Portrait of a Friendship

Portrait of Simon Akam, by Moussa David Saleh.

When we had to make things right, we went to the French House. The pub stands on Dean Street, in Soho, in central London, near the Algerian Coffee Stores, where the windows are stocked with Hazer Baba Turkish delight, and the sex shop whose window flashes LEATHER RUBBER NEOPRENE. Inside the pub, there are framed cartoons by Michael Heath. They served cidre long before international booze conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev ventured into that spelling.

That was where, in 2016, I met my friend David for crisis talks. The matter at hand was a painting. The canvas lay four miles to the northeast, unfinished, in a studio in Dalston. Despite its distance, the painting lay between us that night, the crux of our disagreement.

I always thought of David Saleh as my friend who could draw. I met him at university, a decade or more before, when he contributed cartoons to the student newspaper that I worked for. They were elaborate, anxious drawings in ink, filled with grotesque faces and tapering legs. They were beautiful, if profoundly dark. David had drawn obsessively since childhood. After university, he, to my disappointment, took his first class degree in history and became a lawyer. I became a journalist and later, perhaps, a writer. Four years ago, David did as he had always said he would—and as I had never quite believed—and left Slaughter and May, the most white-shoe of London law firms, to pursue his art. Illustration came first; he had drawn before for Fabergé and various newspapers, and for a while he contributed a weekly spread to the European issue of Newsweek. But on another occasion, in the French House, where cartoonists have long gathered, David listened to one prominent veteran illustrator wax drunkenly about the painter he might have been. He decided he did not want to just do hack work for periodicals. He wanted to paint in oils.

I applauded this desire. I felt my attempt to write at greater length and with greater vim than is permissible within the confines of newspapers lay in the same vein. As he determined to become a