Splendour: Contested Treasures was the name of the exhibition. The essay in the heavy catalogues – which were also expensive, with flocked covers and marbled endpapers – was full of words like sumptuous, grandiosity, and luxuriant. There was also starvation, furious and bonfire, but I suppose it’s a question of emphasis. Everything in the exhibition had been stolen, or nearly destroyed, or hidden in an attic or tabernacle to keep it from looters. Displays of opulence, Leonard argued, led almost inevitably to envy, and then to violence.

I had known Leonard since art school. I knew that he truly frothed for beautiful things. Once, he’d spent the weekend in his parents’ garage figuring out a way to gold-plate objects. He hooked a car battery up to a bucket filled with some toxic mixture of chemicals, then ran through the house like a high, skinny Midas, finding things – coins, paperclips, forks and spoons – to drop into the solution. ‘I’m a motherfucking emperor,’ he yelled, standing on a chair, brandishing a gold-plated coathanger.

Eventually there was an explosion. A piece of that mock gold melted right into Leonard’s skin, above the outer corner of an eyebrow. ‘One more inch,’ he said later, ‘and I’d have been blind.’

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘will you go?’

We were standing in his office.

‘Can’t you send the van?’

He shook his head. ‘These are not van people,’ he said. ‘They’re old. They’re eccentric. They’re suspicious of anything too official. They’ll like your clapped-out Vauxhall – they’ll find it authentic.’

He smiled his cajoling smile.

‘All old money drives shit cars like yours, Tracey,’ he said.

I flinched; I hate my name. He used to call me Trace. And he calls my car a Vauxhall, though he didn’t visit London until he was twenty-five.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘And take some flowers.’

After art school, I kept painting; he did a masters in curatorship. Now he curates and I stand in the corner of the gallery, among his arrangements, saying ‘No flash photography’ and watching people pick their noses and adjust their balls when they think they’re alone.

I still paint. It’s where my money goes: on pigments and canvas and brushes. The smell of turpentine still makes me giddy.

I paint nudes, mostly. But I can’t afford models, and my friends with their slack, postpartum belly-skin and knee-folds are no longer willing subjects. They don’t understand that this is what I want, what I’m greedy for – the brown splotches and spider veins and tough, thick toenails whitened with fungus. It’s my dream to paint a close-up portrait of an anus, in satiny dark pinks and purples, with hints of sienna in the folds, and that black knowing pupil at the centre.

If I could get a good enough look at it, I’d paint my own.