of the best universities in London. Even if it was a lower grade than Damien’s!

A much lower grade.

But so what? There was no need for him to point it out quite so harshly and speak without thinking, was there?

That was an idea that seemed good — my own gallery. My own exhibition. It would take my mind off Glen and his gym-bunny if I channelled my anger elsewhere. Damien was as good a target as any at that point. And anyway, my rage was always water off a duck’s back to him.

I’d never really used my art degree, and I’d spent the last five years working mainly in bars and coffee shops — anything really, to pay my bills — and at the same time trying to get myself noticed in the area I yearned to work in. I was twenty-six and really needed to do something with my life.

My friend Rosie, who owned the flat and let me pay very generous mates-rates for rent, was one of the world’s eternal optimists. Well, to be precise, her family owned the flat. It had belonged to an eccentric great aunt who had left it to them to “expand the life experience of the children” — the children being Rosie and her older brother Jay. Rosie was the only one of them who had wanted to expand her life experience and move to London. I’d met her in our first term at uni — she was studying media and journalism and I was, of course, doing art. Soon, the three of us — Damien, Rosie and myself — were firm friends and I moved in with her in our second year. We moved into the flat permanently after we both graduated.