The Majorcan and the Garden Shed

A portrait painted by the Majorcan

London's cool to the bone.  It's the trendy and the hip with posh accents and Top-Shop nonsense.

It's fun and cultured and somewhat pretentious with pub-crawl ambiance and bad British teeth and tea time (which probably contributes to bad British teeth) and distinction and colonization and Manifest Destiny and just a whole bunch of scrawl.

I take the Metro from Picadilly to Wimbledon, get off, Oyster card in hand.  There's a lot of young white people and there's the flower guy outside the station.  There's the expensive grocery store that I'm boycotting and the line of narrow houses, a kid on a scooter and a public bus.

It's the narrow house with the metal planters that Robert calls the "silver caskets."  Inside the house are a bunch of rocks in drawers and cats on prowl.  The Majorcan artist is in the garden (*side note: the Majorcan artist is always in the garden).  Albert has a twitch, smiles too wide, and smells like primer.  His work is strictly portrait and he's in the garden, painting.  I walk to the back of the yard, past the chicken coop to Albert's studio, a converted garden-shed.  I knock on the door just to say, "I'm here."  He shows me his masterwork in progress, naked clawing bodies desperately stretching across three large canvases.  The bodies have dark under eyes and ugly mouths and they look at you.

"Fantastic," I tell him and go inside the main house, open a cider and sit at the kitchen table, thinking about the ghosts in the house and what's for dinner.
Later that night, Albert and I make crepes, drunk on cider and white wine.