“Can I be you for a bit?”

I don’t say anything back; I don’t know what she means.

“Please?” she says.

“Come on,” Heather says. She’s waving at me to step away from where I’m standing. “Let her do your job for a bit.”

“What?” I say.

“Come on,” Heather hisses.

“Oh, okay,” I say. I step away from the wall, and the actress slips into my place. She hunches her back slightly and leans against the bricks and looks blankly ahead, with a sullen expression on her face. It’s all very strange. Heather steps to the side. “Go on,” she whispers to me. “Go on, what’s your name again?”

“Oh, um . . .” I say. The textile designer from earlier comes into the room. I notice that he has the puppets of the queen and the devil on his hands. He’s talking to someone next to him about how the working classes can be helped into engaging with the arts. “Now, it’s all about getting them involved in all the stages, I’m telling you. Getting them to volunteer their time to making an exhibition possible, having them invest their time in making partitions, painting the walls, choosing the works. It’s about a community-led approach—this is what I have been saying for a decade now.”

I turn back to Heather. “It’s Yaga,” I say, absentmindedly.

“Yaga?” Heather says. “Okay, whatever. Out, Yaga, now. Be back in five minutes.”

I leave the room. I leave Heather standing in the corner, watching the actress who pretends to watch over the art, and the textile designer talking about community engagement with someone who looks like they might be a curator or something similar, with puppets on his hands, and think that these people—all of them—are just completely repugnant.

I step outside into the night air. I take a deep breath. Someone offers me a cigarette—some older guy, who leans in close to me with a lighter, lights the end, and winks as he steps away. He keeps talking with a group of people who all sound like they are high up in one of the big, well-known commercial galleries around Green Park. Occasionally, he glances over his shoulder to look at me and, as he does so, a woman in the group watches him. I wonder if they’re together. I stand apart from everyone else. I lean against a wall. I look up at the sky. There are a couple of stars, very faintly visible. I don’t really get anything from smoking. I kind of just let the cigarette burn out, occasionally holding it to my lips and then tapping ash off the end, watching the orange light die and then come back to life and then ultimately die again when I step on the butt.