Chapter Six

The warehouse had only just begun to smell less like mould and more like wet clay when William decided to build a cinema.

I arrived one morning to find half the studio sectioned off by a faded curtain he’d strung across the rafters. Behind it sat a row of cracked cinema seats scavenged from a skip on Johnston Street, all facing a white sheet pinned unevenly to the wall. An old projector balanced on a milk crate beneath it.

William looked up proudly.

“It’s culture and community in one,” he said. “The Abbotsford Independent Screen.”

I looked at the curtain hanging dangerously close to my wedging table.

“It’s theft,” I said. “You’ve stolen a quarter of the studio.”

“Investment,” he corrected.

Then, with complete confidence:

“People need this.”

Annoyingly, people came.

Not for pottery, but for free screenings of obscure French thrillers no one fully understood. Students, retirees and assorted warehouse romantics drifted in carrying wine bottles and supermarket hummus. They balanced drinks on my clay bags and wandered casually among the drying shelves as if everything was part of the installation.

One woman dipped her finger into a glaze test and announced it looked delicious.

“It’s toxic,” I shouted across the room.

She nodded thoughtfully and asked if it came in other colours.

By the second Friday, the screenings had developed a following. People cheered when the projector stayed in focus and applauded when the reel jammed, because William insisted calling it “intermission” made the breakdown seem intentional.

The quiet warehouse I had imagined was slowly turning into something else entirely.

Then the books arrived.

William’s evening walks with the dog became scavenging expeditions. He returned carrying boxes of battered novels, Reader’s Digest collections and self-help manuals swollen with damp. One night he dragged in an entire encyclopaedia set missing the letter M.

“Street library,” he announced.

He painted an old filing cabinet turquoise and installed it beside the roller door.

The neighbours emptied it within days.

No books returned. Instead, stranger things appeared in their place: old VHS tapes, tax pamphlets, a water-damaged biography of Margaret Thatcher. The warehouse seemed to attract objects nobody else wanted responsibility for.

At the same time, money began disappearing from the account.

Fifty dollars a month was quietly leaving for something called Living With Loneliness.

When I confronted William, he looked genuinely surprised by my concern.

“It’s compassion,” he said. “We’re not just clay and film. We’re empathy.”

I told him empathy did not require a direct debit.

He promised to cancel it.

He did not.

Meanwhile, the warehouse itself continued mutating under William’s organisational theories.

“We need zones,” he declared one afternoon, chalking rough boundaries across the concrete floor like a sleep-deprived urban planner.

Within days, the pottery section had been subdivided by curtains, shelves and mysterious furniture migrations. I barely had enough room left to wedge clay without colliding with a salvaged armchair.

Into this increasingly unstable ecosystem walked Dawn.

She arrived carrying her own clay — grey, sticky and entirely unsuitable — and placed it on the wheel with ceremonial seriousness.

“We are landing,” she announced.

I still wasn’t sure who “we” referred to.

By the end of class she had proposed an installation involving unfired clay heads watching films in William’s cinema.

“It’s ephemeral,” she explained.

I pointed out the heads would collapse under steam from the popcorn machine.

She looked disappointed in me personally.

But Ruth arrived differently.

She came in quietly one afternoon, sat at the bench and surveyed the warehouse with the focused expression of someone mentally reorganising a cupboard.

“What you need,” she said eventually, “is a brand.”

Her first suggestion was Ceramics and Organics.

I checked the business register.

Already taken.

Ruth reacted as though someone had stolen a family heirloom.

And so the naming session began.

We gathered around the workbench while suggestions spiralled steadily toward catastrophe.

“Pissed on Pots,” Dawn suggested solemnly.

Finn, joining by speakerphone from somewhere deep inside the tram network, offered:

“Wheel and Woe.”

William contributed nothing initially. He wandered upstairs in striped pyjamas to make tea while the rest of us dissolved into increasingly desperate nonsense.

By this point the warehouse was hot with frustration. Dawn had started whispering affirmations. Ruth looked close to tears. Finn was attempting to explain branding through interpretive breathing.

Then William reappeared.

He stood there for perhaps five seconds listening to the chaos.

Then he said:

“Clay Soirée.”

Silence.

Dawn closed her eyes.

“We are landing,” she whispered.

Finn gasped audibly down the phone.

Ruth immediately wrote it onto her clipboard as though she had personally discovered it.

And somehow, absurdly, it worked.

That night, after everyone left, I sat alone at the workbench and opened the ledger.

The Run Away Fund was carrying everything now.

Years earlier it had financed Everyone’s, the café experiment I still tried not to think about too directly. I had rebuilt the fund quietly over time, treating it as emergency escape money — something private, something protective.

Now it was disappearing into windows, plumbing, electricity and William’s accidental cultural empire.

I wrote the latest numbers into the ledger:

Outside, the projector flickered against the warehouse wall while someone laughed near the roller door.

The cinema hummed. The pottery wheels sat drying quietly under fluorescent light. The street library leaned sideways beside the entrance.

The chaos was reshaping itself into atmosphere.

And though I hated admitting it, there were evenings when the combination of wet clay, bad cinema and low conversation made the warehouse feel briefly, improbably alive.