‘What would split apart?’
‘Whatever it is that’s holding me together! I’m just somewhere horrible at the moment.’
‘And Zeb isn’t?’
‘Well, he’s not in the horrible place my dad’s in.’
Bianca looks up at me. ‘And I don’t think you should be either!’
The sun comes out and floods the studio through the raindrops, and the gold glitters and flutters to the floor as Bianca stands up and says, ‘I know! I’m going to take you somewhere!’ And begins to pack up her sketchbook and collage materials. ‘He’s the patron saint of Londoners!’ she says, pulling on her coat, ‘and we are Londoners!’
‘Bianca, what are you talking about?’
‘Come on, downstairs! Get your stuff! I’m taking you on a pilgrimage!’
‘But you’re not religious.’
‘No, but I am superstitious,’ says Bianca. ‘And I think you are losing it.’
‘Losing what?’
She just looks at me.
‘D’you think so?’ I say.
‘It’s in the eyes!’ she says, pointing at me with two index fingers.
So I let myself be led downstairs to get my coat and sketchbook and out the door into the sunlight and the rain.
Chapter 8
On the top deck of the bus Bianca gets out her guidebook and translates from Italian about Rahere who went to Italy and saw a vision of a six-winged animal with lion’s feet who took him up to the top of a mountain to meet St Bartholomew who told him to build a church in Smithfield, because it was a holy place.
‘The meat market? Really?’ I say.
We climb out the bus and walk down Smithfield, past men in blue and white striped aprons, carrying dead pigs and cows from refrigerated lorries down metal ramps and through the gates of the meat market.
We walk away from the road and the iron smell of blood down Rising Sun Court and come upon a grey church and a grass garden dappled with sunlight from an overhanging tree, hidden behind buildings, with a feeling of stillness. We walk into the garden. The quietness encloses us. From the branches a dove calls roo-coo, roo-coo.
Sometimes you walk through an invisible curtain that divides one atmosphere from another. It is a gentle thing, but within the gentleness is something that could completely rearrange you. Your whole being might turn into dots and become part of the air.
The garden feels separated from time.
Bianca and I go down the steps into the church, which envelops us in flickering darkness and the smell of frankincense.
And I feel as if we have fallen beneath ordinary reality where the air is thicker.
We walk past a statue of Bartholomew carrying his own skin.
‘Poor thing, is that what happened to him?’
I light a candle for dad.
Bianca is turning the pages of an enormous red leather book with gilt-edged pages.
‘Rahere built it in 1123 with the help of children and beggars,’ she whispers, and the whispering fills the air with ‘s’s’ that linger and echo, as she tells me stories from the Book of the Foundations.
‘So many people were healed that he’s only going to tell us about the ones he’s seen with his own eyes! the writer says,’ she whispers.
‘Maybe he can heal your hepatitis,’ I say.
‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘if I didn’t have hepatitis I’d go and score heroin straight away. It is my protector!’
While Bianca sits at the back of the church in a tall wooden pew, making collages with metallic sweetie wrappers nailed smooth, I wander up the dark corridors and wonder what it was like being alive then, shuffling up the aisle with your legs in a basket, pushing yourself along on sticks, so you could get to the altar among the songs and the glimmering candles and be healed by a saint you can’t see. And far away I hear a church bell and I feel the reverberation of the sound in my cells.
We sit outside the church for a while. The rain has stopped. The little garden glistens. Bianca has bits of coloured paper all over the bench. I draw a picture of St Bartholomew by a wide blue river and a church built by children from the time when people were healed by invisible hope.
A wind blows through the plane tree and Bianca’s pieces of paper flutter. She chases them across the grass.
Then the bells start ringing, dong-dong ding-ding-dong, in different rhythms. Once they must have rung all over the city, telling about times to pray, and the hermits who guarded the gates of the city and the holy wells, with their long matted hair and ragged clothes, would have closed their eyes.
We walk away from the sound, out of the old gateway and past St Bartholomew’s Hospital and into the city streets to catch the bus home.
Chapter 9
It is Saturday, and the college is closed. I bike along the river with my paintbox, a jar of water and a tube of white. I chain up my bike in Victoria Gardens and walk between the plane trees that eat up the traffic fumes and keep London clean, and up the steps to Lambeth Bridge. The dark clouds have gone and the river shines with light.
I stand on the bridge, looking towards Westminster, and paint the curve in the river. I follow the wall with my paintbrush all the way up to Westminster Bridge, which is distant from me, but little on the page. I follow the arches with the tip of the brush, making sure they are small enough, and behind the bridge, the dome of St Paul’s, a curve and a dash of blue. My brush follows the line of the water’s surface. I put in the trees in Victoria Gardens, then a frenzied tumult of dashes and spires, and among them a circle; the face of Big Ben.
The brush follows my eye. I paint the surface of the water. Little dashes far away, ripples nearby; a small boat in the far distance, a large passenger barge on the bottom of the page.
I wait for the paint to dry and look into the river and watch the water slipping over itself, brown and deep. Down there among the stones, something is lodged. I see dark orange rust spots behind the silty water, and the rippled blue surface that reflects the sky.
The sun slips out and the Houses of Parliament light up, all spiky.
I turn the page and draw with my pen.
A barge moves over the water and under Westminster Bridge. A yellow lorry crosses over the bridge at the same time, and an aeroplane moves slowly across the sky and disappears behind a blue and grey striped tower block. I keep up with my pen. They describe the near, the far and the middle distance, and help me make the small page into a big space.
Tied-up boats slide gently over the up-and-down of the water in the ribbon of reflected sun, sending tiny ripples and dots of light over the surface. Then the clouds come from behind me and little spots of rain begin to smudge the ink.
The castellations of Lambeth Palace begin to drip downwards into the trees.
The bridge vibrates with the weight of a bus.
I walk towards the café on the river, opposite Lambeth Palace, in the rain. It sits over the water and the windows look down the river to Westminster.
The window-pane is covered in raindrops. I can see Westminster Bridge in the misty distance.
I draw the frowning sea serpents coiled around the globes of light, and the green lions holding circles in their mouths along the curved wall.
I turn the page. I am learning the scene. I draw quickly in black ink, the spiky towers, the distant bridge, the curve of the water, the lions and dolphins in squiggles and the pavement under the trees, with the castellations of the palace behind. On the bench is a man. I am making him up. He is hunched on the bench. The trees are holding the sky in twiggy branches.
I turn the page. I draw just the man on the bench, I can see the trees and the bench and I copy the shapes, but I am making up the man. He is surrounded by dark shapes. They are crying out somehow.
I turn the page. I can’t go there.
I take out my paintbox. I think I am painting the olive-green water, and the verdigris lion, but the paint coagulates on the page and there is the figure stooped over on the bench, surrounded by other figures. I draw them in the pa
int. They are the people of his despair. I’d felt their presence in the flat and entered their city in my dreams. Their eyes were hollow, their mouths chewing nothing, fingering me with greedy hunger, and I’d fled from them along a dark underground tunnel, knee-deep in water, and woke myself trying to scream.
I close the book and don’t care if the pages get stuck together. I am comforted by the sounds of the coffee machine and the smell of coffee, and the man in a knitted yellow hat that keeps his hair in a bundle. I look out the window. The other side of the river is more and more hidden by white mist; the spiky Westminster towers poking up in ghostly silhouette, Big Ben’s face still visible, but the river beyond the bridge is obscured behind white, and raindrops rush down and make the surface of the river shiver with hundreds of droplets.
When the rain stops I walk out into the white day. The air is clear, washed clean of dust, and the wet pavements reflect the sky. I feel heavy. As if weighed down by a memory that is living in my chest. I stand still. It is living under my breath. If I stop and close my eyes and stop breathing maybe I will see it. It is far away.
Then I see his crumpled face.
When the wind had come along with the rain, and the black sky had broken and lashed his hair, his face crumpled into a strange shape; while everyone stood under the umbrellas, he stood by the gaping hole with streams of water running into it, and clenched his hands together instead of holding mine.
I walk along by the benches that are placed up on little plinths so you can see the water.
A smartly dressed man in a hat and a brown raincoat, with a crease in his pinstriped trousers, lays a newspaper on the wet bench and sits down on it. He looks like he belongs in a 1950s film when everything was dark red and pale green.
I wonder if the gold and silver statue people will be standing still beyond Hungerford Bridge or maybe they’re worried the rain will wash them clean.
I look into the water. It is swollen with the rain.
I am remembering the cold church with the wind outside and an old lady saying ‘Poor child’ as if I wasn’t there, while I touched the face of a mermaid carved into a chair. I looked round at her while my hand felt the contours, to tell her that I knew she meant me, because my mother was dead, but she looked away, and I looked back at the mermaid who had strange eyes.
I breathe in the river wind. The mist is lifting. I copy the smart man and climb up the steps and put my sketchbook down on the rain-spattered bench.
Big Ben booms out his dong that colours the air. I take my book from under me and draw his portrait. He started life as a drawing, and before that he was just an idea in Pugin’s mind. He is difficult to draw. It is easier to draw quickly.
But suddenly I put my sketchbook down and leave it on the bench to go down the steps and lean over the side and look into the flowing water.
I had new goggles. I wanted to swim in the seaweed forest, deep down where the waving fronds grew high, and the sun made shivering underwater ripples on the sea floor.
I saw it floating upside down with its mouth open; it slowly bounced towards me and touched me, a dead dogfish, with white stuff, omelette-like, coming out of its mouth. I screamed all the breath out of my body, and heard the scream fill the water. I fought my way back to the surface, heavy without air, and spluttered into the above-water daylight, coughing out the water I’d gulped instead of breath, until I was hauled out, laid flat on the rock, and she’d blown breath into my body through my mouth, until the gurgling water in my lungs spewed out of my mouth in a long stream.
The sun comes out from behind the clouds and lights up the river.
The water glitters and I close my eyes and feel rippling light on my eyelids.
But I am still seeing memories.
I remember Mrs Tregenza held me against her white apron, and I didn’t like it because it smelt of fish, and I didn’t like her fishy hands, that sliced the long silver mackerel bellies so the red guts tumbled out in bloody coils, fingering their way through my curls.
‘He’ll be back in a minute, darling, don’t cry,’ and she’d jigged me up and down against the scaly oily apron until I’d seen dad outside and run into the drizzle to be with him. His hands had made tense starfish and clenched together in a jerky rhythm but in time with each other, I couldn’t hold those hands, while Bob was murmuring to him and making my dad’s face go strange. And the pavement was slippy and the sea came into my Wellingtons, as I hurried after him between the boxes of fish with their red eyes staring. They didn’t frighten me. It was the rhythmic pulse of the starfish hands.
I open my eyes. The sun has gone again and the water is brownish green. I turn back to the bench and sit down next to my sketchbook. I open it and draw a little girl underwater, swimming next to a dead dogfish.
Then I remember it. The image that was conjured in the slant of light, by the words that came through from the kitchen along with the cooking smell: ‘They’ve found the body by Lamorna, the eyes wide open,’ and I’d imagined my mother wrapped in seaweed, the kind like hair, her eyes staring, with a frill of egg-white floating from her mouth.
It must have all happened within a few days.
I nearly drowned and then she did.
I bicycle slowly back. The memory has opened a shaking space within me. I bike past Millbank and the wide stairs of the Tate, through Pimlico and the red houses of Chelsea, and by the silver river all the way home.
I climb the stairs and lie down in bed although it’s not even time for the streetlights to come on, and lie looking at the ceiling until my eyes close on their own.
Chapter 10
I wake up with a start. It is dark outside. I can still hear dad’s voice calling to me out of my dream. It is so real I think it’s in the room. There is a car alarm going off in the street. I switch on the light. It’s only 11:30. I get up, put my clothes on without thinking, and pick up my keys. Surely if I follow the feeling I will find him.
I go down the stairs and out into the street. There is a wind blowing. The sky is dark blue, with stars. I walk down the dark streets, looking up the alleys and along the King’s Road, lit up with coloured light, people coming out the pub in crowds. I pass three men, their arms round each other’s shoulders, singing ‘Here we go here we go’ and laughing.
‘All right, love?’
‘Hello, lady of the night.’
I walk up to Sloane Square. Two figures are lolling in the centre of the square, under the trees. I feel like I’ve walked into one of my paintings. One of the men gets up and falls over.
I walk up Sloane Avenue towards Knightsbridge. The wind is blowing through the leaves. A police car whizzes past me, its siren blaring, the blue lights flashing. I feel the wind of it, it drives so close to the pavement.
The sky has gone brown with orange clouds. I walk along Knightsbridge beneath the tall buildings, imagining I am following his footsteps, sure I’m being led to him, if I just follow my feet.
Under the hotel in Knightsbridge some old men are sitting by the big-leaved plants, and chatting to the doorman in his top hat and gold buttons, but dad is not with them. I trudge on up to Hyde Park Corner. I keep thinking I’ll just go on a bit further. I’ll find him if I carry on.
By the time I’ve walked up Green Park and Piccadilly to the Circus I feel as if my body doesn’t fit together. People sit around the fountain under Eros, dressed in ragged clothes, with lurid faces which change colour in ripples under the advertising lights. The lights make rhythmic circles and zigzags and wave patterns and flash out Coca-Cola and Fuji film.
Cars are zooming, more sirens flash past, and the sounds begin to echo.
Maybe I will find him if I carry on down the Haymarket, maybe he’s sitting on the steps of the National Gallery or among the lions made out of melted-down guns. That’s the sort of thing Zeb tells you; and the cross on St Paul’s weighs the same as seven cars, and reality is 80 per cent invisible.
Someone by the fountain is screaming. Two men are fighting on the pave
ment. I see the man’s head wobble as it is pounded by the other man’s big fist. I run away from them, down a dark street, past whistling scaffolding pipes. A man gets up from the bench on a ledge, and bursts into tears.
A night bus slides past and opens its doors. I recognise the number and clamber in. I sit down and close my eyes.
Chapter 11
‘You look fucking terrible!’ Rob says as she comes through the muslin curtain into my space.
‘I feel it, Rob!’ I say, sitting down on the stool.
‘No, really, shit! You look bad. You’re a state! Your eyes have got rings under them. Look at yourself!’ she says, getting up and fetching the mirror she uses to paint self-portraits.
‘Oh don’t, Rob, I don’t want to look.’
‘Listen! He’s missing, he’ll turn up, you can’t spend your nights and days tramping the streets!’
‘Yeah, but what if he turns up dead, Rob? What if he turns up in the river, or frozen to death on a piece of cardboard?’
‘It’s spring, it’s getting warmer.’
‘It was freezing last night! And that wind.’
‘Yes, and you were out in it, listen to me! It’s not your responsibility! Are you listening? He’s NOT your responsibility.’
‘That’s just words, Rob. What if your dad was out in the street? Probably drunk in a gutter?’
‘I think you should go and see Safi.’
‘Who’s Safi?’
‘The college counsellor.’
‘Oh and she’ll help me find him, will she? The police were fucking useless!’
She shakes her head at me, and puts the mirror down in my space.
‘Look in the mirror,’ she says as she goes through the curtain, ‘and see Safi.’
I look at myself. My eyes are wide open and scared-looking, with dark rings. My face is shockingly pale with a yellow tinge, and I have a squint look.
I stand outside the red door. And look at the label. Mrs Safi Irfan.
‘Oh, bugger this.’
I walk down the stairs halfway to the canteen, then turn around and go upstairs again, and stand outside the door. I breathe in and knock.
Invisible River Page 10
