Last Christmas by Lily Greene Page A

skipped down the steps to the pavement and floated to Highbury and Islington tube station with an absurdly wide grin on face and a spring in her step.
    *
    Ella arrived at the Beat Gallery at eleven o’clock. She walked through the spacious venue that had once been an old Victorian railway station. It was the perfect space for a contemporary art exhibition; it’s enormous arched ceilings provided enough space for the larger paintings in her collection. Her pieces were leant against the walls where Ella presumed they were to be hung. Ella saw the gallery staff, Sophie, Guy and Daisy discussing something, pointing and gesturing passionately towards different corners of the gallery.
    “Ella, hi!” a tanned voluptuous figure called from the opposite end of the gallery. This was Celia, the gallery manager. She was holding an armful of small brown parcels that she put on the table closest to her. She glided over to Ella.
    “Hello Celia! How are we all?” Ella asked, waving at the others in the gallery.
    “Fantastic! The others were just discussing where each painting should go. We thought we’d wait for you to arrive before we hung any.” Celia smiled, flashing a perfect set of white teeth. Her uniform teeth shone brightly against her molasses-coloured skin and her amethyst eyes burned vibrantly.
    “Great. Thank you Celia. You’ve all done a great job. The gallery looks magnificent and so Christmassy!”
    The gallery staff had found some unique fairy lights that could be hung vertically from the ceiling. They bought and installed three hundred of these individual lights that now dangled down to just above everyone’s heads. The function was threefold; to illuminate the paintings, to make the gallery look festive and to fill up some of the space in the venue. They looked marvelous even in the daylight and Ella could tell that when it was dark outside and the main gallery lights were switched off, the place was going to look magical with these glowing orbs.
    “So do you like the positions of the paintings? Can we put them up?” Celia asked. Ella walked over to Daisy, Guy and Sophie who were huddling around ‘Toasted Sunset’. The brush strokes of burnt orange were bursting into life, flaming wildly in the well-lit gallery.
    Ella walked through the gallery several times; she moved from the front door, down the winding corridor-shaped room and back again. The room was tall and narrow with brilliant white walls and one sea-blue feature wall. Makeshift walls had been erected in the middle of the room where more of her paintings were to be shown. The structure created two channels so guests would have to walk through one corridor and back up the other or they could snake through the middle where was a slight gap in the middle, semi-permanent wall. This layout had been cleverly designed. It meant that most paintings could be seen from all angles of the room so viewers could either focus on the painting in front of them or turn to see the whole collection at once.
    Seeing the paintings in their places was making Ella excited. Her very first exhibition! She had waited so long for this moment. She had worked so hard for the last few years behind the scenes at the Triangle gallery and now it was all coming to fruition. If it went well she might be able to work fewer days in the gallery and devote more time to being an artist in her own right. Taking the leap to professional artist was risky. It wasn’t a stable job and it wouldn’t be lucrative unless she was very lucky and in the right place at the right time. She felt tremendous appreciation for her colleagues at the Triangle Gallery. They had helped her to secure this exhibition as they had praised her artwork to the Beat Gallery’s owner and told him to check out her art.
    Luckily, the owner took to Ella’s paintings and now she was standing in London’s coolest, newest, most talked about gallery with her paintings on the wall!
    Ella was staring at the ceiling that was