Invisible River

by Helena McEwen

  ‘Oh God, you are so romantic! Life as an artist out there is tough! TOUGH! It’s not all pale green tutus!’

  I laugh. ‘No, I know that. But at least there’s no Sergei.’

  ‘Ha!’ she says, pointing at me with a wagging finger. ‘I know exactly what is wrong with you!’

  I blush and look out the window.

  Suzanne is making a sculpture in the courtyard down below. She has a welding mask on and her overalls undone and tied round her waist, so she is standing in the cold in her vest with her brown arms exposed. The sparks are flying.

  She is back from Barbados.

  ‘It’s so vulgar to have a tan in January!’ says Bianca, looking over my shoulder.

  I can’t help laughing at Bianca sometimes.

  Of course I wish I hadn’t told her, but I had to tell someone, and it’s obvious I can’t tell Rob.

  It happened in a moment in the canteen, and it’s annoying that Bianca was right all along.

  ‘Hey! What about you and Geoff?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, Bianca, please. Just forget it.’

  But one moment can change everything. One moment in the canteen.

  I could hear the saucers being laid out in fours, then the cups being unstacked and placed in the saucer, and the tinkle of the little spoon; clink clop tinkle, clink clop tinkle, and Zeb was telling me about white: titanium white is a blue white, but it can turn yellow if you get the cheap kind; zinc white is a purple white, it has a metallic tinge; lead is yellow white; and I picked up the teaspoon to look at the white sugar crystals and the teaspoon flipped over and the sugar went on the table. I leaned over to wipe up the sugar and I looked at him.

  I looked into his eyes.

  And the moment opened like a flower and stood still. And I saw what a lie time is, because it all stands still. And eternity is right there.

  For ever, I’ve known you for ever.

  So I looked away. And now I can’t stand next to him, or come into the room or pass him in the canteen without blushing or blurting out some rubbish, and we used to be friends, and it was easy. And anyway, Suzanne is Zeb’s girlfriend.

  Chapter 19

  Maybe I should tell him! I stand up quickly, woken by the idea and the terror of it. Quick! before I lose my nerve.

  ‘See you later!’ I say

  ‘I didn’t mean it, you can stay and mope!’ says Bianca, following me to the door.

  ‘No, it’s OK, it’s not that. I’ll see you later.’

  I run down the stairs to the mezzanine with my heart beating. The door to his studio is open.

  Zeb is standing with his back to me. He is reaching up to a high place on his peculiar tinkling sculpture that looks as though it’s come from another world. It lights up with coloured light, it twirls things and it tinkles. The sleeves of his dark blue paint-spattered shirt are rolled up above his elbows so his upper arms show. I can see his shoulders under his shirt and the curve of his biceps. He screws something high up above his head, so his arms reach up and make a diamond. His long fingers twiddle something and the structure shivers and tinkles. His head is tilted a little. I follow his black hair falling down his long back and his dark blue shirt is only half tucked in, and his long legs in jeans; one leg straight with the weight on it, the other sometimes a little off the floor like a dancer, as he reaches upwards.

  On Wednesdays Karl sometimes makes us do drawings for three or four seconds and the model changes her pose. I could do a drawing now with diluted ink: his beautiful shape, and the shirt half tucked in, that I want to put my hand inside, want to travel up the spine, under his shirt all the way to the back of his neck, touching the curves of his body, the smooth skin. I want to touch him. I want to touch him.

  I run back up to the studio, clatter clatter up the glossy stairs.

  I stand in the studio, breathing. I put my hands on my cheeks and look out the window at the white sky.

  ‘Rob, let’s go the RA.’

  ‘It’s not Friday,’ she says from behind the muslin curtain.

  ‘Let’s go anyway. We can draw.’

  ‘But it’s a collection. I don’t like collections, I prefer one artist at a time.’

  ‘Oh, but Rob,’ I say, going through the muslin, to stand in her space, ‘they’ve got the dancers, we might not see them again, and the Red Room, and Cézanne, and Kandinsky. Let’s go. Come on.’

  She puts down her paintbrush.

  ‘Oh all right,’ she says.

  We get off the bus and walk along Piccadilly.

  Pigeons are cooing and bowing, in sunlit corners of the pavement, making gentle burbling sounds as they circle one another, then flutter together on high-up ledges as though they are cliffs, with a sea of people below them, to-ing and fro-ing in tides.

  We walk into the Royal Academy across the courtyard and up the wide steps.

  When we enter the tall rooms, we separate. I walk slowly and look at Cézanne’s pale blue mountain, hot light and cool green trees breathing the air, and Monet’s pond, the light slipping over the ripples on the surface of reflected trees. I see how he paints a poppy field with cobalt violet and salmon pink, so it looks like sunlit red poppies growing as far as the eye can see, and how he paints the stalks of grass that glow in the shadow under a haystack, which is made of colours you can’t describe, only they are the colours of hay in shadow: pink-grey, blue-grey, green-grey, yellow-grey, if you look close.

  The red dancers blaze in the centre of the next room; bigger than life-size, moving all the time since they were painted, the red bodies vibrant against the blue, and singing with the green.

  The dancers turn pink in a blue studio, and a pink chair stands in front, the white dashes on the blue cushion pulling the chair into the foreground.

  I move through the big doors and see Chagall flying his wife like a kite in a purple dress, over green houses and a pale pink church, and friendly Kandinsky celebrating in rainbows and spillikins.

  And then I find the one I like the best and need the most. It is a lonely curved path, in winter, with spindly black trees. But the snow, how he sees the snow! It is pink and yellow and many different pale blues reflecting the sky. The mountains are covered in blue fingerprints. The picture glows in constant twilight.

  I look and look at it, till Rob pulls me by the sleeve and says, ‘It’s time to go,’ and we walk out into the Piccadilly evening.

  Chapter 20

  ‘What have you done, Bianca?’ I walk into her studio space and it’s orange.

  She is lying on the chaise longue with one leg up, the other down and a piece of Paisley-pattern material over her eyes.

  ‘I am suffering!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She sits up and takes the material away from her eyes.

  ‘Oh, no, I can’t bear it!’ And puts the material back and lies down.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s PMT. Why else does anyone paint their space orange!’

  ‘You can repaint it! I quite like it.’

  ‘No! No! Don’t mention it! Don’t look at it! I don’t even want to imagine you looking at it!’

  I look out over the city and into the far distance. I am restless too. Every dot of air has Zeb in it.

  And I’ve got a tutorial with Sergei in one hour.

  ‘Oh, you are in one of your far-away moods, go away! I can’t bear you when you’re like that!’ she says.

  I sit down on the end of the chaise longue.

  ‘I can’t work today.’

  ‘But listen!’ she says, sitting up, the Paisley pattern flying. ‘I have a plan for you!’

  She starts busily piling up pieces of wood.

  ‘Oh, not me and Geoff!’ I sigh and go over to the window

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes, I have all these stretchers that need their ends cutting.’

  I look into the courtyard, the sparks are flying from the welding gun.

  There’s Suzanne. I mean, it’s not surprising, is it? Standing out there with h
er overalls half undone, the arms tied round her waist, with her long blonde curls tied up in a fetching cascade, welding that thing.

  I passed by it with Rob and tried to get her to criticize it with me.

  ‘I mean, look at it, what is that?’

  ‘Well, she’s just experimenting.’

  ‘Yeah, but come on, it’s pointless!’

  ‘Well, it’s quite a skill, welding.’

  ‘Oh please. She just does it because she looks good in the gear. The welding mask, stripped down to the waist. You know, to weld a bloody pointless monstrosity that just gets bigger and bigger and tips over if you so much as touch it, loads of skill in that! Yeah, right!’

  But Rob just looked at me then, and I thought I ought to shut up.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ says Bianca, close to my ear.

  She looks out the window at the welding.

  ‘Ah! Like her sculpture, she is a spider!’

  ‘No, I don’t want a date with Geoff,’ I say, walking away from the window.

  ‘He really likes you and you like him, he’s patient, you admire patience!’ she says with a scoff.

  It’s true that he is patient. He bends over the ruler and cuts the wood to the right millimetre, when all the panic-stricken third-years are lining up to get their frames cut in time.

  ‘Listen,’ says Bianca, slowly putting the stretchers into my hands and talking in a kind of sing-song way. ‘Just listen to me. You aren’t going on a date, you are asking him to Silvia’s party. Say it after me: “Would you like to come to Silvia’s party?” See? Easy peezy lemon squeezy.’

  I laugh. The phrase sounds funny in her Italian mouth.

  ‘Up the stairs . . . up one floor,’ she says as she steers my shoulders from behind out the door of the studio.

  ‘Look, I’ve got a tutorial with Sergei!’

  ‘There’s time!’ she says.

  I walk upstairs and into the workshop with my pile of wood. The sky shines through slanted skylights. The room smells of wood. There is a circular saw in the table, and freshly planed wood shavings on the floor. Geoff is leaning over the ruler marking a notch with his pencil, which he puts back behind his ear. He looks up and smiles. He has short brown hair but the fringe goes in his eyes.

  ‘You want to cut those corners?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘What d’you want to do? Knock them together with corrugated nails?’

  ‘Yep, that’s what I’ll be doing.’ I nod.

  ‘OK, here, use this vice.’ And he sets up the saw so I can saw them through at the right angle.

  I set to sawing away at the wood and think, what on earth am I doing this for? And can’t think how I ended up cutting all these stretchers for Bianca. Then I remember a vague plan about Silvia’s party and I look up at Geoff and watch him as he bends over the measuring and his hair falls in his eyes. He turns his lips inside as he measures. He looks up and catches me looking at him and smiles.

  He looks down again and says from behind his hair: ‘There’s something really good happening this Saturday, want to come?’

  ‘I . . . oh, what’s that?’ I say, trying to remember if that was the way round the plan was meant to go.

  ‘Have you heard of Billy Graham?’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah . . . the preacher,’ I say, my heart sinking.

  ‘He’s a really wonderful speaker, he knows what life’s about and he fills you with this kind of warmth . . .’

  But I’m picking up my wood, saying ‘Thanks so much for . . . you know . . .’ trying to walk backwards out the door with a handful of planks.

  I clamber down the stairs and into Bianca’s space.

  ‘What happened?’ she says, ‘Did you ask him out?’

  ‘Of course he’s a patient carpenter!’ I say, throwing the stretchers on the floor, ‘he thinks he’s bloody Jesus!’

  Chapter 21

  ‘Line them up so I can see them!’

  Sergei is in my space. He is leaning against my table with his legs sticking out and his arms crossed. His glasses are on the end of his nose and the sneer is on his mouth, curling back his lips to reveal brown teeth. Eyes like nails look at things with a cold sharp pricking look.

  I feel as if I am lining up my pictures so they can be shot.

  I turn them to face him, some I hang on the nails and the others are lined up on the floor against the wall.

  They have tender colours. None of them are finished.

  He takes his glasses off and puts the end of the arm in his mouth, eyeing along the row and sniffing out, as though he’s laughing at something.

  They are my new pictures, explorations into another world that is hidden.

  Sergei is shaking his head

  ‘What are you trying to do with these, what is that?’

  He points to a painting of two figures.

  Phthalo turquoise, and alizarin crimson mixed with cadmium red, create a dancing vibrance, and as I tried to make the colours sing together, a winged man appeared in the paint and spoke to the figure sitting next to the river. It whispered in her ear and it stood on its toes, as one leg reached behind, its wings outstretched as though it had just landed. She listens.

  Sometimes the images come by themselves.

  I wanted the two colours to sing.

  ‘What is that supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be anything. I wanted to make the colours harmonize, and the figures came along.’

  ‘You’re really better painting what you can see instead of this mumbo-jumbo. You’re going way off track here, who are you trying to be?’

  I wasn’t supposed to answer that question.

  He shakes his head. ‘There’s far too much colour in it anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’m just experimenting.’

  ‘Just experimenting! You’ve got no tone in it! It’s all one tone. Don’t you know anything about tone? You have to work out what it is exactly that you’re trying to achieve, and then follow a plan to achieve it. You’re all over the place. It’s a mess! And what’s that?’

  He points to the painting with the blue figure.

  She has a body made of water. She feels everything. She stands on the bridge with the water flowing beneath her and it is telling her its history in visions that flow through her like memories.

  ‘That’s a figure made of water.’

  ‘Another cliché,’ he says under his breath, ‘angels and bloody mermaids. This isn’t the eighteenth century, you know, things have moved on! Don’t you look at what is going on around you?’

  ‘I want to paint my own things,’ I say, too quietly for my liking, suddenly transformed into a too-small person with this ugly smelly pale-skinned man with eyes like nails, and words like hammers.

  ‘You don’t know what you want.’

  There is a tall painting at the end, standing upright. It is the largest and only just begun. I want to paint the spirit in the stone. The London stone. The first time I imagined him he was flying above the blue river over Albert Bridge and Battersea Bridge, and down to Blackfriars past Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. He flies over Tower Bridge to the Tower of London and his finger is pointing. He is making the sky orange and the air pulse and throb.

  ‘What is this, an attempt at Chagall?’

  ‘I was trying to paint the spirit in the London stone.’

  ‘Ah, so we’ve gone from the eighteenth century to what, the New Age? Is this a New Age fad?’

  ‘No,’ I say, offended on behalf of the ancient spirit. ‘No, that stone has been there since before the Romans! It was probably erected by the druids.’

  ‘Druids!’ He puts his forehead in his hands and shakes his head. ‘Oh God give me strength!’

  He looks up and his face is suddenly yellow, the rims of his eyes are red. He opens his mouth and I see his brown teeth.

  ‘Are you an idiot?’ he blares at me.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I say.

  ‘What world are you li
ving in? Airy fairy land? Escaping into some world of your own!’ He bangs the table to give emphasis to his words. ‘Live in the real world!’

  He sighs and looks down. ‘Here you are, tra-la-la-ing through your degree, painting fairies and fauns. I’m just trying to bring you into the real world,’ he says in another tone.

  ‘But is there any point,’ he says under his breath, standing up and brushing his coat and walking out of my space without a backward glance.

  I stare at the table he’s been leaning against.

  Roberta pokes her head through the curtain.

  ‘Wasn’t too bad, was it?’ she says.

  ‘Are you joking?’

  I look at her with my mouth open, and all my joints go limp.

  She laughs.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, putting her arm round my shoulder and guiding me out of the studio. ‘Don’t worry about the zombie! He hasn’t painted a picture in twenty years!’

  ‘I know. That’s what makes him lethal!’

  Chapter 22

  ‘I think you should wear this one!’ says Bianca, putting a red velvet dress over the side of the bath.

  She flicks through the dresses in the wardrobe.

  I’m sitting in the armchair between the chipped stained-glass window and the communal dressing table, which has a row of twenty lipsticks under the mirror. One of Silvia’s copper-coloured bras is lying in the doorway.

  ‘Or this one?’ She holds up a green Indian dress with gold thread and sequins around the neck.

  I shake my head.

  She looks at it with her head tilted.

  ‘No? OK,’ and puts it back. Clip clip through the hangers.

  ‘Here is one of Silvia’s.’ She holds it up. It is a communal wardrobe for the overflow of clothes. The dress is gold, ruched, 1940s-looking.

  I shrug. ‘I’ll try it.’

  I pull off my T-shirt and pull the gold dress on.

  ‘Take off your trousers!’ shrieks Bianca. She gets up and pulls the dress down and zips it up, then steps back and looks at me sideways.