Green Grass Read Online Free PDF Page B

keeps them on permanent display leaning against the walls of his studio. Occasionally, in summertime, he picks out the necessary combination of these items and puts together a bike to ride between home and work, buta constant quest for perfectionism, spurred by the perusal of various bicycle magazines and websites, makes it difficult for him to stick with any single combination.
    Laura knows better than to think he is making a bike to ride home on today. A wheel has always been a comfort to Inigo. He has one from a mountain bike suspended on wire from the ceiling at the back of the studio, next to a window, and he can spend hours there, looking out of the window, spinning the wheel. A regression therapist once told him that in a past life he was a Flemish weaver sent to Norwich to make silk. While Inigo does not believe in reincarnation, something in him likes the idea of being haunted by ghost memories. However, today Flemish silk weaving is far from his mind, and the bicycle wheel is a tool through which he can express his frustration at the beeping answer machine and flashing computer.
    He turns on Laura, bouncing the tyre in front of him as he speaks. Laura can hear nothing; she shakes her head helplessly. Displeased, Inigo pounces on the remote control and zaps Bartok down a few decibels. He grinds his teeth audibly and continues, ‘I said, the gallery in New York left about ten messages last night, and now I can’t get back to them because it’s too early. D’you remember what time they open there?’
    â€˜I think it’s eleven, which isn’t for hours here. What’s happened?’
    Inigo grips the tyre like a steering wheel and moves it round and round in his hands. ‘There’s been a leak to the press about my show and I’ve had three major US newspapers and a magazine call me to talk about it and I’m not ready. I can’t.’
    Inigo also has celebrity status in America, where his work is venerated for being both obscure and eye-catching. He was artist in residence at NYU, when he and Laura were first together, in New York, and his exhibitions in America are always given a great deal of attention. Inigo enjoys this success, but likes to keep a strong front to hide behind. The leaking of information on a show he has not yet hung makes him feel vulnerable and paranoid. Now that someone knows what he is doing, his confidence could ebb until he decides to pull the whole show.
    No one is more aware than Laura that while seeing is believing for Inigo’s audience, believing is seeing for Inigo. This is where the whole thing starts to sag for Laura. It’s the believing bit she’s beginning to have trouble with, but it’s her job to bolster him now, as it always has been. Laura and Inigo’s business partnership grew out of their relationship. Supporting Inigo in whatever direction he chooses to take can be wildly frustrating. Too often, as now with thePark thing, Laura is left wading through swamping bureaucracy while Inigo skims ahead, evolving new ideas which she must make into reality.
    The most extreme example of this was Inigo’s first creation on returning from New York nine years ago. Driving to visit his mother in the comfortable Manchester suburb where he was brought up, he was caught for some time in a traffic jam in Birmingham around Spaghetti Junction. The result of four hours’ contemplation of this concreted web of roads was daring and historic. Inigo suspended seven giant neon Möbius strips from the flyovers, embroiling Laura in more than five hundred hours of negotiations with insurance companies, crane contractors and the Highways and Byways department of the the local council. It won Inigo international renown and brought Laura a very depressing crop of grey hairs. These are dealt with on a monthly basis at a discreet salon on Haverstock Hill and, she supposes, will continue to be treated until she is too senile to care.
    Laura