Ever was truly appreciative, well, a fan, of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work. Philistines being one of his favourites, and Fishing had to be up there, looking like it was stripped of all goodness and raw to the world. Took him to his cheese-grater experiences. His skin scraped raw, all nerve ends exposed; the vulnerable pain in mental collapse.

The exhibition promised to be the largest collection of his works gathered in one gallery in the last twenty years, with all the celebrity collectors donating to the exhibition. It should be, at least, an event.

Ever had always felt he understood the substance of what went into Basquiat’s work. It represented a mania and disturbance of the norm that he empathised with, also Basquiat had a mother who spent a lot of time in mental institutions, obvious really. Heroin was not a shared experience though, Ever thought, but that’s a detail. An act away.

It was all in Ever’s head, in his own imagination, the connection, but that is what it all is in life anyway. Isn’t it? Yes, for sure. Perception, how you perceive things, from whichever stance you want, or decide to take. Basquiat was all done by the time he was twenty-seven, another member of the 27 Club.

Ever paused deep, deep down inside.

Twenty-seven. Jesus Christ. Twenty-seven. His father was a twenty-seven. A member of the club in his own way. Unique version. All, all of them twenty-seven.

27 27 27.

Stop saying. Stop seeing. Breathe. All he could see inked on the retina focused by the cornea was twenty-seven. The number twenty-seven.

His hand smacked his face, stinging his cheek. He focused on the sting.

It fuzzed the image, it brought him back out of his mind’s eye.

It was Basquiat’s talent, of course, yes, he wanted to see what he had never seen before, the majority of his catalogue in one place, live in the painted flesh. It was not a disingenuous whimsy.

This made him compare and reflect on his father’s work; it worried him.

That maybe after all the agony, the taking on of the pain, that his father was not a crippled and halted genius. Maybe he just wasn’t a genius. Ever couldn’t bear the weight of that. Ever had always felt that he himself amounted to very little, that his father had become the giant, the adored one in his life, the idolised one. He had wished as he was growing up that he had his father’s reckless abandonment and, well, just that lightbulb illumination quality.