This made Helena look back across at Petra from where she’d been staring out the window at a pair of cats squabbling in the block’s mudhole of a garden. It was Tuesday morning; Needful Things only opened at noon on Tuesdays to Thursdays, and Petra had brought the slices of pecan pie from the Three Elephants partly in guilt for not having her mind fully on her mother for the past few days: she was in recovery from a procedure, after all. A good daughter should have been hovering around her all weekend, not fantasising about a kind, sad stranger she’d just met and shagged on the weekend.

But now Helena raised her eyebrows and Petra half regretted mentioning her art to her. It might set off another round in the Petra, you really need to do what you love in life lecture series. There hadn’t been a session of that for a while, and Petra had hoped the topic was finally dead.

‘That’s great, darling,’ Helena said tentatively. Petra knew Helena harboured lofty hopes for her Creative Becoming, but she’d become defensive whenever it came up. It wasn’t that Petra felt Helena wanted her to fulfil the creative dreams she had failed to achieve. A regular mother-and-daughter dynamic like that would be secretly affirming, a bit of inter-generational jealousy would make Petra feel good about herself – but Helena was creatively self-fulfilled, admirably so. The simple fact was that Petra never thought herself or her art worthy of those ambitions. Objectively, there were so many better artists out there, flashing up all over her timelines, ones who seemed naturally productive and joyous while they did it. They were the ones who should do art for a living, not her. Petra knew Helena wanted the best for her, but how could she admit to her deep-living, lee-draining personality whirlwind of a mother that compared to all the geniuses out there, her daughter was nothing special, and was trying to be okay with that? That’s why she’d become defensive. Helena had recognised this and learned to tone down her enthusiasm. ‘Are you still drawing?’

She’d given up for a while – almost three years – but in the last six months had taken it up again. She’d been inspired by a documentary she’d come across about new digital artists, and had followed some mind-blowing social media accounts of some insanely talented people. She made the decision to stop feeling she had to compete with these clever people for a slice of the pie, because she’d never win – they were simply better than she was… but she could still do it for fun, couldn’t she? She’d taken the plunge and bought herself a new top-of-the-range tablet and stylus and started up again.

It was all thanks to Suki and her charity – because that’s what the job was; she was underworked and overpaid compared to anyone else in retail – that she could afford the new equipment. But she’d never even told her that she tried to do art. She’d never show her pictures to Suki. It was possible she’d like them, but there was also a good chance she’d scythe them down in an unthinking act of irony, and that would be devastating. As nice as Suki was, she’d struggle to understand how hard the rest of the world clung on to their hopes and dreams. They were tiny pieces of flotsam keeping them from drowning – they clung on to them because second chances don’t come easily. Giving up and starting something new; ‘failing better’, ‘pivoting’, ‘reinventing yourself’ – all those motivational buzzwords required a financial safety net that most people didn’t have. That’s why working-class artists couldn’t ‘fail better’; they were just set up to fail.