“I don’t know. She’s having trouble with her work and stuff. I guess she’s finding some commercial success and, so, her audience is changing.” Ben is looking straight ahead as he talks. “The people who are interested in her art now are all the people who want to buy it, all the rich people who want her paintings for above their sofas in their massive houses. Anyway, it’s all kind of stupid because when you’re not successful, it feels like art means more. Like, you’re just in shows and stuff and it’s all about the meaning of the work. But, then you get successful and you become basically like a dresser of sets, a producer of crap for rich people to hang on walls to look cultured.” Ben sighs. “Kind of makes me feel grateful for my lack of success, in a way.”

“I think art comes to mean something different to people when it becomes something they can possess,” I say, thinking about the comedian, quietly gliding around the room at the Otter; there had been something unsettling about the way he looked at the paintings, and I think now that it was because he could easily just purchase them, and hang them in his own home, and make it so that he was the only person in the world who could look at those works ever again in his lifetime. I think about my dad’s works that were bought by collectors and famous people; a few pieces, according to my mum, were bought up by a hugely successful actor who died, and whose art collection went to his daughter. It’s strange knowing that the daughter of this actor has more of a claim to one of my only links to my Japanese and my human half than I do. And then there are the paintings by my dad that Gideon has; every day, Gideon can look at any of them and study the marks on the silk that each link to a specific time in my dad’s life. He can follow a line in a piece and experience the moment my dad chose, however many years ago, to lift his paintbrush from the silk, or to make the line jaggedly turn. Each little mark a life decision, albeit small. Each little mark, owned by Gideon.

“Yeah.” Ben looks glum. “I don’t know. I suppose seeing how it is for Anj, it makes me think, like, maybe I don’t want to be an artist, you know? If that’s how it’ll be.”