Pumping Up Napoleon Read Online Free PDF Page B

sign of a pedestal. Nowhere, even, for me to sit down. So I stand and face them and repeat dutifully: ‘I am an installation,’ nod a few times, then ask, ‘In what way… exactly?’ My pencil noses the paper, as if anxious to take down a reply. Stew looks up at the ceiling and sighs. The ceiling is a very long way above our heads.
    I shift my weight and try again. ‘Is it possible to tell me what exactly is going to happen?’
    Hannah developed this work at art college: ‘I showed this as my final piece,’ she says. ‘But it’s more important for us to do this; to show it here.’ She waves her hand at the otherwise empty room.
    â€˜Right. So… ’ I waggle the pencil from one to the other, ‘which of you is the actual artist?’
    Hannah blushes.
    â€˜It’s a collaboration,’ says Stew.
    â€˜But who had the idea?’
    â€˜Actually,’ says Hannah, shaking the hair out of her eyes to look at me directly, almost defiantly, ‘I did.’
    My next question – ‘How do you feel about showing your work to the home crowd?’ – is intended to be a little more sympathetic. I’ve been away and come back myself I tell them; it’s a small town.
    â€˜Oh yeah,’ says Hannah. ‘You know, I think my Dad said you went to school with him.’
    â€˜Really?’ I say. ‘Who…?’
    â€˜And anyway,’ says Stew. ‘Hannah’s not ashamed of who she is.’
    â€˜So, how do you think people will remember you?’ I ask.
    â€˜As talented,’ says Stew.
    But exactly what they’re going to do or show, neither of them will tell me. They’re ‘not into talking about it’.
    â€˜At college,’ says Hannah, ‘I wrote that it was an allegory of the effects of time on a psychosomatic-social being.’
    â€˜But that’s just art college bullshit,’ says Stew. ‘We can’t explain it. You just have to get it.’
    I smile as condescendingly as I can and say, ‘Isn’t that always the way?’
    An hour later, with all the blood in my body pooling in my shoes and my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, I stagger across the road to the Boar’s Head.
    What I like about the Boar’s Head is that it hasn’t changed much from my under-age drinking days, before college, London, New York: other lives. Its walls are perhaps a deeper shade of cigarette-tar brown, but the same oil-painted ships still battle choppy seas inside their picture frames and the smell – of wood steeped in the local beer, soggy carpet and fags – is for a moment or two as magical as when I was sixteen.
    â€˜What can I get you?’ It’s the very same landlord, older of course, as everyone is in this town. There’s nothing like coming home to remind you how you’re aging.
    Seated on a stool at the bar, and having taken the first restorative gulp of gin and tonic, I look at my notepad: Hannah Gifford; twenty one; a potential graduate of Diffington Art College; local girl. I’ll have to find more to say than that. It’s tricky. The exhibition opens tomorrow but the actual opening night, when ‘the whole thing goes interactive’ as Stew put it, is on Thursday. By then the paper will have gone to press for its Friday distribution.
    â€˜What about a last minute update?’ I’d asked my editor.
    â€˜To be avoided at all costs,’ he says, ‘though in an absolute emergency you can ring me, and then email it in, by midnight at the latest.’
    Which means I will have to write my review article before the exhibition ‘goes live’, disguising, as far as possible, the fact that I haven’t seen it. It would have been in their own interests for Stew and Hannah to tell me what is going to happen, but they don’t seem to think it’s necessary.
    â€˜Word of mouth is the best publicity,’ Stew said. I decide