Lost Children

by Willa Bergman

  The roads are quiet as we twist our way quickly through the city streets towards East London, it’s less than half an hour before he’s pulling over to drop me off. I step out onto the empty street outside my home and he bids me goodnight. As he drives away I stand there for a moment. The sound of the taxi engine fades into nothing and I’m left alone in the silence. I close my eyes and feel the night close in around me.

  I live in a small one bedroom flat in a converted warehouse in Hackney. It’s something of a come down after where I’ve just spent the evening, but I’ve made it my own and there’s much worse places to live. I’ve lived here for five years but the area is becoming too gentrified now and I’m worried I won’t be able to afford the place much longer. The team at work tease me that I’m their edgy, hipster work colleague because they all live in and around Chelsea, but I’m just here because it was the cheapest place I could find at the time that didn’t mean I had to commute into London from some remote suburb every day. As for all the Sloane Rangers at work, Roth isn’t paying any of them anywhere near enough to live there despite what they’d like each other to believe, but they’re all from that small group of families still rich enough to put their offspring in a bolthole off the King’s Road.

  My flat is on the first floor of the building. I make my way up the stairs, quietly open my front door and slip inside. My eyes take a moment to adjust; the closed living room blinds are outlined by the light from outside and give some shape to the otherwise dark room. My semi-permanent lodger brother, Jack, is passed out on the sofa.

  My body is tired but my mind is somehow still stirring. I can’t seem to shake the unwelcome feeling inside me from the launch party. I get undressed and collapse into bed but I don’t fall asleep. I just lie there with my eyes open in the darkness. I can hear a train noise coming through the slightly open window. I can hear trees rustling in the wind. I hear a plane or a helicopter; I wonder where it’s going.

  Somewhere between waking and dreaming I fall asleep. Usually once I’ve fallen asleep I don’t stir till morning, but there’s something different tonight. Tonight, my dreams are vivid and intense. I dream of a cityscape and a never-ending sea of towers. I glide over them, I walk through them, in them. I walk through deserted streets that I don’t recognise. I feel lost. I realise I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I begin to feel something heavy bearing down on me, weighing me down. Suddenly I’m running through the corridors of some forgotten building. I see beams of light in every colour rush past and through me. In my mind I hear the words of Edvard Munch’s Scream: I’m on a road with two friends, the sun is setting. Suddenly the sky turns blood red. I stop, I’m exhausted. I look around me and see blood and tongues of fire above a blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walk on, but I just stand there trembling with anxiety, and I can sense an infinite scream passing through nature.

  I don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t know what’s happening but I don’t want to be here. I thrash and turn in my sleep. Something closes in on me and it’s suffocating. I feel my heart racing and my pulse pounding. I wrestle with myself, fighting someone who isn’t there. I can feel someone trying to restrain me. My body thrusts and spasms uncontrollably. Then suddenly, as if I’m thrust up from under water, gasping for air, I come back into consciousness. I wake up screaming in a cold sweat, I don’t know where I am. My eyes can’t focus but I see a face I recognise, Jack is at my side. He tells me it’s okay, that I’m at home in my bed, that he’s by my side. My heart is pounding but my eyes are coming back into focus now and I can relax my body a little. I lay on my back for a moment breathing deeply, trying to calm myself, both of us in silence. After a couple of minutes I’m breathing normally again. I can see he wants to say something, to help, but he knows better. I roll onto my side and curl into a ball. He waits by my side, I don’t know for how long.

  The morning comes too soon and the sunlight seeps through the curtains into my room waking me. I want to sleep more but I know I won’t be able to, so I get up and wander through to the other room. At least there’s no rush to get into work – it’s the morning after the night before.

  Jack is already sitting at the breakfast table. I can see he’s still concerned about last night and he’s done his best at preparing breakfast for me. I appreciate the gesture.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks, somewhat hesitantly.

  “I’ll be fine.” I reply.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  He tries to leave it at that but he can’t let it lie.

  “When did this start happening again? Have you had any more… like last night?”

  “You’re here every night, you’d know if I’d had another one.”

  There’s a slightly strained pause before we both look at each other and I realise that he’s just concerned for me. I lean over and rest my head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around me. It feels good and familiar, a safe place for when I need it.

  Jack is a little over two years younger than me. He works in a bar in Shoreditch, which was an offer of charity from one of his friends who manages the place and likes having him around. He’s got a few issues, he’s had on and off problems with drugs and alcohol for the better part of the last eight years and struggles with depression. But he’s a good brother and has a good heart; he’s always been there when I’ve needed him. Anyway, I’m hardly the one to talk about problems. I thought I’d moved past all this; I haven’t had one of these fits in nearly six months. But there it was, as bad as ever and all of my efforts to get better good for nothing.

  So this is where we find ourselves my brother and I, a psychotic and a degenerate, aren’t we the pair? We press on the same, each making up for the flaws in the other and between the two of us there is a person that is whole.

  I sit at the kitchen table and try to eat something. I try to make conversation about anything other than my episode. I begin to tell Jack about last night’s launch party but I can tell he’s uninterested. He’s never been interested in the art scene and does little to hide it. He cuts me off mid-sentence and tells me I shouldn’t be going to work after last night. He’s right of course but there’s a stoic pride in me that doesn’t want to let my episodes affect the rest of my life; something in my head that says if I get up and go to work it didn’t really happen, that it’s not real. Or if I can’t deny it, at least I can show that I’m going to fight it and that it’s not going to make me do anything differently. All very stirring and defiant thoughts but I’d probably be better off just taking a sick day. I tell him I’m going in and my mind is made up. I’m not a complete martyr though, so I take a more than leisurely breakfast and an indulgently long shower to ease me into the day as gently as possible. By nine I’m feeling just about human and start making my way into work, the outside world none the wiser about the torments of last night.

  3

  The Roth auction house sits proudly at the south end of Bond Street, nestled happily amongst the luxury boutique clothing stores and jewellers; an impressive Grade II listed white stucco fronted building. My offices are on the third floor with the others in my team, eight in all including Victoria.

  I am a private buyer. I find rare objects for private individuals. My brother teases me that I’m a corporate sell-out Indiana Jones tracking down lost antiquities, but that’s very far from the reality (except perhaps the corporate sell-out part). The places where I go to find the objects I’m tracking down tend to be the homes of very rich old men, or worse a very secure safe in a bank carved into some alpine mountain… which belongs to a very rich old man. But what my job does grant me is a front row seat to works of art that I would never otherwise be given the chance to see. That for me, is enough. It’s why I work as a private buyer and not on the auction side. I see the art that hides away in private collections, not just the leftovers that are paraded at auction. What they pay me for, what I’m good at, is finding the most desirable objects for someone. Some clients will gi
ve me a brief, some occasionally even have a particular object they want me to help them acquire, but the typical client wants me to guide them. They have the money but not the experience and knowledge of the art that exists in the world. I’m their guide through the Aladdin’s cave. Some will say that choices are all subjective, people should buy what they like and not what some pretentious history of art grad tells them to like, and at times I have sympathy for that argument, one person’s beautiful thing is another’s monstrosity. But I stand by the value in what I do. And besides, if they don’t value my taste, I can speak to them in a language they will understand: what pieces are going to appreciate the most in value and how quickly. If I had any money myself I’d make a fortune.

  I find the whole question of value fascinating, how you determine the value of something. One of my university professors always asked us that question. He was an economist as much as an art historian and he wanted us to apply academic rigour, approaching on scientific method, to art valuation as a means to determining the importance of a piece of art, its place in art history. He’d start off simply, getting us to think about the raw materials the artist used. Does the fact that Vermeer used very expensive pigments in his paintings make them inherently more valuable? Probably not. But what about the eight thousand diamonds Damien Hirst encrusted in a platinum cast of a human skull for his ‘For the Love of God’ sculpture? The value of the diamonds alone is believed to be in excess of ten million dollars. It’s hard to ignore the value of the materials in that work. He wanted us to think about the artists themselves and whether a scrap of paper with an artist’s absent minded doodlings is worthy of value just because they were doodled by someone whose other works were of great importance. And then after the materials and the artist, finally he would ask us to look at the piece of art itself: the quality of the brush strokes, the craftsmanship, the subject; but then more: its influence, its legacy, its place in history and how it captures the imagination.

  Valuation is the best way we’ve managed to apply some common metric to measure one piece of art against another. This one costs more so by extension it must be better. But the concept is flawed because all valuation is inherently relative to the individual making the valuation. The most expensive painting Roth has ever sold at auction is Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, oil on canvas. It was sold in New York last year for fifty-one million dollars to an anonymous bidder. You can argue that’s the price the open market paid for it and so that’s the value of it, but the average person doesn’t really value it at fifty-one million dollars except in so far as they could sell it to someone else prepared to pay that much for it. The average person doesn’t have fifty-one million dollars. So that’s the first thing about relative value, what people can afford, but even when you move past that, and you get into that exclusive club of people who can actually afford to spend fifty-one million dollars on a painting, those individuals will all still have different valuations relative to one another. Some may want to use the painting to complement or complete their collection, others may see value in returning it to its original home in Italy and be prepared to pay for it. Some may want to buy it for its place in the history and evolution of art and others may want to buy it simply to stop someone else from buying it. And all of this is before you even get into whether anyone actually just likes the painting for what is. For any and all of these reasons each valuation is different and in all these reasons lies the weakness in valuation as a measure of an artwork.

  These academic debates are not front of mind for me right now though, I’ll be happy just to see the day through. My plan was to visit my mother after work but I’m going to have to postpone it to later in the week, which I don’t feel great about. She lives in a care-home up in North London, we had to move her there a couple of years ago after she had a severe stroke. I visit her as much as I can but today is going to be a bridge too far.

  It’s well after ten when I arrive at my desk but the place is still near deserted. Last night seems to have wiped out most of the office, at least no one’s going to bother me. I try to make a start on some work, there’s a collection of antique Persian coins that have come in from a collector that wants to sell and I can think of a few potential buyers I want to sound out. You have to be very careful unfortunately with anything coming from Persia, or that part of the world generally, in case whatever it is has been obtained by nefarious means. I’ve worked with the collector before though so I’m not overly concerned. With all the checks you have to do for Middle Eastern antiquities and the limited interest at the top end of the market, most of the team just stay away from these sort of sales but I can’t help myself. Middle Eastern artefacts and antiquities, particularly those from Egypt and Syria are my passion. I studied the region’s art for my Masters.

  I’m at my desk less than half an hour before Victoria steps out of the lift onto the floor and walks hurriedly down the floor to my desk. “I need to talk to you. Now.”

  She seems even more on edge than normal so I leave what I’m doing and follow her into her office. She tells me to shut the door and then blurts out in a mix of tears and anger, “I just got made redundant.”

  “What?!” I reply with genuine shock and surprise. “When? What happened?”

  “Just now. Jo just called me into her office and told me they were letting me go. She said it’s part of a ‘broader business restructuring program’ whatever the fuck that is.”

  I’m trying to be sensitive to Victoria but my brain is now in overdrive trying to work out how much danger I’m in of going the same way. I need this job. There’s not much else I’m qualified to do and certainly nothing that pays the same. The house of cards that is my mother’s care, my brother’s lethargic dealings and my own way of life, such as it is, are all at risk. Sensing my concern Victoria looks at me directly, holds my hands and says, “You need to watch yourself Elle. They’re going to cut more, they’ve been talking about it for months in the management meetings. They haven’t ruled out shutting the team down. Not a sufficient return for the cost outlay. Viktor’s set everyone quotas and we’re not meeting them.”

  This latest bit of information makes me angry. If they’ve been talking about it for months why am I only hearing about it now? What fucking quotas? But I hold back and push the feelings down, this doesn’t feel the time to tell Victoria she’s a shitty manager.

  “You know I’ve been thinking about leaving for months, but I thought it was still worth trying to stick it out and see if things got better. Well not now. The fuckers can keep their shitty job!”

  She screams this latest obscenity and I have no doubt that the glass walls of her office have done little to dampen the sound for the rest of the floor, now starting to fill up.

  As fast as her mood turned to anger, Victoria’s defiance turns as quickly to sadness, and I can see her eyes begin to well up again. I don’t know why she has chosen to confide in me, chosen me to be her shoulder to cry on. I know the thing to do is offer her a comforting hug but I am lost here, a mixture of awkwardness and cowardice. She however is oblivious to the debate my inaction is causing in me, caught up in her own world. She reaches out and grabs me for support, pulling me in and hugging me like a bear. We hold each other and she cries on my shoulder.

  Despite my abject failings at being a supportive friend, after a little of crying it out she seems to be in a bit better shape and begins to calm down. She decides she needs to get out of the office to clear her head. I ask her if she wants me to join her but to my great relief she tells me she’s fine and that I should get back to my desk. I make my exit stage left.

  I’m back at my desk for less than five minutes when I get the call from Jo. Getting a call from her is a rare occurrence for me, so with Victoria’s news fresh in my head there’s no doubt in my mind what she’s calling for. A shot of adrenaline ripples through me with the fear and expectation of what this means. I have no choice but to answer. I leave it a couple of rings before picking up, deciding that is the mos
t casual number of rings to leave it, and then in my best attempt at a voice of someone unaware they’re about to be made redundant, pick up the phone.

  Jo is brief and courteous. She asks if I’m free and if I can come to her office. As I hang up the phone I look around and can see the others trying to look preoccupied. They know what’s going on, they know who just called me.

  I take the lift up to level six where Jo’s office is, the rarefied heights of senior management. I’ve been up here only a couple of times before. It’s been styled in a different way to the more modern functionalism on my floor. There’s a lush, warm carpet and the space is tastefully littered with an eclectic array of furniture design classics: a row of Barcelona chairs line one of the walls, there’s a coffee table designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh sitting in the centre of the room with two Wassily chairs on one side and two Eames chairs on the other. There is a selection of original artworks on the walls, some of which I know are due to go to auction later this month.

  I knock on the open door to Jo’s office and walk in.

  “Elle, come in, take a seat. How are you?” She’s too welcoming. I manage to tell her I’m fine and nothing more.

  “Great. Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Yes it was good fun. I think there’s a few sore heads this morning.” The small talk is acutely painful for me.

  “I’m sure, yes. Okay, so the reason I’ve asked you to come up here is that I’m sure you’ve been hearing over the last few months the various discussions that have been going on around the proposals to restructure a number of our businesses.”

  No, I just heard about them twenty minutes ago, thanks Victoria.