I feel like that woman in Manet's Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, except in a studio in Shoreditch, and with messier hair.
Nevertheless, I am standing behind a bar (aka a kitchen worktop) with several rows of wine glasses in front of me and the choice of white, red or water in a loft the size of a five-a-side football pitch.
Every now and again there's a sort of grandfather clock chime (I may be making this up, but either way it's a noise) which heralds another guest, several storeys down at street level. Some minutes later, a body or two appears in the doorway and, as if genetically programmed, makes its way towards me. I hand them a glass and they go off into the throng which divides unequally into two: friends of the artist Graham Rawle and People from Atlantic (though the categories are not mutually exclusive).
The space is amazing - both cosily and quirkily domestic and the sort of place that makes your teeth ache with envy, especially if you spent any time in an Art School and ever had dreams of having your own studio. It makes my cupboard with a window in it and the garden shed with the table top press that is now buried underneath the lawn mower, pale into insignificance in the way that The Sahara is a desert and a sand box is where kids play with buckets and spades. I'm still in the sandbox, making pies. He's at the far end of the Saharan room with an enormous record collection, a brace of drawing boards, display cases of the sort you used to find in old draper's shops full of dolls and old toys set out in a little shrine to a 1950s childhood, and a jumble of disembodied dummies.
I mean, apart, that is, from the people from Atlantic.
These dummies are blank faced and fixed-eyed.
No, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic. (They're the ones with glasses in their hands.)
I'm referring to the torsos with gaping sockets, separated heads and loose arms and legs that are strung up from the ceiling like laundry hung out to dry. It's a magician's workship. A bizarre magician's workshop. Little Dorothy from Graham's Wizard of Oz illustrations poses in one of the shop cabinets next to the threadbare lion frozen in an open mouthed roar that still manages to look more pained than punitive. When I was a kid we had a doll that went on top of the Christmas Tree every year called John (so, who says angels have to be girls - ever heard of Gabriel?). John had plastic moulded hair onto which someone (me) had once stuck cotton wool, was cross eyed with one eyelid that was forever winking, and his limbs were attached to his body with elastic bands that perished annually and had to be replaced. I always wondered what happened to him. Now I know. Graham's studio is where the old, broken and bald go to live again...
And yes, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic.
We're out in force. Everybody wanted to come to this party. A large number of us are wearing silver shoes (in the book Dorothy's slippers were silver not ruby, however in the, then, exciting new world of Technicolor film, silver would have shown up on the screen as grey) although we managed to persuade MD that motorcycle boots were perhaps, in his case, more appropriate.
Beside the dummies (yep, okay, fair enough, this time I do mean two or three of us from Atlantic) twinkles the fantastic Emerald City itself. It's exquisite. Forget having a studio. If you ever wanted a model railway, or a toy farm, or a doll's house, or you ever watched Blue Peter and made a Sindy bedroom out of a cardboard box and a washing-up bottle (I confess, that sad girl was me) you can't help falling in love with the Emerald City. I want to live there. Okay, well as a consolation prize, if you insist, I'll take the studio...
In the meantime, I go back to the bar and keep pouring drinks.
More and more of Graham's friends arrive. I see a cool blonde with whom I think I may once have gone to Dorset for a weekend. She's a friend of a friend, who isn't any longer. I say hello in that awful way you do at parties when you have to first remind the person who you are, and they still look at you blankly. (To me this is called introducing yourself.) So you're stammering, clutching at any topic of conversation you can grab out of the air ('nice space' - 'mmmm very nice') and saying something stupid like: 'and how's Louise?' (the person who organised the Dorset weekend) when I saw her myself two weeks ago and I know she's fine.
I'm fine.
Lost weekend in Dorset woman's fine.
Louise is fine, her husband is fine and her kids are fine.
We're all really, really fine.
Groan.
I hate parties.
Why am I cursed with this memory that never forgets a face and the urge to go and speak to that face, just because I recognise it? It's an affliction. A mental bloody illness. In this way I once bounded up to Anna Chancellor in the actor in Portobello Road and asked her how she was because I thought I knew her. I did. From Four Weddings and a Funeral. In this way I strike up conversations with women on the bus who I am sure I know really, really well. And I do. They work on the tills at Sainsbury's. If I was once introduced to someone at a lecture at St Antony's College in Oxford in 1985 and they turn up in the offices at Atlantic Books, believe me, I will remember them.
Them, me? Not so much.
I seem to be one of those bland people that your memory erases like bleach does a stain.
So back behind the bar.
Red or white?
And, damn it, there's another face I recognise.
Don't do it Marion.
Just say no.
But I'm sure...
No, walk away from the lightbulb moment. Do not introduce yourself. You do not know this person - it is a mere quirk of memory. Walk away...
But I'm off asking Graham: 'Is that your brother?' while referring to a man who looks exactly like Graham but a little older, darker and more fashionably stubbled.
Graham sighs long sufferingly, used to this, and agrees.
'I wondered why you looked so familiar, and now I know, it's because of your brother.' (And your genius and boyish good looks, charm, modesty and talent.) But just to be on the safe side, I investigate further: 'Didn't he used to be on Drop the Dead Donkey?'
Graham nods, thinking, ah yes, another star * er.
And I'm off, across the floor in seconds, not to Graham's brother but to his wife who is wearing her mother's vintage frock - a Biba original. Sigh. If I wore my mother's vintage clothing I'd be in a pre-war wrap around pinnie with a turban and a fag in the corner of my mouth.
'Didn't you used to live in Highlever Road?' I gush.
'Yes,' she agrees, smiling (smiling - take note lost weekend in Dorset person) and within seconds we have established that we were neighbours, and that my best friend just bought their house, and, two more handshakes later, I meet Robin and her husband (okay faces I get but names? Don't even know my own after two glasses of wine) who live round the corner from me and whose kids and mine have shared a primary school.
Mwa, mwa. I'm connected.
and I love parties.
