Houses of my friends.

London, April 2010.

An iron bar.

She turned toward him in her seat, crossing her legs beneath her. ‘You know, there was this piece of installation art in some gallery in Germany, which was basically an iron beam suspended across the corner of a room, with a piece of metal vaguely in the shape of a sail hanging from it. I’m not sure what it was supposed to represent but I think something to do with mankind manipulating metal into these useful things, yet being stuck on the ground while these objects hang out of reach and blow away from them in the wind, or something like that. Anyway, one day this guy comes in and he’s looking up at this piece of art, standing right below it, when suddenly the fixings come loose and this huge metal beam falls right on his head, killing him instantly. It’s this peaceful art gallery, on an average day and out of the blue this guy is killed by a piece of art. And there’s this photography student right next to him when it happens, and he looks at this guy’s splayed, lifeless body in complete shock, this iron beam crushing his head into the floor, and he’s overwhelmed with the realisation that it so nearly could have been him. And the only reason it isn’t is because he’d stopped to tie his shoelace a few moments earlier and had fallen a few seconds behind this guy and so is standing three metres away when the beam falls. And it occurs to him that if his new dog hadn’t ruined his old shoes, forcing him to buy these new shoes with these slippery laces that kept coming undone, or if he’d even chosen a pair of laceless shoes that morning then it could have been his body laying facedown, his head smashed in on the floor in front of him. And so after twenty something years of living, this guy finally experiences the beauty of coincidence. He looks at this poor man, his blood slowly creeping across the pale wooden floor of the gallery, and he realises that it’s beautiful. Life is beautiful! So he takes a photo, to capture this beauty and to capture this moment of revelation and to just give this guy’s life some meaning after it’s been so cruelly destroyed by this freak accident. And six months later, this photo is hung on display in the exact same room that the installation art had hung in and that this guy had died in. And it was art, and everyone thought it was beautiful’. Eleanor’s eyes sparkled as she finished the story.

‘Is that true?’ he asked.

She grinned playfully at him. ‘Does it matter?’

Daniel considered her for a moment as he thought. ‘I suppose not’ he said finally, and then he laughed, at her playful expression and because it didn’t matter. She had spoken it out loud and it existed between them, and at that moment in time, that was enough.