Prologue
…as if money ever made anyone less pathetic. I mean, they like to pretend it does, strutting about with their sharp suits and shinier shoes, sipping champagne as though bubbles make up for having no actual personality. I’ve seen them, on the steps of auction houses, in glass towers that make you feel like a pigeon circling scraps, and spilling out of black cars like the world was built just so they could ruin it with perfume and entitlement.
And maybe that’s why I’m standing here at the edge of yet another London night, paint-smeared trainers on the pavement, staring at the neon-lit belly of a city that doesn’t even notice me. Because if life had played fair, I’d be the one drinking overpriced wine and pretending to understand Rothko while secretly wanting chips and curry sauce. Instead, I’m elbow-deep in turpentine most nights, praying the landlord forgets rent day again and convincing myself that starving artists are, in fact, a noble breed. Spoiler: we’re not. We’re just… starving.
Not that I’d admit it out loud. There’s a kind of dignity in being broke but unbowed. A kind of poetry in being the one who sees while everyone else is too busy flashing their platinum Amex. But the truth? The truth is it’s bloody exhausting.
Take tonight. My fingers still sting from hauling canvases bigger than me up three flights of stairs. My hair smells like linseed oil, my bank account looks like a crime scene, and yet here I am, plastering on a smile for a gallery crowd that would rather spend five grand on a dog’s diamond collar than a piece of art that took me three months of actual living to wrestle onto canvas.
Still. I’ve learned the trick. A raised eyebrow here, a sharp quip there, and they think you’re enigmatic. Enigmatic sells better than desperate, after all.
“Your work is so… visceral,” some hedge fund brat had said earlier, champagne glass dangling from his manicured fingers as if he’d just discovered the word ‘visceral’ on an inspirational quote Instagram.
“Thank you,” I’d replied, fighting the urge to ask him if his soul had ever been gutted by reality or if he just skimmed that word off the label of an artisanal wine bottle.
Visceral. My arse.
Here’s the thing, though. Somehow, improbably, paintings are selling. Mine. At prices that make my eyes water. I should be ecstatic. Should be plotting how many tins of beans I can now upgrade to actual groceries. But instead, there’s this itch at the back of my skull. Because someone keeps buying them. Someone who doesn’t hang around to collect, someone who doesn’t even haggle, someone who just… pays.
And it’s not the first time. No, this mystery benefactor, let’s call him Saint Moneybags, has been scooping up my canvases like a magpie with a taste for melancholy oils.
Which is flattering, obviously. But also unnerving. Because the rich don’t do things without a reason. If they’re not buying power, they’re buying people. And I don’t fancy being bought.
I sip the dregs of cheap corner-shop wine from a plastic cup, perched on the ledge outside the gallery, while the city hums around me. My throat burns, but it’s better than the flat Prosecco they served inside. At least this has honesty in it.
“You look like you’re plotting the downfall of civilisation,” a voice says, low, amused, not from the gallery crowd but from the dark edge of the street.
I don’t flinch. London teaches you not to. Instead, I roll my eyes and glance over. A man leans against the shadowed brick, half in lamplight, half out. Not one of them, at least not visibly. His jacket’s worn, his trainers scuffed, hair too unruly for Mayfair. But his eyes, grey, steady, study me like he’s peeling layers without permission.
“Already done,” I say, raising my plastic cup. “Civilisation’s down. I’m just waiting to inherit the ruins.”
He laughs. A real laugh, not the nasal bray of someone who’s had too much Dom Pérignon. And that unsettles me more than any silk tie could.
“You don’t strike me as the ruins type,” he says.
“Shows what you know.”
I turn back to the city. He doesn’t leave. I can feel the weight of his gaze, the kind that lingers, curious but not predatory. And because the wine’s warm in my blood and the night feels too heavy otherwise, I let him stay.
The thing is, I don’t know then, in that sticky slice of London midnight, that this stranger leaning casual against brick and shadow is the reason I’ve managed to pay rent the last two months. I don’t know that his scuffed trainers hide the fact that his other shoes, polished, handmade, Italian leather, could pay off my overdraft three times over.
I don’t know he’s Daniel. Not really. Not yet.
What I do know is that he doesn’t talk like the rest of them. He doesn’t talk at me. He talks to me. And that’s rarer than money, rarer than diamonds, rarer than someone actually seeing me without trying to buy me in the same glance.
“Do you always stand outside your own exhibitions?” he asks, voice edged with humour but softened at the corners.
“Only when I need a smoke break from humanity.”
He grins at that, slow, like it’s a secret joke meant just for us. And for a second, for one traitorous second, I wonder what it would be like to let someone like him in.
Of course, I don’t. I’m Zara Mensah, professional cynic, patron saint of bad luck. I don’t let anyone in. Not the critics, not the buyers, not even the ghosts I paint. Especially not some stranger with eyes that look like storms are brewing in them.
But, if we’re starting the story anywhere, it’s here. With me, half-drunk on corner-shop wine, and him, half-hidden in shadows. With me pretending not to care, and him already knowing he’s going to break through every wall I’ve spent years building. With lies crouching between us, and truths neither of us are ready to say.
And the irony? For all my talk of civilisation collapsing, I didn’t realise my own walls were the first to fall.
