Before my boyfriend left for work this morning, he asked if I was okay. I groaned.

‘That’s because you went to London and back in a day,’ he said.

I told him, or the pillow, that I didn’t even go — that, actually, I was hiding around the corner the whole time. I heard the front door close behind him. The kitten climbed under the covers with me. Almost back to sleep, I imagined hiding in the offy on the next road. The woman in there never speaks more than she has to. I respect that. It’s so powerful not to talk. It just means that last week when she complimented the small lemon-shaped purse in my hands, I surged. Ran a mile with her inch and pushed my luck. I asked Offy Lady if she had seen Mars in the sky outside. I explained quickly that it was on the news. Something about the planets aligning. Venus and the other ones too, except I couldn’t be sure of those. But Mars — Mars was definitely redder than any star I’d ever seen and it was right on top of the Offy.

She did not come outside to look at it with me. She had retreated. Off Lady made a comment about the mound of EVRI packages filling the space behind the counter. Silence as we both waited for my payment to go through. There were a lot of packages. I could have hidden under all of that plastic yesterday instead of going to London and no one would ever know. I could have slept on a bed of new clothes and returns. The tape and padding. Cardboard is warm. Cats know that. Good bubble wrap bedding. God, I could have tried all the fun drinks in the fridge. I could have had all the time in the world to coax Offy Lady out to Mars.

She works too much! I work too much! We have to. I do not have time for myself most days. I hardly ever do my makeup anymore. And It’s obvious stuff but my illness is a lot easier to bear when I’m careful with my body, when I pace myself — which I never do. Taking inches, running miles. Back on Earth, I woke up a few hours before I usually do yesterday, bought a Boots meal deal and got on a train to Euston. There was a bus to Islington after that. Stairs up through London Art Fair. I walked past a print on sale for £120,000. Spoke to a gallerist who had paid ‘three’ to rent their small booth. Spoke to one who told me the larger booths on the ground floor were ‘ten.’ On the earth or falling through it, I found out London Art Fair uses unpaid volunteers. They get travel reimbursed up to 15 quid, lunch up to 15 as well, and that’s it for, what, a ten hour shift? It cost £9 for a slice of pizza. And the building was too hot and I walked too far and spoke too much, and that cost my body something else.

In the afternoon, I was interviewed on stage for an hour. Britney mic. I told the audience that this stuff was life or death. It can’t only be rich people who get to make art. If more people don’t get to satisfy their creativity, then more artists will die. If we aren’t born into money, we aren’t born free, and that goes far beyond art. It goes beyond making art, and buying art, and buying a handful of square footage to sell art to the very people in this building. I still can’t afford my freedom. I made just below minimum wage last year. I am on track to earn less in 2025. If I get sicker, I’ll slip further — unless money can prop me up. One man stormed out of the talk. I expected more than that. When the interview ended, I couldn’t find my mask. People were kind. My throat was dry and dry and dry in the art fair desert heat.

In the onslaught of freelancing, I had accidentally said yes to doing this event despite the fact there was no mention of a speaker’s fee in the email. I never even go to art fairs. I’m a critic and this is no place to feel art; it’s like seeing your own image flipped horizontally. It’s like hearing someone sing when they can’t hear themselves. Art drowned. It’s seeing a thing someone once wanted to make simply because they wanted to, packaged, called Art, and sold at the butcher’s. Air smelling of luxury perfume and old blood. I saw a collection of 2 inch-squared paintings. 112 of them in total. The collective price tag was £26,000. I passed a painting that looked like a Van Gogh rip-off, except there was a sign next to it saying it was by Claude Monet’s great grandson. I needed to sit down.

I kept seeing that particular brand of rich person who dresses like they’ve just got out of a month in hospital. Greasy hair, Dorian Grey skin. Clothes that might have been ran over on purpose by a nervous assistant driving a Range Rover who wishes they could just use an iron. I sat in somebody’s spare chair. Got recognised while I was recuperating there, then got chatting to the girl who had let me sit down who alluded to also being recognised. I wondered why that was. I searched her eponymous gallery. The Tatler metadata that came up when I Googled India Rose James mentioned she was richer than the Queen by age 21. An heiress to some Soho fortune. I don’t know. She was fun. An artist I spoke to later told me she puts a lot of money into the pockets of artists, especially women who, however outdated it sounds, typically earn 40% less in the UK’s art industry than the men. We’re eating scraps off the butcher’s floor, if we’re lucky enough to eat.

And I tried to look at some of the art in the fair, I promise, but I couldn’t tell you about a single thing I saw — and this was only yesterday. My body had already started to fold. I was supposed to be in London for a week to get some work boxed off but it was already time to retreat. I paid £2.85 for a 750ml bottle of water in Euston and got on a silent train to Liverpool Lime Street. Bubble wrap bed soon, boyfriend, Offy, cats. I fit an hour of work in for one of my part-time jobs on the train home. I know I should have just stared out of the window at a blacked out England. I know I should have looked for Mars. But I also knew that if I did an hour yesterday, I wouldn’t have to do an hour today. I could stay in bed. Type this text in the Notes app on my phone. Brace for the pain of chronic fatigue dripping inside me, like an invisible IV that makes me feel like I have the flu multiple times a week.

It’s funny that the events of the day before have already become stories, the people characters, and the art that they were shopping for has expired in my memory. Other things to be dealing with. It’s Saturday night as I type. On Monday morning, I have my assessment for PIP. I went for it once in 2021 when I first got sick. It has taken this many years to feel brave enough to try again and that’s sort of funny as well. Calls and forms and months to see if I will qualify for £72.65 a week. Arbitrary reimbursement for the curse of being chronically ill. It’s only £72.65 and I need it and, yeah, all of this is funny. I won’t ever be the kind of person who can take an art fair like this seriously. We might be in the same building but we’re standing on different planets and I can’t even see the art.

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