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Adam Thorpe
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much mist at one point it
was like Barnett Newman’s
Stations of the Cross
.
When she pointed this
out, Jasper just nodded.
‘Why are you frowning
at me?’ he now asks. The
train is going at crawling
pace.
‘I’m not
at
you anything,’
shesays. ‘Privatethoughts.’
‘A peseta for ’em, bitch.
Wiv interest. No diss me,
yeah?’
Jasper kisses her on the
forehead. He is a posh,
but she didn’t go with him
for that, whatever her old
friends think. They reckon
he’s pretty cool and
gorgeous – which he is.
Pwhoar, they tweet, he’s
fit. Like they can’t invent
their own sentences?
But that isn’t the reason,
either. It’s because he is
so mysterious behind it,
behind all the posh crap.
He was bullied at boarding
school
(over-sensitive),
wandered
into
really
serious
whoa-no-way
chems, was cleaned out
by Mummy and Daddy,
went off to the Blackfoot
Reservation thirty years
too late but came back
sensible. He even got rid
of his undercut.
And now he’s a really
brilliant graphic artist
down in London, freelance,
with his own agency,
getting slowly known and
admired. Right at present
it’s pamphlets for a
VisitEngland assignment, if
he beats the competition,
but you have to start
somewhere. His agency is
called Disruptive Pattern
Material, the official name
for camouflage, or
DPM
on the logo. Brilliant. OK,
the agency is just him,
with herself answering
emails and tidying up the