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The London Magazine | June/July 2024 Then he said: It also means you don’t have a boss, not really. Like, you’re in charge of your own destiny here. No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. Years later, while working a temp job at another hybrid ethical advertising practice, whose directors all wore suits to work and underpaid their junior staff, I would remember that moment, and how I took it for granted. Don’t worry. It’s not all like this. I’ll get to the bad thing, I promise. It’s coming. I had been there three months when one of the junior creatives, Gael, asked me to help him on a project he was working on. Gael was five years older than me, serious, elegant and razor sharp. We ate lunch together in the park by the office. I guess you could say we became friends. The project was for a site that was in a patch of woodland on the far eastern edge of the city. Gael and I would take the tube east to visit the site, travelling to the end of the line, to where London wasn’t really London at all anymore, but somewhere else; the countryside. Those parts of London-not-London are like a different world, somewhere that’s between places; not really anywhere at all. I always wondered how people could just live there, going about their daily lives as if there was nothing weird about that. Gael had designed a series of installations which would be placed throughout the woodland. These installations would replicate oldfashioned interior décor; bring things outside that should really have been inside. They would be fused with the natural surroundings, mostly in tree stumps or rocks or dead trees, and would form a trail through the woods that local residents could discover. There were codes to scan that gave you information about the client, but you could simply enjoy the trail without these. It would be charming and delightful and uncanny and interesting. At the centre of the trail was an ornate ladder that Gael had designed the year before. It looked like the type of ladder you’d find in an old-fashioned library – you know, the kind with casters that slides along the bookshelves – although it was cast in wrought iron and went straight up into a tree. The ladder was there to invite passers-by to climb up into the tree; showing them a way up into the upper branches that would have been otherwise inaccessible from the ground. The branches at the top of the tree looked 10
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Claire Carroll | There Or Not There too flimsy, so he didn’t think anyone had tried yet. But in any case, Gael had said to me, on that first visit to the site, I think it’s quite interesting to have a ladder that doesn’t lead anywhere. I agreed with him, but then, I always agreed with him. We were to install ornate bathroom taps into a piece of rock that sat near a stream, brass doorknobs into the side of trees to make it look like they might open up. We had a ceramic basin, square like a Belfast sink, that we would set into a tree stump. Do you think people will like it? I asked Gael as we took the Tube back from a site visit one afternoon. The trail; the installations I mean. Yeah, he said looking up from the email he was typing rapidly on his phone. Well, they should anyway. It’s a really cool project. He smiled at me, reassuringly, and went back to his phone. I looked out of the windows as the land edged past. The Tube trains roamed over ground out there, before burrowing under the city again. I wondered how he could be so sure that people would like what we were doing in that scrap of woodland. I wondered how we could be sure of anything. The designs were nearing completion, but there was still something missing. The weeks rolled on in the studio, and Gael made sketches and mood boards whilst I hovered and filed things away, brought coffee for meetings with clients, played with the creatives’ children on school inset days. A week before the installation date, I arrived at work to find Gael in the office, the first one there. On his desk was a cardboard cube; a box. About the size that might contain a mug from a gift shop. Look, he said. Delia has said we can have this. For the nature trail, I mean. Delia was one of the founders of the practice. We hardly ever saw her as she was usually giving talks at conferences, or lecturing. When we did see her, it was fleeting. Chunky glasses and red lipstick and vetiver and then gone. I went over to the desk. Gael opened the box. Inside, on a blur of cotton wool, was a human eyeball. It gazed up at the ceiling, glistening. It was completely real in every way. Except it was four times the size it should be. Gael put in his hand and slowly, carefully, pulled the eye out of the box, 11

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The London Magazine | June/July 2024

Then he said: It also means you don’t have a boss, not really. Like, you’re in charge of your own destiny here. No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.

Years later, while working a temp job at another hybrid ethical advertising practice, whose directors all wore suits to work and underpaid their junior staff, I would remember that moment, and how I took it for granted.

Don’t worry. It’s not all like this. I’ll get to the bad thing, I promise. It’s coming.

I had been there three months when one of the junior creatives, Gael, asked me to help him on a project he was working on. Gael was five years older than me, serious, elegant and razor sharp. We ate lunch together in the park by the office. I guess you could say we became friends. The project was for a site that was in a patch of woodland on the far eastern edge of the city. Gael and I would take the tube east to visit the site, travelling to the end of the line, to where London wasn’t really London at all anymore, but somewhere else; the countryside. Those parts of London-not-London are like a different world, somewhere that’s between places; not really anywhere at all. I always wondered how people could just live there, going about their daily lives as if there was nothing weird about that.

Gael had designed a series of installations which would be placed throughout the woodland. These installations would replicate oldfashioned interior décor; bring things outside that should really have been inside. They would be fused with the natural surroundings, mostly in tree stumps or rocks or dead trees, and would form a trail through the woods that local residents could discover. There were codes to scan that gave you information about the client, but you could simply enjoy the trail without these. It would be charming and delightful and uncanny and interesting. At the centre of the trail was an ornate ladder that Gael had designed the year before. It looked like the type of ladder you’d find in an old-fashioned library – you know, the kind with casters that slides along the bookshelves – although it was cast in wrought iron and went straight up into a tree. The ladder was there to invite passers-by to climb up into the tree; showing them a way up into the upper branches that would have been otherwise inaccessible from the ground. The branches at the top of the tree looked

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