I’m seeing again the police car screeching to a halt, siren whooping, because on the phone all I said was, “She’s dead, she’s dead, please come.”
“Min.” Ash puts his hand on my shoulder, making me jump. “Easy,” he says, the way you would to a runaway horse. “I don’t want to rush you, but we’re getting sopping out here…”
“Yeah, okay.” I fumble for the key, jitters making their creepy-crawly way along my arms. What are we going to find inside? What if Mum didn’t do it at Beachy Head? What if she doubled back and came here? What if she’s inside? Stupid. She wouldn’t. The worst I can expect is dirt. Three months of dust and cobwebs and that peculiar, damp coldness you only get in empty buildings.
I unlock the door and yank it across the asphalt with a rat-a-tat-tat boom that judders my ribs. A trickle of dread runs down my spine as we step inside and I click on the light. It buzzes once, twice, then floods the room in harsh, unforgiving fluorescence.
Ash coughs, wafting a hand in front of his face. “Sorry,” he says huskily.
The dust is at Sahara levels. This is normal, an unavoidable side effect of ceramics—clay, plaster of Paris, powder glazes. They’re all, essentially, dust. It’s a crematorium.
I step slowly past Ash, who’s still spluttering. My body stirs the surprisingly warm air, which gives off a waft of her perfume. Jesus. It’s like walking through her ghost. I’m already lifting up my arms, wanting to embrace her, wanting to touch her, but there’s nothing to hold on to.
I turn away, trying not to breathe.
There’s a dirty coffee cup on a worktable, the rim still printed with her lipstick mouth. Black against the white china. Tiny fruit flies buzz around the syrupy dregs. I waft them away and lift the mug up, carrying it to the kitchenette, arms trembling.
The tap is dripping into the metal sink. It makes a faint, creepy echo that brings me out in goose pimples. The room doesn’t feel empty and dank, the way you’d expect after three months; it’s warm and dry. Everything is so exactly as she left it—from this mug to the blinking light on the kiln—that walking through the space is like reading a book full of unfinished sentences. The drainboard is heaped with buckets and jugs and jars, paintbrushes. I reach out and squeeze one. The bristles are damp, like it’s only been recently used. My heart scurries and skips.
Carefully, I fill the mug with water to get rid of the coffee without removing her lipstick. I catch sight of my reflection—a bonkers girl with voluminous gray hair, holding an ocean of foolish hope in her hands.
“Is it always like this?” asks Ash curiously.
“Like what?” I turn round, trying to see what he sees, if he can see evidence of her the way I’m starting to.
The concrete floor is swirled with old mop marks and thick with dust. There are miles of shelving lining the walls, bowed beneath test pieces and experiments and jars of glaze powders. There are cloths over the out-of-action kilns, turning them into squat, square ghosts. Milk crates holding equipment are stashed under every table and workbench; books are piled and strewn haphazardly. In other words, it’s mayhem. She could have been here the minute before we arrived, mixing up a glaze or kneading clay, before rushing out to grab cigarettes or food.
Seeing her space so casually abandoned is a sharp knife to my heart.
“It looks like your room,” Ash says, giving me a tentative smile. He’s been prowling around the studio, carefully avoiding touching anything. Now he waits in the doorway out of the rain, watching me.
I turn away, trying to tune in to this peculiar sensation the studio is giving me. I want so much to believe that Mum has been here.
There’s a book open on the workbench, cigarette ash scattered on the pages.
A picture is forming in my mind, of her climbing out of the sea—like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus painting—and returning. Throwing out Schiaparelli and starting over with a new series.
I pick up a smooth, prekneaded ball of clay from a stack of them, each wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, and weigh it in my hand. Didn’t I feel her presence watching me in the walled garden? Aren’t I seeing her all the time? And hasn’t it always been a too, too ridiculous concept that such a helter-skelter of a human isn’t coming back?
It feels indescribably good to believe she’s in another room right now, instead of totally and forever gone.
“I can still smell her perfume…” I say.
Ash gives me a tight smile, clearly unsure how to respond. “You ready to go?”
I shake my head, putting the clay down on my wheel and picking up the book. It’s photographs: wiggly bronze sculptures like alien life-forms, by an artist named Sir Tony Cragg. Some pages are marked with Post-it notes. I sit on my stool and start turning the pages, then stop, not wanting to lose Mum’s place.
“You won’t,” she says, leaning over me. Her hair brushes my face, tickling. “You should open the kiln, though.”
“No way,” I say, grinning with relief that she’s shown up. “No snooping, remember?”
“You can if you like.” She cups a cigarette in her hand and lights it, taking one single drag before flicking it to the floor and snuffing it with her work clogs. Then she starts gusting back and forth across the room. When she blows past Ash, I swear I see him twitch. He pulls his headphones on.
“That’s okay,” I tell her, starting to pump the wheel into a lazy spin. I dump the clay ball out into the center, make a hollow with my thumbs. “I’ll wait for you. What’s even in there, anyway?”
“You’ll find out,” she says. “It’s something I’ve been working on for a while.”
“And it’s finished?”
“Mmm, as finished as anything ever is,” she says, tilting the flat of her hand back and forth.
“What do you mean?”
“Minnie, not every story has an ending—”
She blinks into nothing as Ash walks over and rests his hand on mine. The clay quivers and collapses. I stop the wheel, feeling—irrationally—like he’s stolen something from me.
“Whoops. Not the first artwork of yours I’ve ruined.” He tugs at my hand. “You’re not going to start working on something now, are you?”
“Well … that’s why we’re here.” I look down at the wheel, then up again. The studio is bright with artificial light, but through the open door the sky is gathering, dusk sinking into the corners, rain tumbling down. The truth is, now that I’m finally here I could happily stay all night—sleep here, even. I tell Ash this, and he smiles worriedly.
“Don’t be daft. Come on.” He pulls me upright. “I’ll buy you something to eat that isn’t microwaved.”
Before I shut the door, I glance back inside the studio. Like the house, it’s in stasis, waiting for her to return. But it’s also different. The studio is alive, buzzing. As if any second now, she’s going to tap her heels together three times, and come home. I think of the dregs of coffee and the damp paintbrush, and wonder if maybe, she already has.
Belief in this idea is washing over me, like I’m swimming in a sun-drunk sea.
“Min?” Ash tilts his head at me, frowning. “You’re drifting off again. Sure you’re okay?”
For the first time in forever, the answer isn’t a resounding no. Hope lifts me up like a balloon, carrying me through the rain, back into Ash’s arms.
Silver
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Her earrings. Metallic marker pens. The mirror, tarnished with watermarks and crud from weeks and months and years of art.
CHAPTER 18
The Color of Chalk
When we emerge from the yard, the city’s nighttime yell has arrived. Up and down the main road, buses scream their horns, the last call to prayer rings out from the mosque a few streets away, and music blares from hipster bars beneath the station, filled with crowds of SCAD students. London is alight.
We run through the rain and win a table in the window of a family-run Italian place Mum and I used to come to sometimes
after the studio. I’d try to make my half of the tiramisu last for hours, watching the clock, counting down to the point I’d have to share her with Emmy-Kate and Niko again. But there was always a moment when she’d reach out with her fork and scoop up the last bite, ready to get moving.
Ash and I sit side by side in the radiance of twinkling Christmas lights and hundreds of candles, choosing buttery garlic bread and pizzas the size of bicycle wheels from laminated menus.
“Min!” Ash beams brighter than the candlelight as our table is overloaded with food. “Look at all this. Makes me want to go to Italy.”
Caught in the spotlight of his brilliant Ash-meets-Elvis smile, I’m right back to being the girl who met his eye in the National Gallery. And the cinder block in my chest becomes a little less heavy. It’s strange. I keep expecting it all—grief, sadness, hope, happiness—to happen in a straight line. But life lately is more about tiny moments like this. Pockets of ups and downs.
I say, “Imagine, Italy. We could visit Rome, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. See Botticelli. And da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo…”
“All four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if you like,” Ash teases, and there it is, moment gone.
Because I immediately start thinking about Felix in the kitchen on Saturday, raving to Emmy-Kate about Michelangelo and telling me he wished he could see The Kiss. If I went to Italy with Felix, we would lie underneath a hundred sculptures.
I’m unforgivable. I’m on a romantic date with my boyfriend and I’m thinking about someone else.
Ash hums happily, sucking butter from a piece of garlic bread and discarding the crust. Between each bite, he drums the fingertips of his other hand on the tablecloth. “This is fun, Miniature. Pizza was a good call.”
“It is fun,” I manage to say. At least, it beats the frozen version, eaten at Niko’s mandatory sit-down Saturday nights. “Thank you.”
“Good. And you’re welcome.” He smiles to himself, body-bumping me gently, then lifts a slice of pizza. It trails white cheese strings that remind me I once had a macramé-making phase but didn’t finish a single piece then, either. “So, we should go to Italy for real, though.”
“Obviously,” I say through a delicious mouthful. “Everyone should go to Italy.”
“Yeah?” Ash starts chair-dancing. “We could do the backpacker thing through Europe. Italy, and there’s this banging music festival in Paris every August, one in Barcelona too…” He’s off, his hand full-on slapping the tablecloth in a frenzied drumbeat. Both his legs are bopping up and down. It’s the happiest I’ve seen him in ages. I put down my pizza, no longer hungry, and break off a chunk of soft candle wax, molding it in my hands as Ash continues: “We can get cheap flights, leave well after our exams. I could carry my guitar as well as a backpack, make money on the road by busking. You want to? You could take a gap year before SCAD. I could put off getting a real job after graduation; that’d thrill my parents.”
“You’re not serious.” I drop the wax back into the candle, where it starts to melt and pool, and stare at him. “Ash, I can’t go on holiday. Or backpacking.”
He stops tapping, wiping his fingers on a napkin before taking my hand, giving me his full attention. “Why not? It might be good for you, Min,” he says. “We don’t have to do the full gap-year thing. But a holiday might help. Some time off. Come to a party. Go out.”
“We’re out now,” I say, bewildered. What more does he want from me?
“Yeah, and it’s fun. Going away might be even better. Give you something to look forward to.” He knocks his knee against mine. “Think about it: you, me, spaghetti, gigs, when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.”
I take my hand away and flap it miserably around the restaurant, trying to tell him telepathically: I can’t go anywhere. Not as long as Mum’s not here. Which, okay, I might end up stuck in Poets Corner for a lifetime. But so what? I’ve got whole worlds on my doorstep: the Rainbow Series I, a gingerbread cottage of a house, an overgrown back garden, the studio, Meadow Park, galleries galore, dinosaurs. Who even needs Italy?
My sigh says everything I can’t, and it hits Ash like a gale-force wind. He drops his head, looking down at the grease-stained tablecloth. “Min. I know it’s hard, but—”
“You don’t know,” I interrupt, appalled. How can he?
“True. But…” He starts chewing on his lip, watching me warily. Then he sighs almost as loudly as I did, makes a decision: “I don’t know because you don’t tell me.”
There it is. I shake my head, lips pressed together.
“And I wish you would, Min,” he urges, taking my hand back and holding it between both of his. “Tell me it’s hard. Tell me everything. Tell me something at least? Tell me we both reek of garlic right now, I dunno…”
He huffs a laugh, and I give him a tiny smile, one that hurts my face.
Ash returns it. He looks like he wants to say something else but doesn’t. Instead, he lets go of my hands and turns back to the table, picking up a slice of pizza. He drops his other arm around my shoulders with a clunk, and we eat the rest of the food that way, awkward and silent.
When Ash pays the bill, I stare out of the blobbed-with-rain window and try not to think about the other boy who’s somewhere beyond it, as lonely as I am.
* * *
Later, I take the train alone back to Poets Corner. Here, the streets are still slick with rain and striped with neon reflections from the halal-burger-chicken-BBQ-ribs-chips-fried-everything place opposite. There’s one every ten yards in south London.
Above this scene towers the spiky castle silhouette of the Full Moon Inn. The windows form squares of light, like a pop art painting by Mondrian. I linger on the corner for a second, looking up at the second floor and wondering which window is Felix’s.
I have no idea whether I like him, or if I like the fact he likes art—and Ash doesn’t—or whether I’m an unholy mess of a girl and he’s an unholy mess of a boy.
My footsteps beat slowly on the cobbles. I pass the Bluebird Bakery, shuttered for the night, and realize I’m in no hurry to go home. I’m in no hurry to go anywhere. I stop, turn around, drifting, aimless—and see Felix coming round the corner.
He cups his hands to his mouth and yells: “Minnie!”
This startles a fox from the garbage spillage outside the kebab shop; it goes slinking into the shadows. Felix skirts round it, lumbering toward me. I retrace my steps until we meet in the middle, a lamppost casting an umbrella of light over our heads.
“Going for a walk?” I ask, tilting my head back to look up at him.
He shakes his head. It’s silhouetted. “Looking for you. I saw you from my window.” His shadowed face is swimming with sorrow, and I wonder what he was doing up there in his bedroom. Actually, delete that last thought: I don’t want to know.
“You were looking for me?” I repeat, unable to keep the happiness from my voice. Even though I should be pouring cold water all over this, walking away, mentioning my relationship.
Felix nods. “How was your mum’s studio?”
“Good,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. “And bad. Well, more like weird. Strange.”
“It was adjective-y?”
“It felt like she was there,” I tell him. Out loud, it sounds bonkers.
Felix nods. He’s holding me in his dark gaze, and my whole body is vibrating imperceptibly with something—misery, want, calm, intensity, lust, all at once. I don’t know. I only know that if I don’t look away, I might thaw into this puddle I’m standing in.
“Did you try doing porcelain?” he asks.
“Not yet. I’m kind of out of my league as far as that goes.” Not to mention, Minnie, your boyfriend was there. Only I don’t mention him. I continue to not mention Ash.
“Well…” Felix smiles. Kind of. More like a glimmer at the edge of his mouth, like the moon emerging from behind a cloud. His melancholia is beguiling me. “I did say I’d give you lessons.”
I do
want to try porcelain—I want to try everything—but it would be impossible. I can’t go to the studio with Felix—it’s too near to SCAD and Niko; to Ash’s house. It’s too big a betrayal of my sisters, who I’ve never offered to take.
“But—” I say, at the same time as Felix says, “So—”
He bops the toe of my boot with his. “You go.”
The Meadow Park clock tower strikes ten, a countdown to what I’m going to say. Even the fox comes creeping back out of the shadows, pricking an ear. But I can’t seem to make myself speak, can’t make my mouth form the word no.
“Minnie, you want me to teach you how to make porcelain?” Felix asks slowly.
And I nod, a mute marionette.
“What about tomorrow. After school?”
“Tomorrow,” I repeat. Then I think of how closely Ash brushed by Felix yesterday. He’s pretty dedicated to university; he wouldn’t be anywhere near the studio in daytime. I add recklessly, “But not after school. During.”
Felix gives me a quick, searching glance, then says, “It’s a plan, then. Tomorrow.”
I think he’s going to say good night and walk away, but he doesn’t. He hesitates, then slides his arms around my waist, bending me backward so our bodies curve together like double quotation marks. I close my eyes and inhale, drinking in his bonfire scent: a mixture of cedarwood and mint. However much I tell myself it’s body spray, this hug is conjuring swollen rivers and thunderstorm skies, nights lying on the grass in Meadow Park as sheets of lightning break across my head.
It’s not a kiss. But if anyone saw us, I’m not sure they’d be able to tell the difference.
Pale Yellow
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
The sun in midautumn, casting primrose light through increasingly bare branches. Petrol-scented London smog. Brioche and croissants in the window of the Bluebird Bakery. The quiet beehive hum of jealousy between me and my sisters.
How to Be Luminous Page 11