13 Little Blue Envelopes(12)

He went with her to the next place, an installation by Harry Smalls, demolition artist, who Ginny quickly dubbed “The Half Guy.” He cut things in half. All kinds of things. Half a briefcase.

Half a sofa. Half a mattress. Half a tube of toothpaste. Half an old car. Ginny thought this one over, then asked herself if she really wanted to give almost a thousand dollars to a guy who had a chain saw problem.

Once they were back outside, Ginny struggled to come up

with another idea.

“I’m thinking maybe one of those people who perform on the street,” she said. “Where do you think I could find those?”

55

“Like buskers? Street musicians, people like that?”

“Right,” Ginny said. “Like that.”

“Try Covent Garden,” he said after a moment. “Middle of

London. Lots of performers. All sorts of things going on, people selling things. It has its own tube stop. You can’t miss it.”

“Great,” she said. “I’ll go there.”

“It’s on the way. Come on, then.”

She rode with Richard in the late morning rush until he

ushered her off at her stop.

There was nothing garden-like about Covent Garden. It was a large cobblestoned plaza, jammed with tourists and stalls of knickknacks. There was also no shortage of performers. She gave it her best, spending over an hour sitting on the curb, watching.

Some guys juggled knives. Several guitarists of varying quality played either acoustically or through banged-up amps. A magician pulled a duck from his coat.

All she would have to do was pull the pile of bills from her pocket and drop them into any one of these hats or guitar cases and she’d be done. She could picture the scene—the astonished knife-throwers looking at the flutter of twenty-pound notes. The thought was tempting, but something told her that this wasn’t right, either. She gripped the money in her pocket, balled it tight, then got up and started walking.

The sun was making more of an effort today, and the

Londoners seemed to appreciate it. Ginny wandered around the stalls, wondering if she should buy Miriam a T-shirt. Then she was walking down a street full of bookstores. Then she was in a massive square (which, according to the tube stop there, was called Leicester Square) and it was five o’clock, and the streets were 56

beginning to fill with people getting off work. Her chances of succeeding seemed to be rapidly dwindling. She was about to turn back and divvy up the money between all of the hats on Covent Garden when she noticed a large advertisement for something called Goldsmiths College, which claimed to be

London’s premier art college. Plus, the advertisement gave directions. It seemed worth a try.

She found herself on a city street, with a few fairly modern academic buildings scattered around. Of course, she realized, it was also summer, and evening, which meant no school and no students.

She should have thought of that before she’d come all the way down here.

She wandered around, glancing at a few flyers stuck to notice boards and walls. A few protests. Yoga classes. A few album releases. She was about to turn and give up when a flapping piece of paper caught her eye. It read: STARBUCKS: THE MUSICAL.

There was a cartoon of a man diving into a coffee cup. The bottom of the flyer said that the show was written, produced, directed, and designed by someone named Keith Dobson.

Something about this just sounded promising. And it was

still going on—even now, in the summer. Tickets, the flyer promised, were on sale in something called the uni. She asked a girl passing by what it was.

“The uni?” (She pronounced it you-knee.) “That’s the student union. It’s just across the road.”

It took a lot of asking around to find her way through

Goldsmiths’ massive student union building to where they sold tickets to the show. It was like they didn’t want anyone to find it: down two sets of stairs, around a corner, left at the bucket 57

(really) to a door at the end of a hallway, where only one of two fluorescent lights worked. There was a flyer for the show stuck to the door and a pale redheaded guy visible through the nine inches of plastic window that made this a box office and not a closet. He looked up from a copy of War and Peace.

She figured she’d have to scream to be heard, so she just held up a finger to show that she wanted one ticket. He held up his hands and indicated eight. She dug around in her pocket and found one of the tiny five-pound notes and three of the pound coins and carefully pressed these through the slot in the plastic, and he pulled a photocopied ticket from a cigar box and passed it over to her. Then he jerked his finger, pointing her toward two red double doors at the end of the hall.

58





Jittery Grande

She was in a big, black basement room. It was a little damp. A few fake palm trees had been pushed off to the side. The seats were mostly empty and a few people sat on the floor or on steps in the back of the room. All in all, there were only maybe ten people in the audience. Most of them were smoking and talking to one another. She was the only person here who didn’t seem to know someone else. It felt like a private party in a basement.

She was thinking about getting up and leaving just as a girl appeared in the doorway near where she had come in and

flipped off the light switches. Punk music started to blast from a few scattered speakers on one side of the room. A moment later, it stopped abruptly, and a light came on in the middle of the stage.