We pass a crowd of travellers in rainbow jerseys drinking cans of lager and singing about a new world, and a crowd of little girls in tie-dyed frocks doing cartwheels on the grass. We pass people holding banners and placards, people laughing and people looking bored.
Silvia and Carlotta are standing under the big white bird, along with a crowd of South Americans. Bianca is greeted with warmth and laughing and they all begin to talk at the same time.
We begin to walk down Park Lane behind the Gays Against War, some of whom are twirling about on roller blades, wearing pink tutus.
The South Americans and the Gays Against War begin to mix together and the tutus begin twirling around the big white bird so that by the time we reach Hyde Park Corner and come to another standstill they have devised a choreographed piece which they perform to the delight of the tourists in a roofless tourist bus, who all stand up on the top deck and applaud.
We move slowly along beside Green Park, and a group of serious-looking people dressed in black and grey, who do not smile, push past us, carrying posters of dead soldiers.
Maimed and swollen faces, bloody limbs, bounce off the placards into my eyes. ‘The unpublished pictures,’ ‘the real face of war,’ say the placards. Then come several posters of death tolls and statistics and a truly horrifying picture of dead children, which Rob looks away from with her eyes shut and her mouth open.
Bianca doesn’t see them; she is busy wobbling unsteadily on roller blades five sizes too big, holding the hand of a huge man in a pink tutu, who walks along barefoot past the Ritz. She is screeching with laughter.
There begin to be more and more policemen standing in the roads leading off Piccadilly; some are on horses.
The tall buildings of the Royal Academy and Fortnum & Mason seem to close in on us. I begin to feel claustrophobic. There is a scuffle with the police in Piccadilly Circus, when the people with dyed black hair and black eye make-up, with chains in their clothes, decide to sit down in the road.
We walk down the Haymarket. There are red and white barricades at the mouth of all the roads, and police with riot shields. The march gathers in Trafalgar Square. It is crammed. People are talking on a stage. Their voices echo off the walls of the National Gallery. Placards are being raised up and down. An unquiet feeling throngs the air. I can see people climbing up on to the lions. Rob says, ‘D’you know they’re made from. . . .’ ‘Melted down guns,’ I say, nodding.
I am surprised she isn’t affected by the violence in the air. Cecile looks like a frightened rabbit. We catch each other’s eye.
‘Let’s go into the Underground!’ she says. Bianca feels it too, and we push our way through the seething crowd.
A pole smashes through a window. There is a surge forward. People are throwing stones. I see a policeman hiding his head. I see a girl in a green skirt being pulled into the back of a van. The air has become strange.
I look round to see where Bianca is, and a crowd of people dressed in black are pushing past, raising their placards and shouting.
I am separated from the others. I can hear Rob shouting, ‘Eve!’ I see Cecile’s red hair slip between the people, and the crowd surges away from the centre of the square. I am pulled along in a mass moving up St Martin’s Lane. I am squashed in the press of bodies. A bang explodes behind us. The crowd begins to panic and run. I run along with them, and slip down a side street and run up an alley, away from the noise. I see a pub. I push the door open and fall in. I close the door, and stand against it, breathless, my heart pounding.
The landlord comes out from behind the bar and looks over the frosted glass window.
‘What’s it like out there?’
‘Mayhem,’ I say.
He locks the door, and we watch through the back-to-front ‘Beer and Ale’ etched into the window, as the people run past in both directions.
I buy a half of cider and my hands are shaking when I lift the glass. I hope the others are all right.
I look round at the dark brown pub, crimson flock velvet on the benches and stools. It is dingy and smells of smoking. An electric organ instrumental of ‘Danny Boy’ is playing on the jukebox.
‘Were you on the march?’ says a girl in a rainbow jersey.
‘I got separated from my friends,’ I say.
‘You poor thing.’
I walk over and sit down.
‘I hope they’re all right, one of them is pregnant!’
She pats my shoulder reassuringly. ‘Doesn’t do any good to worry.’
We discuss the march, and how it had begun so peacefully. It turns out she’s from Cornwall too, and we talk about missing the sea, and the stupidity of war and my hands stop shaking and outside it grows quiet.
‘Are you going to the vigil?’
‘We were planning to,’ she says, inclining her head to the boy beside her.
‘Looks like it’s getting dark outside.’
He gets up and begins to feed money into the slot machine.
Suddenly she turns to me and says, ‘You look WOW!’ and puts her hand up to my face. ‘It’s like, geometric!’
‘Are you on something?’ I say.
‘I think it’s just kicked in!’ she says, looking about her slowly with an open mouth. ‘Sometimes he just slips it in my drink,’ she says, nodding towards the boy, ‘and I say to him, “No, you haven’t, you haven’t,” and then I realize, “Yes he has!”’ and she starts giggling. ‘He most certainly has!’
This is all I need, I think to myself.
‘Well, it’s quietened down out there,’ I say, standing up and nodding.
‘Far out!’ she says, stroking the air around me as though it is soft.
‘Nice to meet you anyway.’
When I walk out into the evening I see the damage; shop windows are smashed and I crunch through the glass strewn over the road. I pass a scaffolding pole smashed through a windscreen of a car, surrounded by police tape. There is hardly anyone on the streets.
A neon cockerel says ‘Take Courage.’ Maybe the others will be at the vigil.
Flyers are being blown across the road by the wind or plastered to the tarmac by the drizzle. I walk over the bricks and cans on the paving in Trafalgar Square and the photographs on the discarded placards are covered in footsteps.
The square is deserted after the riot, the traffic lights change colour even though there are no cars. There is an eerie feeling, as though the buildings are listening to me. Watching me.
The placards have been chucked in the fountain and photographs of dead soldiers look up from under the water that reflects the orange sky.
There are strips of police tape flying about. I walk between the fountains. I turn to look at the National Gallery and to my horror it shouts at me. It shouts so loud I put my hands to my ears in case they bleed, but the sound is still overwhelming. I scream and can’t hear the sound. Then I realize it’s my own thoughts which are loud and the sound is echoing off the buildings.
I collapse on the rim of the fountain and put my hands in the water. The sound subsides.
‘Maybe he spiked my drink, too,’ but the thought does not shout back.
Then I look in the water and see dismembered soldiers calling to me through their own thin red blood. Their hacked limbs are waving and running.
‘Oh God, oh God.’ I put my head in my hands and the water cools my hair. I put my face up to the light of the moon that has come out from behind an orange cloud, and the light touches me.
I am blinking my eyes, seeing the ripples of reflected moon.
‘Please don’t let me see anything else.’
There is a terrific boom. I look up at Nelson’s Column and the air throbs. The sound evaporates into the enraged sky and the lions begin to melt back into guns.
I run between the fountains of blood, and men with green faces spew water from their mouths.
The silver angel from the Evening Standard is flying about above the steps down into the Tube, which seems like the mouth of hell.
There is a face down there in the dark, his hair is long and matted, his eyes glint at me. I hurry past. Lion-headed, claw-fingered creatures with scary roaring mouths have jumped on to the lamp-posts. Winged children without legs look down from a pillar. I run away down Whitehall towards the river, past a cloaked man high up on a horse, but he is no help.
People have left empty clothes hanging on a plinth. They have turned to stone. Their emptiness reminds me of death and I smell the musty stone smell of a tomb that echoes when you whisper. I stop running and walk along the pavement.
The feeling of the night changes and becomes desolate. The wind makes an eerie sound along the hollow pipes of the scaffolding like many sad singing voices. The grief-stricken wind blows through me and tears pour down my cheeks. I feel burdened by the pain in the world. I walk past a huge poster of a dry river bed. Skeletons lying on the bank, with their skin still on, open their mouths. Their eyes revolve upwards and swivel in fear.
I reach Westminster and Big Ben looms up.
I cross the road to be by the water. The river is high and laps against the walls.
A brick-red shadow steps out of me and slips off into the darkness and I realize I’ve been looking through the eyes of despair.
There is a crowd of people standing outside the Houses of Parliament. I can see the dove but it isn’t lit. I look for the others but they aren’t among the crowd.
The people are humming and the sound has pictures in it; I feel them changing the atmosphere as they rise up into the night. A breeze blows from the river into my face.
Then everything stops. No noise. The water does not flow. The trees make no sound. There is no movement.
The world is passing through a still point.
The stillness is like a prayer. The air is potent.
I stop breathing and listen, and out of the silence I hear a beautiful sound. I open my hands and raise them to touch the air it passes through. It lights up every atom and makes my breathing sweet. It hums in my ears and glows behind my eyes with gold light.
All at once there is a dong. It is Big Ben.
Big Ben stops booming and little lights are being lit among the crowd. I see the dove being lit up from within and carried over and placed on Boudicca’s chariot so it looks as if she’s riding a bird.
I cross the road and pass through the luminous people. The sky is dark blue. An angel is looking out of my eyes, and everything is made of coloured light. A man gives me a night-light to hold. People begin humming again and the sound is soothing. I feel washed with relief.
A small girl looks with longing at my candle and I give it to her, she smiles shyly at me, and I decide to go home. I walk away from the humming people past the tall stately buildings and through the plane trees that hang over the river.
A Japanese man with black-rimmed glasses walks up to me. ‘Excuse me, Downin’ Street?’ he says, adjusting his glasses. I can’t think what he wants there at this time of night but I point him in the right direction.
Then just before I step on to Lambeth Bridge I seem to hear the leaves tinkle together in the night breeze, and look round.
There are birds here, small and lit-up. They glow with colours and emanate their coloured light. They are turquoise and rose-pink and orange. The songs they sing into the vast London night are complex and beautiful melodies. They fly up and about from branch to branch as birds do, never interrupting their song. Then they rise up in a swift synchronized motion and swoop up into the night. They leave the echoes of their harmonies and change the dark into something that is alive, that touches you and wants to open you, and I walk back along the river all the way home.
Chapter 12
The birds flit about in my mind as I walk into college, and fill me with stillness although they are moving.
I walk up the stairs and meet Bianca coming down.
‘Hi, Evie, were you OK? We lost you. Did you go to the vigil?’
‘Yes, what happened to you lot?’
‘We went down into the Tube.’
‘All of you?’
‘Yes. Cecile went home with Rob, she was a bit shaken.’
‘I’m glad. I had visions of her being trampled or something horrible.’
‘What about you?’ says Bianca.
‘Oh blimey,’ I say, ‘I was in a stampede.’
Bianca nods.
I open my mouth to tell her what I saw, but can’t fit the words together to describe it, and instead I say, ‘The birds are flying round my head.’
She looks at me with a frown. ‘Are you all right, Evie?’
‘Sort of.’
I want to tell her what happened but I can’t.
‘Come to the print room with me,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to finish my etchings, and I’ll show you how to do monoprints, you missed that.’
All the images and feelings are in me and I can’t speak about them, so maybe I will make them into pictures, and I nod, ‘Yes, yes, that’s a good idea. Monoprints. Show me how.’
The sun is slanting through the tall windows of the print room, cutting the room into triangles and rectangles of light and shadow. The big room is empty and all the tables are washed clean.
The window next to the etching press looks in the same direction as Bianca’s studio but two floors down, so we can’t see over the tops of the trees, but into the leaves and among the branches.
‘Here! I’ll show you,’ says Bianca, pulling out a piece of plastic-coated chipboard from a box under the table and two rollers and some ink from the shelf above.
She sits down on the stool and leans over the chipboard palette and squeezes some black ink on to the shiny white surface.
‘Did they light the bird?’ she says, looking up at me.
‘Yes, it was beautiful. Everything was so . . . surreal.’
‘Did you see Silvia?’
‘No.’
‘She must have come home. OK, you take your roller.’ I smile because she lifts up the roller to show it to me.
‘And you smooth the ink out like this.’
She makes a rectangle of ink with the roller.
‘Make sure it’s not too thick, and it’s evenly spread out.’
‘Let me try.’
She gives me the roller to roll the ink. It makes a sticky sound.
‘Did you get home all right?’
‘I walked along the river.’
‘At that time of night?’
‘I just felt like it.’
‘OK, now you take a piece of card,’ and she starts drawing into the oblong of ink. The lines are white.
She gives me the card and I draw into the ink.
‘I like this.’
‘Then all you do is put the paper on top and roll the clean roller over it.’
I lift my hands to let her do it. Then she nods at me to peel the paper back; the white lines and shapes glow out of the black ink.
‘Wow.’
Bianca slips off the stool and goes to the other side of the room to cut paper, and soak it in the paper bath ready for her etching, and I sit down to work.
I make pictures of the frightened faces, the dismembered bodies and the lions melting into guns. I peel the pages off the palette and tape them to the shelves.
I draw the clock and the bridge over the water. I print the shining swan, and a figure in the dark, and people lit from within. I make the river of black ink in the background, or leave it white so it shines in the foreground, and as I work the birds begin to fly outside my head and out the window.
I lose sense of time as I draw into the ink, one after the other, the images pouring out of me like dreams. And as I print I see the paintings I will paint emerging from them, of someone in despair who remembers hope, and know that now I’ve found my own way of working.
‘My God,’ says Cecile bursting through the double doors, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you two.’
‘Cecile!’ says Bianca.
‘It’s Rob!’ says Cecile.
‘What?’ we both say together, standing up at the same time.
‘The baby’s coming!’ says Cecile. ‘It started this morning; her waters broke!’
‘Oh no!’ Bianca’s hands cover her mouth, she doesn’t like thinking about things like that.
‘Where is she now?’ I say.
‘She’s in hospital, with Mick.’
‘Oh, I’m glad Mick’s there.’
‘So are you coming or not?’
‘Where?’ says Bianca.
‘To the hospital! She’s just about to have it!’ says Cecile, holding the doors open.
‘O Dio, I hope we don’t have to watch!’ says Bianca, covering her eyes at the thought.
I take her arm and glance back at my prints taped to the shelves; they’ll be all right. ‘Come on, Bianca, let’s go.’
We fetch our coats and run out into the road. Standing on all three corners to make sure we get the first taxi that comes. Bianca calls out and whistles and we all clamber into the back of a cab.
‘Where to?’ says the cabby.
We look at Cecile, who tells him which hospital.
‘Our friend is having a baby!’ says Bianca through the glass.
‘I’ll get you there quick!’ he says, doing a U-turn so we fall against each other, and putting his foot down so we zoom along the road.
‘He’s not joking!’ says Cecile.
‘Is she all right? I mean, it’s not dangerous, after yesterday and everything?’ says Bianca.
Cecile shrugs. ‘They don’t know. They were asking her all sorts of questions when I left.’
‘Oh God. I hope it’s all right.’
We arrive along with ambulances and climb out of the cab and through the big white doors into a turquoise hall. We run along a green corridor following signs and down a moving stairway.
‘It’s like a bloody airport!’ says Cecile.
‘I hate the smell of hospitals,’ says Bianca, holding her nose. ‘I hope she’s had it,’ she whispers to me.
Every desk we come to, and think we have arrived, we get directed somewhere else.
‘Go up two floors, and turn right, and then left,’ says the nurse with the telephone next to her ear.
We have to take a lift along with a man attached to a drip, and a bandage round his forehead.
Invisible River Page 19