Bleak Water

by Danuta Reah

  SEVEN

  Thursday morning, Eliza was up early and working on the exhibition. One more day. She was disappointed that Daniel wouldn’t be here for this final putting together to collaborate with her in the fine-tuning that this last bit of the process required, but at any rate he’d be back for the opening.

  She remembered suddenly that she had promised to send Tina Barraclough an invitation to the private view. She scribbled a note on a post-it and stuck it on the door where she couldn’t miss it. If it went first class, Tina should get it tomorrow. She wondered what Jonathan would think about one of the detectives investigating Cara’s death coming to the do – he talked, some of the time, as though Cara had got herself killed on purpose to inconvenience him.

  She straightened up, pressing her hands into the small of her back. She was supposed to be concentrating on the exhibition, but her mind kept wandering. She looked out of the window. It was a bright, clear day, frozen and still. The sky was blue and the light reflected off the water in a dazzling glow. It was so different from the heavy water that flowed through the Brueghel, so different from the ‘canal of death’ of the newspaper article. Suddenly she wanted to be away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of Flynn’s exhibition and out enjoying the fine winter morning. A walk would help to clear her mind. She headed down the stairs to the lower gallery, taking the steps two at a time in her sudden urgency to get out.

  Mel, who was dealing with some outstanding clerical work in a rather desultory way, pulled a face when Eliza told her she was going out for a while. ‘That means I’ll be on my own,’ she said. She hit the print button on her word processor and sat watching the paper run through the printer.

  ‘Jonathan’s here,’ Eliza said.

  ‘He’s in his office,’ Mel objected. ‘People keep phoning.’

  ‘Who?’ Eliza said. She didn’t want Mel talking to the press.

  ‘Oh, it’s just, “Are you open? When can we come down?”’ Mel gave an exaggerated sigh.

  Curiosity and sensation seekers, Eliza translated. ‘Don’t tell them anything,’ she said.

  ‘You mean I can’t tell them when we’re open?’ Mel’s obtuseness had to be deliberate.

  ‘Of course you can,’ Eliza said. ‘You know what I mean.’ She ignored Mel’s raised eyes and had a quick glance through her post. It seemed to be all routine. ‘Can you deal with this before lunch?’ she said. Mel had hardly made great inroads into the work Eliza had left for her that morning.

  ‘Jonathan says I’ve got to do art work,’ Mel said, ‘not typing and things.’

  Eliza kept her tone even. ‘This is art work,’ she said. ‘Art administration. It’s essential.’ She flicked through the last of the letters. Nothing important. She separated the junk and binned it. ‘I think we need to keep the door to the upper gallery locked as well,’ she said. It was inconvenient and restricted access, but, in fairness to Mel, no one could expect someone working downstairs to monitor any comings and goings. It would be different once the exhibition was open.

  ‘Look, I’m going out,’ she said. ‘If there are any calls you can’t deal with, tell them I’ll call them back in an hour. I’ll be back before then,’ she said, picking up her jacket.

  The day was still fine. Despite the cold, the clear skies gave a promise of spring. It was a deceptive promise this early in the year, but Eliza was glad of the respite from the winter gloom. She wondered which way to go. She could walk back towards Victoria Quays, get some coffee and sit in the sun watching the activity in the canal basin, or she could walk the other way, stay with the part of the canal she preferred, the part where the gentrification hadn’t reached.

  She remembered the canal the way she had first seen it, last summer when she had come to start work, disorientated by the sudden changes in her life, not sure, now that she had made her decision, that she had done the right thing.

  She remembered the way the reflections rippled when the water lapped against the bank, suddenly, disconcertingly alive. She’d walked the canal often those first weeks, past the old warehouse with the corrugated roof, and buddleia growing from the cracked pipes. The summer had blazed in Mediterranean splendour, blue skies, hot pavements, and the canal had blossomed, the leaves and flowers flourishing among the rubbish. Butterflies had danced in the buddleia, tortoise-shells and red admirals, and she remembered that then, she had found the canal beautiful.

  She wanted to paint it, not as the ‘canal of death’, not as a relic of industrial decay, but as it was, all its contradictions: pollution and danger and decay, yes, but also the regeneration of nature, in the way the crumbling industrial remains had become incorporated into the natural world – the purple flowers growing out of the cracks in the rusting fall-pipes, the small trees that colonized the guttering of the warehouses, the birds and the animals that exploited this relative seclusion so close to the city centre.

  She noticed that the light she was passing was broken, shattered as though it had been the target of an air-gun pellet. As if on cue, two youths passed her, their eyes ahead almost as if they hadn’t registered her. They were carrying air rifles and had a dog that looked, to her admittedly untutored eye, like a pit bull. Their wool hats were pulled low down around their heads.

  She stopped and watched them walking ahead of her. They were coming to a bridge now, and they stopped and talked to an angler who was sitting by the towpath, aimlessly dipping his line in and out of the water. The towpath looked empty ahead, the weekdays not attracting the walkers that the weekend did. The isolation that had drawn her seemed less attractive suddenly, and she turned back towards the canal basin.

  Five minutes of brisk walking brought her back to the gallery, and five minutes more and she was at Cadman Street Bridge. There were flowers against the base of the arch, where the path ran into the darkness of the tunnel, still in their Cellophane, left by the canal side. Flowers for Cara? Eliza paused to look at the label which had been faded by the rain. But Cara hadn’t inspired much sympathy. People who mourned for strangers didn’t mourn dead prostitutes. One bouquet, with a teddy bear attached, had been placed as a talisman for the recovery of Cara’s baby. It was addressed to Briony Rose. God will keep you safe.

  The flowers, decaying in their wrappings, seemed morbid. Someone else must have thought so too, because there was a second bouquet, but this one had been torn open. The flower heads had been ripped off. Maybe the youths with the air rifles had paused on their way past. Something in the water caught her eye, and she saw that whoever had torn the flowers apart had thrown the discarded heads into the water. They were red – roses? No, carnations – and they lay on the thin ice where the surface was still frozen in the shadows under the bridge and floated in the water. There was a card lying in the mud. She picked it up. It remembered an older tragedy: For little Ellie.

  Ellie…Raed azile…Morbid. She needed some coffee.

  She was about to move on when she realized that there was someone coming along the towpath in the other direction. He was approaching the archway of the bridge, where the path was too narrow for two people to pass. She stood back to let him by, and he gave her a nod of greeting as he came through. ‘Eliza…’ he said. He didn’t seem surprised to see her.

  She looked at him. A tall man with dark hair. His features suddenly resolved themselves and she realized it was Daniel.

  ‘Daniel!’ she said, surprised. ‘I thought…’

  ‘I was going to give you a ring,’ he said. ‘But I was on my way by then, so…’ He shrugged. ‘I wanted to come back,’ he said. ‘Do a bit more work with you on the set-up – get something out of it before the punters move in.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the water. It was an oddly dismissive gesture. ‘Nature seems to be anticipating art,’ he said.

  Cara. The triumph of death. ‘She lived in the flats. I knew her,’ Eliza said. She felt a bit bewildered by his sudden volte-face, by his casual reference to the canal death. The canal murder.

  ‘It made it into t
he national papers,’ he said. He looked down into the water, watching the flowers on the still surface. ‘Why do people do that?’ He sounded irritated.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Eliza had wondered herself. ‘They’ve left something for the children, but nothing for Cara,’ she said, voicing the thought that had been in her mind when she read the labels.

  ‘Well, toms,’ he said. ‘Who cares?’ She looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to say something like that. Then she saw that he looked angry. ‘Just stupid kids,’ he said. ‘Stupid kids.’

  She looked across the water. A boat was moored at the other side of the canal, but otherwise it was empty. It mostly carried leisure traffic these days.

  ‘You know the canal well?’ she said. He came from Sheffield originally, she knew.

  He nodded. ‘They’ve done it up along there,’ he said. ‘But it hasn’t changed.’ The sky was clouding over now, and the water looked leaden and dull. ‘It’s probably as good as anywhere to have an exhibition about death.’ He looked down at her again. ‘It’s not a good place, this, Eliza.’

  More ‘canal of death’ stuff. She checked her watch. If she wanted that coffee, she needed to get moving. ‘I’m going along to the canal basin for coffee,’ she said. ‘Do you want to join me?’ It would be a bit like Madrid, drinking coffee together, talking about art.

  His eyes held hers for a moment, then he said, ‘Aren’t you working today?’

  ‘I’m playing hooky,’ Eliza admitted.

  His eyes creased in that slight smile she remembered well. ‘I won’t say anything if you don’t,’ he said.

  Eliza laughed. ‘Jonathan owes me about six months in unpaid overtime. He won’t mind.’

  He frowned, looking at the water again. ‘Massey’s there today?’ he said.

  ‘Yes – he’s in all day today.’

  ‘Right. I’ll get along there. I’ll see you if I’m still there when you get back, OK?’ He turned to go.

  ‘OK,’ Eliza said. ‘I’ll see you in half an hour or so.’

  She thought over their exchange as she sat at a table in the café, stirring sugar into her coffee and watching the water in the canal basin changing colour in the winter light. She’d wanted to sit here with Daniel, pretend they were back in the Madrid days before things went so suddenly wrong. How had it happened? It had begun with the exhibition, with Ivan Bakst, with Africa.

  Madrid

  Eliza had never thought about going to Africa, or not until Ivan Bakst came back to Madrid. It was May. Her funding would soon be coming to an end, and she needed to start making some decisions. Madrid was so good for her – Daniel, the work, the people – that she’d been lotus-eating for months.

  The night was warm. She was walking up the hill into Old Madrid, to the bar at the Puerta del Sol where she and Daniel customarily met. Madrid evenings started late, and the streetlights cast an orange glow across the uneven pavements and the tables that were starting to appear outside the cafés at night, now that spring was well under way.

  She was early. She sat at one of the tables where she could watch down the narrow street and ordered some wine, the rioja they both drank. The bar wasn’t busy yet, it was still too early, at nine, for the Madrileños to be out in force. It was colder now she was sitting, and she pulled her wrap round her shoulders. Maybe she should move inside before the bar got too busy and the tables got taken.

  She moved into the shadows of the interior. The lights glowed a dim orange, glittering off the glasses and the polished taps, leaving the further recesses of the room in darkness. She looked round. The tables closest to the bar were taken, and the air was hazy with smoke. Further back, away from the light, it was quieter. She chose a table that gave her a view of the door, and sat down.

  She was alone in this part of the bar, apart from a man at a table in the corner. He was sitting in the shadows. She could see the glow from the tip of his cigarette. There was something…The shadows…chiaroscuro, the planes of his face emphasized in light and shade, the eyes pools of shadow. It was as if he was wearing dark glasses…a fair-haired man in dark glasses…And she recognized him. Ivan Bakst, the man who had come to Madrid with Daniel.

  He’d left a few days after she’d met them in the Prado, heading for Tangier, as he had told her. She hadn’t been sorry to see him go. He’d been rather distant, cold and unfriendly. She’d wondered if he’d been jealous of the growing closeness between her and Daniel. And now he was back. She wished she’d stayed outside, but she hadn’t. If she left now, he’d see her, if he hadn’t already.

  He had. He seemed to notice her looking at him, but the light still obscured his eyes. ‘Ivan,’ she said.

  He pushed the chair next to him away from the table in invitation, and she went across. ‘You’re back,’ she said, which was bloody obvious, come to think of it. ‘Did you make it to Tangier?’

  ‘Among other places,’ he said. ‘It was good,’ he added, after a pause.

  Eliza tried to think of something to say. ‘What did you do there?’

  He shrugged. ‘It was an art thing,’ he said. ‘I need to think about it.’ She had experienced this before, a reluctance to talk about his work. He was a conceptual artist. Eliza found this genre problematic. Conceptual art was the ultimate in abstraction. It focused on ideas rather than concrete form, was often transient, was often without a clear place. A conceptual artist might float hundreds of oranges in a swimming pool, but you couldn’t take it home with you and hang it on the wall. The paintings she was working with had been crafted to endure. The Triumph of Death looked now probably much as it had when Brueghel finished it.

  ‘It’s part of something I’ve been working on,’ he said. ‘Your line of country, really.’ He blew a smoke ring up towards the ceiling. ‘Death, change, decay.’ He nodded at the smoke, watching it as it wavered and dispersed in the turbulence. ‘Like that. Everything changes. Everything moves towards degradation.’

  There was something familiar about this conversation. ‘Have you been talking to Daniel?’ she said.

  He ignored her, leaned forward and picked something up off the ground. He held it out towards her. ‘Look,’ he said.

  Eliza recoiled. He was holding a cockroach between his thumb and forefinger. He turned it in the light, studying it. Its legs and antennae waved madly. ‘La cucaracha,’ he said. ‘Just the sort of nasty thing you get if you leave your evolutionary algorithm running for too long. The flying monsters in your painting…’ He looked at her. ‘Brueghel was probably familiar with the winged vermin.’

  ‘Oh, get rid of it,’ she said. She lifted her feet nervously, looking to see if the darkness had brought any more of the creatures out. He drew on his cigarette until the tip glowed, then applied it delicately to the beetle’s shell. Eliza heard the pop of it cracking.

  ‘Christsake, Ivan!’ she said.

  He dropped it, and crushed it under his boot. ‘Gone,’ he said. ‘You can freeze the moment, but that’s all you can do. That isn’t art, it’s record-keeping.’

  And then Daniel arrived. The two men talked easily for a few minutes, then Bakst said he had to go. ‘Nice talking to you, Eliza,’ he said.

  She nodded but didn’t say anything.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Daniel asked as he poured himself a glass of wine.

  She told him about the cockroach, and he laughed. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘You asked him to get rid of it. Look, Ivan lives on a boat, he’s used to catching and killing things. He’s just come back from Africa. They don’t have time to be sentimental about animals.’

  ‘He told me he’d been to Tangier,’ she said. Maybe she was being over-sensitive.

  ‘He’s been as far as Tanzania,’ Daniel said. He sounded envious. She remembered that he and Bakst had originally planned to go to Africa together. ‘He’s got some plans for a show.’ As he had told her. She wanted to know more about his work. Many conceptual artists were original thinkers, but there was a lot of space for charlatans, and i
t was often the charlatans who ran away with the publicity, and sometimes the awards. She wondered which category Bakst fitted into.

  ‘What’s he got in mind?’

  There was silence for a moment. ‘He wants to do something about the triumph of death. Something about putting it into a modern setting.’

  Eliza remembered the sense of familiarity Bakst’s words had given her. She looked at him. ‘That’s what you’re doing.’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s no copyright on ideas. If I shoot my mouth off…It’ll be different from what I do, anyway.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. She started to say something, but he shook his head. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘What I do will be mine. What he does will be his. Did he tell you about those pots he made?’

  ‘He never talks about his work to me,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘He probably sees you as too much of a gallery person. You can’t get more gallery than the Prado. But this was brilliant.’ His face clouded. ‘I wish I’d thought of it. I don’t know why he didn’t get more publicity – but Ivan never goes for that kind of thing. Anyway, what he did was he got cremains, ashes from people who had died. He kept some and the relatives buried the rest, you know, in those little caskets. Then Ivan dug clay from the graveyards where they’d been buried and made it into pots. And he used the ashes in the glaze, and people had pots that were made out of their dear departed. He took photographs of them together. He called it Soulmates.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Ivan said one woman – her husband had been having an affair. He made her a goblet. She drinks wine out of it.’

  Eliza laughed, and found herself warming a bit to Bakst. Daniel’s next words surprised her. ‘Listen, have you ever been to Africa?’

  She’d heard the frustration in his voice when he’d talked about Bakst’s African trip. He’d been in Madrid for long enough. He wanted to move on. He began to outline his plans as they sat in penumbral light. He was going to go. She’d known – known from the start – that their paths would diverge eventually, but she would miss him.