The Park Bench Test

It’s just like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory – except you don’t eat the decorations, you paint them.

Caroline has a little girl – Molly, who’s five, and she’s six months pregnant with her second child. She’s starting to take things a bit easier now. Her friend Fiona works here too – but she’s in the process of setting up her own shop – a children’s clothing shop – just a few doors down in the same street, so she isn’t able to work any extra hours.

That’s where I come in.

So – Caroline is a former art teacher and Fiona stitches pictures of angels on t-shirts and socks, whilst I, it seems, am the token pleb who can’t even draw stick-men.

Today, though, stick-men are the least of my problems.

I am learning how to glaze a pot – that’s the bit that makes them shiny when they come out of the kiln, apparently. I haven’t gone near the kiln yet. I’m not sure I ever will after today’s disaster.

I pick up the larger fragments of plate from the floor and apologise to Caroline. Again.

“Don’t worry,” she says kindly. “That’s why we’re doing this – so you can get it right before you start handling the proper stuff.”

By proper stuff she means the pottery with the pretty pictures – straight from the hands of proud little girls and boys – instead of the plain items straight from the shelves. The very thought of touching the ‘proper stuff’ makes me nervous. The last time I had anything to do with any kind of pottery was in art class at secondary school when I accidentally dropped Emma’s cat dish. It was a masterpiece – a bowl in the shape of a cat’s face with delicate clay whiskers sticking out of the sides. She cried for the rest of the day. So did I. It was very traumatic. And we were eleven. Imagine what it could do to a toddler…

“Try again,” Caroline says, handing me the tongs you use to dip the pottery. They look like a pair of industrial-size barbecue tongs. I hold them awkwardly. I feel like Julia Roberts in the scene from Pretty Woman when she’s trying to pick-up snails at that posh restaurant.

I grip a mug like Caroline has shown me, with one half of the tongs at the bottom and the other on the rim, and slowly ease it into the bucket of glaze. It’s a thick blue gloopy substance.

“So why doesn’t everything come out of the kiln blue?” I ask Caroline.

“The blue disappears in the heat, but there are chemicals in the paints which make them resist the heat,” she explains. “Normal paints – poster paints for example – they would burn off.”

“Hmm,” I say, taking it all in, twisting the tongs gently in the bucket, to make sure the mug is coated all over.

“That should do it,” she tells me.

I ease the mug out of the bucket and then watch as it slips out of the tongs and drops back in. It bobs up and down like a bobbing apple at a Halloween party before filling up with glaze and sinking to the bottom of the bucket.

I smile at Caroline. It’s a smile of resignation.

I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Selling pencils was much easier.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#u1d9f1cbe-faa7-5737-bbf0-df3cb6fdfa4f)

By the end of the day I have broken one more mug and successfully glazed a dinner plate and a kitten ornament. Keen to leave on a high point I hang up my apron for the day and get the tube back to Katie’s.

I’m staying with Katie and Matt while I get myself sorted. They have said I can stay with them as long as I want. Technically that means I can stay forever – I don’t want to be on my own. But I won’t stay forever. They are getting married soon. They don’t want me cramping their style.

They have a lovely flat in Clapham Junction, just two stops on the Overground from Potty Wotty Doodah. They bought it last year after living with Matt’s parents for almost eighteen months to save for the deposit – a period Katie affectionately describes as her ‘time inside,’ so I know how much it means to her to finally have her own place.

Fortunately I left some of my stuff at Fliss and Derek’s. Katie and Matt’s spare room is tiny – just about big enough to swing a cat. But only just. Any smaller and there would definitely be claw marks on the walls.

It has a single bed, a bedside table with a lamp and a framed photo of Katie and I dressed as witches, and a canvas wardrobe that Katie and I bought the weekend I moved in. I think we both underestimated just how many clothes I own – something we discovered when we hung the last t-shirt on the wooden pole and watched as it popped out of its sockets, spilling the contents onto the floor in a big heap.

“Matt!” we both yelled simultaneously, before collapsing onto the bed in a giggling heap ourselves.

“We’ll see you in a couple of hours,” Katie tells Matt as soon as I get home, giving him a quick kiss on the lips and throwing her bag over her shoulder.

“A couple of hours?” I ask, horrified.

Katie is dragging me to the gym. As if my day has not already been torturous enough…

Katie loves the gym. She goes at least twice a week – runs a few kilometres, cycles a couple of miles, rows the equivalent of a small river or two, does a few sit ups, a few press ups…

I hate the gym. All that puffing and panting – not to mention all the sweating. I keep telling her – it’s ever so unattractive.

And she pays £75 a month for the privilege!

This is the same gym, might I add, where Katie had her underwear nicked from the changing rooms while she was having a work-out before work one morning. I saw this as an opportunity – attempting to get out of going on the grounds of security.

“No-one would want to steal your knickers, B,” she had politely informed me. “They’re old and saggy and off-white.”

I decided not to waste crucial time being offended – that could wait till later – and attempted to come up with an alternative excuse instead.

“I don’t have any gym gear,” I said.

“I have spares,” she told me.

“I’m not a member,” I said.

“I have guest passes,” she announced.

I admitted defeat eventually, of course.

But bloody hell – two hours! Anyone would think we were training for the London Marathon.

We get the tube to the gym where Katie signs me in as her guest. Before I am allowed in I have to fill in a form with my name and address, date of birth and vital statistics – so that they can use them to attempt to con me out of £75 a month, no doubt. And I also have to sign a waiver – to say that I won’t sue them when I come flying off the end of the treadmill and break both my legs. Or words to that effect.

“You never know B, you might meet a man here,” Katie tells me, shoving her bag in the locker and slamming the door shut before it falls back out again.

Katie wants to find me a man. She thinks I need one. She says it’s just like falling off a horse – “you have to get straight back on”.

“Or what?” I asked her, “I’ll forget how to do it?” I’m not quite sure exactly what it was I meant by ‘it.’

“I keep telling you – I don’t want a man right now,” I say, pulling my ponytail tight and digging my knickers out of my backside through Katie’s cycling shorts. Her bottom is a bit smaller than mine, evidently.

“Well keep digging your knickers out of your backside in front of everyone in the gym and you’ll probably be safe,” Katie laughs.

“Where do you want to start?” she asks me.

Nowhere is not an option, I presume.

I look around at the equipment – there are rows and rows of bicycles, treadmills, cross trainers, rowing machines…all with maniacs on them cycling, running, rowing for dear life and getting absolutely bloody nowhere. It all seems ever so tedious. Whatever happened to getting outdoors – on a real bike, on a real road?

“How about the sauna?” I ask.