The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  The hardest part of it was picking up Clara from nursery, and telling her we weren’t going home, that we were going to live with Ganna for a while. ‘What about Daddy?’ she asked, and I nearly broke down in front of her. I plied her with treats and kisses, I was so worried she’d be traumatized and would rightly blame me and I’d have unwittingly destroyed our future relationship and we’d get on even worse in later life than I did with my own mother, and she would probably move to another continent to get away from me and would only ever send me a Christmas card once a year and I would probably die old and alone… But she was surprisingly okay with it! So that took the pressure off a little.

  But a few days later, once we’d settled in at Mum’s, I got embroiled in flat-hunting and divorce lawyer communications and my anxiety started rocketing again – I couldn’t sleep, and I could tell that me being so on edge was annoying Mum, and we kept bickering. So one morning she offered to look after Clara for an afternoon while I went out to a gallery to take my mind off things. I agreed – and then it occurred to me to text Joe to let him know what had happened. I didn’t really expect a response, as he hadn’t responded to any of my other messages, but to my surprise he got back to me, after all, and agreed to meet. So I suggested we go to the Serpentine. And as soon as I saw him there, it felt weirdly familiar, like I was reuniting with an old friend.

  We both loved the exhibition – Chris Ofili – and had a great chat about it over lunch afterwards. There was an unspoken agreement that neither of us would mention the article, or the election, or my marriage – but he said he had gone ahead and met the lawyer I’d found, and made a claim after all, which was brilliant. The poor guy had broken his arm in a fall, and was living in this squat still with a bunch of guys, not allowed to work, and I could tell how hard that must be, especially when I knew he was expected to send money to his sister. But amazingly, to me, he hardly complained. He told me a bit about Asmara, about its architecture, culture, weather, things like that.

  And it was then that he paused, looked really nervous, and then revealed to me that his name wasn’t actually Joe. It was Yonas. He looked so worried when he said it, as if I’d be angry! But it made total sense that he would have used a pseudonym in his situation. And I was just glad he wanted to share his real name with me, and that he cared what I thought. So I found myself telling him I wanted to change my surname back to my maiden name, which was the strangest thing, because I hadn’t even thought of doing it until that moment! But as soon as I’d said it, I knew I would follow through. I guess, subconsciously, it was also a way of telling him I was available – but he didn’t give me any sign that he’d read it that way.

  We got back to talking about the art, and he asked about my work, and so I said, spur of the moment, ‘Well, you’re welcome to come and see it, if you like? My studio’s just over in Hackney.’

  I still remember the look on his face when he took a few steps inside and stood, staring. It is a lovely space: airy, open-plan, with tall windows that let in lots of light, in a converted warehouse. I share it with three other artists, and we each have our own space in one corner, and cover the walls with our work. I hadn’t been in there myself for months, and ever since Clara was born I’d been by far the most sporadic artist there, to the point where I hardly felt I deserved to have a space – which, incidentally, Quentin had been paying for.

  Yonas gravitated towards Tim’s corner first – Tim does woodturning, and displays his pieces on long white shelves. ‘Feel free to pick them up,’ I said. So he turned a wooden bowl slowly around in his hands, running his finger over the silky outer curve and then around the rugged rim… and I couldn’t help imagining it running down my cheek. But that was the first time I noticed that he wasn’t touching the wood in the normal way, with his finger pads, but with the lower part of his finger, or the very top part of the fingertip, by the nail, and I looked closely and saw that his finger pads were all dark pink and ridged. I knew there was a story there, but I didn’t feel I could ask, not just then. But again I became almost transfixed by his face, how composed his expression was but how much it concealed, and his incredible bone structure – I wished I was half decent at portraiture.

  ‘Is this walnut?’ he asked, holding out a dish, and I had no idea. It was a hard wood, fawn-coloured, with dark patterns scattered like water droplets. He sniffed it and smiled.

  ‘I love that smell,’ I said.

  ‘It is my favourite too,’ he said, and he picked up piece after piece, holding and replacing them so gently you couldn’t hear a sound. ‘This work reminds me of my grandfather,’ he added. ‘He was a carpenter.’ I asked him what kinds of things his grandfather used to make. ‘All kinds,’ he said. ‘But not like this – not art, exactly. More ordinary. Furniture, mostly. But he made us toys as children. Actually, one of those is the only thing I brought with me.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, super-curious. ‘What is it?’

  He smiled, quite sheepishly, and pulled something out from his pocket, but held his fingers over it at first. I went across to stand next to him, and looked at his closed fingers, and it struck me how long they were, and then he opened them up, exposing those scarred fingertips, and I peered down, and there in his palm was this little wooden rooster, all pert and comical and delightful. Its edges were worn smooth, and I imagined how much it had been handled, how many memories were stored in it for him. It made me think: what on earth would I take, if I had to leave the UK for ever?

  I asked if I could hold it. It still felt warm from his body heat, and I examined it more closely, then wrapped my own fingers around it. ‘He’s just lovely!’ I exclaimed. ‘What a brilliant treasure to have kept. Actually, I have a bit of an obsession with rescued objects in my work. “Found objects”, I normally call them…’

  ‘Can I see?’ he asked, so I led him over to my workspace, worried he’d think my stuff was garish in comparison to Tim’s. The obsession I’d developed during my MA involved uniting found objects with new paintings – on canvas or other materials. I would go out to places and look for discarded things that you wouldn’t expect to find there, then I’d photograph where I’d found them, and take the objects back to the studio, then make paintings of the places from the photos, and attach the objects in conjunction – often distorting the proportions, and abstracting the images – so defamiliarizing both. Which means the viewer has to construct their own story of the object and the scene and how the two connect. And I try to give each picture a title that alludes to either the object or the place in a way that could make the viewer associate them with something else entirely. So, for instance, I remember the picture Yonas started looking at intently that afternoon was called Teeth, where I’d attached a broken orange comb to a blurry charcoal image of a multi-storey car park…

  Well, he didn’t laugh at it, exactly. He was really interested, or pretended to be. And showing him the series reminded me how excited I’d felt when I first came up with the idea. I’d go off to these random places to get ideas and forage, picking up discarded things and thinking about where they’d come from and what they’d meant to their previous owners, and how I could locate them in not only the scene I found them in, but also bigger narratives about urban diversity and interconnectedness and disconnectedness and time and chance, and reflecting on the importance we place on objects and places and ownership and memory and what it all really means in the end…

  And more practically, in terms of my anxiety, that series turned out to be a brilliant way of reconciling myself with randomness and uncertainty. You know? It was comforting to contain these little objects, to contextualize them, and give them a home in a piece of art. Quentin didn’t say it, but I knew he thought it was stupid. Proper art, to him, was beautiful, and probably representational, but ultimately would look pretty on the wall of a living room. I mean, he always lied and said he liked my stuff, but I’m sure that was just because he knew how much the making of it reduced my anxiety.

  So Yonas asked m
e where I got all the objects, and when I told him, he said, ‘Ah, so you are a rubbish collector!’

  I burst out laughing, and admitted that was basically it. ‘But the idea is to transform rubbish into art, by making the viewer imagine how it came to be rubbish in the first place.’

  He nodded at this, slowly, looking sceptical, I thought – but then he said, ‘You rescue abandoned things and make new homes for them in painted stories.’

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘That’s a lovely way to describe it, actually. I’d better write that down…’ And then we were staring into each other’s eyes. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ I said, a bit flustered. ‘Do you want a cup?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘With sugar, please.’ And then he asked, ‘What was the first object you rescued?’

  I laughed. ‘Good question – actually, weirdly, it was a disembodied Lego man’s head. I found it in a park. I’ve still got the picture I made with it, over there.’ Yonas walked over to it while I got mugs out. ‘It reminded me of Dad,’ I said. ‘He was killed when he fell off scaffolding; and afterwards, I couldn’t stop imagining his body split like a tomato, with his head rolling away across the floor… It gave me this terrible fear of heights, and other things… So anyway, I’d been looking for a way to express all this in my work, and commemorating him somehow. So when I got the idea of using the Lego head, and combining it with a painting – Dad and I used to paint together, you see – I felt like I was communicating with him, in a weird way. And that was how the series started.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I like your work even more now.’ He smiled, and told me how, when his father died, he was like me – he wanted to write plays because that’s what his father did, and the process of writing made him feel closer to his father. He told me how Gebre, his friend who’s an artist, lost his parents too, and how his painting helped him.

  ‘It’d be so great to meet Gebre,’ I said. ‘And he’d be welcome to borrow my studio space once he comes to London.’

  ‘Really?’ Yonas said, and his face lit up.

  ‘Sure. I’d love to see his work as well.’

  ‘He does not use objects like you,’ Yonas said. ‘But I suppose his paintings are a bit like yours, because they are quite abstract, but you can still recognize some places or things. Most of them would contain one or more small figures, usually fighters, looking as if they were standing alone in a seething mass of paint.’ He launched into telling me about Gebre’s studio in Asmara, and how his paintings of wartime memories were a way to deal with the trauma. But also – and I found this really interesting – he told me how Gebre was spotted by a government official who exclaimed at how patriotic he thought his paintings were, by portraying the heroism of the fighters and martyrs. So the official bought three to display in his house, and that sparked Gebre’s reputation, so he started selling lots more to people high up in government, when it wasn’t really about that at all. And then Yonas started telling me about their childhood – his friendship with Gebre went way back. He told me how Gebre used to draw these cartoons of their teachers at school, and could capture their quirks in seconds. ‘He wanted to be a cartoonist when he grew up, but you cannot do that in a country with state-controlled newspapers,’ he said. I hadn’t really thought of that, how dangerous a cartoon could be in that context.

  It really made me think, hearing about Gebre and his artwork. I mean, I’ve always had access to materials, even if I haven’t always had my lovely studio. But Yonas told me about the time he and Gebre were in prison; Gebre had no materials at all, but he managed to make a paste out of brick dust and water so he could draw on his cell walls. ‘And what about you – how did you stay sane?’ I asked, and Yonas said it was only by reciting poems and things he knew by heart out loud over and over, and writing his thoughts on the walls. He told me how Gebre never recovered from the terrible journey they had to get to the UK, and how he got very low. Then he paused, and added that Gebre was gay, which wasn’t allowed in Eritrea, and that being here, in a country where that was okay, had made him wish he had talked about it more to Gebre, and been a better friend, but he was determined to rectify that when Gebre got to London. ‘You sound like a great friend,’ I said, thinking bitterly about Meg – about what can happen if you do talk to a friend. And then I realized my tea had got stone cold, and it was getting late.

  ‘We should go,’ I said. ‘But I’m so glad you came – you’ve made me realize I’ve been taking this studio space for granted and not using it nearly enough. I just get so preoccupied with Clara and everything… But I’m going to get back into it now, and put work out there again. Put myself out there again.’

  ‘You should,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, it really shouldn’t be so hard,’ I said. ‘Being a mother and an artist – millions of women do it – but you find yourself worrying about responsibility, and all these tiny dilemmas multiply until they dominate… But I just need to remember that making always helps. And also that I shouldn’t need anyone else to motivate me to do it.’

  ‘Clara must like having a mother who is an artist,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, struck that I hadn’t really thought about that.

  So I guess that was the day we connected, Yonas and me, in a way that wasn’t just accidental and instinctive. And then, what cemented how I felt – if you can use such a stolid word to describe feeling – was how good he turned out to be with Clara! He’s a natural with children. Even though he doesn’t have any of his own. He managed to defuse one of her tantrums when he’d only just met her. I’d told her it was dinner-time so we had to switch off The Clangers and that we were going to have fish, and she started screeching that she wanted to watch more and that she didn’t like fish, even though she had happily eaten it the week before. I was about to tear my hair out, but Yonas asked Clara if she knew what penguins did when they knew they were going to get fish to eat. And she stopped, thought about it, and said no. So he said, ‘Well, they normally waddle about like this’ – and he did a ridiculous penguin impression with straight arms and turned-out feet – ‘and then, when they hear there’s fish for dinner, they do this’ – and he made some squawking noises and pit-patted across the room at top speed, then challenged her to have a penguin race with him to get to the iceberg where the fish were waiting. And she smiled, giggled, and actually did it – I mean, I could never have got her to snap out of demon-child mode that fast! And they proceeded to spend the whole of dinner doing different animal impressions, while Mum and I looked on. Clara adored him from that moment onwards.

  I was watching them play together a week or so later, when I realized that there was this unlikely match between our needs. Yonas was unable to work officially for money but really needed cash yet wouldn’t accept a loan or a gift; and I really needed someone to help look after Clara on her non-nursery days while I dealt with my marriage fallout and tried to get back into making work, so that I could pay for my own studio space. And regain some self-belief! I had a new project about equations, chaos and beauty that I wanted to work on, harking back to my maths days. But Clara was only at nursery twice a week, there was a waiting list to increase it, and Mum couldn’t step in with childcare to the extent I needed (she dotes on Clara, but she’s a bit physically frail these days, and the idea of taking a small-bodied but strong-willed child to the playground and dealing with the possibility of her running off freaks her out; plus, she’s the busiest person I know). So that was how Yonas started looking after my daughter.

  I tried it out once, thinking it probably wasn’t appropriate, and Quentin would freak if he knew, and Yonas had no childcare training, and it almost certainly wouldn’t work out. But Clara didn’t bat an eyelid when I left them together. I was almost offended! And she seemed as happy as Larry when I came back. So we tried it again. And, for a while, the three of us had this little secret quasi-family life going on together. I didn’t tell any of my friends – and certainly not Quentin. But it somehow felt entirely natural.

 
; The only person who can have had any idea about what was happening between Yonas and me was Mum, but we were never overt in front of her. She did stay in and babysit Clara while we went out for drinks a few times, and to the cinema – she encouraged that – but I think she just thought she was helping us to get our lives back on track. Which she was, in a way. She just didn’t realize how much our life tracks were converging. You know, it’s so funny how it’s Yonas who – unintentionally – pushed Mum and me even further apart than we’d already been for decades, but then brought us much closer together.

  Anyway, it was all going fine, but then there was this one moment when Yonas and I had taken Clara to the playground, and we’d stopped off at the supermarket to pick up some things, and I’d put my arm through his when we were laughing at something, and then, on the street outside, I saw Meg, just walking along, looking at her phone. I panicked, grabbed Clara and yanked them both into some random dry cleaner’s shop, and started asking at the counter about prices – Clara kept complaining that I’d pulled her, and Yonas must have thought I’d lost the plot! Meg didn’t come in, so I don’t think she spotted us. But I guess that should have made me realize that the situation couldn’t have gone on for ever: that I’d inevitably have to encounter Meg at some point, and tell Quentin about Yonas and the temporary childcare arrangement, and, actually, work out for myself what was going on between Yonas and me, and where I wanted it to lead. But it struck me that I’d been putting all that off because I was happy – happier than I’d been in a while, anyway – I was simply enjoying spending time with him, as was Clara, and I didn’t want the pressure of having to define it publicly or fight about it with Quentin or make a big deal about it with anyone else. And so, once Meg was out of the way, I told the shopkeeper I’d get back to him about the fictional load of overly complex dry cleaning, and we stepped back out onto the street and carried on our way as if nothing had happened.