Astrid worked for the Roehampton Modern Art Gallery, otherwise affectionately known as the RMAG. Some unwise marketing employee had written a rap about it, which had been used in TV and radio commercials alike, to draw in foot traffic. The rap rhymed RMAG with swag a whole bunch of times and it made Astrid cringe with second-hand embarrassment when she even thought about it.
RMAG wasn’t an especially large art gallery, but it had a lot of changing exhibits and installations. As such, it was a fairly popular tourist attraction. It also had a lot of school tour bookings. Astrid did a lot of things at the gallery, but part of her job was giving tours to school trips. There were regular tour guides who led the tourists and the seniors groups through, but Astrid was somehow in charge of the school trips. Her boss, Esther Crane, maintained that it was because Astrid had a way with children. Astrid could read through the lines. What Esther really meant was that Astrid didn’t take shit from annoying elementary school-aged boys who snickered at the artwork depicting naked people.
There were no school tours during the summer, for obvious reasons, but the occasional camp came through. One such tour came through toward the end of July. The Roehampton Children’s Summer Art Camp, or the RCSAC as some other unwise marketing individual insisted on calling it, came for a tour every week of every summer vacation. It was usually fine because the number of kids clamouring to get into art camp was not high. Most kids wanted to go to swim camp or pony camp or the illustrious soccer camp. Astrid knew this because at least one kid per summer told her that they’d wanted to go to one of those camps instead. This summer was no different. Some kid with a lisp and a turtle-themed backpack told her that he’d rather be at soccer camp. Quite frankly, Astrid wished he was at soccer camp as well, but she kept that to herself.
Since RCSAC wasn’t a very popular camp, there weren’t many kids on the tour, which suited Astrid just fine. During the school year, the school trips that came to RMAG were enormous. There were tonnes of kids and a lot of them had a tendency to shout. The kids attending RCSAC for the summer were quite calm and timid. All except for one.
“Do you like it here?” The girl asked Astrid within the first two minutes of the tour.
“Yes,” Astrid answered. “I think the art is beautiful and I’m constantly learning new things.”
Only parts of that were true at different times. Some of the art was genuinely quite ugly and she already knew a lot.
“But do you like it here?” The kid pressed, leaning close and peering up at Astrid’s face. “Are you happy with how your life has turned out? Is this what you wanted for yourself? Is this as big as your dreams get?”
To say Astrid was startled would be an understatement. The camp counsellor, a funky woman named Pam with an angled bob and some chunky cat eye glasses, laughed nervously. Pam reached out and patted the girl uncertainly on the shoulder.
“Now, now, Hilary, that’s enough,” she instructed weakly. “Leave the poor woman alone. She’s going to tell us all about this cool art. Isn’t that fun?”
“Not really,” Hilary answered bluntly. She was as honest as she was alarmingly perspicacious.
“We love art! That’s why we’re here!” Pam tried again.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Hilary returned. “I’m here because my mom said Shark Camp wasn’t a real thing.”
Astrid foresaw the tour ending poorly even before it did.
Hilary, as Astrid quickly learned, was a truly terrifying child. She was only seven years old, but she seemed to know a lot more than most of the other seven year olds in the group. The rest of the kids at camp were shy, artsy introverts, who barely looked at Astrid let alone asked her why so many artists were so fascinated by boobs. Astrid had found that a difficult question to answer. Pam was no help at all. Astrid got the impression that Pam was too busy counting the minutes until Hilary was gone to focus on much else, especially now that there was another adult in the room, supposed to be teaching them things.
It was a long day. Astrid was relieved when Pam left with the RCSAC kids and then she was even more relieved when her shift ended and she got to go home. She would be leading another tour to RCSAC kids next week, but there was very little chance that Hilary would be there as most people tended not to sign their kids up for two whole weeks of art camp. Art camp didn’t burn energy quite the same way as soccer camp and Astrid gathered that was a primary motivator in most parent’s decisions when picking summer camps for their children to attend. Having had a seven year old ask her if she felt like she was living up to her potential and fulfilling all her dreams, Astrid was certain her own future children would basically never stop playing soccer.
When Astrid returned home, there were three extra sets of shoes by the door and two pairs were quite small. One was a pair of light-up dinosaur sneakers and one was a pair of tiny, black Vans. There were voices coming from further into the living room. Astrid wandered in to find Hilary from RCSAC sitting on her living room floor next to a smaller, very similar-looking boy, who was chewing on a crayon. There was a woman sitting on the couch across from Tallulah and beside Priscilla, who looked quite similar to them both, but not quite as much as Tallulah and Priscilla looked like each other.
“Hey, Art Lady,” Hilary greeted her, offering her a suspicious frown. “Are you following me?”
“Not even a little bit,” Astrid answered. She looked to Tallulah and then Priscilla for an explanation.
“This is our roommate Astrid,” Priscilla said to the woman beside her, who she then gestured to and looked back at Astrid. “This is our older sister Cynthia and her two kids, Hilary and Harris. But I guess you already knew that.”
“Hilary came to the gallery today with the rest of her art camp friends,” Astrid clarified. She tried to keep her tone neutral, so that neither Tallulah nor Priscilla would know how she really felt about Hilary’s trip to the gallery, but she gathered they could tell anyway. Maybe they had just assumed.
“You put her in art camp?” Tallulah asked Cynthia incredulously. “Why would you think that was a good idea?”
“Well, she loves scissors and she keeps trying to glue her brother to things,” Cynthia answered with a sigh, as if she was being harassed.
“I wanted to go to Shark Camp,” Hilary piped up from the floor.
“That’s not a real thing,” Cynthia sighed again.
“Girl, the last thing you need is access to sharks,” Tallulah told Hilary. “You’re already like one white cat away from becoming a Bond villain.”
“You should’ve put Harris in art camp,” Priscilla told Cynthia, waving a hand at Harris. “Look, he loves crayons. And he’s made so much progress. Remember when he used to exclusively put them in his nose? Look at him now!”
Cynthia sighed for a third time, somehow managing to sound even more long-suffering and tired.
“Come on, kids, gather your stuff,” Cynthia instructed, pushing herself up off the couch. “We’re leaving Aunt Priscilla and Aunt Tallulah now until they have children of their own and can understand how I suffer.”
Hilary clambered up off the floor and walked over to her mother. She patted her gently on the hand.
“Buck up, Cynthia,” she told her. “You’re fine.”
And then she basically dragged her younger brother to the door to put their shoes on. Cynthia waved good-bye to all three of them left in the living room and then left with her two children.
“Your niece is a terrifying child,” Astrid informed Priscilla and Tallulah bluntly. Tallulah only laughed.
“You should see her when she’s hungry,” was Priscilla’s upsetting response.
The Roehampton Chronicle 