“I’ll do it, just don’t tell anyone.”

Theresa was stirring hot chocolate with a spoon. Outside the café a cycle courier was entering the Barbican. At the table next to Theresa and A., a boy was writing a text message on his mobile phone.

“You’re not going to put my name on it or anything like that?”

“Along with your phone number? No. Everything is untitled.”

“You mustn’t tell anyone. Don’t tell my parents. I’m not even going to tell my boyfriend. He’ll kill me. He’ll stop me for sure.”

She spooned the cream under the surface.

“Seven pounds fifty an hour? That new job must pay well. That’s what you get for working evenings, I suppose. I could use the money. I’ve got university next month. I need to save. I was meant to get an office job this summer but I didn’t want to. My boss wanted me to come back to the place I used to work last summer.”

“You didn’t want to?”

“He was touching me up. I mean, not even subtly, just, you know.” She pressed her hands over the front of her breasts. “He’s old enough to be my father. Anyway, it was so boring just filing and answering the telephone. I’m a bright girl, you know?”

She lifted hot chocolate to her lips with a spoon.

“It’s not going to be too cold, is it? It’s almost autumn. I walk around the house with no clothes but there’s carpet and stuff. I mean, I walk around like that when there’s no one home. I’m not weird or anything.”

The boy stood up and went to the counter before leaving.

She paused, licking the cream from her lips.

“So, what do you look for in a model? I mean, I’m not classic model material. Regardless of prettiness, one way or another, I mean, I’ve not got the type of figure you’d expect from a nude model. Well, I guess there was Rubens in the whatever-century-he-lived-in.”

“Someone I can spend hours with each day.”

“Oh, so you’re hiring me for my conversational talent.” Theresa’s eyes sparkled. She leant over the table towards A- “Ah hA- But won’t my complete and thorough nakedness distract your intellect?”

A- smiled.

“So, if I like it, how long would you want me?”

“Until you go. Next week, is it?”

“Next weekend. My father’s driving me up on Saturday. I’ll need to finish my packing on Friday. So, all of next week except for Friday I am free. And we can start tomorrow? I better go to the gym tonight and exercise. I’m okay about how I look but I want to look my best for posterity. I don’t know. Can you slim me on the canvas? Or…My God,” she said, gazing into the distance. “I can’t believe I’ve just agreed to take off all my clothes in front of you. It’s only because I trust you that I’m doing this. I’d never do it in front of a stranger. Unless…”

“You’ve taken your clothes off and had sex with men you know less well than me.”

Theresa sucked her spoon.

“I guess. Since you put it like that.”

She smiled and dipped the spoon into the chocolate. “I’ll have to cut down on this if I’m going to keep up my career as a nude model.”

She sighed and raised the cup to her lips. The door opened and a couple with a child in a pushchair took seats on the other side of the café.

“This time tomorrow… It’ll be in black and white, won’t it? I don’t want you to paint me in colour. Will you paint me or just draw me? How are you going to paint me? Do I get any breaks? I don’t have to stand still for two hours or anything like that, do I? Can I have a comfortable pose? Sitting? Lying? Asleep? You won’t be too strict with me? I mean, this is my first time.”

She smiled and lowered her head, catching the last of the froth in the spoon.

“Do you want me to…?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

A- looked at his watch.

“I have to get to the office. I’ll walk you to the station.”

They walked from the café to Shakespeare Tower.

“I want to stop in there,” Theresa pointed to a sheet music shop.

They kissed on the cheeks and parted. At the revolving doors, he looked back. Theresa had gone.

 

Theresa was waiting at the gate when A- got there. They walked up to Mudchute station. The sun was hot, burning dew off privet hedges.

“No, I’m not nervous. Well, a little. It’s odd. Does everyone feel the same way the first time?”

A team of workmen were pollarding linden trees on Marsh Wall.

“I was thinking about this all last night. I wondered what it would be like. So, no one will see me? Do I look okay?”

They bought tickets from a machine on the platform, boarding the second train that arrived. They did not talk on the journey until they alighted at Limehouse station.

On the other side of Butchers Row, she asked, “You won’t be rude about my figure, will you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what you are use to, with models.” She drew her handbag closer to her.

They crossed the threshold into Cable Street Studios. A woman was loading plinths into the back of a car.

“And if I change my mind, you won’t shout at me or force me, will you?”

The woman at the car watched them pass.

“You can have your money back. If I don’t take off my pants, can I do it at a reduced rate? I don’t mind showing my boobs, I show them when I go on holiday on the beach, but…”

A- keyed in the code into the gate lock.

“All or nothing but I won’t force you.”

Theresa sighed. A- unlocked the passage door and pressed the light switch. In the studio, A- locked the door and left the keys in the lock.

“That’s so no one walks in on us.”

“Would they?”

“No. It’s just so you won’t feel they might.”

Theresa looked up at the skylight, then the walls. She moved to the square paintings hanging up.

“I’m not going to be in one of these, am I? These are the ones from photographs you told me about, aren’t they? They’re quite full-on, aren’t they? Not in a bad way. That looks familiar.” She was facing a painting of a squatting woman, breasts bared.

“In what way?”

“Well, you know. The way breasts hang. They do that. It’s just right.”

She rested her handbag on a chair and clasped her hands in front of her.

“So.”

A- took off his jacket and took a roll of used cotton duck which he unrolled with the painted side to the floor.

“So you don’t get dirty.”

“Should I….”

“Go down to your pants.”

Theresa took off her clothes while A- moved a chair and picked up a sketchbook and pencil. They did two poses, A- drawing quickly.

“Now the rest.”

She looked at him.

“Now?”

She paused then with a deep breath took off her pants and put them on the clothes draped on the chair.

 

A- brushed the dust from Theresa’s back using a bundled bed sheet.

“I can do tomorrow. If you want me.”

“All week if possible.”

“Great.”

She stepped into her pants.

“It wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t what I expected. When you said, now the rest, I thought, well, might as well and took them off before I could change my mind. The funny thing is, I felt more exposed and naked when I had my pants on. Afterwards I felt better. More normal. I just forgot I had no clothes on.”

She drew in her stomach to do the waist button of her jeans.

“Don’t tell anyone about this though.”

 

“I told my boyfriend last night.”

Theresa was lying on a length of canvas, stomach down. She was leafing through a contact magazine.

“I wasn’t going to tell him but it just sort of happened. You know how it is.”

A- sharpened his pencil.

“So, I told him and I thought he was going to explode. Well, I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see his expression. Anyway, we talked about it and I said there was nothing going on between us, you and me, I mean, and he relaxed a bit. He asked me how much I was getting paid and then he said, well, if you want to make more than that I have a friend who makes porno films and he’ll pay you more.”

Theresa frowned.

“That’s not a very nice thing to suggest to your girlfriend, is it?”

She sighed.

“Maybe I like his unpredictability. He wrote off his Mercedes last month and he didn’t care. It’s amazing. Imagine that. I suppose he’s got enough money. He’s a drug dealer. Anyway, he’s banned from driving. He’d been driving me around for a week before he tells me though. Maybe he isn’t banned though. Maybe he’s just trying to impress me. It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?”

She paused.

“He drives wildly enough for me to believe him. My God. I told him to slow down or I’d get out and walk. He stopped the car, reached over and opened my door.”

Pause.

“Anyway, he took the hint and drove a bit slower after that. He only skipped a couple of red lights.”

She flipped closed the magazine and sat up. The grain of the canvas had left stippling over her stomach and breasts. She rubbed a patterned elbow.

“I’d like you standing.”

“Like this?”

She stood up against a wall.

“Hands on the stretchers.”

She raised her arms into a crucifix position between two large stretchers. A- picked up a sketchpad.

“I told all my girlfriends. We went for a pizza in Stratford. They were, I don’t know, shocked and impressed. Impressed that I would do something like that. They said, out of all of us, it could only be you, Theresa, who would do something like that. It’s funny, I made this promise not to tell and then I ended up talking about it all night. In the end they had to say stop talking about it, TheresA- You know, Theresa the nude model, blah blah. Well, so much for my promise.”

She altered her balance slightly. A wheeled cart crossed cobblestones, rattling.

“None of them would do it. I mean, I asked because you might want a model while I’m at university. They’re all Indian. You’d like them. They’ve got large breasts. You like large breasts, don’t you? I think they’re pretty conservative or maybe their families are. Either way, they won’t do it, so you’ll have to look elsewhere. I know I’ll be hard to replace.”

She laughed. A- made an erasure and redrew a line.

“It’s strange. I’ve spent more time with you with no clothes on than with clothes on. Sometimes I forget that I’m nude. I just find it so normal. I don’t notice any more. You’ll have to stop me if I wander out of that door like this. I get up in the morning and I have to remind myself that I have to put some clothes on to get to work where I take them off.”

“It’s sad when you cover yourself with clothes. It’s like the sun going behind a cloud.”

Theresa smiled.

“That’s very sweet.” She paused. “That’s nicer than anything my boyfriend’s ever said to me.”

Water had run from under the studio door and trickled across the corridor to form a puddle.

“Looks like trouble, sonny.”

A woman in a cardigan was smoking under the no-smoking sign.

A- unlocked the door. The middle of the floor was underwater. Water was trickling from half a dozen pipes below the ceiling and running down the side of the downpipes. A- skirted the puddle and craned his head.

“Bought a pig in a poke there,” said the smoking woman, at the threshold. “They’ve had trouble with those pipes before. They should never have let the space out. The last people skipped off owing rent. Hamish is trying to get this space earning again.”

A- studied the pipes. Her eyes narrowed.

“Do you know what’s up there?”

“Where?”

The smoking woman jerked her head upwards.

“Up there. Above.”

“No.”
“Toilets.”

She laughed and pocketed her cigarette packet.

“Fuck knows how those sandwich people there before you didn’t get closed down. Turns me cold, it does. Making food there. Gave me the right horrors.”

She threw her cigarette in the water.

“Don’t take this personal, sonny, but Hamish has fucked you over good and proper.”

With a laugh she pushed open a door and left A- alone.

When A- arrived at the manager’s office, McGregor was on the telephone. He glanced at A- in the doorway.

“I’ve, um, seen the, um, leak,” he said, replacing the receiver on the telephone. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Turn off the water.”

“I have. I cut the water this morning when I arrived at eight.”

“It’s still coming in.”

“That’s what’s upstairs draining. There’s no fresh water coming out. It’ll take a few hours to run itself dry.”

He lit a Silk Cut.

“It’s happened before, I heard.”

McGregor hesitated.

“Um, yes. Once. A few times. Before, yes. It’s vandalism, pure vicious spite. They smashed all the toilets, must have been Saturday night or Sunday. I’ve told tenants about inviting people over, about giving out the gate security code. We don’t have full-time security. I’ve asked. I ask every month.”

His hands were trembling. The end of his cigarette jittered. He looked A- in the eyes.

“Security,” he added, with emphasis.

“The Naked Spur” (Exeter House, 2025, pb, £15.99/$20) follows the life of a painter in London slipping into failure and anonymity. He rejects the art world and begins to paint humanity’s darkest corners, unwittingly revealing his own. He quits his job. He stakes everything on a reckless scheme, battling his own paralysis and the cold indifference of others. The Naked Spur is part satire, part raw confession, exposing a man in crisis. We witness a man coming apart as the truth dissolves his dreams and he realises the part he has played in his own downfall.