‘Come in,’ says a voice from within.
I open the door.
She sits behind a desk, and looks round to me.
‘Come in, dear,’ she says.
She has a soft Indian accent, her hair is grey at the roots and dyed dark chestnut. She has high cheekbones and dark eyes.
‘Sit down, do you want to sit down?’ she says, standing up. ‘I can make you a cup of tea if you want to talk for a little bit.’
I want to walk out the door but I am touched by the pretty way the words sound in her mouth.
I sit down.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’
All the consonants are softened, and there is a melody in the sentences.
I just nod to everything she asks, that way ending up with a biscuit, a cup of tea with two sugars, none of which I really want.
I would like to sit in here and listen to her saying ordinary things all day.
‘My dear,’ she says kindly, ‘you are here to talk to me?’
‘Well I . . . yes,’ I say.
‘What would you like to talk about?’
I look out the window at the white sky.
‘It’s my . . . well it’s about my . . .’ I swallow and look at her, and her look is so deep that it reaches into me where my tears are; the look says, ‘It’s all right, you know,’ and the tears begin to silently pour out my eyes.
She sits nodding slightly until the tears stop.
‘My dad,’ I say in a whisper.
‘Yes.’ She nods. ‘It is difficult for you.’
I feel as if she knows it all already.
She has seen him on my front steps, slumped against the railings, and us dragging him up the stairs. She knows that he pissed on the floor and I had to change his trousers, and about the beautiful letter he wrote.
‘He said he was sorry, you see,’ I say, and she nods. ‘Sorry because of all of it, that he didn’t want to be that way.’
She nods.
‘And I remember . . .’ I say, shaking my head slowly at her while the words are stuck, and the memories are in the air round her head, so I’m sure she sees them too, ‘I remember how he was.’
She nods. She can see how he was; so noble and tall.
‘He doesn’t like what he’s become, you see.’
She nods. ‘And its hard for you, too,’ she says, and something cracks in me and and I begin to sob.
‘You see, he left because he’s ashamed, I made him ashamed, that’s the thing, and now he’s out on the street in the cold. On some park bench,’ and the tears pour down my cheeks.
‘My dear,’ she says gently, ‘you didn’t make him ashamed.’
‘I did!’ and my voice has a screech in it, ‘I did! I told him I didn’t want him in my flat, that I couldn’t put him up, I couldn’t cope with him. TO GET OUT. To get out.’
‘And what if I were to tell you that you did the right thing?’ says Safi.
‘The right thing’ sounds beautiful in Safi’s mouth. The trill of the ‘r’ is soft. It opens some kind of doorway in the air that reveals many possibilities. The doorway closes abruptly.
‘But what if he DIES on the street? He might DIE!’
Safi stays perfectly still.
‘That is his choice.’
The melody in her voice makes the word ‘choice’ end on a high note. And I hear that his choice comes from a place within him that I cannot reach.
‘You cannot make that choice for him.’
I nod, she has made me see it.
‘And you cannot protect him from it.’
I look at the many-armed deity Sellotaped to her diary. She turns the book round for me to look at, the colours are pink and green and gold.
I talk with Safi until the sky darkens and she switches on the light. I tell her about the far-away memories; the day mum went missing, and Bob telling dad, and her funeral, and dad crying in the rain. I tell her about nearly drowning and the dead dogfish, and my mum’s kiss of life. I tell her about Magda and the farm, and escaping from dad’s despair to come to London. When I stand up to leave she comes round the desk and takes my hand. Her eyes look into mine.
‘You don’t have to be in there with him,’ she says. ‘Despair is a lie. There is always hope.’
And I see the spirits of his despair whispering their lies, and I see hope as a bright place brimming with possibilities. Safi’s words contain reality in them. They are not empty.
‘Come and see me again. Ring me any time,’ she says, giving me a telephone number, and I take it and thank her and walk upstairs to the abstract studios to see if Bianca is still working.
But the studio is empty and I look out over London as the streetlights come on, and sit among Bianca’s pictures in the glinting dark.
Chapter 12
I go and see Safi again and tell her things I’ve never said before.
I tell her about dad, and how he used to tell me stories on the green sofa while I looked into the flames, how we went walking together on the cliffs and the moors and fishing sometimes when he had the time. I tell her about finding all the empty bottles in one go and noticing the bleary look in his eyes, and the scared feeling as it happened more and more, and the horrible fear it turned into, watching him slowly fall apart.
Safi asks me about mum, and I remember how I longed for her when I was small, but never really knew her. She was on the stage, and I imagined it as a huge platform on stilts. She used to walk out of the station in high-heeled shoes and lean over to kiss me, and then she’d be gone again, waving out the window; and the longing in me that was attached to the train and the waving hand would stretch out long and thin as the train moved away, and after the train disappeared I would cry into dad’s jersey.
I remember all the feelings because of Safi’s eyes. She has eyes that overturn places in you, that turn over pages in your mind you haven’t seen for years and look at them with you.
I tell Safi that I missed mum when she died but not like dad did. I felt dad’s howling grief in the depths of me and saw it every day in his eyes. And when I got older her absence sang through our lives like a sad song you hear in the distance.
Safi says an absence can have a powerful presence in people’s lives and I see a person-shaped emptiness behind dad, and feel its magnetic force, and realize that’s why I had to get away.
‘Your mother is not an absence, Eve,’ says Safi, ‘that is your father’s pain. Your mother is a presence,’ and I close my eyes and feel light feelings pass through me in whispers. And even if it’s faint and far away, I can feel her presence, and I wish I could find dad so I could tell him that.
‘But you must let him go,’ says Safi, ‘and set yourself free.’
And even though I don’t understand, I can feel what Safi means, and I breathe in and look out the window at the sky, so it fills up my lungs with sky light.
And she asks if Magda is my aunt. I say no, she was a neighbour, but I used to call her auntie. ‘Did she look after you?’ And I remember the smell of the slurry in the farmyard and the sound of the cows breathing, and the warm kitchen with the wind outside and the coats steaming in front of the stove. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘she was like a mother to me.’ Safi nods, and I tell her how I used to hold on to Magda’s legs when my mother came back because they were safe legs. Safer than my mum’s in her high heels, that wobbled and clipped and clopped. And besides, she might say, ‘No don’t, you’ll ladder my stockings.’ And I didn’t like the nylon skin that could break into ladders if you touched it.
I tell her about the argument Magda had with dad. How I didn’t even know what it was about, but I was a teenager and took my dad’s side. She says, ‘Why don’t you ring her?’ I say, ‘She doesn’t have a telephone.’ ‘Then write to her,’ she says.
So I do.
Chapter 13
I am sitting next to the window in my studio so the light shines on to the palette. The colours I am mixing are neutral and quiet.
I told Cecile I was ti
red of the ugly colours.
She said the ugly colours make the other colours look more beautiful, but I said I was tired of those colours of despair. She said, ‘What colours are those?’ and I said, ‘Like Indian red mixed with Prussian blue,’ and she mixed it to see what colour it made. She said she thought that was rage, maybe rage gone stagnant. I said, ‘Yes, it could be that.’
We were sitting downstairs in her space after her tutorial, and she was fed up because of what the tutors had said. It was an insult, after all.
That space down on the ground floor isn’t like the other studios; less cosy, people do huge pictures and there are ramps and pulleys and loud music, and I looked at her pale delicate face as she considered the colour she had mixed. She has naturally red lips and orange eyelashes, and was frowning slightly as she put her head on one side. Its true that her pictures are huge, and stretched above us in flower shapes and spirals so you could be looking at undergrowth or outer space; but I never feel that Cecile really belongs on the ground floor.
Then I mixed the scary green from cadmium yellow and lamp black, just to show her, and told her it was like the rotting seaweed at low tide, that when you walk through you have to keep your mouth shut because of the flies. ‘But it could be despair, couldn’t it? Wouldn’t that black-green weigh you down? I mean it wasn’t one to lift your spirits, was it?’
She said, ‘No, you’re right, you’d have to be careful of a colour like that, it might murder someone!’
I laughed and said, ‘Especially if a bunch of tutors had just told it to “get a job painting window displays!” ’
And we laughed at the idea of the colour having a tutorial.
‘If anyone ought to paint window displays, it should be the head of painting and his endless vertical stripes,’ said Cecile, and I nodded in agreement.
But even so, she looked at the green and said, ‘I can imagine painting with that colour, it all depends what colours you put it next to.’
I said, ‘I’m sure you’re right but I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to make my paintings out of grey from now on.’
So I’m mixing neutral colours now; browns and greys and dirty whites. Colours that speak like stones and bricks, scaffolding pipes and cement. Unnoticeable colours. The blue-grey of the paving slabs after the rain, and mud stuck in the grip of tyres, the colours of rags and dirty string, and sacking and wet cardboard and paper blowing across the street, and the bone colours of discarded bus tickets pressed into the road by lots of feet.
These colours and their tiny shift towards blue, hint of purple, or tinge of pink, I like them. They comfort me.
Chapter 14
‘No, I’m not saying I don’t like them,’ says Bianca, balancing on one spindly leg of the chair and trying to do a pirouette holding on to the table edge. We are sitting in the canteen next to the glass window.
‘It’s just they’re not those beautiful colours you used to use. I mean, people go through phases, don’t they? This is your drab phase.’
I laugh.
Rob shakes her head.
‘What?’ says Bianca. ‘It’s my opinion. Come to the Rothko! That’ll cure you!’
‘Oh, let’s go,’ says Cecile. ‘I really want to see those paintings.’
‘The colours are fantastic!’
‘Yes, and the real thing is completely different from the reproductions.’
‘Yeah, some just don’t, do they.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Reproduce.’
‘Cézanne doesn’t, either. You don’t get what he looks like in the flesh, until you see him.’
‘The flesh?’
‘Stop being so annoying, you know what I mean. In the paint, then.’
Bianca’s chair skids sideways and she ends up sliding down the glass wall, so Rob has to catch her and the chair and pull her straight, while Bianca is squealing and Roberta is laughing.
Suzanne walks into college arm in arm with a man with hair so short he looks bald, and sunglasses on the top of his head although it is not sunny.
‘Is that her new boyfriend?’ says Bianca, looking round.
They walk through the door into Sculpture on the other side of the quadrangle.
‘Is it?’ She turns to Rob.
‘How should I know?’
‘Because of Mick. They’re friends, aren’t they?’
Rob shrugs. ‘Doesn’t mean he tells me everything that’s going on in his friend’s ex-girlfriend’s love life!’
‘Have they really split up?’
‘Who knows with those two!’
Bianca looks at me. But I look away at the grey paving stones. So what if I like drab colours.
Bianca puts her elbows on the table and cups her face in her hands. She slides across the table so she’s looking up at me, her mouth stretched wide, and lifts her eyebrows up and down.
I laugh at her.
Rob and Cecile get up and take their plates away.
She slides back again and sits up and cricks her neck from side to side.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ she says. ‘It’s like you’ve been walking in the realm of the dead. I didn’t like you being a zombie!’
‘Is that what I seemed like?’
‘Yes! You got lost.’
‘Was I lost?’
‘Yes, of course! Junkies do it! They go off. You look in their eyes and they’re gone. I have done it myself!’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, into oblivion.’
‘I wonder where I went.’
‘Maybe your soul was out looking for your dad.’
‘I’m glad it’s back, then,’ I say, looking out at the quadrangle through the glass, and the pigeons pecking under the statue.
‘Listen, come back with me for the weekend. Come to Brixton. Get away from your little place and stay with us. You need some good food. You need some normal life. OK? Then you will be able to do the most normal thing in the world, and go and see,’ and she inclines her head upwards to the mezzanine, ‘that friend of yours.’
‘Thanks, Bianca, I’d like to.’
‘We can go for a walk, we can make a nice dinner,’ she nods. ‘It’s a good plan.’
Chapter 15
It is a grey London day. It looks like it might rain.
The air is damp. I am on the bike following Bianca’s pink and green Guatemalan shirt. She gets off her bike at the embankment and we cross over the thundering road. We stop to look over the wall into the water reflecting the white sky.
‘Let’s bike through the park,’ she says.
So we cross Albert Bridge by foot, just to see the river flowing under us, and lean out over the water and shout each other’s names into the wind. It begins to spit and we hurry through the park gates and ride our bikes with our heads down against the drizzle, to the shelter by the fountains. We stand in the shelter to wait until the drizzle stops. There is a man in there. He has a low voice and his voice booms round the shelter when he says, ‘It’s wet, isn’t it.’
Bianca says, ‘You must be an opera singer.’ He says that he is, and he’s from New York and here to sing Mozart. Bianca says, ‘Oh could you sing something for us, please.’
He booms out ‘Don Giovanni,’ and it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my mouth fall open, the sound is so big.
But Bianca glances at me, and says to him, ‘Oh, not that, please’ so he sings ‘Moon River’ and the sound reverberates around the shelter, and I look outside and the trees are glistening in the evening light, and the river turns into something sorrowful.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ says Bianca. ‘It’s heavenly.’ And he laughs and his laugh also fills the shelter.
We cycle away when the rain stops and realize we didn’t ask his name.
We ride between the glowing green playing fields and into the trees and bushes that line the lakeside paths, past the blue boathouse, and the café and the ducks on the rippling lake, and the peac
ocks and peahens who strut about behind wire mesh calling their plaintive call, and through the gates into the rush-hour traffic. Bianca winds her scarf round her nose so she looks like a bandit, and we dodge and weave between the cars following the 137 round the corner and up Queenstown Road. We dismount and push our bikes up the hill. Then Clapham Common spreads out before us large and flat, where we flew Zeb’s kite. He attached it to a fishing line so it reeled out and out, and up into the sky, until it was a tiny speck and there was no more fishing line and Zeb let it go, so it floated off into space. It must be up there at the edge of the ozone by now. And we cycle along the tree-lined road and round the corner into Acre Lane. We pass the timber merchant where we had our studio and the air smells of newly sawn wood. Past the café where we had our bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea, past Reggae Records and the sari shop, and the Ritzy Cinema, where I automatically check the old men gathered on the steps drinking Special Brew, and into Bianca’s road.
When we’ve chained our bikes to the banisters we walk up the stairs. On each landing there is a different-coloured strip of stained glass, and as I follow Bianca up the stairs the strip of coloured light passes over her, changing the colour of her clothes. Red, green, yellow, pink. When she stops at her front door and takes out her keys she has a strip of turquoise light across her face.
‘Why did you tell him not to?’ I ask.
‘Not to what?’
‘Sing that song.’
‘Never mind why.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the father’s ghost singing and I thought it would be bad luck.’
And I stand still, on the doorstep, while the strange feeling passes through me.
We have fennel tea made from what looks like dried grass stalks, from a flat black teapot that Bianca bought in the market. The tea smells of liquorice and tastes of aniseed, and Bianca tells me a story Silvia has written, about a woman whose body is a landscape: her breasts are hills, her thighs are valleys.
Invisible River Page 11
