I love it, she told me when she came home that day, and I saw her brush it carefully with her hands and it seemed so right, to bring something from an old space to a new space, another place where different acts could be performed on the same sheet of metal. From cracked eggs to turpentine, there was a certain beauty in the surface’s resilience to mixed chemicals and harsh products. I imagined the kitchen porters scrubbing it down at midnight, after last orders had been taken from under hot lights, and it had reached that time of the night when the chefs and the waiters could tone down a bit on their bad language and their abuse and sit back at the end of the kitchen near the wash-up area and have the talk, and suck on their cigarettes, with the back doors opened fully out into the darkness of the night. The table washed and clean and ready for another day. The sharpness of the metal was like something from an operating theatre and I could hear the clink of the instruments as they were laid out on it, the surgeon’s scalpel and clamp and tweezers and saw.

The table was perfect for Jenny’s work and she decorated it with empty jam jars and other jars, filled with buttons and feathers and craft glue and ribbons and marbles and cigarette lighters. In one jar there was a lone silver Zippo lighter that was a gift from Jerome and every time I looked at it I wanted to throw it away.

Above Jenny’s desk she had pinned to the wall, feathers and flyers to the Magic Roundabout and Carl Cox and Strictly Handbag, a spell on a sheet of her expensive handmade paper. It came from a book she had about witches’ spells. The idea was to anoint the door jamb in your home with an essential oil. You could choose from frankincense, cypress, cinnamon, clover or dragon’s blood. You had to walk through the door and close it behind you. I performed the spell with Jenny one night when I was drunk and I remember waving around a piece of rosemary and threatening to light it.