Silvia steps in the doorway and picks up her bra.
‘What do you think?’
I find it touching the way Bianca speaks to her Italian flatmates in English if I am there.
‘Yes, you look very nice, I like it, I like it,’ she says. and crouches a little, to see in the mirror and put dark purple lipstick on her lips.
She doesn’t seem to mind that it’s her dress. Silvia has long dark auburn hair, and a curvy body.
‘Well, I think you should try the red one,’ says Bianca
I feel constricted by the structure in the seams, and breathe out with relief when she undoes the zip.
The girls Bianca lives with do textiles at Goldsmiths, and the flat is hung with velvet curtains printed with spirals, and quilted spreads sewn with appliquéd animals are thrown over the sofa and chairs. A piece of pink silk is tied around the shade, which tints the light in the sitting room.
I walk in, wearing the red dress. Bianca nods, and points her finger at me.
‘This one! Yes, this one! What do you think?’ She turns to Silvia.
A huge cauldron of minestrone is bubbling on the stove in the kitchen. Silvia stands in the yellow-lit doorway, holding a huge chunk of Parmesan cheese wrapped in silver foil.
‘Yes, I like too,’ says Silvia.
‘Now shoes,’ and Bianca gets up, takes my hand and leads me into the corridor, where there is a long row of shoes.
‘Try these!’ She calls through to Carlotta, ‘Porti quelle rosse sta notte?’
‘No.’
‘Allora, try these.’
I slip my feet into shoes that are far too high.
Bianca kneels back on her heels and looks me up and down with satisfaction.
‘Ha! ha! now you can steal him!’
‘Are you sure this is the best way in, Bianca?’
We have climbed in the end of the garden, which is more of a waste land, two gardens knocked together behind houses that are mostly squats. I am walking in the dark on high-heeled shoes, through piles of rubble and old tyres and a forest of sycamore saplings, my heels sinking into the mud.
Bianca is giggling. ‘Maybe not!’
As we near the party we hear the dooff dooff dooff of reggae beats thumping under the grass. A bonfire is crackling and sending sparks into the air. Some home-made torches have been stuck in the ground and light up flickering patches of the garden, and smell of paraffin. The sky above the sparks is a clear indigo night and the red moon looks strangely afflicted. There is a dark bite in the bottom corner. The moon is being swallowed.
Many people are piling out of doorways on to the grass, and the smell of chicken and rice and minestrone flavours the air. Silvia has brought the cauldron of soup, and bowls of food are spread out on a table that has been hauled outside, along with bottles and glasses and paper cups. Inside, the people are thick, bodies are sweaty and pulsing together with the music.
The thumping rhythms fill the air and the drums pulsate in the ground and the bass pounds in our ears.
There is the smell of marijuana mixing with the chicken.
I feel suddenly nervous and the air has become strange. The moon is half swallowed by the black shape. The flickering torches leave their imprint on my eyes so my vision is dotted with purple and blue flashes over the dark garden. Bianca is surrounded by people. They chatter away like geese in Italian and Spanish. She has a big piece of Parmesan in her hands, wrapped in silver foil, which she is undoing and grating into the huge pot of minestrone. I can smell the cheese from here through the clouds of aromatic marijuana that two tall men with long dreadlocks are smoking with their backs to the bonfire. The flames fly up behind them, making them into black silhouettes.
The moon has been swallowed. It feels cold without loss of temperature and quiet although the music still plays. A glimmering, eerie feeling.
Zeb walks up the steps from the basement. He must have slid through the bodies. He stands still, looking. He can’t see into the dark.
He could be an Apache, with his long dark hair. But I think he’s a Crow man.
He sees me and nods. He walks towards me and the quiet intensifies. Time stops passing. His eyes look at me out of the dark and I can see the fire reflected in them. He stands over me like a tree.
He opens his mouth, but doesn’t say anything.
‘Look at the moon,’ I say. ‘It’s just been swallowed.’
Everything feels wrong. Disjointed. Jangling.
My voice doesn’t seem to synchronise with my mouth. I speak, and hear it echoing.
A thin sliver of red moon appears out the other side.
He looks up at the moon and back at me.
His eyes are strange.
Bianca is suddenly there beside us. ‘Zeh-Beh-Deeee!’ she calls up at him, holding his hand and reaching up to kiss his cheek. She winks at me.
‘Look, you must have some wine! Where is your cup?’
‘I’ll get some,’ says Zeb, going over to the trestle table.
I watch his back walking away and stooping over the table.
‘Here! I have a bottle!’ she calls to a knot of people next to the tree, and walks over to them, holding her bottle up in the air.
I look across at Zeb but now Suzanne is at the table too and she is talking. She wears a yellow dress and it shows off her tan from Barbados.
‘Blondes should never wear yellow!’ says Bianca, coming back with her bottle. ‘It clashes with their hair! I will break up the fight.’
She walks across to the table, and smiles to one and then the other. Suzanne doesn’t smile. Zeb glances over at me and hands Bianca a cup. She comes back.
‘Here you are.’ She pours it as she walks towards me.
‘Thanks.’
I take my wine under the tree where Rob and Mick are lying on his coat with their backs leaning against the trunk, gobbling chicken and rice from paper plates.
‘How are you?’
‘Did you see the eclipse?’
‘We’re not going to stay that late but you can get a lift back with us if you like.’
I nod and wander round the garden to look at the shadows and the purple flashes. I can see Zeb and Suzanne having an argument in silhouette in front of the bonfire. I’m sick of him and his love life.
I wander past them into the seething mass of bodies in the basement. Silvia is dancing with her boyfriend. He is a muscular black man in a white T-shirt, he has a bald head and it shines. Silvia gyrates her hips slowly, looking at him all the time. Her hips move but her head stays in the same place.
I close my eyes and dance. The music fills the darkness, pulses through me in colours, and sweat runs over the surface of my skin.
The music becomes slow and people are pressing up against one another. I slide through the writhing bodies to the doorway and the garden. On the edge of the crowd Zeb and Suzanne are dancing. She has her arms in a circle round his neck.
Bianca is at the top of the stairs. She nods over at them and shrugs.
I walk past the embers of the bonfire. The torches are spent and the garden is dark. Rob and Mick are cuddled up under the tree. Mick has big arms and he squeezes her to him.
‘Are you ready to go?’
I nod.
‘Come on, then.’
We drive up Acre Lane, past two people fighting, with a crowd shouting around them. I feel dark, closed in by the buildings, and deep down within me is a crying sound. We drive round a corner to Clapham Common and the sky is purple with orange clouds.
The trees are dark against the sky. We flew the kite here. Zeb brought fishing line and attached it to the string, it just kept going higher and higher, until it was a tiny speck. When the fishing line ran out he let it go, and Bianca said, ‘I didn’t realize your intention was liberation!’ and we all laughed.
Suzanne wasn’t there. She wasn’t there for the whole Christmas holiday, when we’d met up in the Portuguese café and had crispy custard cakes and fish-balls with the Italians every Sunday
.
I have to put Zeb out of my mind. Not feel these feelings. Fold them up, put them away somewhere, then take them out and paint them secretly.
We drive past Battersea Park gates and I look into the dark trees, and then out on to the bridge. I love the river at night, reflecting the coloured lights. We cross the river and I feel the water flowing beneath us. Rob and Mick are talking to each other, but I can’t hear. There is a crying sound. Far away. It is the sound of the moon. It hangs over the river, eclipsed. But there is another moon; to find it I have to follow the sound to within my own world. I know it. I have painted it. There is a forest there. It is still. Sometimes the moon disguises itself and looks at me with intense eyes. When I find it, and paint it, the crying will stop.
We drive along past the barges with glimmering lights outside, and up Edith Grove. Litter is being blown about the street by the wind, and a huddle of men in dirty clothes sit drinking on a traffic island lit by yellow light. They are calling out, their arms flailing, and I don’t know if they are sad or singing. The city has a peculiar atmosphere, as though it has slipped through time to another century, or the veil between time is thin and other centuries are showing through. Zeb knows about those things.
We drive up and along the streets and stop outside the peeling porch of my house. A drunk man is curled up outside my door.
‘Oh dear!’ says Rob. ‘You’ve got an alkie on your doorstep.’
‘D’you want me to help you shift him?’ says Mick, as he pulls the handbrake.
Something hits my chest. I breathe in quickly.
‘Oh my God!’
Roberta looks at me.
The breath is knocked out my body.
‘It’s dad!’
Part Two
Chapter 1
‘We’ll help you get him up the stairs,’ says Rob, making a decisive move that wakes me from my shock.
He is a dead weight when Mick and I try to lift him, and smells of sour alcohol. He mumbles and groans as we lift him. I open the door and he falls on to the mat. My one room, with a small kitchen at the back, is too small for his presence. It fills the air with his weight. I open the windows. I have a sofa and a bed, a table and a chair. In my kitchen there is a small table covered in formica with bananas and apples on the shiny white surface.
Rob has made tea.
We have laid dad on the sofa and he has fallen to the side and now his head is on the arm so his face is pulled sideways and his mouth is open.
Mick is standing up, looking out the kitchen window, through the gap between the houses where you can see the dark river under the purple sky.
I look at Rob, bewildered.
‘He didn’t say he was coming.’
‘Is he always like this?’
‘You mean drunk?’
She shrugs with one shoulder.
‘Yes, I mean, it’s been getting worse.’ I sigh. ‘He’s all alone in the house now and . . . Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.’
I get up and look round the door at him lying squint and uncomfortable on the sofa. The sour alcohol smell fills the room. I don’t want him to be there.
‘I don’t want him here, I don’t want this.’
‘Well, he’s here,’ says Rob, ‘and he’ll sober up.’
‘And then what? What’s he come here for?’
‘To be with you, I expect.’
‘I don’t want him here. I can’t look after him.’
There’s such a horrible combination of disgust and tenderness and anger and panic in me that I begin to tremble and I put my shaking hand on the door lintel to steady myself.
‘Sit down,’ says Rob. ‘Just sit down a minute and drink your tea.’
And I think of Bianca still at the party and Zeb dancing with Suzanne. Then I look over at the sink and start thinking odd things, like Mick’s back pocket is torn and maybe he should sew it up and will Rob do it, and then I imagine her sitting under the light, sewing up his pocket.
The surrealness of the night continues. The apples, pears and bananas are too bright, divided by their bamboo squares. The flat feels overcrowded with energies that do not belong here.
‘You must go home,’ I say, looking up. Even Rob looks strange. Her lips are purple.
I blink my eyes. ‘God, I feel as if I’ve taken acid or something. D’you think someone spiked the drinks?’
She looks at me. ‘No, I don’t think it’s that.’
I shrug.
She gets up and Mick turns round. He puts his arm round her.
‘You’ll just have to send him home when he wakes up.’
‘I can’t imagine him, I mean, getting on the train, oh well.’ I give a half smile. ‘I’ll be OK. Off you go.’
They close the door. My flat is too full. His presence is heavy.
I sit on my bed and look at him. My eyes are too wide. Something in me is trembling.
‘Dad? Dad?’
He moans.
‘Dad?’ I lean across to shake him. His head falls off the arm. I move to catch him, and tug him back on to the sofa.
‘What are you doing here, dad?’ I know he won’t answer. ‘What d’you expect me to do?’
He suddenly opens his eyes and clutches my hand with both of his.
‘I’m frightened, Eve. I’m frightened of dying.’
‘But, dad, you’re not going to die.’
He holds my hand so tight that it hurts. And squeezes his eyes shut, but his mouth is open, his teeth clenched together in a look of acute pain.
‘Oh, dad!’
I sit back on the bed.
He suddenly, violently, rolls off on to the floor and lies on the mat between the bed and the sofa. From the acrid smell and a trickling sound I realize that he is pissing on the floor.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, dad!’
I get a bucket of water and a cloth.
‘For God’s sake, dad!’
I pull off his trousers. I wrap him up in a towel, and ease the mat from underneath him. I mop up the piss and take the mat between my thumb and finger and rinse it in the sink. Then I shove it out the window, weighted down by a packet of washing powder and a pan filled with cutlery.
When I go back through to mop the floorboards he is lying in a foetal position with the towel wrapped round him. He looks like a big tiny baby.
I take the blanket off my bed and throw it over him.
‘For goodness sake, dad!’
I lie under my duvet and look at the yellow window on the ceiling. I don’t want to close the curtain, so the yellow streetlight shines into the room making the shadows brown and the light lurid.
I can feel a presence in the room that isn’t just dad. As though he has brought something else with him. I’m afraid it will get into me when I’m asleep. I lie with my eyes wide open. A blue window is flicked around the room by the headlights of a passing car.
Chapter 2
All morning, at college, I’ve been listening for sounds: someone clattering along the corridor, bumping against the thin partitions, slumping down somewhere. Like he might turn up any moment in my painting space and piss on the floor, then fall over and lie with his chin resting on his breastbone, and his legs splayed out at right angles.
I am scared he’s going to come in to the college and show me up! That’s what they used to say at school: ‘Oh, my dad, did you see what he was wearing? He really shows me up!’ That’s when you’re thirteen, it’s all right to be ashamed of your parents, afraid they’ll make you conspicuous, make you ashamed of them. That horrible feeling squirming inside your belly that makes your toes curl. They really do. They curl sideways so you stand on the outer edges of your feet. It makes you hold your breath but the cringing is the worst part. Everything seems to turn inside out; all the intestines and the stomach. You clench it but it does it anyway.
Rob puts her head through the curtain.
‘D’you want that?’ she says, handing me a cup. ‘I don’t want it.’
‘Why not? It’
s still hot!’ I say, taking the coffee.
‘Dunno, it’s making me queasy,’ says Rob, sitting on the stool and getting out her tobacco to roll a cigarette. ‘So what about your dad? Where did you leave him?’ She licks the paper closed and puts the fag in her mouth.
‘Should you be doing that?’
‘Listen, I’m down to three a day so shut up.’
‘OK, OK.’
‘Well?’
‘He was still sleeping when I left this morning,’ I say, looking out the window.
‘So he’s usually like that?’
‘Mostly, I suppose.’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Maybe he wants to come and stay with you.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘You’ll have to kick him out, it’s your life.’
‘Rob!’
‘Well, you have to be like that, alcoholics are hard work!’
‘Is that what my dad is?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Oh Rob, I just hope he doesn’t come in here drunk!’
‘Why should he?’ says Rob.
‘To see me, I suppose.’
‘Well, he might find a friend!’ Rob laughs and gives me a nudge.
I know she means Terry and I laugh half-heartedly.
Rob picks up her bag. ‘I’m going down the Housing Benefit,’ she says along with a puff of smoke and stomps off with the fag in her mouth.
There is a feeling of drama in my body. A trembling that I cannot quieten. I feel shocked. Something in me is shaky and unsteady. And all my ideas, which usually congregate in a humming throng of colours, are scattered about in a disconnected distance from each other.
There is an emptiness around me where the ideas usually are, and all I see is the dream that I woke from with sweat on my face, trying to cry out that it wasn’t my dream.
I’d been pulled down a tunnel with wet walls. The ragged people had despair in their faces. My dad was there and they were clutching at him. There were broken bottles among the filth. The dark river in the tunnel was full of rubbish. They saw me, and began coming towards me.
Invisible River Page 7
