Gallery

I exhaled a guttural sigh, as my dad’s bag full of gifts weighed heavily in my arm. Breathing in without letting any tears get to me felt like I was snorting snakes into my nostrils, and I could feel pressure building in my skull. My face was looking away from Una, although it usually was. I knew people couldn’t bear looking at me for too long. Polite as people were, their expressions slowly turned to grimaces the longer I looked. My face radiated disgust, and my eyes - it seemed - were about to drip with tears. I clutched the bag harder, and double checked my tickets with shaky hands.

“Yorito, what are you looking at?”

I didn't look back at Una. I was usually okay at stabilising my mood, but the fact my dad was gone again was only starting to hit me. It overlapped with everything, and my dazed eyes, painted with a thin trickle of tears, remained fixed on a small neon sign flickering in the distance.

“We should be-,” I inhaled sharply. I wasn’t sure if the tremble of my voice was me about to cry or yet another of my awkward slips of the jaw. “We should be going now. To the station.”

“The station is the other way,” Una said with irritation in her voice. I wiped my face with my sleeve, and turned to meet her eyes. I was so deep in my own head, I could barely fathom how neutral and blank Una’s face seemed. I wondered if she really ever thought about anything, or if she simply never let things show.

“Right,” I replied. I followed her across the street, still averting my eyes from her so I could gaze at the lights around me on the street. “We should pick up the pace.”

I’m not really sure what I expected from my first outing with Una, but it was nothing like the trip to the cafe with Shimizu and his friends. Probably because it was just two people, meaning I had to make a contribution that was deeper than laughing at someone for pissing in a sleeping bag. Racking my brains for a few seconds, I decided to stay silent, and go to the station without saying much. On the train journey, I gazed outside at the darkening landscape in the window.

When we got off the train, I double checked that I had both tickets on me, and fished them out from my back pocket, giving one to Una.

She turned as I gave her a ticket. “On second thought, don’t you think this might give people the wrong impression?”

“What,” I replied. “That you’re cultured?”

I walked forward into the queue, which wasn’t too long. Practically everyone around us was at least double my age, which is probably to be expected for an event like this. There were a few children with their parents, their faces etched with bored expressions. Getting into the building was painless, although Una definitely looked as if she was having second thoughts about coming with me whenever I turned my head to look behind me.

Once I was inside, though, the tables turned entirely. Una was very annoying, and I regretted coming with her. Her eyes swept past every descriptor card in about two seconds, she’d take a brief glance at a painting, and then move along. By the time she’d finished with a room, I was still getting lost in the tired cracks of a centuries-old painting frame.

“Come on, haven’t you looked around enough? We should look at one of the other rooms now!”

I exhaled out of my nose with mild exasperation, although I didn’t really have anyone but myself to blame for bringing someone like her to a place like this.

My hand clutched onto the bag harder.

Actually, I did.

“Una, I need to ask,” I said, looking around the room to catch more glances of the art surrounding us.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have to rush through here when you’re in a gallery full of masterpieces? I know art isn’t your thing, but,”

Una interrupted. “Art is very much my thing.”

“Gruh,” I spurted out, very much not expecting that response. I cleared my throat and wiped my mouth, and tried to make eye contact as if I hadn’t made a complete tit of myself. But it was no use, her eyes had glanced at the painting behind me.

“They’re all the same, aren’t they? So I’m not really that interested. There’s no point to a gallery like this. They’re all old and in the same style.”

My face is distorted at the best of times, but hearing that response even made the top half crinkle into the most confused and disgusted expression I could possibly muster. “You… what?”

“The perspective is all boring, the materials they paint with are all the same. You can’t really get very inspired to draw. Where’s the passion? It’s just some guy who died 400 years ago painting exactly what he sees.”

I wiped my face with my hands. “Jesus, I’ve eaten yoghurt with more culture than you. Are you intentionally trying to piss me off?”

She pointed at a painting of a tea set. “Go on then, what does that make you feel? Literal tea cups. It’s literally just a bunch of tea cups.”

I groaned. “It’s not about the tea cups. It’s the comfort of the cracks in the canvas, a painting style that nobody makes anymore. A redundant relic that most people don’t care for. Something like that is familiar. It smiles back at you when you’re lying in a bed, leafing through the same book for the fiftieth time. It reminds you of the happy memories from everything like it. And, I think it’s quite a nice teapot.”

I noticed she wasn’t particularly happy with my answer, so I looked at her. “What, do you think you could make something better? Something with all that dynamism and passion you talk about?”

She looked at the painting. “Sure. I do painting. I’ve made things a lot more meaningful than this. The technical skill is better than mine, sure. But if I wanted pure accuracy, I’d just take a photograph.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, you’re a painter?”

She paused, looked at the painting, and then back at my shoes, then up to a button on my coat. “Yeah, of course I do painting. I’m thinking of applying to an art college, maybe. Well, I’m having second thoughts because I’m not as good as I thought I was.”

I pulled my face into something close to a smirk. “Well, if you’ve got such low opinion of stuff like this, I can see you’re clearly-”

I saw her expression sank a little as I continued, so I decided not to totally crush her confidence

“-clearly into the sort of things that conventional teachers might not appreciate.”

“I just feel,” she said, “As if people are so focused on clinging to the past that they’re unwilling to experiment. Not that I’m great at experimenting myself, but at least I try. People who do that interest me.”

Her face seemed invested as she talked about the topic. It did occur to me that I hardly even asked what she did for fun, or what her plans for the future were. Somehow, it was refreshing to exchange something that wasn’t a quip or a jab.

“I suppose you can always invite me to a gallery you’re more interested in next time,” I said back to her, looking around the room at the paintings I hardly even got to glance at before Una’s complaints.

“What?” She tapped her foot a bit. “No, I don’t go to places like this, I just search up the paintings on my computer. Why would I spend money to see them?”

I sighed. “Right. Yeah.”