Invisible River

by Helena McEwen

  ‘Haven’t we, Evie?’

  ‘Yes, dad, of course we have.’

  He’d nodded ‘I’m so glad,’ he said. ‘Something good came out of it.’

  I’d followed him downstairs.

  ‘Dad, you’ll be all right, won’t you?’

  I knew he’d say, ‘Yes, be off with you, get on with your packing, you’ve a train to catch tomorrow.’

  But he didn’t.

  He looked at me and he breathed hard with his mouth open, and closed his eyes for a few minutes with a frown on his forehead.

  ‘Dad? What is it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, Evie,’ he’d said.

  ‘Will you be all right, dad?’

  He’d looked away, out the window, and said, ‘Oh, there’s a storm coming in.’

  He wouldn’t be.

  I’d known he wouldn’t be and so had he. He couldn’t lie about it and it was stupid to ask him to. But he also didn’t want me not to go.

  He just didn’t have enough to live for on his own.

  A slender boy walks through the rain, smiling, with his hands out, doing a strutting bouncy walk. It lessens. Only a few drops come through the air now.

  I walk out along the wet streets.

  That white breathing face.

  The gaping mouth, looking out of the window at the grey sea.

  When I reach the turning to college I meet Rob coming the other way, pushing her bike.

  ‘Any news?’ she says.

  I shrug, and shake my head.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, putting her hand on my shoulder. ‘Let’s get a tea and sit by the river a bit.’

  We go to the newsagent that sells takeaway tea, along with newspapers in every language, and boxes of exotic vegetables.

  ‘It’s all right, Eve, he’ll turn up,’ she says, as we walk down the street towards Albert Bridge, past a man lying on a bench, his coat tied up with string, and I double-check to see if it’s dad. His face is old and grey. He has white bristles. He is asleep on a rolled-up sleeping bag.

  We cross the beeping road and lean over the wall to look into the olive-green water. On the other side are the calm trees of Battersea Park.

  ‘It said in the letter he didn’t want to burden me. What does that mean?’

  She shrugs and blows on her tea, then sips it in little slurps.

  I watch the river water slipping over itself. It runs fast and full after the rain.

  ‘He’s not going to throw himself over the bridge or something. He won’t do that will he, Rob?’

  ‘No, I’m sure he won’t.’

  We sit down on the bench held up by Egyptian figures with the faces of people and the wings of birds. Grimy daffodils tremble in the traffic wind. The sky is low and heavy. We sit in silence for a long time until our tea is finished.

  ‘Think it’s going to rain again, Rob.’

  ‘Listen, things work out in the end,’ she says, and squeezes my arm, as we get up from the bench and leave the river behind.

  As we walk fast in the spitting rain along Oakley Street, Rob tries to tell me not to worry, and dad has to live his own life. I just nod, and stick my hands in my pockets, while all the time planning the places I will go and look: the railway stations and Underground stations where there are waiting rooms; tunnels and passages where there is shelter and warmth.

  Then suddenly, as we reach the King’s Road, a car drives through a puddle, just missing Rob, and I see blue glass smashing into small splinters and pink water splashing on a wall, and then an almighty crash, and I wonder why I am seeing Zeb’s sculpture splintering to pieces in my mind.

  ‘Can’t you just leave him to it?’ says Rob, after we’ve got back to the studio and hung up our coats and unpacked our bags.

  ‘How d’you know I’m not going to?’

  I am sitting at my small table and Rob is taping a huge piece of paper to the wall.

  ‘Because you’ve got the A to Z out, and you’re planning where to look,’ says Rob, who must have eyes in the back of her head.

  I shake my head at her intuition, and put the book away.

  ‘Well?’ she says, standing in the doorway, holding the muslin curtain aside. ‘Why not? Why can’t you let him go, and find his own way? It’s his life.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, undoing the cloth full of tubes of paint.

  The reason is too deep for me to reach, yet I know that part of me is inextricably linked with his dark journey, and it fills me with dread.

  ‘He’s a grown man, Eve,’ she says, and lets go the curtain.

  I look at her figure moving about behind the see-through muslin that absorbs the light from the white sky. Rob’s huge pictures of women painted out of river mud glow from the walls. They are seven feet tall and smell of baked earth.

  ‘Anyway, how d’you know he’s on the street, there are places he can go,’ she says with her back to me, as she sizes the huge piece of paper with long strokes.

  ‘I just know,’ I say, looking down at the colours I am mixing. Cadmium yellow, cobalt green and blue, lamp black. I have left out any form of red so nothing can go brown.

  The cobalt blues and greens are making gentle combinations that calm me. The picture is by the river. The road is green because of the light.

  Why can’t I just leave him to it? I say to the green painting.

  ‘Better that he’s gone!’ says Rob matter-of-factly as she bends to size the base of the paper.

  I look at her as she kneels and swishes the size with a wallpaper brush, then look down at my colours. Lamp black has got in with the cadmium yellow and turned it a rotting green. The colour of the slime in the river when the water is low, I think to myself, and from deep down in my imagination comes an image; the slime they find the bodies in when they are pale and cold, and I shake my head to dispel it.

  Chapter 6

  I wait among a crowd of people outside a lift. We push together as it arrives with a ping, and troop through the silver doors. We squash inside, breathing each other’s breath, and with a clanking grinding sound we lurch upwards, trembling beneath the arhythmic flicker of a zinc-white striplight.

  The cool air of the night hits my face. I walk beside a looming building and through tall trees. I am glad to be out in the air.

  I’ve been looking in bus and train terminals, in Underground tunnels, under bridges, on park benches.

  I’ve been to Paddington to look in the alcoves of the echoing station, to bleak and windy King’s Cross and the nooks and crannies of St Pancras, looking at the grimy faces to see if I can see dad’s. I’ve been along brown tunnels lit by yellow light, up escalators and down tiled stairwells, going to as many places as I can with my one-day travelcard.

  I walk under the bridge. The streetlights reflect off the river and throw glimmering shadows on to the underside of the steel girders and gently stroke the dignified faces of the bearded refugees with trembling water light as they sit, pale and proud, on their makeshift cardboard beds, each bowing slightly when I look at him. They have lost their home and their possessions but they have their souls still with them. They do not belong among the people who crowded my nightmare when I woke and knew I had followed dad into his dream. The place his soul had slipped. I walk up the dark stone stairs.

  I stand on the bridge and look into the black water and see the green lights reflected in rippling lines until they crash and splinter apart, broken into by the wake of a night-time police boat. At the same time a siren makes a frantic eee-aw eee-aw along the road and a blue light flits between the trees and fades away. He must be somewhere in this huge pulsing noisy city; lying on a piece of cardboard or a bench along the river, under a bridge or up a dark dirty alley where the restaurants put their rubbish, out of the cold wind. It is blowing in my face from the river, and the black water flows under my feet.

  I have a feeling in me, clogged and heavy like red mud, and it has a sound, a moaning sound.

  I don’t know if it belongs to me or dad, and I wa
lk into the middle of the bridge where the traffic is loud. I lean over the edge and make the long red moaning sound into the wind, and the feeling uncoils and flows out my mouth and is carried away by the river; and the sound has memories in it. They dig into me and pull up more memories from the mud. They flow through me and unfurl in the windy air; and I remember being held in his arms next to the fire, in the warm green room, and walking with him along the cliffs, he shielding his eyes to look at the far-away islands, and along the shore, the sun shining on the belly of the waves so it seemed they were lit from within. I remember the bonfire in the woods at night when all the trees came in close, and we baked potatoes, and I remember him walking with his big stick in the long grass, me collecting things to show him, snail-shells, twigs and feathers. And I remember his eyes at night, ‘Bless you, darling!’ ‘But I didn’t sneeze, dad,’ and the light from his eyes when he smiled. And I remember him walking by the graveyard on the anniversary, and not even looking over the wall.

  I walk back across the bridge and away from the river and the indigo night.

  Poor dad. He couldn’t bear the pain of losing her.

  I duck beneath the scaffolding and walk between striped poles past the skips. I peer into the dark brown shadows of a tall doorway at the bodies swaddled in sleeping bags that are tied with string. Dad doesn’t have a sleeping bag. The yellow streetlights bounce up and turn the sky orange.

  I walk across Trafalgar Square past the huge lions, and climb on to a bus that zooms along the Haymarket and drives so fast round Piccadilly Circus that a woman falls over and shouts ‘We all want to get home, love, but have a heart’ at the driver, and I sit on the lower deck and look out at dark and bright Piccadilly flashing past, too tired to shield my screwed-up eyes and see if I can spot dad in a dark doorway.

  I remember picking petals out of the grass when the wreaths had tumbled over each other in the wind as though they were racing. The men chased them, their hair blowing sideways, and the women held their black hats on to their heads so they wouldn’t be blown down the oblong hole that was surrounded by planks of wood holding down tarpaulin; you could only just see the red mud cut clean and plummeting down into the dark. Dad threw a handful of earth in and handed me some earth to throw in, and I threw but it landed on the tarpaulin. I thought it was a kind of game. And above our heads the sky was moving, and through the salty blowing air I could smell the earth.

  After dad let go my hand, and I looked up and saw his face contorted and felt a tear-drop on my face that had been blown on to my cheek from his eye, so I knew that he was crying, the wind blew a crowd of dark clouds over the cemetery and it began to rain sideways so even the people under the umbrellas got soaked down one side. And I got pulled next to someone’s legs, but dad stood in the rain with his hair being plastered down straggly over his eyebrows, his mouth open and his teeth showing, but not his tears, and the raindrops splashed on the planks of wood and poured into the oblong dark and made a drumming sound, and the piles of earth on either side began to move in red muddy rivulets down the grey flag-stoned path. And someone put a mackintosh round my shoulders, but dad stood on his own, getting wet to the bone.

  The driver speeds so fast around Hyde Park Corner that we all lean sideways and hold on to the poles. He doesn’t even stop at the bus stop at the top of Knightsbridge, and cross shouting voices are left behind in the night as we career along the road, while frantic people pull the cord, ringing the bell to stop him so they can get off.

  I climb off the bus and walk along my road, and up the stairs to my bedsit. I take off my clothes and get into bed without putting the lights on. I don’t want to remember any more.

  I lie in bed, listening to the girl upstairs practising the violin and hitting the wrong notes. But the musical notes in the wide black night are beautiful and comforting, coming from her body movements I can see in my mind’s eye, and her longing and her hope. The big wide night, lit by a pale half moon, embraces the sound and me in bed, and her longing, and the nearby river, and the streetlights and the person clipping along the street outside. It is holding it all, and the sound of the violin accompanies it, colouring the night with its warm sound, and gives the night a heart.

  Chapter 7

  Today the studio is cold. Rob hasn’t arrived yet and I miss her presence.

  I am mixing the colours on my palette but they are making horrible combinations. I put down the palette knife, and look out the window at the trees and the grey buildings.

  Sometimes I am afraid of the white canvas, afraid of what can happen on the smooth sized ground, the mistake that can turn all the colours to mud. It’s always the same mess. It must wait somewhere for its chance; and then it slips down the brush and on to the surface. It gets itself in all the colours and gobbles them up with its deadness. It gobbles up the clear bright colours and regurgitates them so they are ugly next to each other. It turns it all to mud, but not the mud we scooped out of the river that has been baked in the oven so it fills the studio air with a warm sweet smell, not that kind of mud; and I look through the muslin curtain at Rob’s paintings and wish she would arrive.

  At coffee time the door opens and Rob and Cecile and Bianca all come through the door, talking at once.

  Rob plonks her bag down.

  ‘Eve, you forgot Karl’s class.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Wednesday!’ I say, putting my hand up to my forehead.

  ‘We were doing three-second poses,’ says Bianca, mimicking the poses and changing them every second to show me.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Cecile, ‘he didn’t take the register.’

  ‘That’s the second time, Eve,’ says Rob.

  Bianca comes through the curtain to look at my picture.

  ‘Oh Evie, your paintings are getting uglier and uglier.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘It’s awful!’

  ‘Well, it isn’t just about making pretty pictures!’ says Rob through the curtain.

  ‘It’s because you have a worry,’ says Bianca.

  ‘I think it’s interesting’, says Cecile, leaning over to look.

  ‘Interesting is always an insult,’ says Bianca, laughing. ‘What happened to all your beautiful colours?’

  ‘Are we going up to the abstract floor for coffee?’ says Cecile.

  ‘Well, I’m not staying here for Rob’s instant!’ says Bianca, making a face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ says Cecile as we follow the other two out of the door.

  ‘I suppose,’ I say.

  ‘You think everything should be beautiful,’ says Rob to Bianca as we walk up the stairs.

  ‘Well, who wants something ugly on the wall?’

  ‘You aren’t really, are you?’ says Cecile to me.

  ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Then you should only express nice things, should you?’ says Rob.

  ‘No! Look at Goya. I’m not saying that!’ says Bianca.

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘But why paint in those ugly colours? Eve has a sense of colour!’

  ‘You have to paint what you feel sometimes.’

  We walk into Bianca’s space, filled with light from the huge windows, and glinting gold and crimson.

  It is a dark and light day, with sunlight through rain, and lit-up buildings against black clouds. The racing raindrops have rainbows in them. Bianca’s collages catch the light and also the dark, reflecting the weather that shines and glints and glowers over the city.

  ‘Not everything can be pink and gold!’ says Rob, with disdain in the ‘p’ of ‘pink’.

  ‘Well, not everyone wants mud on their walls!’ says Bianca.

  Cecile makes an exasperated face at me.

  ‘Who cares what they want on their walls!’ says Rob. ‘What about Francis Bacon, he’s not pretty.’

  ‘I didn’t say that anything had to be pretty! That’s what you said.’

  The conversation continues and includes Frida Kahlo and Brueghel and tho
ugh I want to join in, something in me is listening to a far-away sound, as though dad has taken part of me away with him.

  Bianca goes to fill the coffee pot for another cup and returns with her face animated and a little flushed.

  ‘Oh my God, I just heard some gossip on the landing.’

  ‘What?’ we all say, looking round.

  ‘It’s not good. Not good at all.’

  ‘Well, tell us!’ says Rob impatiently.

  ‘She smashed his sculpture!’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Zeb’s.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Suzanne, of course.’

  ‘How could she?’

  ‘Poor Zeb.’ I turn to the huge window looking out over London.

  I’d seen it in the puddle when the car tyre split the water to smithereens.

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘Were they having an argument?’

  ‘He’s split up from her, that’s what I think.’

  I look across the buildings at the far-away distance as they talk about who heard it from who, and who said what, and I think of Zeb walking down the road, looking forlorn.

  Rob stands up, rubs her back and says that whatever’s happening in anybody’s love life it’s time she got back to work. Cecile nods, and Bianca gets out a sheaf of gold leaf and sits down. But I don’t want to go back downstairs to my mess of a picture. I just want to sit up here above London and watch Bianca glueing gold leaf to a piece of wood. When she leans close to it the outbreath from her nose makes the gold leaf flutter.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see him?’ says Bianca, after the other two have gone downstairs.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who! He likes you, you like each other. You told him to go away, remember.’

  ‘I can’t, right now. I just can’t.’

  ‘I know your father is missing, Eve. I know that it’s hard for you, but . . .’

  ‘I just can’t deal with all the feelings. I feel stretched taut like a drum with too much in me. One more feeling and it would all split apart.’