Trullo, Islington, around 8pm

Girl with a Kitten

Waiting for a friend. I have been holed up in London to finish a book proposal; the idea of finishing it seemed wild only four hours ago and then the thing that happens happened; it tightened up, and there was nowhere else I could take it without other eyes. A friend has been doing the same to a manuscript, we decide to meet for dinner. A wet evening, Upper Street slick with rain, street lights reflecting yellow on the ground; small children collected from nursery, their knuckles reddening as they grip their scooters, buses splash puddles up onto the pavement. Decide to meet another friend quickly before dinner, walk down Camden Passage as day is turning to evening, bakeries rolling striped awnings in, pubs putting tables out. The joy of seeing someone after weeks of not, even if it’s rushed, the necessity of the conversation going deep quickly, then back up Upper Street. Not being organised enough to have booked dinner, I take my chance on Trullo, knowing the chances of there being a table are tiny, and yet, a cancellation, and the waitress takes me downstairs and I expect a bad table, a cold basement but what opens up is a warm, dimly lit room, tables covered in white cloths and everyone looking impossibly beautiful, some trick of the light maybe or submission induced euphoria. I sit down. Feels like a long time since I last breathed properly.

Breathe out. Somehow, the proposal is done. Two years. Two years of trying to work out not just how to say what I want to say or how to think it, but daring to see and to say it. Have not stopped thinking about the Philip Guston exhibition since I saw it. Specifically the two opening portraits, one of him, one of his wife. The level of detail in each, startling. Even down to the soft hairs on his wife’s arms. Her mournful expression. His haunted black eyes. How sad she looks. How ill he looks. How intently he looks at her, at himself. It is one thing to see someone in this way, it is another entirely to communicate it. They are so unflinching as to be excruciating. And what it must have taken for him to see that version of himself he painted in the self-portrait really is extraordinary. I mean this as extra-ordinary. Ordinarily we give our best versions to others, it is rare to make ourselves ugly for art’s sake. Rare, but likely necessary. Unfair to subject others to scrutiny if we can’t do the same to ourselves. Each painting reminds me of Lucian Freud’s Girl With a Kitten, that similar singularity of the sitter’s gaze, a similar cruelty on the part of the painter too. It takes a certain level of daring to create something like that. I like operating at this level of risk. Think of what I’m proposing to work on. Think of how long it’s taken me to dare to do it. Think of how I dared to see with Ava Anna Ada, perhaps people will call it a cruel book. Perhaps it is. Life is. We are. Dare to say that. A strange proposal in any case but I like strange books. I am coming to realise I write them too. The thought of a third book is something else. One book, a trick perhaps, a second, another trick, but three, what’s that? Then I think of Bacon, because in part Bacon is hung in the same room at the Tate Britain as Girl with a Kitten. My daughter, impressed by the girl with the tight grip on the kitten’s neck whereas my son sat on the floor, transfixed by Bacon; a visual metaphor perhaps for the difference between the two. Thinking of Bacon too because I was writing about him earlier - we are all meat. Dare to see ourselves as only meat. A relief really. Waitress returns with my drink, my friend comes down the stairs and she seems to glow; she is always beautiful but tonight especially so, lit by the jubilation of finishing something huge. She sits, we settle into a long night.

(I missed a day of writing this thanks to the impending deadline of a book proposal in the middle of moving home/unpacking/etc.)