I stir the sauce round and round, adding the milk slowly and it thickens, turning smooth and yellow.
‘And she’ll still be there, will she?’
‘No, Bianca said she’ll be gone by tomorrow.’
‘So you’ll be on your own.’
‘Not for long. I’ll see them when I go in to college.’
Magda is carefully removing the cooked white flakes of fish from their silver skins.
‘She’s a good friend then, Bianca.’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Well, that’s good. You need people to help and that’s that. I don’t want you to feel alone.’
‘I don’t. And I can talk to you now,’ I say, nodding at the new phone.
She smiles. ‘I’ll do for some things,’ she says ‘but you need your friends.’
‘I’ll get the parsley,’ I say and go outside into the wind and pick it out of the stone basin at the back door where it grows along with the chives.
Back in the warmth, Magda is mashing the potatoes. Mashing and smashing and whipping them round. I wash the parsley and chop it small.
‘Oh, wait now,’ says Magda looking up. ‘While I remember, I dug it out for you.’
‘What?’
‘Open the drawer, Evie, it’s in there.’
I open the drawer and see a little black and white photo with a white rim all the way round.
‘This?’ I say, lifting it out.
‘Yes.’
My dad is in the middle, squinting at the camera, holding my mother’s hand. My mother has her hair up, with a far-away look in her eyes.
‘She looks so young,’ I say, looking closely.
On the other side of dad, a young Magda is holding me in her arms. The wind is blowing her hair across her face.
‘Can I keep it?’
‘Course you can,’ says Magda.
I can feel something in me, something deep down, but I don’t know what it is until it comes out of my mouth in a question.
‘Magda?’ I say, taking a deep breath.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘D’you think she didn’t like me?’
She stops mashing and looks at me, and for a few seconds she is perfectly still.
Then she continues stirring the potatoes but more slowly.
‘Your mother, you mean?’
I nod.
‘She was just too young, love. She didn’t know what to do with a little thing like you. That’s all. But she loved you in her own way.’
I mix the parsley and the fish into the sauce and pour it into the square brown dish.
‘That’s all,’ she says again, as she spreads the potatoes over the top and forks them into a pattern.
‘There now,’ she says as she puts the fish pie into the oven and closes the door. ‘All we need now are the peas.’
I look out the window at the bay. The Mount is obscured. There is a dark cloud over the sea and the sun turns out like a light.
Magda looks up. ‘Oh, my washing!’
‘D’you want me to bring it in, Magda?’
‘That rain’ll be here any second, would you, love,’ she says looking out the window at the Bay.
I take the basket from outside the back door, grey wicker from being left out in the rain, and walk to the washing line with the wind blowing against me. I pull the big stick down that keeps the line propped up, and take the washing off the pegs as quickly as I can. The wind is pulling the sheets out horizontally and billowing them so they’re hard to get hold of, and I grapple with them.
Magda comes out the kitchen door.
‘I’m going to give you a hand with this!’ she shouts, because the wind is so loud. ‘Didn’t realize it was so bad.’
We pull the washing off the line and bundle up the linen, there’s no time to fold it, and the sky breaks just as we’ve pulled the last one off the line. We run, crouching, into the house, being beaten by the rain and the wind.
‘Thank goodness for that!’ says Magda, wiping away a wet curl from her forehead. ‘That washing would have been all down the valley if we hadn’t got it in!’
She builds a fire in the big stove in the kitchen and we fold up the sheets between us.
Chapter 6
We stand under the televisions waiting for the yellow writing to say Paddington. It is cold inside the station and I am jumping up and down to keep warm. When it says One, we walk through the gates, along the platform, into the wind. The train slides in and we look for my carriage and stand together at the open door.
‘Oh, Magda, what would I have done without you?’
‘I don’t know at all,’ she says and smiles. ‘Now don’t be a stranger!’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I’ll ring you.’
‘Well, if you feel like it. I just want you to know there’s always a place for you here.’
‘Thanks, Magda.’
I climb into the carriage and open the window and lean out.
‘Magda? You know with dad?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘What was the argument about?’
‘What?’
‘With dad. Why did you argue?’
‘It was over the drink.’
‘Really?’
‘I told him he couldn’t set foot in the house if he was drunk, and I meant it.’
She looks away and sighs, then looks up at me.
‘But I never meant you,’ she says, and pats my hand.
‘Oh, Magda, I didn’t know.’
‘Ah, I thought you maybe thought I was interfering.’
‘No. I was a stupid teenager. I took dad’s side. But really all that time, my God, I wish I’d known.’
‘Ah well, what’s done is done.’
She nods and pats my hand again, and the train begins to judder and make moving noises.
‘Now you take good care of yourself!’ she says, and takes a few steps with the train, and I lean out the window and wave and watch her get smaller, and the train curves away from the platform, until I am sitting next to the Bay and I watch as the sea turns grey under the clouds, and the Mount slips behind the marshes at Marazion. I roll up my jersey and lay my head against the window and close my eyes and see Magda standing on the platform, waving, and imagine her getting in her car and driving back up the hill to the kitchen and the warm stove and the cowshed full of cows. And I imagine dad’s empty house that I know I’ll never go back to.
When I’d finished burning all the pieces of paper I’d walked back down the corridor to the study. There was only the green sofa and the desk left in the empty room, and I’d lain down on the sofa like I used to. The room had felt quiet then, and peaceful, and I’d remembered the trellis of stories dad had woven across the room when I was small. In and out of the dark alleys, along the river, and under the arches of the mysterious city, while I snuggled up beside him and listened, and the wind blew outside and the rain hit the window. We’d travelled backwards and forwards in time through golden coronations and music that echoed off the water, yellow fog and griffins with red eyes, and I’d seen the riots and the blue cockades. I’d seen the cherubs on the ceiling before the crowd fell silent, and the pigeons dropping out of the sky when the city caught alight.
And as I move through the evening towards London I sink into sleep to the rhythm of the train, remembering the stories that once flowed through him.
Part Four
Chapter 1
It was strange coming up the stairs to the same hole in the carpet, the same chips in the paint, and letting myself into the flat.
Bianca’s cousin had left a vase of red tulips on the kitchen table, and milk in the fridge. I had to turn the lights out and sit in the dark for a while and watch the car-lights from the street whizz round the walls. I didn’t want to close the curtains and sit in the dark. I just wanted to feel what it was like being back in the city.
Feels like I feel everything, and I don’t know what to do about that.
But when I got under the covers and l
ay in bed with the curtains still open, I felt glad about being back; glad of the honking sounds and the twinkling lights and the constant hum, glad of something else too; the feeling of hope, of possibilities that London exudes.
I didn’t feel it when I got up, though. I felt that naked feeling again, and I biked along the side streets to avoid the vehicles with big wheels.
When I’ve chained up my bike, I walk across the quadrangle into the building. I smile at Stan, who raises his black eyebrows and nods at me. I walk straight into Cecile’s studio, past a boy halfway up a ladder, painting an orange stripe on to his canvas with a wallpaper brush.
The music is blaring as usual and Cecile is sitting in the corner under a big green painting of tendrils and spiral patterns.
She is drawing a green labyrinth, and looks up.
‘Evie! Oh, Evie, welcome back!’ she says, getting up and giving me a hug. ‘Sit down,’ she says, pulling a stool out from behind the partition. ‘How are you? How do you feel?’
‘Like I’ve been all the way to the middle and fallen apart,’ I say, looking at the green labyrinth.
‘Well, now you can come back out again,’ she says, ‘and you’ll be brand new!’
‘I hope so, Cecile. Anyway, how are you doing? I like this green painting,’ I say, standing up to look at the picture. ‘Green is brave!’
‘I’m discovering just how!’ says Cecile, standing up and looking at it with me.
‘On a good day I think, leaves, chlorophyll, on a not-so-good day I think pea soup, but on a bad day I think, well, mould!’
I laugh. ‘That’s the danger of green!’
‘Yes, and everyone knew that except me!’ she says, and laughs too.
‘Oh, Cecile, it’s lovely to see you.’
‘You too! So what about the painting?’
‘I’m in a muddle, Ces, I don’t even know if I want to paint any more.’
‘Well, I wonder that most days!’ she says, and smiles. ‘You’ll be all right. You’ve fallen apart, and now you’re a little shoot growing out of the rubble. Just take one step at a time.’
‘I’m scared to go upstairs and even look at the half-finished pictures.’
‘They’ll be in the storeroom. I’ll come with you,’ she says.
So we take the lift up to the storeroom and collect my canvases and a bag of materials and I don’t even look at the old paintings, or the half-finished paintings tied up with string.
‘Thanks, Cecile,’ I say when I walk out of the lift. She waves at me through the sliding doors. ‘See you at coffee time,’ she says as the doors close.
When I walk into the studio that I share with Rob there is a blanket over the window and one has been pinned over the skylight so the studio is dark but for candles, which flicker in jam jars on the floor. They light up the huge mud women that have been taped to every wall.
Their presence fills the studio with stillness and the smell of baked earth. I close my eyes in the flickering darkness, and wonder how Rob opened a doorway into another time.
I hear Rob walk in behind me. I open my eyes and turn round.
‘Evie, you’re back!’ she says and hugs me. Her belly has grown big.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m OK,’ I say.
‘I’ll take the blankets down I just wanted to see how they looked.’
‘They’re wonderful, Rob.’
We look at the figures in silence for a minute.
‘Have you shown them to anyone?’
‘Oh, I tried to get Tom to see the point of them but he just talked about the fire hazard. I want them to be like a cave wall, you know. Like you’re deep down in the earth.’
We take the blanket off the window and fold it up, and I stand on a stool and pull the pins out of the skylight so the other blanket falls down on me. I pull it off and light pours down into the space.
Rob looks up at me.
‘You OK, Eve?’
‘I feel a bit strange, Rob.’
‘You’re bound to.’
She untapes the paper so it rolls upwards.
‘So the mud didn’t crack?’ I say.
‘No, it’s a good medium. It’s holding it together, anyway. I’m glad you’re back,’ she says.
‘Me too,’ I say, and jump off the stool.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ she says. I’ve got something to give you. Zeb left it for you when he went to Barcelona. It’s in my locker. We didn’t know where to send it.’
My heart beats. ‘Have you heard from him? Is he coming back soon?’
‘Yes, Mick knows when he’s back, it’s not long.’
‘Really? Has he got friends out there, d’you think?’
Rob shrugs. ‘Don’t know.’
I follow Rob out on to the landing. She opens the locker and hands me the packet, and goes back in the studio. It has ‘Evie, love Zeb’ written on it in black marker, and I say his name Zeb, Zeb, Zeb, under my breath. I open it and pull out a box.
It is a big matchbox with a miniature battery attached to the base. I push it open and inside is a small tree made of gold wire, and on every branch is a tiny coloured bird, that lights up when the box slides open, and each one glows a different colour and I look at it under my jersey to see it glow in the dark.
When I walk into Bianca’s studio at coffee time she gives a shrill cry and runs towards me with her arms out and kisses me twice on both cheeks.
‘Evie, you look too thin! Almost as thin as me! You must come to Brixton and eat something!’
London spreads out under the white sky. There is a faint green mist over the trees. The new leaves are beginning to unfurl.
‘I eat, Bianca. I do eat!’
I sit on the windowsill above the radiator and look around the room.
The work has grown larger. And sometimes a glinting person, just the shape, no features, shines from a corner, or a turquoise figure glows in the foreground on a background of gold.
Bianca sits on the chaise longue and crosses her legs. She is wearing floppy orange trousers. She hands me small boxes. ‘These are just ideas for bigger ones,’ she says, and I open their lids. Inside are strips of metallic paper and squares of ultramarine, green or rose, each like a doorway opening into a shrine.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I say. ‘I like them small.’
Bianca shrugs. ‘Yes, maybe.’
I show her what Zeb left for me, and she slides it open and looks at it with her mouth open at the same time as smiling, because it is enchanting her.
‘Ah!’ she says and covers her head with a sheet so she can see it in the darkness like I did.
She is sitting with her head under the paint-spattered sheet saying, ‘Bastard! Ingenious!’ when Rob and Cecile walk in.
They laugh and want to know what she’s looking at. So we all get under the sheet and the coloured birds light up our faces in the semi-darkness.
‘How is it, then, Evie, are you glad to be back?’ says Bianca, pulling the sheet off us, her long hair gone electric and sticking to the sheet.
‘I am feeling a bit weird.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll look after you,’ says Cecile.
‘Yes, we don’t mind if you’re weird.’
‘Rob’s always weird anyway.’
‘Thanks,’ says Rob.
‘I’m glad to be back with you lot, that’s for sure.’
‘Me too!’ says Cecile. ‘Now I’m not the only one being referee!’ and she points at the others with her eyes, and looks up at the ceiling.
‘You know what we should do after coffee!’ says Rob.
‘What?’
‘Stephanie’s going to show a few of the first-year printmakers how to make pinhole cameras. She told me I could come if I want. There’d be space. We could always make one between us.’
‘Yes, let’s.’
So after coffee we walk down the stairs to the print room and sit at the high table looking over St Stephen’s, and measure cardboard to the right measurement
, paint it black inside when we’ve constructed the box, and pierce it in exactly the right place so when the light penetrates, it hits the photographic paper at the right angle to make an upside-down imprint. We make two cameras between us.
Stephanie hands out the photographic paper and sends us out to the sculpture yard to take photographs, and we pose for each other, trying to stay still for eight minutes, to take a clear picture, or move slowly, so an image is captured moving across the paper like a ghost.
We sit on the wall of the sculpture yard in the full light, in the shed in the dim light, and half-in and half-out, so the light is bright and the shadows are dark; then go upstairs and squash together in the tiny dark room to expose the pictures.
‘Ces said you need a job, Evie,’ says Bianca. Her lips are the same colour as her face in the red light.
‘Yes, I do,’ I say.
We stand in the corner, while the other two lean over the chemical baths and watch the photographic paper reveal its images. We are taking it in turns to drop the white glossy paper into the liquid. The chemical smell gets up our nostrils and stings them. Then we lift it out by the corner and hang it on the line to dry in a row.
‘I’ve got some grant money left,’ I say.
‘Won’t last long,’ says Rob, looking up from the baths.
‘I know,’ I say, but I don’t want to talk about it any more in this squashed space filled with chemical smells that make it hard to breathe.
‘I’ll ask Susie,’ says Bianca. ‘They often need people to waitress.’
‘Thanks, Bianca.’
‘Oh wow! Look at this one!’ says Cecile, turning round. Even in this light you can see Cecile’s lips are red.
‘It’s all four of us,’ she says, picking it out of the bath with the tongs and hanging it on the line.
‘It’s nice!’ and we look at ourselves in a row, staring out of the sculpture shed between sacks of plaster and a heap of wrought iron.
I lie awake. The curtains are open and the street light shines in. I listen to the cars passing and the sound of people walking along the street. The girl upstairs begins playing the violin and the music is gentle and sad.
‘Dad?’ I say, ‘are you there? Are you there, dad?’
Invisible River Page 15
