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slammed the toilet door and within seconds we heard him retching. His stomach was sensitive to any changes in routine and he’d asked me for two quid earlier which I was sure had gone on a box of Don Quixote.
    — Is he OK? she asked anxiously.
    — Oh, yes, this is perfectly normal. He just takes a while to get used to.
    I committed to spending the evening with her, chatting. To not come across as mercenary as Saul. To find the real person, not the chequebook. In her room I saw her paintings stacked against the bed – abstract and brightly coloured – and I worried then, because Saul despised paintings and colour in all its manifestations. Furthermore, she was a trust-fund kid and somewhat hippy-ish and on a daily basis he screamed for the genocide of both. She put on her favourite record for me: Joni Mitchell – and if there was one thing Saul despised more than anything it was the ‘heart-felt mewings of that menstrual monster’. I tried to smile as the acoustic guitar started up.
    All week it had been coming, this scene of the most crushing despair. From her locked door I heard her sobbing and it took me back to two years before, when, having just moved in and filled with enthusiasm, I attempted to show Saul my latest writings.
    She’d talked to me for hours that morning about how much her art studies meant to her, when Saul wandered through in his kimono, curious, no doubt, to find out what he was being excluded from. He said very little, but was judging, I could tell. He returned to his room and in excitement she followed, carrying two small canvases. I could not stop her, so sat, peering round the door, as she set the canvases by his wall and asked what he thought.
    They were too far away for me to hear clearly, I only heard bits when Saul raised his voice . . . Bourgeois . . . reactionary . . . obsolete! You may as well destroy them! The eraser says more about you than any mark you wilfully make. If you must paint, then paint your face, or your room, tattoo your tits, or graffiti a flyover. Do it like Warhol if you must – car crashes in lilac, electric chairs in pastel peach – a hundred a day. There is more art in my ashtray than in a hundred thousand paintings. Why not exhibit my soiled bed sheets, a more damning indictment of our time you will not find! Fuck art and turn yourself into an artwork. Steal a video camera and record yourself eating, sleeping, taking a shit!
    As she wept in her room, he played Bach’s cello solos in his, the ones in the minor keys, as if the necessary destruction of egos caused him some subtle pain. The same record he played after my ego-death.
    I worried for her then, with her fragile ways. The quiet way she carried herself, the look on her face, of fear at the simplest of things. Her inability to finish her sentences, the waiting when you had to guess and then she said, ‘Yes,’ as if it was easier for her to let you speak for her. She was in her last year at art school and had to have something to show for her graduation. Perhaps he had already destroyed her education. I had to go through and see if she was OK, apologise on his behalf. Confess that I too had been thwarted by him, how her fear of the empty canvas was the same as mine of the empty page.
    But yet, as I paused at her door, I told myself that, perhaps, she would come in time to see that he had done her a great favour as he did for me. His critique of Western civilisation was correct. What was the point of adding more art, more reproduction of the same to the stinking stockpile of crap that was our culture? Why give the wealthy the opportunity to buy status objects that told them how sophisticated they are when their wealth was made on the suffering of millions? Stop being creative and embrace the beauty of destruction. And in that moment of suicidal despair, reach for your first breath as a truly free soul. That was what Saul believed, or did the last time I’d asked.
    In the days that followed she