The man on his hands and knees in front of me had been there for a few minutes already, but in this establishment that was nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't realize at once that he was asking me something; the Velvet Underground were pounding lugubriously out of the speakers at a high enough volume to drown out anyone speaking in an appropriately servile tone of voice.

"Can I lick your boots clean?"

"I'm sorry, what?" I ducked my head. Rearing up on his knees, he said more loudly:

"Can I lick your boots clean?"

I shrugged. "Be my guest." His face fell. "You filthy little piece of scum," I added, not wanting to disappoint. He cheered up at once and ducked down, tongue poking out of the slit in his leather mask. But just as I turned back to the conversation he had interrupted, a horrible realization struck me.

"Oh my God, they're suede! Stop it! They'll be ruined!" I kicked out involuntarily. He curled over on one side and started moaning:

"Sorry, mistress, sorry, I'm a bad slave, do with me what you will...."

"Do with me what you will?" I said sotto voce to Janey. She shrugged.

"Been reading too much Anne Rice."

"Mrs. Radcliffe, more like." I looked down at the bad slave and, feeling guilty at having deprived him of his fun, prodded his rubber bodysuit with the heel of my boot. He whimpered in ecstasy.

"I never know how they manage to let the sweat out in those things," I said to Janey.

"Probably don't."

"Ick."

"Oh well, at least he didn't claim to be the slave in Pulp Fiction," she said. "I've had three of those already this evening. So unoriginal. I like your dress, by the way."

"Thanks." I looked down at myself complacently. "Makes me feel like Scarlett O'Hara."

She gave me a frankly uncomprehending stare. "Ran it up out of a pair of old curtains, did you? I'd like to see the room they were hung in."

"The lacing, idiot." Without a Mammy to pull me in while I gripped onto the bedpost, I hadn't quite achieved an eighteen-inch waist, but it was still considerably restrained. And my bosom, never insubstantial at the best of times, was now resting precariously just under the top of my leather corset, propped up by what felt like most of the flesh that should have been covering my ribcage.

"Sam!"

I looked around to see a slave heading towards me at full lick, rather like an out-of-control Labrador, dragging his handler behind him on the leash. At first I didn't realize who he was; his features were obscured by two wide strips of leather, one over his eyes, the other over his mouth, secured at the back by a cross-piece. The zips that would have made him blind and dumb were hanging open, and squinting through them I began to distinguish a familiar face. He was wearing a black rubber sleeveless bodysuit, which at least allowed the air around his armpits to circulate.

"Eet's been so long!" he was exclaiming. "How are you?"

With the clue of the accent, I pinned down his identity: Salvatore, Sally to his friends, one of a gang of gay Sicilians who had for that very reason emigrated en masse to London. We had been at art school together, but our paths hadn't crossed for years.

"Hi, Sally." I did my best to kiss him hello, though the straps kept getting in the way. Janey had meanwhile struck up a conversation with some guy who'd been trying to catch her attention for the past half an hour and was now deep in a monologue about the latest power politics at Channel 4; she was a TV script editor. Disturbing her to introduce Sally would have been like breaking into the middle of Mass to ask the priest what the time was.

Sally looked round pleadingly at his handler. "Meestress, thees ees an old friend. May I harmbly talk to her for a few minutes?"

"Only if you obey her every command," said his mistress, handing the leash over to me. Her heels were so high that her calf muscles stood out like clenched fists. I took it gingerly. I've never really liked being responsible for other people.

"Um, buy me a drink," I suggested. "And that's an order."

"Two of the usual," Sally said to the barman. "On my account."

"You have an account here?"

"Not really. I give heem the merney at the end of the evening. I can't carry money een thees." He indicated the latex bodysuit. I saw what he meant.

The barman was already placing two identical concoctions in front of us, the salt rim to the glasses contrasting prettily with the pale aquamarine liquid inside.

"What's that colour?" I said warily, reminded of mouthwash.

"Blue cura\\a231ao," said the barman proudly. "Half and half with the triple sec. They're blue margaritas."

"Aren't they fabulous!" Sally enthused. "Eet's my dreenk of the year."

"Ever since the time some wally brought a bottle of crème de menthe to a cocktail party and made us Peppermint Somethings that tasted like toothpaste and cream, I've stuck to the whisky sours," I said, picking up my glass. I sipped tentatively. "God, this is delicious." Instantly converted, I took a good pull at my straw.

"So, tell me everysing you have been doing," Sally said.

"Oh, it's going OK, I suppose. I've got an exhibition coming up soon and I've finished most of the pieces for it. All of them, really. I'm just tinkering around now."

"Who are you weeth?"

"The Wellington Gallery."

"But that's excellent!"

"I know," I said gloomily. "It's hard to explain without sounding spoilt, but the trouble is ... Sally, do you remember Lee Jackson, who taught us sculpture? I know you only did it for the first year--"

"How do I forget a woman like that?" said Sally rhetorically, lapsing for a moment into the traditions of his culture.

"She said once that the two responses of the hack sculptor, if a piece of work isn't going well, are either to make it big and paint it red, or make loads and fill the room up with them."

"So you are making everysing raid?"

"Nope, it's the second one. I see fifteen mobiles hanging together and I just don't know if I think they're good any more. They look really striking en masse. But anything looks good if you multiply it by fifteen and hang it from the ceiling: goldfish bowls, bits of ironmongery, even cocktail glasses-- why are you staring at me like that?"

Sally's eyes were bugging out through the zips as if he were a Hanoverian king with water on the brain. The very small part of my mind which was not occupied with the misery of my artistic crisis wondered how he zipped his eyes shut without catching those long Sicilian eyelashes in the teeth. Be a waste to pull them out.

"You said you are making mobiles now?"

"That's right."

"Guarda bene, we must meet up and talk about thees. Can I come round to your stoodio? Are the mobiles there?"

"Yes, but--"

"I remember your work well. I liked what you did very march. Very march."

"Well, it's completely changed," I said instantly, not being one of those people who hoards their juvenilia. I'm the opposite: I need to keep moving on. Preferably as Juggernaut, with spikes on my wheels to shred my old work as I go. At art school our painting teacher made us bring in what we considered the best of our current work, then announced that we were going to build a bonfire in the yard with the paintings as fuel. I was the only one who jumped at the idea. Move on or die. Thank God I had a gallery and could get rid of my mobiles. I knew artists who, still unrepresented, lived with the pieces they had made years ago, unable to sell them. As far as I was concerned they might as well have been living in crypts surrounded by mouldering corpses.

Sally shrugged his shoulders, raising his hands, palm up, in a gesture I remembered well. It meant, "So what?"

"Why do you want to see them?" I asked warily.

"I am set designing now, and I am doing well." Sally had none of the English inhibitions about blowing one's own trumpet. It was very refreshing. "I am just to start-- just about to start," he corrected himself, "to wairk on a new production of the Dream. That ees Midsummer Night's Dream, if you do not wairk in the theatre."

"Thanks, I didn't think you meant I Dream of Jeannie."

"Cosa? Anyway, we want it to be modern, modern, modern. Also we have some money, we have thees nice big theatre with a proscenio-- the Cross-- and so for instance we can permit oursailves to fly some people. I have been theenking about thees for a long time, how to do it in an interesting way, like Peter Brook with the trapezes. And now you come to tell me that you are making mobiles, and this whole idea explodes in my haid ... They are beeg, aren't they? You always make theengs beeg."

"Pretty big. But Sally, even if you like them, the last thing I want to do is start making more for a theatre production. I was thinking about a holiday. Somewhere warm, where the boys are pretty and the drinks are cold."

"I come weeth you! I know just the place. After we've done the show."

"Oh, for God's sake--"

Sally's leash was abstracted from my hand.

"Was he well behaved?" his mistress asked me. Her lipstick was dark plum and so fresh that it glistened stickily, even in the dim light. Either she had touched it up recently, or she had been at the newly tapped virgin's blood in the back room.

"Not at all," I said vindictively, "he's been nagging at me and won't take no for an answer."

She drew in her breath sharply and tugged Sally's collar so hard he nearly fell off the bar stool.

"I see you still wilfully fail to respond to discipline!" she said, dragging him off with her. It was a choke leash; his half-strangled gurgle of pain wasn't faked. "Down!"

"I'll reeng you!" he croaked at me, hobbling off on all fours, and providing me in the process with a nice view of his bottom through the lacing on the back of his suit.

I stared after them, knowing that he would. Sally didn't have my number, but that wouldn't stop him; he'd just ring round everyone he knew till he found someone who did, persistent little bugger that he was. Well, he would just have to take no for an answer this time. There was no way I was making any more mobiles for a very long time, let alone ones specially customized so that people answering to the names of Peaseblossom and Mustardseed could use them as tarted-up hoists. I had my pride.

"Who was that?" said Janey later.

I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Sally and his latest brilliant idea. To my surprise, she said immediately that she considered it to be by no means a bad scheme.

I stared at her blankly.

"Are you serious? You know what kind of state I'm in! The last thing I want to do is start bastardizing my own work for a bunch of vampires in a theatre production. I want to get away, far, far away--"

"Where the boys are warm and the drinks are cold. I know, you keep saying so. And it'd do you good. You haven't had a boyfriend in ages, not since you dumped that perfectly nice one--"

"He was too straight," I said sullenly. "He wanted to take me to his parents' vicarage in Sussex for Sunday lunch, for God's sake. I know he was a nice guy, but we didn't have that much in common apart from sex. And OK," I admitted, anticipating her objection, "that was great at first, but it always tails off after a few months, you know? Familiarity breeds not a lot in that department. Anyway, I've been working. I haven't had time to think about anything else. I told you, all I need is a holiday."

"But you can't just yet. You said you had to be in London for at least another couple of months to finish things off and do the catalogue notes. Maybe this could be just the thing to get you out of a rut. You know you're happiest when you're working."

This is the trouble with friends who've known you for too long; they are unanswerably well informed on your best interests. (Also they remember your entire sexual history better than you do, and are all too willing to fill in the lacunae that you were hoping would be left blank by posterity.)

"What production is it?" she was asking.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream, at the Cross."

"Really!" Her blue eyes widened into saucers. "Helen auditioned for that! Wouldn't it be nice if the two of you could work together?"

Janey, bless her, was an eternal optimist. She would never see that Helen, her girlfriend, nursed a cordial loathing for me which was her normal response to someone she couldn't influence with her personal brand of synthetic charm. I wasn't that fond of Helen either, but I had more justification for my dislike, including the episode where Helen had left Janey for a TV producer called Kurt (a man, nota bene) and the promise of a leading role in the series he was then working on. The part hadn't materialized and Helen had come back to Janey, not noticeably sadder or wiser but definitely contrite, promising to be faithful from then on. I suspected that Helen's definition of faithfulness was looser than the elastic on Mick Jagger's underpants, but had not shared this observation with Janey, not wishing to destroy the friendship. A lack of this kind of maturity and judgement had imperilled relations with another good friend of mine recently, and I try never to make the same mistake twice.

"What part was she up for?" I asked.

"She wants to do Titania. She thought she gave a pretty good reading, but she couldn't tell what the director was thinking. It's Melanie Marsh. I haven't met her, but she's supposed to be very good. Helen said she was a cold fish."

Which, translated, meant that Melanie Marsh hadn't responded when Helen had flirted with her. Maybe she would cast her as Helena, the girl nobody fancied.

"Anyway," Janey was saying with quiet persistence, "it won't hurt you to show this Sally guy round your studio. What have you got to lose?"

I shrugged. "I'm just so sick of my work, Janey. I feel completely burnt out. Sometimes I wonder if I've just been busking along on one good idea up till now. After everything happened with Nat, I started working hell-for-leather to distract myself, and now I feel like my energy's run out."

"It's been a while." Janey looked concerned. Nat's wasn't a name I mentioned very often.

"A couple of years. Sometimes it feels like a couple of weeks ... If it hadn't been for him I'd never have been making mobiles. I should tell the whole story to this idiot who's writing the catalogue."

"For God's sake don't!" Janey went pale under her powder. She had the prettiest, plumpest little eighteenth-century face, with rounded cheeks and cupid's-bow lips. Her hair was fair and wispy, her skin like expensive white velvet worn to the softest of downs. I always imagined her in a gilt-framed portrait reclining on a chaise longue, fanning herself, wearing blue silk and eating fairy cakes. Even the rubber frock she was wearing tonight was so layered with chiffon and draped with necklaces that you could hardly see its origins. She was one of my best and oldest friends and just now she was giving me her special elder-sister, concerned-about-my-soul look. I wilted under the force of her solicitude.

"That's why you haven't been seeing anyone, isn't it? You've gone all morbid. You've been thinking about him."

"How could I help it, Janey?" I said simply, abandoning my defences. "For the past few months I've been in my studio, working non-stop, living like a hermit ... and sometimes it seems to me that making the mobiles is just a way of balancing out what happened with Nat ... How could I not think about him?"

But Janey was looking so worried now that I promptly reneged on my last words. I've never had much time for confiding in people; either that, or it's never seemed to work. Which comes to much the same thing in the end.

"I didn't mean it," I said lightly. "I'm just sick of my work, that's all."

"Don't worry. My writers go on like this all the time." Janey twisted one of her many silver bracelets and gave me a sibylline look. "What you need is a complete change of project. You'll see. Something to get your teeth into."

"What I need," I corrected, "is another one of these." I waved my glass at the barman. "Two more blue margaritas, please."

"Two more what?"

"You'll like them. I guarantee it."

I hadn't had people round to my studio in so long I had forgotten what kind of effect it usually has on visitors, even without fifteen very large silver mobiles hanging in clusters from the ceiling, moving gently in the breeze from the open door. The heap of power tools, welding masks and work gloves below the mobiles looked as though it was growing up to meet them: stalactites and stalagmites. Never tidy at the best of times, the studio had completely let itself go over the past few months, as, indeed, had I. At least I had been forced to shower regularly, remove the metal shavings from my hair and cleanse my face after long stints with the welding mask. The kitchen hadn't been so lucky; I had been living off takeaways to avoid having to clean work-related debris off the surfaces. That's the trouble with these open-plan spaces: everything goes everywhere....

"You leeve here too?" was the first thing Sally said, in an incredulous tone of voice. I had heard this from too many people already to find it offensive; and, besides, he had been standing for a very complimentary length of time with his head cocked backward, staring at the mobiles.

"Up there." I gestured to the sleeping platform, built twelve feet up the far wall. "I wake up in the middle of the night and my head's on a level with most of the mobiles. It's beautiful, particularly when there's moonlight, but I can never get away from them either. Sometimes they'll be moving, because there's a wind through the skylights, and I imagine they're talking to each other. I always think they're alive, once I've hung them."

That was a particularly badly structured sentence, I reflected. Still, Sally didn't seem to have noticed. Melanie Marsh, introduced by Sally as MM, said nothing either, but although I had only known her for five minutes or so, I was beginning to suspect that this was her modus operandi: speak only when you have something to say. The cowboy ethic.

"Can I go up the ladder to see them closer?" Sally asked eagerly.

"Sure. Just don't look at the sheets. I know your sensibilities are delicate."

Sally spent the next few minutes hanging off the ladder that led up to my sleeping platform, squinting at the mobiles nearest to him, looking like a monkey with a new set of toys. Feeling it incumbent upon me, I went over to what was now euphemistically known as the kitchen area and put on the kettle. One thing I always had in stock was tea.

Having people round was making me step back and take a good look at the scuzzy, bachelor-boy lifestyle-- empty beer cans, takeaways and dirty sheets-- which I had elected recently. Enough was enough. As soon as the mobiles were out of here I would do a major clean-up. Perhaps I should hire one of those industrial cleaning hoses and blitz the place.

"Do you want some tea?" I said to Melanie Marsh.

"Yes please." She remained where she was, in the centre of the room, surrounded by mobiles, her feet squared apart, hands in her pockets, rocking slowly backwards and forwards, eyes still, almost blank. Her looks were nondescript-- mousy hair pinned at the back of her head, average-to-thin figure-- and her clothes equally so. She wore jeans, work-boots and layers of sweaters. If I had had to describe her it would not have been by a list of physical features but her aura, the sense she gave of calm and control, of harnessed energy. She was someone who knew what she was doing, and if she didn't, she knew at least which path she needed to take. I couldn't help being impressed by her.

I brought the tea over and we stood together, sipping from our mugs, looking at the sculptures. Through some strange osmosis of Melanie Marsh's aura I found myself relaxing in her company, able to detach myself for the first time from this batch of work; I felt the first faint fraying of the cord that tied me too close to them, the beginning of the process of letting go. Until Sally clambered down from the ladder and bounded over to us we didn't say a word.

"Tea's over there," I said, nodding.

"Thank you, I do not dreenk tea all the time," Sally said haughtily, "I have my coffee een the morning and poi basta."

"You wait till we start work properly, Sal," Melanie Marsh said affectionately. "You'll be at the tea with the rest of us."

She turned to me for the first time, cradling the mug in her hands.

"I like these a lot," she said. Later, watching her in rehearsals, I was to realize that this was probably her highest unit of praise. "I can see exactly where Sally's going with the idea."

"We raise them for the scenes at the court, so they become like lampadari," Sally cut in excitedly. "How do you say-- hanging lights--"

"Chandeliers."

"Chandeliers. Maybe remove some, I weell have to see. Then for the scenes in the wood, they come down, the lovers find their path through them, they lose themselves-- maybe Puck comes down on one. With the lighting eet weell look like magic."

"We have a respectable budget for this one," Melanie Marsh explained to me. "An old benefactor of the theatre left a legacy for them to put on one Shakespeare a year, so we hit the jackpot. We can afford to fly the fairies-- Puck at least. It would mean designing a mobile for him to ride on. Quite a challenge, I imagine. I don't even know if it's feasible."

"Oh no, it should be fairly straightforward," I reassured her. "Obviously the design would be very much simplified anyway-- you can't have all those contraptions round things that are going up and down and might get caught." I gestured to the silver wire, like planetary rings, which surrounded most of my mobiles. "We'd have to strip them down and stylize them. Puck's would have to be strengthened and I'd beat the surface flat around the chain, or maybe have two long dents for him to put his feet into."

"But would it look like the other mobiles? Because it would be good if the audience didn't guess in advance what was going to happen, seeing one that was a bit different."

"No, there's no reason for it to show at all. The dents would be on the top, near the chain, so to see them you'd have to get much closer than an audience would be. I can sketch it out for you if you'd like...."

My voice tailed off. Sally was grinning at me, showing most of his teeth and quite a lot of gum.

"Well, I'm very pleased," said Melanie Marsh, having finessed me so neatly I had only seen the trick once she had taken it. "The best thing initially would be for Sally and you to put your heads together for the design, and then he can draw up something for me to see." She crossed over to the kitchen and put the mug down. "You could do the work in the theatre workshop, if you want. It might make sense. We can clear most of the room for you. After all, the mobiles will form a large part of the set. Though if you'd prefer to work on your own, that's fine, of course. It just occurred to me that you're rather out of space here...."

Strangely enough, it was the idea of working in company, a group of loud, busy people in a constant flurry of activity, that swung the decision for me; that, and the escape route it offered from the studio. The mobiles would have to remain here for quite a while until the gallery was ready to take them, and the less time I spent with them now, the fewer doubts I could have about whether they were really finished, and the better I-- and they-- would be.

"No, that would probably work very well," I said slowly, feeling my next few months swirl around me and reform into a new and interesting pattern.

"Great. I'll look to see something from the two of you by the end of next week, say. Why don't you come to the read-through? We can talk afterwards, and you might find it interesting. Sal will tell you when. I'm very glad to have you on board, Sam." She shook my hand. Her face was round and pale and as smoothly inexpressive as a nun's, but now it broke into a smile. She moved towards the door. Looking back, she said:

"And call me MM, won't you? Everybody does."