Sarah Lefebve

The Park Bench Test


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      To illustrate (no pun intended), until the age of ten (okay, fourteen) I drew people with square heads, because I couldn’t draw circles, and with arms that protruded horizontally out of their bodies, because shoulders and elbows were beyond even comprehension to me.

      But I haven’t even got to the stage yet where I’m being asked by a five-year-old to draw a giraffe on the side of an eggcup and I’m already a disaster.

      Caroline – my new boss – opened Potty Wotty Doodah three years ago, after six years as an art teacher and two years studying business at night school. In other words – she can draw.

      It’s adorable. The walls are covered with rows and rows of shelves filled with every kind of plain white pottery you can imagine – bowls, plates, cups and saucers, salt and pepper pots, cookie jars, money boxes. There are even light switch surrounds, doorknobs and toothbrush holders.

      The far wall is half-decorated with a mosaic of tiles painted by customers since the café opened, while the other half is waiting for the next three years’ worth.

      To the left as you walk in there is a counter where Caroline greets everyone and serves coffee and juice. And in the centre is an island unit – it’s the kind you find in big kitchens, but instead of pots and pans and recipe books it’s filled with picture books, stencils, rubber stamps and tracing paper, and hundreds of bottles of paint. Inspiration Island – that’s what Caroline calls it.

      The rest of the room is filled with pine tables and chairs, a different coloured plastic cloth draped over each table, a miniature pinny hanging from the back of every chair.

      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

      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