Invisible River

by Helena McEwen

  The sun has gone behind the buildings and the air has become cool.

  ‘We’ve been at it four hours!’ says Bianca, picking up her watch and putting it back on. ‘Can you believe that?’

  We stand together and look at the painting.

  ‘It’s amazing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah, don’t know how we did it.’

  ‘Let’s put it under cover,’ says Rob. So we drag it into the sculpture shed, and Bianca fetches traffic cones from the bike shed and we leave it to dry, and go through the sculpture department and up in the lift with our bags and baskets, suddenly so exhausted we can hardly see.

  Chapter 7

  I lie in bed under the covers. I don’t want to move.

  There is traffic outside the window and the cars are honking and hooting. I get up and close the window and put Nina Simone on the player and climb back into bed. I feel like a snail outside its shell. I can’t even go through to the kitchen and make a cup of tea.

  I don’t want to think about the studio and the mess I’ve left on the canvas.

  I was so glad after the wild painting we made together, because it didn’t feel pointless any more. I thought, ‘Now I know what I want to paint,’ and I’d gathered all the colours, even gold. I’d tried painting the city, the beautiful river and the ancient past, under the metallic sky, that shines dark and light at the same time, with the mad men and the sad men and invisible hope; but the picture turned into a dirty mess. And when Andrew, my new tutor, came through the curtain to introduce himself I was sitting on the stool holding my head, next to a canvas of muddy chaos.

  I liked him because he knocked on the partition when he came through the curtain, and blushed when he said hello.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘I’m making such a mess!’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you’re trying to do too many things at once,’ he said, and I took him out on to the landing where we’d put our painting on the wall, beside the stairwell.

  ‘See, it has them all, the beautiful and the ugly colours,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s twenty-three feet long!’ he said. ‘There’s more space for all the colours! You can’t paint all the paintings at once!’

  I stood there looking at it, and knew what he meant.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’ll get there!’

  But it isn’t because of the painting that I want the covers over my head.

  I listen to Nina singing:

  ‘My father always promised me that we would live in

  France,

  We’d go boating on the Seine,

  I would learn to dance, we lived in Ohio then,

  He worked in the mines,’

  and I think of my dad and I lie in bed and draw my knees up to my chin, and pull the covers round me because there are too many feelings to feel, and my senses are too raw for the outside world.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Come on! Let’s have one more go,’ says Cecile.

  ‘But it’s so nice just lying here,’ I say.

  ‘I know,’ says Bianca. ‘I want to live here.’

  I am lying with my eyes shut. When the water splashes it echoes against the tiled walls.

  ‘How long have we been here?’

  ‘Three hours, I should think.’

  ‘Bianca!’ calls a voice from downstairs.

  ‘Coming!’ she says, and gets up off the bed and pads downstairs, wrapped in a towel.

  It was Bianca’s idea, of course. As soon as she saw me she said, ‘You’re miserable, you look ill! You need a treat!’

  I smiled and said, ‘What like?’

  She said, ‘Come on, I’ve got an idea!’

  Cecile was nodding, but Rob said, ‘We’re supposed to be drawing with Karl, we can’t just not turn up!’

  ‘Yes, we can!’

  ‘Come on, he’ll be livid.’

  ‘Who cares!’ Bianca said. ‘Eve’s ill!’

  ‘I’m not ill.’

  ‘You weren’t in yesterday,’ said Cecile.

  ‘I’m OK, honestly.’

  ‘Anyway, we can draw in there,’ said Bianca.

  ‘In where?’ said Rob.

  ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’

  So we took the Tube and next thing you know, we were walking up the stairs into the huge, warm room and the sound of splashing.

  A small lady with dyed black hair brought us piles of towels and said, ‘Here you are, darlings,’ and Bianca started talking to her in Italian. After she’d shown us into two cubicles as big as bedrooms, hung with red curtains, we undressed and wrapped ourselves in the warm towels.

  Rob said, ‘But we can’t draw in here!’

  ‘Yes, we can!’ Bianca said, and she was right.

  The oil pastels melt in the heat and slide over the paper. I drew a picture of Rob lying on her back, her hands on her big stomach, sitting in the wooden chair in the hot room, and Cecile lying on a bench with her legs stretched vertically up the tiled wall.

  Cecile and I tried drawing in the steam room and two women with long dark hair said, ‘Draw us, we don’t mind,’ but then the paper got so damp it wrinkled, and began to tear, and it was hard to see through the steam.

  We have spent the afternoon sweating in the hot room, lying around in the steam, and plunging into the icy water by turns.

  ‘Come on,’ says Cecile, ‘just once more.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, opening my eyes and sitting up.

  We slip through the red curtain into the huge room where women wrapped in towels are lounging among the tiled pillars, having tea, and walk down the stairs by the cool air of the plunge pool and through the double doors into the tropical heat. There is a smell of soap in the wet air, and a faint scent of pine in the steam.

  Bianca is lying naked on a marble slab being soaped all over with a bristly brush by the Russian masseuse.

  Through the open door of the hot room we can see Rob, who is still talking pregnancy with two old ladies. Cecile and I walk into the steam. The walls are dripping. The air is wet. We lie naked on our towels and sweat trickles down our arms, behind our knees, between our breasts, and down our necks.

  When we come out Cecile is pink all over.

  We pass Bianca again, who is being hosed down and pummelled. She mouths ‘Help me!’ as the masseuse presses down on her shoulders so her cheek slides up and down on the soapy marble slab.

  We laugh, and watch her make open-mouthed and shocked expressions as the muscular masseuse cricks each vertebra all the way up her spine.

  The plunge pool is ice cold. Cecile stands at the side and slowly dips her toe in. I draw her quickly as she steps into the water.

  I put down my sketchbook when she is fully submerged and leap in. I gasp at the sudden icy cold. When I step out of the water my whole body is warm and tingling, and we walk upstairs and lie down.

  ‘Feel my skin!’ says Bianca, coming in and climbing on the bed. ‘It is scrubbed smooth.’

  ‘There were three in the bed, and the pregnant one said, move over! move over!’ sings Rob when she comes through the curtain, and we join in until a curt ‘Shsh’ from the next-door cubicle makes us quiet.

  So we push the beds together and lie top to tail, and look at the gold ceiling, and listen to the whirring sound of the heating system that hums downstairs.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to tell Karl,’ says Rob, ‘and we’ve got Regent’s Park tomorrow.’

  ‘You worry too much,’ says Bianca.

  ‘Well, he’s still pissed off with us because we went to the National Gallery instead of the National Portrait Gallery,’ says Rob, looking pointedly at Cecile.

  ‘I told him it was my fault,’ says Cecile. ‘I read it wrong.’

  Bianca laughs. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says, languidly hitting the air.

  It was obvious he didn’t believe we’d even gone to the National Gallery until we showed him the drawings; though Cecile’s didn’t prove anything as it was a t
hicket of black lines.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Long Grass with Butterflies,’ she said, surprised he didn’t recognize it, ‘by Van Gogh!’

  He just started laughing and said, ‘There’s no one quite like you, Cecile.’

  But when he saw Diana and Actaeon and The Baptism of Christ times two, he believed us, and said, ‘OK, girls, you’re forgiven,’ and tapped Bianca’s drawing and said, ‘You’ve got to use your pencil as a measurement, or you’ll never get it in proportion!’

  ‘You’re not really worried, are you?’ I ask Rob.

  She shrugs. ‘Oh, who cares!’

  ‘You know, I don’t want to be a mother,’ says Cecile out of the blue. ‘My mother frightens me,’ and Bianca says, ‘Let’s not get on to mothers!’ and Rob says, ‘Ahem! I’m just about to be one!’ and Bianca says, ‘But I didn’t mean you!’

  Rob looks at me and says, ‘My God, Eve, you’re an orphan!’ and I feel the empty place in the world they’ve left behind.

  ‘But I’ve got Magda!’ I say, and for a moment I think of her on the farm among the cows, and the blue sea and the Lizard far away in the distance.

  ‘And you’ve got us,’ says Ces.

  Then we talk about who wants what in a boyfriend and Rob says she just wants Mick and Bianca says, ‘That’s lucky!’

  Cecile says she likes her husband, he’s kind, and Bianca says she wants someone with a sense of humour who’s maybe a bit dangerous, and Rob nods to herself as though she knew it all along. And I look at my feet next to Bianca’s closed eyes on one side, and Cecile’s pink cheeks on the other that make her hair look more orange than usual and think, ‘I want a man with dark eyes who wants to make sculptures out of light, and says that reality’s 80 per cent invisible.’

  ‘I think we should order tea and toast,’ says Bianca and all of us agree it’s a good idea, but our limbs feel so heavy, and the drowsiness so pleasant, none of us can bear to get up and we continue to lie there thinking how nice it would be.

  ‘We should be drawing,’ says Rob.

  ‘We’ve done a few,’ says Cecile.

  ‘I’ll do mine later,’ says Rob languidly.

  ‘D’you think the baby likes it?’ says Bianca.

  ‘He’s gone quiet,’ says Rob.

  And we hear each other’s voices along with the whirring and the humming and before long we have all fallen fast asleep.

  Chapter 9

  It was while I was sleeping I decided to go. I must have dreamed the idea because when woke up I had the place in my mind. Cecile said she’d come too, when I told her on the way to the Tube. We stepped out into Queensway in time for the rush hour, and walked through the traffic feeling delicate and clean.

  ‘I’ll come if you like,’ she said, but I said, ‘No, thanks, Ces, I think I’ll go on my own this time,’ and she nodded and gave me a kiss goodbye.

  I’m glad somehow that I’m all clean; as though I’m sparkling. Doesn’t make any difference of course, and anyway he’s under the earth in Cornwall, but it’s where he left his body and that must mean something.

  Ces gave me her water bottle and I bought candles from the cobbler by the station, and when I walk up the steps from the Tube on to the pavement by the river I buy a bunch of freesias from the same woman as before.

  I walk along by the river, up some steps and into the alcove. Today there is sunlight and it shines right into the dark places, lighting them up. I put the bottle in the lit-up corner, and the yellow and pink freesias glow in the sunlight. The other corner is dark and I light the candles and leave them in the shadows.

  Sometimes you think something is over and suddenly it takes you by surprise.

  All at once I see dad. I imagine him lying here, crying. It is déjà vu, or the vague memory of a dream. I feel pierced by his sadness and I crouch down by the flowers and start sobbing so uncontrollably that an old lady stops and strokes my hair as she passes, and leaves a pound coin by my feet.

  Then something peaceful happens. It comes over me, and fills me through and through, and I feel sure this happened to him too.

  And when I go out of the alcove and walk along by the river, I have to stop still, and hardly breathe. The sky is so blue and the light is so clear and the sunlight is on the water; and I feel the invisible reality of dad’s presence spread through me; and the promise, and the hope, and the longing, fill the whole sky from deep within me, and glitter on the water, and spread out into the clear light.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Well, we were showing him pictures of us naked if you think about it!’ says Bianca, and starts laughing.

  We are lying on the grass in the sunlight in Regent’s Park, while Bianca unwraps boiled eggs, pears and ciabatta bread folded in tea towels.

  ‘You know, I never even thought about that!’ says Cecile. ‘We were stark naked!’

  ‘Cecilina!’ says Bianca. ‘Well, it’s the first time he hasn’t criticized my proportions!’

  Rob laughs.

  ‘It’s because you drew us lying down, so we were foreshortened,’ says Cecile.

  ‘Whatever you say, Ces,’ says Bianca.

  When we showed the drawings to Karl he shook his head and said, ‘You four are something else.’ But he said it was an original alternative.

  ‘He didn’t really mind,’ I say.

  ‘No, I think he thought it was quite funny,’ says Rob.

  When we’d arrived in the Park in Karl’s van we’d walked through the green heat and cool shadows, weighed down with easels and canvases, and bags of paint and brushes. We’d walked along paths, by hedges, across sloping lawns, and down a grand avenue, past fountains and flowerbeds laid out in colourful symmetry, that scented the air with lilies.

  We walked until we came to the lake, the weeping willows dipping their new leaves into the water.

  Roberta sat on a bench to paint, and Bianca walked across the grass to draw the fountain, and Cecile and I had settled by the water to paint reflections. Cecile sat under a tree because of the sunlight and her pale skin. She wanted to paint the water through a curtain of green, and we’ve worked all morning.

  ‘At Goldsmiths they’re making a dove,’ says Bianca, putting little twists of salt next to the boiled eggs, and a jar of capers, and Parma ham wrapped in greaseproof paper.

  ‘A dove, what for?’

  ‘The anti-war march.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘What are they making it out of?’

  ‘Willows.’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Oven-proof paper painted with PVA.’

  ‘Why oven-proof?’

  ‘They want to light it up inside.’

  ‘With candles?’

  ‘Don’t know. Might be bulbs.’

  ‘But they can’t plug it in!’ says Cecile, and Rob starts laughing.

  ‘There are batteries, you know, Ces,’ she says.

  ‘Must be candles,’ says Bianca.

  ‘I’d like to see that.’

  ‘Does the march go on till dark?’

  ‘There’s a candle-lit vigil after.’

  ‘In Trafalgar Square?’

  ‘Westminster. Outside the Houses of Parliament.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘We should make something,’ says Cecile. ‘What shall we make?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ says Rob. ‘Look at me! I’m hardly gonna manage the march with this!’ she says, pointing to her belly, ‘let alone carrying some bloody bird!’

  ‘Keep your hair on! I was just thinking.’

  ‘And Bianca gets tired, you know, she’s not going to want . . .’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  ‘Hey, this is a fabulous picnic, Bianca!’

  We eat our picnic and fall silent, and the bees buzz among the flowers.

  ‘Look, Karl’s coming,’ says Cecile. ‘We better get back to work.’

  I walk back to my easel and sit
by the lake, looking at the surface reflecting the trees, and the sky and the sunlight; and butterflies flit about behind my head, twirling round each other in shadows across the canvas.

  Before long a mandarin duck with a bobbing quiff swims through the water I am painting. I try to paint him into the picture as quickly as I can. He has a red streak in his feathers and yellow eyes.

  Chapter 11

  When we gather in Hyde Park behind the long trail of people that stretches up to Park Lane we are glad we have nothing to carry. Especially Bianca, who is dancing around, talking to everyone.

  We are standing behind a group of men in long white shirts and white trousers with beards and skullcaps who have posters written in Arabic in green curly letters.

  The men begin to sing a mournful and beautiful song, led by one who calls out the chant.

  Around us are the green summer trees of Hyde Park, the birds are singing and the bees are buzzing in the long grass. It is a clear sunlit day. The march is taking time to begin.

  Cecile and I wander away towards the trees.

  The anti-war march looks like a colourful carnival from here.

  ‘Oh look, I can see it!’

  ‘The neck’s a bit long for a dove.’

  ‘Silvia said they tried to make it a dove but the willows were too long.’

  ‘It made itself into a swan.’

  It’s near the head of the march and there are four people carrying it.

  The bird rises up very slowly on poles, the wings begin to flap up and down, and we realize the people are beginning to move.

  Though when we get back to our little crowd it’s still at a standstill, and Rob is lying on the grass on a shawl that one of the bearded men has gallantly spread down for her to lie on.

  As the people begin to move she stands up with a little help from Cecile and folds up the shawl. The man bows to her when she returns it to him.

  We begin to move. But Bianca wants to join the dove, so we walk briskly alongside the slowly moving people towards Speakers’ Corner.