THE HOLY TRIANGLE - Sally O'Reilly, Andro Semeiko, Zinovy Zinik 2013

lodging above a pie & mash place on Hoxton Street. There was no central hitting in this place either, but now I had enough paper moneys to change them into a lot of 50p coins. I also bought a big wedge of the cheese I love most. In Russia we call this cheese rokfor, but in this country it is called stilton. I put a lot of coins into the hitting machine to get warm and fell asleep very quickly.

But in the middle of the night I was woken up by a strange rustling noise. Maybe it was coming from behind the wall. The walls here are very thin, like paper, to remind the artist that he should take a pencil and draw something. What shall I draw? I fell asleep again. In my dream I saw a mouse. It ran across the room, passing my bed on the left side and looking at me all the time with its beady left eye. (It was all on the left side because I was dreaming in England, where they drive on the left.) In the morning, I wanted to have a bite of rokfor, but the whole piece of cheese had disappeared from the table.

When I went to the communal bathroom and toilet inconveniences, I met my neighbour from the next room. I introduced myself, ‘My name is Ivan Denisovich’. I explained that the stress in my name is on the 'o' of the third syllable, not on the 'i' of the second syllable. But English people always put the wrong stress on Russian names. Take Abramovich, the oligarch. English people make the stress on 'a' in the second syllable of his name, but it should be on the 'o' of the third syllable. If the stress is on the second syllable, it will be like the patronymic, not a family name. For example, the full name of another oligarch is Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. Here Abramovich has the stress on the second syllable, because it is the patronymic, not a second family name.

‘I know, I know,’ the neighbour interrupted me. ‘I am from Romania’.

‘A lot of mouse in this house,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you hear the noise?’

‘No, I didn’t. There is nothing here for a mouse to steal,’ I didn’t mention my wedge of cheese.

Maybe, it was he who had stolen my cheese in the night.

‘Are you an artist?’ I asked. ‘The artist?’

‘I am the one. Aren’t we all here?’

‘Are you conceptual?’ I asked.

‘No, I am straight!’ he said. ‘I am going back to Romania. Everyone is queer here,’ he said. ‘All this artistic community in Shoreditch and Hoxton is fake.’ A decade ago there were a lot of real artists here. Then the property prices went sky-high. So those poor artists who didn’t make it 26