Later, Bianca’s sitting room flickers with candlelight, and there is a smell of garlic and herbs. She is standing at the table with three grey squid on a newspaper, attempting to cut out the ink sack. The ink is spurting out onto the newspaper.
Giacomo has brought two pots of sturdy basil, and a jar of damson jam he made himself. There is Eduardo from Venezuela, and his wife Anna, and Cesar from Chile, who is cooking the tomatoes in the kitchen ready for the squid, and looks through the door every now and then, to join in the conversation, in his apron and holding a wooden spoon.
His wife Maria Ines is bringing the pudding.
‘Here, help me,’ says Bianca and hands me a knife, and I cut into the strange quivering flesh.
When Maria Ines arrives we cram round the table in the sitting room and everyone is talking a mixture of Italian and English about which shop sells fresh food, and what the food was like in Egypt, where Giacomo just went. The coloured velvets glow and flicker, and Eduardo touches my foot under the table, and I frown at him because he’s sitting next to his wife Anna. We drink wine and eat, and the wine warms me along with the laughter and the red velvet curtains printed with spirals, and the coloured throws on the sofa, and the cushions glinting like gold in the candlelight.
Bianca gives me an embroidered nightdress and I sleep in her big bed, listening to the sirens outside and the crowds of people coming down the road shouting, after the pubs have closed.
In the morning we lie in bed and Bianca tells me another story Silvia has written, about a woman who has a fold-up forest that she unfolds around her when she feels like it.
We get out of bed to make coffee.
We pass Silvia’s open door. She is lying diagonally across the bed with one arm flung above and her auburn hair cascading sideways.
She opens her eyes and looks at us.
‘Allora?’ says Bianca. ‘Last night?’
Silvia stretches and smiles. ‘I was dancing till three.’ ‘Make me a coffee!’ she says, and folds back the covers, ‘and come in with me.’
‘Get in,’ says Bianca. ‘I’ll bring it.’
A piece of lace covers the armchair and a copper-coloured bra is slung over the arm.
I climb into the bed next to her.
‘Did you sleep well?’ She has a kind of lisp.
I lie beside her. Her skin smells of milk. I ask her about the story. She says, ‘I will read it to you.’
I close my eyes. I can smell the forest that she unfolds around her. The flowers exude a thick scent. I smell the forest floor in her hair: the leaf mould, the moss, and the tiny orange chanterelles with earth still clinging to their roots.
Bianca brings in the coffee.
There are animals in the forest too. I smell their fur and their nut-flavoured breath.
‘Move over!’ says Bianca, so I am squashed between them.
Siliva laughs. She has freckles on her face. Her lips are stained dark purple.
‘Oh, but I like me,’ she says, and lies back. Her arm behind her head slowly stretches up through her hair. ‘Everybody likes me.’
Her long silky auburn hair exudes a fragrance.
She turns over and flings her arm round the dip between my ribs and my hip.
‘You smell nice,’ she says. She has a low soft velvet voice. She squeezes me and her hand moves over my breast.
‘Oh, you have enormous breasts!’ she says, laughing. ‘How did you keep them hidden so long?’
I start laughing, her laugh is infectious.
‘Did you know her breasts were so big, Bianca?’
‘Yes, I have noticed!’ says Bianca, sipping her coffee.
‘Remember it took half an hour to get the gold dress off!’ says Bianca, and starts to laugh, so she spurts coffee and has to put the cup down, and I am sandwiched between their giggling bodies.
‘Shut up!’ I say.
‘No, listen!’ she whispers, putting her finger up.
‘What?’
The door opens down the corridor.
‘It’s Carlotta’s boyfriend. Call out to him, Silvia! He’s so English, let’s pretend we’ve had a night of passion.’
‘Oh Tony! Tony!’ says Silvia in a low seductive voice.
Bianca and I listen. He passes the open door.
‘Would you like to join us?’ says Silvia.
He clears his throat like a caricature of an Englishman, and walks past the open door with a startled face, and Bianca puts her hands over her mouth as though she is ashamed, but Silvia is laughing, and the sun shines through the thick lace curtains and lights up our faces in intricate patterns.
Chapter 16
The sun shone all weekend. But now the raindrops are dripping down the window of the studio. They even drip in shadows over the cotton duck I have stretched over the frames. Sometimes the sun comes through and lights up the drops in glinting colours then disappears again, and all the coloured lights go out.
I have knocked the frames together with corrugated nails and stretched the canvas till my thumbs are sore, and now I’m waiting for the soaked rabbit-skin glue to melt into gloopy liquid so I can size the surface.
We went with Silvia to her African dance class after we got up. Partly because Bianca had told me, and I wanted to witness, the cascade of love talk that hurtles towards Silvia from every corner when she walks along Railton Road.
‘Oh please, darlin’, talk to me. I want the whole street to see me talking to you.’
‘Beautiful queen!’
‘Oh sugar!’
‘Woman sweet honey!’
Bianca and I stood at the back of the class in T-shirts and leggings, and watched the leopard-skin leotards and gyrating-in-time bodies moving in breathtaking synchrony with each other and the djembe players; while we jumped too soon, kicked a beat after, moved our hips in the wrong direction, and ended up getting the giggles because we couldn’t keep time at all.
The studio is filled with the animal scent of the melting rabbit-skin glue. It gets up your nostrils and stays there for days so you think you smell it everywhere.
In the evening we went to the crypt in Lambeth to listen to jazz, and the drummer couldn’t keep his eyes off Bianca. It was a dark little place under an old church and I wondered if it was old enough to have been there when William Blake lived in Lambeth. My ears were ringing because I stood too near the saxophone.
I stir the glue round and round. It is melting into a smooth honey-coloured liquid. The texture is just right. I take it off the heat and let it cool.
On Sunday morning we biked along Brixton High Street and up the road, past the paper factory to the Portuguese café in Stockwell. Bianca sang ‘Sunday Morning’ into the wind with her own words. Everyone who came to dinner was there, as well as Giacomo’s boyfriend, and Mikhail, the refugee from Serbia. We sat outside in the courtyard and ate fishcakes and drank galão, and they talked about politics and the war; then Bianca told them about dad. I was embarrassed at first. In a minute, everyone was talking about my father. About alcoholics and people going missing, about where he could be, and who they might ask to help look for him, and when did you last see him? and what was he wearing and how old is he? and where did you look? and how are you feeling? and did you go to the police? no, they’re never any help, and how long has he been drinking? and what! He has no wife, ah well, he drinks because he’s lonely, and so you have no mother, poveretta! and the plates piled up and they ordered more coffee and custard pastries with burnt tops, and I told them about the dark tunnels, and the railway stations, and the benches looking over the river. And by the time the conversation moved to Giacomo’s cousin who went missing in Mexico, to Mexican food, and Steve Hatt in Essex Road, the best fish shop in London, I felt as if everything I went through all alone and full of terror, had been somehow warmed by the light of their attention, been taken from a dank ashamed place and aired along with sunlight and coffee and turned into stories that people share on Sunday morning, and even though dad is still out there, mis
sing, I feel less strange in the world, and less alone.
We walked round Brockwell Park after all that coffee, and ended up in the little garden among the lavender and green hedges, watching the blue tits sipping water out of the fountain.
It was all to make me normal, Bianca said, normal enough to do a normal thing like go downstairs to the mezzanine and knock on the door.
When I’ve sized the last canvas and they are standing in a row against the wall, stinking out the studio, I get up and look out the window at the sun trying to come out and decide it’s time to go and see Zeb.
Chapter 17
I walk downstairs into Zeb’s space. He is sitting mending his sculpture.
The light is streaming in and shining through the bottles of coloured water so they shimmer and tremble on the wall in sunlit reflections. Each time he twiddles a screw the water light twirls and trembles on the wall.
He looks up.
And looks down again.
‘Howsit going?’ he says to the screwdriver.
‘Fine,’ I say to my fingers.
‘Could you pass me that screw,’ he says to the back wall. I look behind him and pass him the box, and one of us drops the box, so I say, ‘Sorry’ and we both bend to pick them up and bump heads, and both say, ‘Sorry,’ and I sit back down and he takes a screw and the rest lie scattered between us, twirling across the floor till they come to rest.
He screws the screw into the metal frame, biting his lip.
I breathe in and look at the door
‘Looks like it’ll be all right, then, the sculpture,’ I say to the door.
‘Mm-hmm,’ he says, another screw in his mouth.
‘Better go now,’ I say, getting up and rolling across the screws.
‘No, don’t go yet,’ he says. ‘I’m nearly finished it.’
There is a tiny squeaking noise as he screws in the last screw.
‘There! Look, it stands again,’ and he wobbles it to show it’s steady and all the glass tinkles, and the coloured light shivers on the wall.
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Looks good!’ I nod. ‘Steady, anyway.’
We both nod at the sculpture for a few minutes.
‘D’you think . . .’
‘D’you want . . .’ we say together.
‘What?’
‘No, what were you going to say?’
‘Just thought we could go and get a coffee.’
‘Yeah.’
We clank downstairs but our awkwardness can’t fit through the door of the canteen, and we stand in the hall looking out the window until the sunlight pulls us outside.
We cross the courtyard and sit on the bench on the other side of the road, out of sight of the wall of eyes. And I remember sitting here with dad. But now it’s Zeb I’m sitting next to.
‘Are you . . .’
‘Is your . . .’
‘What?’
‘No, you.’
We look at each other.
‘Honestly, what are we like,’ he says.
I smile.
‘Your dad?’ he says gently.
‘He’s still missing,’ I say and look at the tall building of the art school; the layers of glass and concrete, stretching up into the sky to catch as much light as it can.
‘Somewhere,’ I say, and lift my chin at London. ‘Somewhere out there.’
A silence falls. With Bianca I can leave my worries for a while, but with Zeb I feel all the way down to the deep places.
‘Are you still looking for him?’ he says.
I glance up. His eyes are looking at me. His look says, ‘It’s all right, you can say what’s true.’
I close my eyes. In the dark part of my mind I can see my dad’s journey; by the river, down alleys, on benches, in tunnels. I can see the empty buildings, the littered paths along dark canals, the bridges by gasworks and steps that lead nowhere, and tears are in my closed eyes.
‘Oh, Zeb, I can’t find him.’
‘No. I know you can’t,’ he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘I don’t think you’re meant to.’
‘I never know about “meant” to.’
‘I don’t think he wants you to.’
‘Find him?’
‘Look for him, even. I don’t think he wants to be found, do you?’
He looks at me and his eyes are so deep they reach into me. I look down at my hands and my voice comes out cracked.
‘Oh, Zeb, I know everyone says so, and sometimes I think it’s true.’
And suddenly the lovely time I had with Bianca breaks apart and something comes up from underneath. And I hear a voice crying, ‘Help me, don’t leave me to this. I’m ashamed of how much I need you.’ It is calling into the dark to be found, to be found, to be found.
‘My poor dad,’ I say, and Zeb puts his arm round me.
‘Oh Zeb, my poor dad,’ and Zeb holds on to me and says, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’
We sit on the bench and the breeze blows through the branches of the big plane tree. It blows through the weight that sits between us made of feelings about dad.
When the feeling eases I see the weight between us is not just dad. And when I ask Zeb about Suzanne, he draws his arm away from my shoulders, leans forward, presses his long fingers together, and breathes out slowly in a big sigh.
‘I mean I’ve got my own things to sort out,’ he says, looking off down the street at the cars zooming along the King’s Road.
In my mind’s eye I see a slender shard that must have leaped out of one of the bottles, and pierced him when the sculpture smashed. She’d meant it to, it was made of an intention, not of glass, and it has wounded him.
‘The school is taking the second-years to Barcelona next week,’ he says. ‘Just for a few days.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I say. ‘It’ll be good.’
‘There’s a chance a couple of us could do an exchange.’
‘Exchange?’
‘With the art school in Barcelona.’
‘Oh Zeb, are you going away?’
My voice is quiet because I don’t want him to.
‘It would just be for a couple of months next term,’ he says. ‘I think I need to get away for a bit.’
He turns back to me. ‘Eve, I’m so glad you came to see me. Look, even if I go, I’ll be back!’
I put my hand on his arm and nod, and his eyes look at me like sunlight.
Chapter 18
‘What did he say?’ says Bianca. ‘Did he talk about Suzanne?’
We’re on the Tube going to the Rothko show, sitting in two twos. Rob is sitting at the other end of the carriage with Cecile. The Tube is full of bodies pressed together, breathing the same breath in and out.
‘Not really,’ I say, but we are going through a noisy juddering and she can’t hear a thing anyway.
‘What?’ she shouts.
‘I said not really.’
Two Japanese girls sit opposite us in orange and purple platform shoes. Bianca keeps looking at them.
The train slows down and Rob and Cecile are making signs at us from the other end of the carriage.
‘We know! We know! We’re not morons!’ says Bianca.
We come out the station at Embankment and walk up the steps and across the footbridge beside the thundering trains. People are playing drums. Cecile is excited about the colours she is going to see.
We stand on the footbridge and a passenger barge passes underneath us and we look down the river to St Paul’s.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ says Rob.
Bianca slips her hand through my arm.
‘You could have asked him to come and see the show. Ask him round to dinner at my house next week.’
‘The second-years are going to Barcelona next week.’
‘So he’s going to Barcelona?’
‘Yes,’ I nod.
‘And you don’t care?’
I look at her but I can’t say anything.
Cecile looks stricken when we pass a man in a wheelchair with
no legs because everyone has given their change to the smiling djembe players.
She stops on the bridge, trying to find change in her handbag.
‘Come ON!’ says Rob.
Cecile finds a coin and slips it into his cup, looking relieved.
We walk across paving stones, up a concrete stairwell, through a glass door, and into the galleries of the Hayward.
In the beginning there are pictures of houses and landscapes. But then he sets the colours free; and the canvases emanate colours like notes of music that go right through you in harmonies of pink and red, yellow and blue, blue and crimson. They bathe us in coloured light. The combined colours sing together. As I walk through the galleries my whole body hears the colour harmonies as though it is a big ear. When I reach the last room I feel as if I’ve swallowed the colours and they are singing within me.
He paints the colours of sunlight and the colours of earth, and the in-between colours of twilight. And then he paints the dark.
In the last room the paintings are black; huge spaces of many-layered black.
They make me hold my breath. Oh my God, I know where he went, from all that light, to no light at all.
‘They were the last paintings he did before he killed himself,’ says Bianca, subdued. And we look and look at the colours of his despair.
‘Poor Rothko,’ says Bianca.
I nod but I am thinking about dad.
We gather outside the gallery, jumping and shivering to keep warm. Rob’s going to Waterloo to take the Tube, she only lives by London Bridge, and Bianca says she’ll walk down with her and get the 59 to Brixton. Cecile is meeting her husband at the Royal Festival Hall to hear a concert by a famous Japanese violinist.
‘You all right?’ she says, looking at me, concerned, her hair blowing about her in the wind.
‘Course!’ I say. But I feel overcome by an agony of leaving them.
‘OK, see you then.’
I turn away, embarrassed by the intensity of my feeling, and wave at them without looking round, then almost run along the concrete walkways of the Hayward.
I just thought we would all walk across the footbridge together, by the thundering trains and see the river, in the dark, gliding beneath us towards St Paul’s.
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