Invisible River

by Helena McEwen

  ‘Let’s get her,’ one said.

  I tried to run on the slippery stones, and woke up shouting, ‘This isn’t my dream!’

  I want to paint the dream to get their pale bony faces outside of me and on to the canvas. I can still feel their groping fingers and smell the stench of the river.

  I mix the colours on the palette: chrome green, raw umber, Naples yellow.

  I paint their greenish faces on the canvas, in dark filthy clothes.

  The painting has grown ugly. I don’t like looking at it. The colours have turned to sludge. Sometimes all you can do is make a mess. When I try drawing with charcoal and spill the turps over the drawing so the charcoal smudges I decide it’s time to stop for lunch.

  I walk into the clatter of the canteen, and the smell of beans and chips. The dinner ladies stand behind the chrome counter chatting to one another, holding long silver spoons. I buy my sandwich and coffee. The wall down the side of the canteen is made of glass so that when you come into college at lunchtime you walk past a row of chewing faces. Suzanne is sitting with her friends next to the glass window. They are talking loudly together and laughing. I sit down in the corner by the wall. Suzanne has her chair tilted back. They are looking out the window.

  ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ one says.

  Then they are all quiet, their faces sideways.

  ‘Oops, no! Didn’t make it!’

  I look, but cannot see what they are looking at.

  ‘Someone should tell Stan or there’ll be a whole crowd of them here in a minute.’

  ‘Oh-oh steady! Nope! Down again!’ and they all laugh.

  ‘Oh God, I think he’s puked!’

  ‘Here’s Stan!’ They all look out the window and are silent for a minute.

  My arms and fingers have gone limp so I have to put down my sandwich. I know who they are looking at out in the courtyard.

  Stan, the caretaker, has white hair and black eyebrows and a name so unpronounceable he’s called Stan.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘Asking him something.’

  He’s a bear from an Eastern European country with huge hands, and even before I see him walk back across the courtyard and through the glass door I know he will be coming to find me.

  He walks through the double doors of the canteen. He looks about the room and sees me. He motions to me with his finger, just quickly; a little twiddle in the air.

  I get up from the table and leave my coffee and sandwich. I follow Stan out the door.

  The eyes in the glass wall follow me. I feel as if my body has turned into thousands of little slithery balls that all slide up against one another and slither.

  Slimey slithery sliding balls. I am glad big Stan is with me. I want to hold his hand.

  He puts his big body between me and the wall of eyes as he bends to talk to dad, who is slumped down next to the Henry Moore sculpture with his legs splayed out at right angles and his chin resting on his breastbone.

  ‘Here is your daughter.’

  Dad looks up. Tries to sit straight.

  ‘Evie, there you are! Evie.’

  ‘Oh dad!’

  ‘Oh there you are, Evie. Evie, there you are.’

  I try and lift him and Stan helps and together we hoist him up to sit on the edge of the wall.

  ‘Dad, let’s go home’

  I try and hitch him up by putting his arm round my shoulders. He stands and staggers. He’s a dead weight. Stan hitches him up the other side.

  ‘Home later, now bench,’ says Stan, and we stagger with him to the bench on the other side of the road.

  I look up at Stan, who nods to me and walks back over the road. I sit with dad on the bench out of sight of the wall of eyes.

  ‘Evie, oh Evie.’ He holds on to my shoulder.

  ‘Dad, for God’s sake, what are you doing here?’

  He is sitting bent over, feeling the raised blotches on his forehead. The drink has poisoned his blood.

  ‘I wasn’t like this,’ he says pointing at the pavement.

  He looks up at me with watery eyes. ‘Evie, I wasn’t always like this!’

  ‘I know, dad, I know.’

  ‘I wasn’t . . .’ and he tries to stand and falls back down. He tries again to pull himself upwards but he crumples down with a wobbling movement, puts his head in his hands and sobs out a dark painful cry.

  I sit on the bench with him, not knowing what to do.

  Zeb comes through the door, and walks quickly across the courtyard and over the road to us. I can see Suzanne in the darkness behind the glass door with her hands on her hips. He comes over to the bench.

  ‘It’s my dad,’ I say out of awkwardness.

  ‘Had a few too many? Done it myself,’ he says.

  Dad looks up at him and growls.

  Zeb wants me to feel better, but there are too many feelings in me with him there as well, and I can’t bear his presence.

  ‘Can I get you something, Eve? Some coffee?’

  ‘Go away,’ I say, my voice cracked, ‘please just go away.’

  ‘OK,’ he says, and goes back over the road.

  Then I feel I’ve been sawn in two, but not across like the woman in the box. Lengthwise, like a fish when they pull the guts out.

  Chapter 3

  The stairwell of the house my bedsit is in always smells of damp. The carpet in the hall is thin and worn and olive green. Under a chipped mirror is a table where the post piles up and every day I flick through it to see if there is anything there for me. But there isn’t.

  How did we get back? Somehow. After I’d left him to sleep under my coat, after plastic cups of black coffee from the machine outside the lift, after hauling him up, weighted down by his heavy arm and steering him along the King’s Road and clambering and nearly falling into the bus, and pushing him out at the stop, when he fell against the wall and banged his head, and all the people going home with shopping or coming back from work didn’t really pay attention to us at all, we finally climbed the stairs, and this morning I’d left him lying on the sofa, still sleeping.

  Not all of the strip of olive green carpet is nailed down to the yellowed wooden stairs. You have to be careful the carpet doesn’t slide underneath you. The landlord doesn’t like to fix things. Dad had slid on the stair carpet when the three of us were trying to haul him up the stairs.

  I wonder if he is sober, and I roll the piece of paper in my pocket as I walk up the dark stairs.

  When Bianca saw the painting of the nightmare, and heard about dad, she had marched me up to Miss Pym’s office and looked through the telephone directory to find out the time and the place of a meeting for alcoholics nearby. I have the piece of paper rolled up in my pocket to give to dad.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘he is an addict like me!’

  There’s a skylight at the top of the stairs. The glass is crusted with something brown and translucent, but I prefer the dingy light to the bare light bulb that hangs down on a long wire and reminds me of a horror film.

  I put my key in the lock and open the door.

  Dad is sitting on the sofa. He is dressed and everything is neat, his hair combed to the side. He stands up. He is sober.

  ‘Evie,’ he says.

  ‘Hello, dad. I’m going to make some tea.’

  I throw my canvas bag on the bed and go through to the kitchen. I feel awkward and so does he. I put the kettle on.

  ‘Listen, dad,’ I say, unfolding the piece of paper.

  He stands in the doorway of the kitchen.

  ‘Darling, there’s a letter for you,’ he says.

  ‘Where is it?’ I say, looking round the door.

  He is putting his shaky hands in one pocket then another.

  ‘Oh, I must have put it down somewhere,’ he says glancing up at me apologetically and looking about him. ‘Where did I put it?’

  ‘Oh dad, couldn’t you have just left it downstairs?’ I say impatiently. ‘That’s where I always collect my post.’ />
  ‘Sorry, darling,’ he says, looking about the room, ‘so sorry, I know I had it.’

  I sigh and go back into the kitchen. I light the gas and put the kettle down on the stove, and then I see that on the table next to the biscuit tin, standing against the empty teapot, is the letter. It is from him.

  I take it out of the white envelope and unfold it. I read the letter, in his beautiful handwriting. It is a gentle letter. It tells me how sorry he is for being this way. That he loves me, that I am a good person, that he is ashamed. The letter makes me cry, because I feel so sorry for him. Cry for his shame, for the way he makes himself loathe himself. He is a good noble person, and that noble nature is horrified by the drunk. I know that he is, and so am I. When you love one and see it being destroyed by the other, what can you do? All you can do is go into the next room where he’s standing with his head bowed and pull his big arms round you and cry into his jacket, and say, ‘But I love you, dad, don’t worry about any of that, so what, it doesn’t matter, dad, it doesn’t matter.’

  And he strokes my hair and whispers into it about how sorry he is.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But, darling, it does.’

  And he’s right. It does. It does matter. It tears you apart, that’s why it matters. And forgiveness has nothing to do with it, because it still tears you apart.

  The kettle whistles and I make the tea and blow my nose on his big handkerchief and we sit squashed together round the kitchen table, and I unfold the crumpled piece of paper with the address and the time, and he takes it and nods. ‘Yes, darling’, he says, ‘tomorrow.’ And I squeeze his hand and nod at him. ‘Yes, dad, please.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘How’s it going?’ says Rob, coming into the studio with a new roll of paper.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK.’

  I tell her about the letter, and the meeting. ‘It’s at the church, practically opposite.’

  ‘That would be good.’

  ‘Oh, it would be such a relief.’

  Rob puts down her shopping and goes to fetch tea, and I go back to my work.

  I have been painting a strange picture all morning, I know it is horrible but I have to paint it; a girl with many slithery arms and legs like an octopus walking past a wall of eyes. I am painting the feeling I had. It has many tentacles and the face of a frightened child.

  I smell him before I even hear him but he is already in my painting space. He is looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck. I am startled and look round with a jerky breath.

  ‘Oh my God, Sergei! You scared me, please don’t do that.’

  ‘I am walking round the studios, it’s my job.’

  ‘Well, you could knock on the wall or something.’

  He ignores me

  ‘What is this? Art therapy?’

  ‘I don’t know what you call it, if you want to call it that,’ I say, confused, wanting to hide it away.

  ‘This isn’t an art therapy course.’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Surrealism is one thing but there has to be a reason for it. It comes from the imagination, but it isn’t self-indulgence.’

  ‘I’m painting what I feel,’ I interrupt him.

  ‘What you feel!’ His eyes look at the ceiling and he nods with his usual sneer.

  But last night dad left me his letter; the sad beautiful letter from the man he once was, and Sergei’s quivering wet lip, his cold eyes looking at me with their closed blue gaze, repel me.

  ‘Fuck off, Sergei!’ I say in a tired voice and I turn away from him.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You heard,’ I say, turning back to face him, and raising my voice. ‘And I’ll tell you why! I’m fed up! Fed up of you coming into my space and criticizing everything I do, fed up of your useless advice. So just go away!’

  He pats the air with his yellow hands as though smoothing it down.

  ‘There is no need to become over-emotional.’

  I just stare at him. He swallows like a lizard, with unblinking eyes, and turns to leave, saying ‘Women!’ under his breath.

  ‘Far out!’ says Rob, putting her head round the curtain. ‘It’s about time someone told that old bully!’ She is laughing.

  I take the tea from her and shrug. ‘Oh Rob, to be honest I don’t care about Sergei. I just hope dad goes to the meeting. I just hope he goes.’

  Chapter 5

  But he didn’t go. He looked at me with bleary eyes, lifting his eyebrows and blinking slowly, unable to shape the words ‘Sorry, darling’. He was slumped in the chair, an empty vodka bottle at his feet when I got back from college.

  ‘But dad, you said you would!’

  It was no good talking about it because he just made gestures to the window, his eyes looking lost then returning to mine, his head shaking slightly, and trying again to shape the words, until his eyes looked at nothing and he didn’t even try to speak. And I kicked the door with tears in my eyes.

  ‘Oh dad, for fuck’s sake!’

  And in the morning, with his hands trembling, he made tea, and he was present in his eyes, and once again he said, ‘Yes, I will today, I promise.’ But when I came back he hadn’t gone anywhere except the off-licence and his watery eyes looked at me sadly and he put his hands up in a helpless gesture, until finally one morning I took the kettle from his shaking hands, when he was trying to fill it under the tap, and I pushed past him to light the blue flame, and said, ‘Dad, just GO! I don’t care where!’ And when I came back the flat was empty.

  That was three nights ago, and I don’t know where he went.

  I didn’t mean it, dad, and now I don’t know where you are. You didn’t take your keys. You’re somewhere on the street, and where did you sleep last night?

  I open the front door, half expecting to find him on the doorstep. The sky has a threatening look. It’s going to rain.

  I walk past the church and look through the railings to see if he’s asleep on one of the benches.

  I run across the road to take the short cut down the alley. There aren’t many cars yet; I woke up so early that the market is only just being set up. A man in an apron, and a fag in his mouth, is joining two poles together. ‘It’s gonna piss down in a minute!’ he says, jerking his head at the sky.

  I walk by the skeleton of the market, the bare metal stalls with no awnings; boxes piled on the pavement and bits of wrapping blowing about on the road.

  I thought he’d go to the address on the slip of paper. I thought it would all be solved. He’d find out what to do. Find people to help him.

  And I imagine him curled up on a damp piece of cardboard.

  A black and white dog comes up to me and sniffs me and goes trotting off down the street.

  Roberta came with me to the police station, but that didn’t do much good.

  The sergeant said, ‘Do you know how many people there are in this city, young lady?’ in a tired voice. His colleague must have taken pity on me because he pushed him aside and said, ‘How long has he been missing, love?’ and took out some forms. I said three days. He gave a little smile and didn’t look at the sergeant, who was pushing his chin back into his chin and nodding with his lips.

  ‘That’s no time at all!’ he said, patting my hand. ‘He’ll be back, don’t you worry,’ but he wrote down the details anyway.

  Rob was waiting outside on a low wall, smoking one of her three roll-ups of the day.

  ‘Well?’

  I shrugged. ‘They say he’s not officially missing after three days.’

  I walk along by the closed shops and people are unlocking the roll-up metal sheets with loud grating sounds. Suddenly the sky darkens and the light turns greenish. It starts to pelt.

  I keep remembering the night before I left home in Cornwall; and dad looking up the stairs with those eyes.

  I run for shelter and stand under the awning of the Turkish cake shop.

  That ‘you’re leaving me’ look that he’d
tried to hide.

  I stick my hands in my pockets and look at the rain falling outside the awning. The road shines and trembles with busy drops.

  But I’d seen it in his shoulders too. His jacket had that weighed-down look, even when he took it off and hung it on the back of the chair there was that round weighed-down look on it, and when I picked it up once, to try it on, the jacket weighed my shoulders down too, so it looked as if I carried something, and it made it hard to breathe, and I took it off quickly and felt frightened.

  Now the rain comes in sheets, slanting and bouncing off the pavement. I feel the wind of it on my ankles.

  Where is he going to go in this rain?

  I’d been upstairs packing up my paintbrushes in an old dishcloth, sorting out the tubes of paint, when I heard him on the stairs.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he said.

  It was a little white room that looked over the moor and the blue hills. I liked looking on to the land. I used to set my easel up and paint out the window, watching the light change the colour of the hills from deep green to glowing orange when the sun shone. Then I painted out of the window that faced the sea; the Mount in the far distance changing colour every day, sometimes obscured by the mist, sometimes dazzling yellow, lit up by the sun, sometimes like a mysterious green isle.

  The sea changed all the time; rippled like a snakeskin on a cold grey day, with a sky dark and brooding; then pale blue that glowed so gently it made your heart limp; then in the morning when the sun rose and the sky was flushed and rosy the sea would turn pink. The whole bay between the distant Lizard and Land’s End would be pink. I loved painting the bay. I loved watching the sea.

  I still loved it, but he didn’t. He hated the sea now.

  The drops drip from the awning to a slower rhythm. The air is filled with raindrops, water slants all landing on the pavement so it is a sheet of bouncing drops, making puddles in the dips, and rivers in the gutter, the traffic whooshing through it.

  He’d looked up the stairs with the tea in his hand and said, ‘We’ve been all right together, you and I, haven’t we, Evie?’ and I looked down the stairs and his face was at the bottom looking up, with my shadow falling over it.