Free Poppyland by Raffaella Barker

changed gear with snow after Christmas and now seems set to stay for ever. The pressure drops in the atmosphere and is mirrored by the mood of mankind. No one ischeerful, and the small act of putting one foot in front of another is such a big deal that some days I don’t get round to doing it and I just stay in bed.
    The only way to breathe outside is through a scarf, for the chill damp of the air on the back of the throat is suffocating, and the whole population is coughing. It seems that the city has gone back one hundred years in time to the cloying, slow poison of coal-fuelled smog. I have been in a bad mood for weeks, and it shows no sign of lifting now as I let myself in to my studio, stamping my feet in pooled melting snow inside the main doors. The walk here from Jerome’s apartment where I live now takes about twenty minutes, long enough for the chill in the air to penetrate to my bones. As soon as I’m in the building the tension of my body in battle with the cold drops, and I begin overheating as I climb the stairs, peeling off hat and gloves, unzipping my coat, weighed down by bulky annoying layers and the sheer volume of all I am wearing.
    In the studio, a pale stillness sits like dust on every surface of the room, thick and untouched even on the walls. I haven’t been here for a few days, and my absence fills my work place. The studio is on the fourth floor of an old warehouse a block from the Hudson, and has a jagged view between buildings of a sliver of Lower Manhattan and the vast river. This has been my own space since I moved to New York more than ten years ago and it has made it possible for me to work no matter what else has happened in my life. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had lost the space; I might have given up painting and got a regularjob. Things might have been different, but I found it in my first week here through Dorelia, one of the girls I shared my first apartment with. She was a dancer in a club and her boyfriend worked in this building, running a business making rubber fetish dresses. I sublet from him and his partner Stephan and I painted the catwalk for their mad fashion shows for a few years. Somewhere I’ve still got a black rubber dress, dangling in my wardrobe as shiny as a pod of seaweed but smelling of the talcum powder I had to dust inside whenever I was putting it on. Unlike the dress, the rubber business is long gone and most of the spaces around me are offices. I lost touch with Dorelia’s boyfriend after she split up with him, but Stephan and I stayed friends and he stripped every vestige of rubber out of his wardrobe, and his soul, or so I used to tease him, and started working in an art gallery. His boyfriend, Ike, and Jerome both work for the same oil company, so Stephan and I are in the same situation, as we often discuss. Stephan is always broke and relies on Ike to bail him out, and my rent for the studio creeps up and up and now I couldn’t afford an apartment of my own if I didn’t live with Jerome. It’s not an ideal situation, but this studio is my security and I love it here. I guess I could move in here if all else fails.
    I kick off my boots and light the gas stove to put on the kettle, each action blowing life and movement into the stillness. The gas flutters, the kettle sits silent for a moment and then, quietly at first but in an increasingly urgent crescendo, begins its slow cacophony of grunts and wheezes.
    The phone rings as I unpeel layer after layer of outdoor clothing. I am almost down to the soft stuff – my actual clothes, thin and light and relevant to the shape of my body. Although the studio is still chilly, I find it hard to breathe as the furnace of my blood rushes to the surface of my skin, turning it lobster-red like a smack on the cheek. The innermost layers of my clothing, normally lovely silky garments I get a thrill just from the joy of having next to my skin, feel loathsomely like fur.