Invisible River

by Helena McEwen

His lips press together, slightly annoyed at the interruption, but he puts an easygoing face on things. ‘One day I’m sure we can arrange a trip to my studio. Now then!’ he rubs his hands together.

  ‘When?’

  He ignores her, and speaks up. ‘I’d like you all to come to the lecture theatre in half an hour so we, the tutors, can introduce ourselves to you.’ He bows a little, pointing his hands at himself.

  ‘And you,’ his hands go out to the side, ‘can meet us! And then we can learn a little bit about what we expect from each other. Thanks very much!’ He puts his palms up in the air and nods. ‘See you later!’ he says, and twirls round so his jacket twirls too.

  ‘Creep,’ says Bianca.

  The next time I see Zeb is in the corridor when I’ve got lost on the abstract floor looking for film and photography, because we are doing animation. He is carrying a roll of chicken wire and some ping-pong balls. The balls are dropping and bouncing.

  I start chasing them and pick one up; the other one drops down the stairwell and we both look over and can hear its musical bounce echoing as it falls through the floors.

  ‘Well done!’ he says, nodding at my eyebrow, and I just laugh.

  And when I’ve finished drawing a hundred and seventy-two pictures of a small man doing a dance so his hips wiggle, and his arms wave, for one and a half seconds of film, I help him move the rest of his stuff down to his new work space. We talk about living in London, and the microbiology of the Thames.

  Zeb is in the second year. He was put on the abstract floor until his paintings began to grow a dimension and they moved him down to sculpture. When he began to project film on to them they moved him back up to film. Then the pieces began to move so they put him next to the technician’s office. Now they make sounds as well as moving, so they’ve put him on the mezzanine which used to be a storeroom.

  ‘They don’t know which box to put you in!’ I say.

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  Chapter 4

  The weeks begin to follow a routine.

  On Tuesdays we have a class with Geoff. He teaches us how to make our own pastels with sieved earth and rice water, and lamp black pigment, by baking chicken bones in a biscuit tin until they are burnt; and how to size canvas and make primer with titanium white and rabbit-skin glue.

  Wednesday life drawing class with Karl is compulsory for the first term. Thursday evenings is art history. Long lectures in the chilly lecture theatre, with Andrew Mackinley-Davis, who uses words like ‘polemic’, ‘dialectic’ and ‘post-postmodern’. We come out of the lectures with glazed eyes.

  On Friday afternoon it’s ‘museums and galleries’. We can choose what. It even includes an afternoon watching films if you want, at the NFT or ICA, as long as it’s in a cinema with initials.

  The rest of the time we spend in the studio, or drawing outside.

  I’m sitting on the windowsill above the radiator, looking out the window at the far-away tower blocks on the horizon. They look blue.

  ‘What do you vote, then?’ I say.

  ‘Museum of London,’ says Rob.

  ‘Sounds drab!’ says Bianca, taking the coffee pot off the heat.

  ‘Why not the V and A?’

  ‘I don’t want to look at decorative art,’ says Rob.

  ‘Decorative art,’ mimics Bianca over the coffee pot.

  Bianca has been moved up to the abstract floor, and it has become our habit to gather in her new space and drink real coffee that she percolates in her silver coffee pot on the ring she melts the wax on.

  And after drawing in the cold wind all day, or struggling with a painting that won’t work, or an afternoon stretching canvases till your thumbs are sore, it is a relief to gather in Bianca’s space and sit on the windowsill above the radiators, looking out over the trees, and watch the weather changing in the sky.

  ‘Tom says we should definitely go to the Hayward.’

  ‘Who cares!’

  ‘Paul says we should start with the National Gallery.’

  ‘Which one’s Paul?’

  ‘Oh, I loathe them!’ says Bianca.

  ‘Tom’s all right.’

  ‘Who’s got your goat now?’ says Rob, crossing her legs and leaning against the wall.

  ‘No one has my goat,’ says Bianca indignantly. ‘I have my own goat!’

  ‘I don’t like the small one, he’s venomous,’ says Cecile.

  ‘Is that Paul?’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘That my work was twee.’

  ‘That’s very nice of him.’

  ‘He’s a bloody moron.’

  ‘Have you seen his pictures?’

  ‘No, what are they like?’

  ‘Vertical stripes, that’s all, vertical stripes of varying thickness.’

  ‘You got to be careful what they tell you, they don’t bloody know.’

  ‘You know what Zeb calls them?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Art officials!’

  Bianca lies down on the battered chaise longue. She pulled it out of a skip. She wants it to lend some elegance to her painting space. It is faded orange-pink, worn through at the end, where the horsehair stuffing is coming out.

  She puts her forearm over her eyes.

  ‘Art officials,’ she murmurs. ‘Oh, I get it!’ and laughs.

  ‘You get tired easily,’ says Roberta, sipping her coffee.

  ‘It’s because I have an illness,’ says Bianca, still with her eyes closed.

  ‘What illness?’

  ‘Hepatitis.’

  ‘Hepatitis?’

  ‘Yes. Hepatitis D. I am very fashionable!’ says Bianca languidly.

  Rob finishes her coffee and gets up.

  ‘Well, I’m going to the Museum of London. If you want to come, I’ll meet you in our space.’

  I follow her downstairs. We have been moved to a lovely space next to a big window. We’ve divided it with a butter muslin curtain that catches the light in its folds and glows white.

  We pack our materials.

  ‘I don’t think Bianca will come, do you?’

  But she is already at the studio door.

  ‘I am coming!’ she says. ‘I have three sketchbooks, some charcoal, some coloured paper if we want to do collage.’ She opens her bag. ‘A box of oil pastels, three Conté sticks, some watercolours . . .’

  ‘Hang on, hang on, Bianca, we’re going to look at the museum.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t not take my things. Here, will you take some water?’ She turns to me.

  In the end we walk down the road with three canvas bags, two rolls of paper, seven sketchbooks and a vast assortment of media.

  We take the bus along King’s Road past the glittering shops, and the twiggy branches of the overhanging trees hit the window in the top deck so that we duck. We get off at Sloane Square and dive into the choking air of the Underground that shunts us to St Paul’s, where we explode out of the darkness into the sunlight. We walk past St Botolph’s, where there is a little garden and a fountain squeezed between the glass and concrete of the city like a slip of London from another time. We ride up an escalator in a glass tube and travel down a concrete walkway across a tangle of thundering roads and reach the Museum of London.

  Bianca wants to go to the rooms that show Roman London. She’s proud of her ancestors, and takes it personally when we call them invaders. Roberta and I wander into the Stone Age, where the sound of macaque monkeys squealing is played on a tape, and trilling birds, to mimic the sounds when London was a tropical jungle.

  Rob unrolls her paper on the floor and begins a huge drawing in brown chalk of cave bears and rivers and crouching people, animal-headed women and large-leaved plants, and I have to walk away from her throbbing images in case I get pulled into her world, because me, I’m still looking for mine.

  And underneath it all, under the shining glass and the old bones and the sounds of mammoths, and clay pots, behind the light-up displays and the touch-and-sniff, the
lists of plants, the wall charts of climate change from the Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, and the glass cases of rounded stones they brought to the river from Cornwall and Cumbria, Scotland and Ireland, maybe it’s there, waiting for me to find it.

  Rob has her paper spread out on the floor, sitting happily with her long dark curls falling on the page, her legs out at right angles, leaning over the drawing, with schoolchildren walking around her, stopping to glance at the mysterious animals and ancient landscape that flow out of her chalk and commenting to each other and whispering, two little boys in red V-neck jerseys pointing at the women with their breasts exposed, and giggling, until the teacher, with her clipboard, ushers them forward into the Bronze Age.

  I look at the pots from 4000 BC marked with fingernails, and wonder, whose fingernail was it? who were you? and what did you think? It says here you thought the Thames was a deity and that’s why you came from every end of the islands and beyond to throw your special stones into the water. When Pall Mall was a field of marigolds and mugwort, when artemisia was flowering in Mayfair and the ice had receded like a miracle, and the grass seeds had been blown on the warm wind, and the birch trees grew and the oak forests, and the red deer followed, and then along the river and through the trees you came and gathered round the hearth fires at night, that sent sparks upwards, the air filled with the smell of aromatic herbs and wet earth; and dawn, by the huge river, the reed warblers echoing off the water. A time of plenty, it says. I just like thinking of them all, sitting around in the woods, where Piccadilly is now, fashioning fine flint blades and listening to the birds.

  I sigh. I don’t like my little drawings of imaginary people sitting next to a river, dressed in skins.

  I wander along the corridor following the timeline of Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes and through a doorway into Londinium 47–550 AD.

  Bianca is sitting by a replica of the Temple of Mithras, found beside the buried River Walbrook, listening to tape recordings of Roman soldiers shouting at each other in Latin.

  In the large dark room the glass cases glow yellow and light up the faces of people as they wander through, like sleepwalkers, led by their headphones that are speaking them back through time.

  We come out of the Museum and pass London Wall.

  ‘Roman! says Bianca with triumph, and Rob looks cross.

  Through the tall buildings of the city we can see the dome of St Paul’s.

  We step out into Ludgate Hill, and smartly dressed people are spilling out of doorways, rushing down the pavement and across the road and queuing at every sandwich shop. It is the city at lunchtime. We walk through the crowds and stand at a bus stop.

  The big red bus opens sliding doors; we climb up the stairs and swerve down towards the glinting river.

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t know it when she said it, but it means something when Bianca says she’ll ask around. She puts the word out into her enormous network of Italians, Venezuelans, Chileans and Portuguese, and within days you have a new sofa, a part-time job, a removal van, a free TV, or a new place to live.

  The bedsit I move to is no palace, but even though the skylight is stuck open and the washing machine is broken and the kitchen as small as a cupboard, I prefer it to the double glazing, the blotchy linoleum, the striplighting and smell of institutions that I thought would gobble me up like that insect that lays its eggs in a frog and eats it from the inside.

  I thought that would happen to me. I’d be sucked out somehow.

  But thanks to Bianca, I have my own place now.

  And every morning I cycle through the rowan trees, past the pyramids of cauliflowers and oranges, the stalls of red and brown handbags and different-coloured dresses, and climb up the stairs to the studio where Roberta paints her mysterious paintings.

  I’m envious of Rob’s paintings.

  Downstairs in the basement, Cecile is painting huge flowers. Upstairs, Bianca is making work from glinting metallic paper, gold leaf and melted beeswax mixed with pigment; beautiful collages that glint in the light and glow in the half-light.

  And I am painting London.

  It is autumn and the city is lit by yellow trees. I walk around the streets, looking at paintings that haven’t been painted yet, and I draw on the corner of streets at night, and by the river in the day, and from cafés high up above the road so I can see the distance is blue. And I take the drawings back to the studio and tape them on the wall to paint from. I paint Sloane Square from Peter Jones with a circle of trees and a red bus going up Sloane Street, and I draw Cambridge Circus from the Fruit of the Loom pub and paint the turquoise lamp-posts and orange brick buildings and a sky cut in half by the clouds.

  In London the clouds have a habit of cutting the sky in half, so the sun shines from beneath and lights the buildings up yellow so they glow against the grey sky, and even the tower blocks look beautiful, lilac and grey with glowing pink windows reflecting the sunset shining against the dark evening sky.

  And I learn about near, far and middle distance, and tone from dark to light, through all the in-betweens, and complementary colours that glow and shine together.

  I look for them in the city streets and I see the sun shining through red leaves, next to green, and glistening on the wet grass.

  I see a large yellow sun between dark lilac clouds, so it looks like a big eye with rays of lemon-yellow eyelashes.

  I see an orange globe flashing at a zebra crossing when the sky is turning blue.

  And Bianca calls it the yellow season except for the ash trees, their leaves flame-red, the tips purple so they glow from within like embers. I paint the dark street with brown madder, magenta and translucent Indian yellow painted over white, so it glows. The streetlight shining in the darkness, illuminating the trees.

  I must have been invisible when I was doing the drawings for it, because a man raced past me with a bag in his hand. Not long after came a plump man, puffing, and then a lady with her hat askew, wheezing and clip-clopping on unsuitable heels. If they’d asked me I would have told them where he ran. But I didn’t think to tell them, I was just watching the night.

  And I paint the river. The beautiful river.

  I go down to the river in the dark, and see the green lights reflected in the water, just after sunset when the sky is streaked with pink and the starlings gather and fly under and over the bridge with their startling precision.

  I paint the river from Westminster Bridge, looking over St Paul’s; from Albert Bridge when the leaves are turning, streaked with pink light at dusk; from Battersea Bridge, looking down towards the park and the serene gold Buddha.

  I even persuade Rob to get up before sunrise to paint the dawn, and we sit on the police pier at Blackfriars and paint the sun rising over Tower Bridge. A grey green before dawn light that slowly turns to pink and lights the water, and then the streaks of yellow begin beyond the blue distant buildings, and we paint with watercolours, one, two, three pictures in as many minutes because the colours change so fast and the sky turns pink then yellow as the sun rises and shines down the river in a ribbon of light.

  But Rob doesn’t need the river, or the park, or the houses with the lights coming on, she doesn’t need the street lights turning from pink to yellow or the turquoise shadows or the purple London night, or finding a place high enough to paint the bend in the river, or see the distance is blue. She doesn’t even need the colours. She can make them in simple black and white, drawings and paintings endlessly pouring out of her, like dreams. Landscapes with paths and trees, and a man with a crown who holds his penis erect, and women who squat and give birth to other women, and horses, and people who she knows but has never seen; she knows how to make an unseen world into pictures and I want to know too.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Will you come and help or just keep watch?’ Rob says.

  ‘Keep watch, why?’

  ‘Well, they might not allow it.’

  ‘You’re only going to collect some earth.’

 
She shrugs. ‘Well, you’re not allowed to do lots of things that are perfectly reasonable.’

  Ever since we went to the museum she’s been obsessed with these ideas she won’t talk about, only now they have to be made with mud, not just any mud, though, river mud. That’s why we end up going to Battersea Park just before the gates close so that the twilight is beginning to fall and all the blackbirds and robins and song thrushes and blue tits in the park are singing their separate songs together in a big dusk chorus, and climb over the fence by the weeping willow with a trowel and a spade and four plastic bags, and dig up the mud from the river where it is low. But it’s not the Thames, it’s ‘Tamesa’, Rob says, which means ‘the dark one’, and she says a prayer to the river which embarrasses me slightly before we dig, which goes, ‘Oh dark water, I am your daughter’, but I am rather glad of the rhyme, and we spade the mud into the bags until they are full and ridiculously heavy, so we have to spade some of it out again, then realize that we can’t climb up the walls that we’ve jumped down from, and we have to call one of the joggers to get the park attendant who we’ve tried so hard to avoid, so that he can fetch a ladder from the gardens in the quadrangle where they grow the bedding plants and get us out.

  He says, ‘What the hell are you doing down there?’

  ‘Collecting mud for my painting,’ says Rob.

  ‘But she won’t tell you the details,’ I say. ‘She’s not telling any of us.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re the helper.’

  ‘I am,’ I say, as I climb back over the fence.

  ‘Well, good luck to you. If you run outa mud just let me know.’

  ‘Thank you, we appreciate it,’ says Rob, picking up the bags.

  ‘Tell us when the art exhibition’s on so I can see what you’re up to,’ he says, following us down the path.

  ‘Certainly will,’ says Rob.

  ‘You sure you can manage with all them bags of mud?’

  ‘Yes, we’re fine, thanks,’ says Rob, and we trudge out the gates, the night turning blue, and the green lights rippling over the dark water.