As my confidence grew, I drew more purposefully and learned to make quick judgements, processing sensory and visual information at speed into marks and lines. I began to see the bushes everywhere — this rare bounty we had driven so far to gather turned out to be rife, pushing in from behind the crash barriers of the motorways that run into and loop through this city. I hold on to these traces of his voice, the slight breaks in its rise and fall, the pauses, as marked on my memory as the rhythm of creaks on the stair in the house I grew up in, where I lay in bed and heard him climb the stairs to his study at night, to prepare for his performances. I sit on the bench and attempt to draw the bandstand, but I cannot get the proportions right, always it is coming out too constrained, it cannot contain all the arched spaces, and I persist in trying to measure the gaps between the pillars, ignoring the advice I have just given the students. And although they walked along the pavement in groups, their shadows passed in separate single procession — a silent puppet play against the wall.

I made them on torn up strips of old life drawings from twenty years ago, that I did not want to throw away, regretting the waste of good quality paper. Our own numbers feel particularly arbitrary to us and we are determined to be unmoved by them, stubbornly holding this middle ground between them, the timeless ground of a long awaited encounter with a friend, refusing to count the years. There are benches against the house for listening to the music and most years there is dancing on the tarmac. They descended at a diagonal, crossed the bridge and merged with the people waiting on the other side.The pauses are slightly longer, our spoken responses not quite as impulsive, although our laughter is. Friends have travelled from other cities and peopled my rooms with stories of places long unimagined. The young man and woman who work here talk to me about how long they haven’t seen their siblings for, about the difficulty of travel, to home in Thessaloniki, to a brother working in Germany.

I wondered if it was the dark that had done it, or Christmas, or prolonged unhappiness, and of course the added isolation of the pandemic. Later a forensics team came, at least five of them, in white suits and blue gloves, they were in and out of the flat all night. The first walks were mostly about wondering what I wanted to draw as I walked, along with the question ‘how do I draw it? It is true that they seem to be more constant these days, a permanence in their windows, continually painting and working.We told the professor’s wife our Russian legends of oblepikha handed down by grandmothers and mothers.