Puppet Master

Chapter Twenty Four

The artist that she was scheduled to meet was a young street artist from further south of the country. For months, she’d chased him, having seen some of his work on a random visit to London, and immediately she knew that he’d be able to bring the gallery through the slightly rocky patch it had recently been experiencing.

Contemporary art was dying a slow and painful death since the large scale installation pieces that had dominated the market in recent years, and consumers were tiring of the contrived production of postmodern plant pots, and ordinary basin units set within the solid white and stainless environment of the traditional gallery.

Tori had been contemplating this for a while, as she’d noticed sales began to dwindle, and commissions much harder to come by. She was, herself, a very traditional artist, with a design twist, and made a solid regular income from both her sales at the gallery, and illustrations for a publishing company in the city.

But the overall gallery sales were dire, and she knew that to bring in a new crowd, she would have to take her exhibitions to innovative levels. Street art was the perfect way to do that, and Ramsay’s politically challenging pieces would be perfect, but it was notoriously difficult to get an artist of his calibre to even betray his real identity, let alone make commissions from a traditional gallery, and a culture that they were bred to rebel against.

So the meeting was extremely important; she’d designed the exhibition proposal, deciding that she needed to pull a twist onto the traditional set up, as well as a portfolio of marketing strategies and public appearances, that would instantly propel his career.

She’d also estimated his gross sales, and established his personal profit, as well as the gallery commission.

In short, what she held in front of her was going to make a star of the young artist overnight, but she knew he still had reservations about “selling his soul to the industry” as it were.

So, when her mobile let out a shrill tone signifying Jayden’s call, she set it straight to divert, as she just couldn’t afford the distraction. He may have sent her brain cascading down a water slide into dangerous, treacherous, and just plain confused jumbles of thought with this morning’s brand new arena of fucked up, but she couldn’t let him ruin her day, not when so much was riding on it.

From: Jayden Caine

Answer the phone Vittoria! I have twenty spare minutes this afternoon, and I bloody well intend to speak with you!

The first text message arrived as she was pouring herself and her client their second caffetierre of ground coffee, and arranging the biscuits into an attractive design on the generic square plate (it was a habit she’d indulged in since she was a small child, playing with food, she literally couldn’t help herself from making it pretty).

She sighed, exasperated, as nerves pummelled through her body. She was already on edge over this – her very first commissions pitch – and he was making it worse!

Her first response to his treating her like a child was generally to behave like one, she couldn’t help it, she wanted to be everything he needed, and if he needed to be her protector, her guardian then her first instinct was to let him.