*

After work I jumped on my bike and headed over to see if I could find her at home. I got out of my saddle to pump my way over an overpass on to the Old Kent Road, a street like a Benson & Hedges lit from the end of a Lambert & Butler lit from a burning tub of paint – as English as it gets, with the megastores full of white goods, and the African churches with great names: Behold He Cometh!, the Everlasting Arms Ministry. A white van with a Millwall FC sticker on the back shaved my arm by a couple of centimetres and I swore at the driver as I overtook him a minute later when the traffic had stopped again. ‘Get out of the fucking road, you mug,’ he shouted, but I was way ahead of him. A bus blew a plume of carcinogens into my face. I held my breath and turned right to Peckham.

In the ten years I’ve been working in the shop Amy has had so many jobs and engaged in so many money-making schemes it’s hard to keep count. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, having arrived in London three years after I did, after she spent an extra year at home doing an art foundation. I had suggested to her that from my own experience it might be more fun to do a degree in a regional city, where rent was less than half the price, where university campuses were leafy, tranquil spaces set away from huge traffic islands and exhaust-blackened concrete. She paid no attention, thinking as she always does, perhaps correctly, that I was patronising her.

She had less fun on her degree than on her foundation; the teachers discouraged her from painting; she thought the theory animating many of her fellow students was bullshit. It was easy to anatomise the problems of capitalism when you had money; the first practical thing she needed to do was get some, so she learned how to use design software and made flyers for other students’ club nights, then she put on club nights with her friends in Peckham and New Cross. She printed T-shirts and sweaters to sell on stalls. She became interested in furniture design – wished she had done a more practical degree. She argued with her tutors, took rejection hard and dropped courses in retaliation. By the time she had her degree she had given up on the art world; it was fraudulent and childish, ‘rich people pretending to be revolutionary’.

‘Are you sure you’re not characterising it in the way that’s easiest to allow you to give up on it?’ I asked – and we had to avoid each other for a month or two after that argument.