13 Little Blue Envelopes. Maureen Johnson
Your Runaway Aunt
The next morning, after reading her letter and splashing around in the tub, Ginny joined Richard at the kitchen table. He was loosely dressed—unbuttoned shirt, undone tie—and was roughly flipping through the sports section of the paper and shoving pieces of toast into his mouth.
“I have to find an artist today,” she said. “Someone who needs money.”
“An artist?” he said, his mouth half full. “Oh, dear. Sounds like a Peg task. I don’t really know much about that stuff.”
“Oh. That’s okay.”
“No, no,” he said. “Let me think a moment. It shouldn’t be hard. Giving people money can’t be hard.”
He munched on his toast thoughtfully for another moment.
“Hang on,” he said. “We’ll have a look in Time Out. That’s what we’ll do.”
He reached under a pile of shirts that sat on one of the kitchen chairs, felt around for a second, and produced a magazine. Ginny had a strange feeling that leaving laundry on the kitchen chairs was something Aunt Peg probably didn’t allow when she was here. For someone who lived pretty randomly, she was a bit of a neat freak.
“They list everything in here,” Richard said brightly, opening the magazine. “All kinds of movies, art events. Here’s one, and right near here. Izzy’s Café, Islington. Shelia Studies, paintings by Romily Mezogarden. And here’s another…a bit strange sounding. Harry Smalls, demolition artist. That’s just around the corner. If you’re ready, I can walk you there.”
He seemed genuinely pleased that he’d been able to come up with something.
Ginny wasn’t quite ready, but she hurriedly squeezed some water from her braids and put on her sneakers. She managed to make it to the front door just a second before he did, and they walked out into the drizzly morning together.
“I have a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll pop in with you.”
Izzy’s Café was a tiny place with a juice bar. No one was there, but the girl behind the counter was making a whole pitcher of beet juice anyway. She waved a purple-stained hand at them as they came in.
A series of paintings hung in a ring around the room, and it was immediately obvious that these were the “Shelia Studies.” As advertised, they were studies of some girl named Shelia. The background in Shelia’s world was bright blue and everything in it was flat, including Shelia. Shelia had a large, flat head with a square chunk of yellow hair sticking up out of it. Shelia usually just stood around (#4: Shelia Standing; #7: Shelia Standing in Bedroom; #18: Shelia Standing in Road). Sometimes, she would stand around and hold things (#24: Shelia with Eggbeater) or look at things (#34: Shelia Looking at Pencil), and then she would get tired and sit (#9: Shelia Sitting on Box).
“I’m rubbish at this,” Richard said, scanning the walls hopelessly. “But I’m sure you know something.”
Ginny took a closer look and discovered the little cards under the pictures. She was amazed to find that Romily Mezogarden wanted £200 for each and every one of the Shelia pictures. That seemed like a lot, considering that they were really ugly and the whole thing seemed uncomfortably stalker-like.
She didn’t know anything about art either. These could be the greatest pictures in the world. There were people who could tell these things. She was not one of them. Still, it seemed like she should have a slight air of competence. She was Aunt Peg’s niece, after all. She got the strange feeling that somehow Richard was expecting her to know something.
“Maybe not these,” she said. “I’ll look at the next one.”
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?”
“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 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 (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