When I walk across the footbridge alone I feel desolate.
I lean on the railing and look into the dark water. It looks like black oil. I can hear a far-away sound. It is beyond reach. I hear it with my ear that hears the colours. He is walking in the cold wet wind. He needs the cold and the wet to distract him from the scream within him.
Because the abyss has no edges.
He doesn’t want to be alone with the moaning wind. There are others like him. I see them in the tunnels, their coats tied with string, and I speak into the dark river, ‘It’s not hopeless, dad, there’s always hope. I love you, dad. Don’t let it go black!’
But even when I’ve got home and cooked spaghetti and hung the washing on the squeaky pulley, and washed my hair in the basin, I can hear the voice of his despair, speaking in my blood.
Chapter 19
And when I sleep it calls me in my dream.
It is an ugly light, the yellow light that lights up the black night and turns it brown. He is in the doorway of a filthy tunnel that smells of urine.
‘This is where I belong,’ he says. ‘This is dark enough for me.’
‘Help me!’ he says to the dark bricks. ‘Help me!’ he cries out in a cracked voice, collapsing on to the wet pavement that reflects the lurid light.
It is not a cry but an animal that moans in him. The tunnel is still echoing his moan.
‘I can’t get free. I am trapped here, and I can’t get free. Find me!’ he cries, ‘because I cannot find you. Find me!’ he cries, in the voice of a child. ‘I’m afraid!’ And the night swoops around him, dripping, and he shuffles himself into the corner away from the water reflecting the yellow light. His feet are wet from the puddle, and he clutches his knees under his chin. Folded up, waiting, while he quivers and trembles from cold. He has reached a place of darkness. He has gone down a tunnel with wet walls and found the wind.
There is a feeling weighing down his shoulders and clenching his breath.
‘Where is hope?’ he cries out, but no sound comes out of his mouth because of the wind. First he hears it in his ears, like a roaring, and the roaring separates him from sound, and he is in a world of silence. The wind comes once more and he no longer feels the hard, the cold, the wet. It separates him from his senses and the world disappears. There is no smell of traffic wind that blew down the tunnel, or urine that stank from the walls. There is no lurid yellow light and no sound at all, except the wind receding into the distance. And he takes a long breath till all the air is gone.
Then, from far away, lying curled up like a baby, his hands between his legs, from above, looking down, he sees himself. ‘Was that me?’ he says, in a clear voice.
I wake up with a start and vaguely remember the dream.
‘Dad?’ I say to the bedroom. I want to go back to sleep to find him. I feel that he is free, like the sun breaking through cloud in rays of light, and something in me responds and shivers, shaking off its own darkness.
‘Are you all right, dad?’ I feel something light pass through my atoms in waves. It is strange.
Chapter 20
‘There was a bad frost last night!’ says Bianca, pointing at the white camellias, their petals tipped with brown.
‘It’s confused all the flowers!’ says Cecile.
Karl has sent us out to draw in the cemetery, the space under the trees. First we had to draw each other upside down in the studio, and Rob said, ‘For fuck’s sake, this is doing my head in!’ and Bianca said, ‘It’s meant to.’
‘Oh, why’s that?’
‘Because you don’t need your head, you need your instinct!’ said Bianca, mimicking Karl. That’s when he sent us out to find a cemetery to make a space on the page.
‘Why it has to be a cemetery, I don’t know,’ says Cecile. It was Bianca who chose Putney and we all clambered on to the number 11 and took it all the way to Putney Bridge.
The river is silver. The sky is pewter, and we go through the gates of the cemetery past the camellias and walk through the cemetery and between the yew trees that spread their branches over the gravestones and drop their needles over the graves. Crows fly about among the tall beech trees, cawing at each other and dancing from one branch to another. We sit down under the metallic sky.
For some reason I feel happy, touched by an inexplicable hope. Maybe dad is all right. Maybe, after all, dad is OK.
‘It’s gonna bloody rain,’ says Rob.
‘No, it won’t, it won’t,’ says Bianca. ‘Just sit like that. I want to draw a Madonna next to the tombstones.’
‘Look, he just wants us to make a space, not a bloody icon!’
‘No, but wait, like that! I like it, it’s good, please, Rob.’
Rob huffs and puffs, and sits down on the bench and gives in with a shrug, and takes out her own sketchbook to draw the big yew tree, and the path emerging underneath it, and the church beyond it and the graveyard all around it, and I draw both of them; one sitting on a bench, one standing under the tree, looking up and down, intent on their drawings. We stay absorbed until Bianca closes her book, cricks her neck from side to side, and looks about her.
‘What did you draw, Eve?’ she says, coming under the birch trees to where I am standing in the flowerbed.
‘I drew the two of you.’
‘Oh, did you? Let me look!’
I open the page and show her the smudged charcoal figures and the trees and the black and white sky.
‘Oh yes, I like it!’
‘I don’t think I better show mine to Rob,’ says Bianca, laughing at the same time as speaking. She takes it out. ‘It doesn’t quite work,’ she says, laughing again.
I look at the picture, at the short legs and big belly,
‘Well, the proportions are a bit . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ Bianca interrupts, ‘but I wasn’t measuring and you know I’m crap at drawing!’
‘You always say that!’
Rob comes over, cautiously picking her way through the twigs.
‘Time we were getting back,’ says Bianca.
‘No, wait! I want to see,’ says Rob. ‘Show me what you’ve done.’
But she doesn’t like the picture.
‘Never mind Madonna!’ scowls Rob. ‘Looks more like the hunchback of Notre bloody Dame.’
‘Don’t be offended!’
‘I’m not offended!’ says Rob, sounding more offended than usual.
We walk through the yew trees and between the stones to find Cecile, pale as a ghost, and chilled to the bone, who has been drawing bark.
‘Trust you!’ says Rob, looking at her drawings, while Cecile does a bouncing dance to keep warm.
We take the bus back in a hurry because Bianca has a tutorial with Terry.
Chapter 21
‘Why don’t you just go and tell Miss Pym you want to change tutors?’ says Rob when we’re back in the studio.
‘Can you? I mean, would she?’ I say.
‘Well, you can ask, can’t you?’ says Rob, mixing the sieved earth with an acrylic medium and setting to work on a new picture. ‘Go on, she liked your blue painting, remember.’
Miss Pym likes turquoise. She always wears it, sometimes with white and black, sometimes with pink, but always there is turquoise, and when she passed our space one day and the blue painting was hanging on a nail, with the muslin curtain pulled back so I could see it from afar, she opened her arms wide at the blue river. ‘Oh, I like that painting!’ she said, and asked for the names of the colours. ‘Phthalo turquoise and manganese blue, not cerulean, no, that’s too opaque, but, yes, if I could afford it I’d try cobalt turquoise.’
I like Miss Pym. She has two selves. The top one is the efficient secretary that most people are quite scared of, including Paul, the head of painting. Everyone knows that Miss Pym runs the school. But the one she speaks under her breath is quite different; naughty and mischevious. To some she only shows her officious face, but the other one glimmers underneath. I like seeing it.
I knock on the door. She’s sitting straight-backed at her desk with her arms leaning on either side of the open diary. She adjusts her spectacles.
‘Yes, dear?’
She’s in her efficient mood.
I clear my throat.
‘Well, I was just enquiring if it was possible . . .’
‘Yes, dear?’ She looks up at me over her glasses.
‘Can I change tutors?’
She looks down at the big diary and flicks to the back page. She puts it to one side and looks at her rota.
‘Who do you have?’
‘Sergei.’
She follows the names down.
‘Yes, Sergei.’ She is looking at the sheet.
‘So . . .’ she says, still looking at the rota. ‘You don’t like him . . .’
‘Well,’ I begin. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘. . . either,’ she says and gives a tiny laugh, then returns to her efficient look.
She purses her lips, following the list with her index finger.
‘Andrew!’ she says, and looks up and lifts her eyebrows up at me in a question.
‘Fine!’ I blurt. ‘Absolutely! I mean is that it? Just that easy?’ I say.
‘Yes, dear . . . if I want it to be!’ she says, breathing in, and looking at me. ‘Now I’ve got work to do.’
So an hour later, when I’m called back, ‘Hey, the secretary wants to see you!’ I think it’s because of Sergei, or maybe Andrew, and I wonder why she has arranged a chair for me sideways and placed the phone across her desk, so I can speak into it easily and not have to lean across, and I wonder why she hasn’t got her efficient face, or even her mischevious face on, but instead a truly concerned look, and I ask, ‘What is it?’
‘The police, dear, they want to talk to you. they said you left them this number if there was any news.’
My heart starts to thump.
‘Yes,’ I say, and look out the window at the sky, breathing heavily and swallowing back my fear of the voice on the other end.
‘We don’t know,’ the voice is saying, ‘three older men. dead. may not be your father. identify. if possible. soon as possible.’ May not be, may not be.
‘It may not be,’ I say to Miss Pym, handing the receiver over the desk, though the phone is near me.
‘It may not be,’ I say and smile weakly as I go out the door, then down the corridor to the studio where Rob is cleaning mud off her brushes.
‘What is it?’ she says, alarmed, and I wonder how she knows.
‘It may not be,’ I say, ‘want me to identify . . .’
‘I’ll come with you,’ she says, pulling her coat off the hook and throwing the rest of the brushes into the bucket so they plop into the water. I look at the surface of the water and the splashes on the floor
‘Hadn’t you better clean them? It’ll ruin them, you know.’
So we slowly and carefully clean the brushes one by one.
When they are stacked together in the paint tin, Roberta says, ‘All right then, are you ready?’
I must look scared because she says, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, I’ll be with you,’ and rubs my arm.
‘Thank you, Rob, thank you.’
Chapter 22
We are led into a room that smells of strange chemical smells like formaldehyde. There are white tiles on the wall, and silver edges. The floor is white, there is a trolley, and a white sheet covers a body. I know it is not my father from the shape under the sheet. It is too squat.
I am relieved, but there is another body under a sheet and she leads me towards the trolley. It was a cold night, cold that kills people.
Oh, dad. But it is not him; I can see from the belly that sticks up under the sheet, and the hair that is long and grey.
I turn away from the pale dead face, and then something strange happens: time slows down, it slows down so slowly that I can look carefully at every little crease and hair in the policewoman’s face. I look at her mouth as it slowly forms the words, but I don’t seem to be able to comprehend the meaning, because she slowly puts her hand in the small of my back to guide me, while her other hand gestures forwards, and opens the way.
I am filled with a strange sense of awe at the beauty of the world, and the humming sound of the air conditioning has many voices in it, singing in a low harmony, and when I look at the body under the white sheet on the third trolley, I know at once from the shape that it is dad.
I look at the white sheet, and in the long moment time seems to have wound down to a standstill, long enough for me to see clearly memories flowing past.
I see him holding up the crab, and bringing me my first yellow fishing net, I remember the rockpools like gardens of beautiful flowers, I remember the walks through the gorse when he held my hand, and lifted me up on his shoulders so that I saw, not only over the gorse that smelt of coconuts, but over the trees below, down over the rolling grass to the bay stretching out, with St Michael’s Mount and the line of silver along the horizon. And tying ribbons to the twigs, and in his study that had a green light in the summer because of the plants that grew over the window and the sunlight shone through the leaves. And in winter with him in the big chair by the fire, and the orange flames that contained the mysterious city.
And then to my surprise part of me is clawing at the sheet, shouting, ‘Dad, my dad!’, wailing like an animal wails, tears pouring out my eyes, wrenching up from my belly, and I am collapsing forward on to the trolley, touching dad’s cold body, and the policewoman is holding me, and pulling me away from the trolley, saying, ‘It’s all right,’ and giving me something to hold, and I am sobbing over the body, and at the same time part of me is perfectly still in a gentle feeling, being held by my father’s memory, not memory, his being, his invisible self. He is there, he is there, and it’s all right. I can feel him, and at the very same time as this strange convulsion is racking my body, I am being held in the arms of my father’s beautiful ghost; as though a door is open and two worlds are existing together that are quite different. And the world my father wraps me in has a singing light, and yet there is the hard floor reflecting the striplights and the metal tubes and the animal that is wailing a grief-stricken wail, but the two realities exist at once. And then the policewoman guides me into Roberta’s arms, who is standing there. I want to tell her that it’s all right, because she has tears in her eyes and strokes my hair. I want to say, ‘It’s all right, he’s here! You can’t believe how beautiful it is, how lovely it is to feel him here, and know he’s all right, that he’s with me. Can you hear the sound of the music in the air conditioning? Can you feel the ribbons of light that are flowing through this room? He’s here, my father is here, and I can see memories,’ but I can also see that the way I am behaving would make it hard for her to see that, because I am distraught.
Then another strange wave of reality comes. It is quiet; a kind of numbness. It is as though I can see it all, but I’m not really feeling it, and I am calm and it’s different. I dry my eyes. I say, ‘I’m all right, Rob, thank you for being here.’ I turn to the policewoman and ask her what needs to be done, what is the procedure, I even use that word ‘procedure’, and she says ‘this way,’ and we all file out of the humming room, and along a corridor with yellowed peeling paint and through a door, and there is a table and file trays and plastic chairs and my mind is lucid but only for the black print on the forms. I remember every detail that I need to: postcodes and dates of birth, names and addresses and doctors. It’s amazing. They all pop up in my mind, and I am going through these strange motions with absolute efficiency.
When it’s all done Roberta says, ‘I’ll take you home,’ and she puts her arm round me and walks with me out of the building.
Part Three
Chapter 1
I am relieved after the clamour of Paddington, the echoing voices, the rushing people and flicking stations, to lean my head against the cool window and surrender myself to the rhythm of the train. I don’t have to do anything bu
t sit here for six hours. I can just breathe and be held in the rocking motion and let the jittering strangeness of the last few days move through me. It is dark outside, and the people around me look quivering and pallid in the electric light that reflects us in the windows. I close my eyes.
I think of Zeb in Barcelona, sitting at a café in a narrow street with orange walls among a crowd of smiling people, and think maybe he will forget all about me.
I walked up the stairs to his studio when I came back with Rob from the police station. She said to stay with her and Mick that night but I had to get my things. I don’t even know what things. I felt like my body was made of lots of bits and pieces that didn’t fit together. When I walked up the stairs I’d gone straight to the mezzanine because I wanted Zeb. I wanted Zeb so badly but he wasn’t there. I wanted to hold on to his big body, I wanted him to stand there like a tree. But the door was locked, so I couldn’t even roll up his old paint-spattered shirt and hold on to it, I could only lean my head against the door and smell the inky smell of the keyhole then lift one foot after the other up the stairs. I’d known fine well he wouldn’t be there. The second-years had been gone days. But I still went there imagining he might be. Just shows how daft you can get.
I open my eyes. A little girl is crying. She reaches up to her mother, who lifts her on to her lap and strokes her hair. The little girl is flushed and tired and her mother soothes her. She curls up and puts her thumb in her mouth and her eyes flicker up and down, up and down.
I look out the window into the dark. We are in the countryside now, passing fields and hedges. The trees are black against the dark blue sky.
I’m so glad they came with me. I don’t think I could have done it alone.
They must have met outside the lift where Rob was waiting for me, because when I came back downstairs Cecile was there too, and had been to fetch the jam jar for the flowers. She even brought candles.
It was Roberta who had asked in the police station where exactly it was they found him. That was one thing I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask. I think Rob is right about the river; because I closed my eyes when I threw the flowers in, and my mind saw a river of light, even though it was raining.
Invisible River Page 13