You

by Phil Whitaker

  We all fall silent after that, thinking our own thoughts. A memory: fetching your sister from school one time, after I’d lost you. Her having forgotten some book or PE kit or something, so we went round to Mummy’s on our way home to mine. Me sitting in the car while she popped inside. At that moment, the bus pitching up, and you getting off, bag slung over your shoulder. You. You saw my Renault and the next instant you darted behind the side of the shop over the road. I sat for a while, trying to figure out what to do. How long you’d wait for. Whether I should get out and go over. Then a door banging, and turning to see if it was your sister, but it was Mummy, who jumped straight in her car and raced out of the drive, whipping the twenty yards to where you were hiding. You, dashing from cover, diving in the passenger side. The pair of you racing off like bank robbers. The power of the mobile phone.

  Me

  Colour speaks for me, to me.

  Cadmium deep red. Ineffably sober and serious, as few reds are, dignified and noble, too. The depth to it. Its vibration.

  Manganese blue hue. Dufy’s southern French seascapes. Hot, lazed beach days, condensation on a glass of chilled beer.

  Milk white. Fear.

  Cobalt turquoise light. Experimentation and optimism. Perhaps youth.

  Flake white hue, underpainted with viridian. The morning mist hanging low over fields of grass, that has come overnight from the dew.

  Winsor yellow deep; rose madder genuine. The light of a late autumn sunset I have only twice seen.

  Do you pause sometimes, arrested by a particular hue? Does colour sometimes speak to you? Or are you too busy, never noticing, rushing from one lecture to the next, from the wards out to see a film, from the film to meet friends for a drink, hurriedly grabbing some food. I know nothing of your life now; the version I have of you is frozen in time – a different sort of cryogenic girl, seven years since your passing. You never were interested in make up, not up to when I last saw you. Fourteen. Your sister is, she who was attracted by the effect of cosmetics from an early age. She would save up her money, even as a little girl, then buy a blue nail varnish, or a luscious black eye liner, applying them more with enthusiasm than sophistication, but all the while experimenting, becoming more practised in the art. You, though; you were indifferent. You preferred to be as you were made. Has that changed over these past seven years? Or do you still like to be natural you?

  Seven years. You are twenty-one. Twenty-one going on fourteen, to me. Somehow I have to let you go, fourteen-year-old you, though it is the hardest thing; though it feels like abandoning you. But I have to manage it, if I’m to be ready; if ever the moment comes to get to know adult you.

  The memories keep snagging me back. The one time you tried a hair colour. Some friend of Mummy’s – a woman she met well after I’d gone, some earth-mother type who had her wedding in a cornfield. I can’t remember what her name was. She was around for a while, cropping up in your and your sister’s chatter. Then, as so many do, she suddenly disappeared, never mentioned again. Some misconstrued remark displacing her from friend to enemy, my guess. Whatever her name was, she fancied herself as a salonista. Did you and your sister actually want her attentions, or were you caught up in Mummy’s mood – cementing things with this latest rescuer in her life, presenting her children to the altar of this new-found, promising-much friendship? She deepened the brown of your sister’s hair, and cut her fringe even though she’d been asked not to. Eight months your sister had to clip it up in an unwanted style, disguising the butchery, till at last it had grown back through. Time and again she washed, trying to get the stubborn dye out; in the end she had to mask it with something closer to her original shade. You. You had your mid-blonde deep bronzed. You disliked it. Disliked what had been done to you. I remember you, down by the Drake Avenue rope swing, explaining how you wished you hadn’t had it done. You were resigned, though – you made none of your sister’s efforts at restoration. You seemed accepting that you just had to bear it, until it was no longer part of you.

  You wanted hair chalk one Christmas, though – the last Christmas I saw you. Hair chalk in blue. No mere step or two from the natural. A great stride in a different direction, no faked naturalness for you. Streaks of French ultramarine like no hair has ever been. Something you decided. You controlled. Something of you.

  Perhaps clothing. Perhaps that is where you find expression in colour. The first couple of birthdays and Christmases after I lost you, I would go round your favourite haunts, choosing garments to give to you. I knew the styles you liked, baggy sweats and hoodies. I chose colours that spoke to me, set them against each other, contrasting combinations that I hoped would tell of the thought I had given. I gave that up by your seventeenth. The Year 11 passing out ceremony I’d gone to that summer. Realising I no longer had any idea what size would fit you.

  Writing that card the previous year. Trying to get it right, every single word I wrote. And that fatal distraction, from being so dog-tired from all the sleeplessness, and writing: Wishing you a very 16th birthday. Having to insert the word happy as an afterthought. The pictures I sometimes saw on your Facebook, on your public-facing page, after you had unfriended me. Standing with a semicircle of friends at your Year 11 prom, your hands clenched. The strain subtly etched on your face, your smile getting nowhere near your eyes. Am I doing my own projecting, seeing what I crave to see, reading the runes wrong? I don’t think so. Cards. The cards you occasionally drew and sent to your grandma, whom you never now saw, which she copied and sent to me. I interpret people’s art for a living, but it didn’t take a genius. One showing a black silhouetted girl on a tree-swing, the branches bare of all foliage, a lake of dark water in the foreground. Another with a blue-sky-bound reindeer at Christmas, its body intricately realised in brown detail, surging upwards over the legend Break Free. A thank you card after one particular birthday: a dusky pink and purple bouquet, arranged in a mottled blue vase, one solitary stem lying fallen on the table beside.

  Colour.

  Picture me: in my mid-twenties, first placement on my art therapy course, uncertain still if this was something I could do. Attached to the elderly care unit where Mummy worked as an occupational therapist. One of the very first patients brought to me for a session. A mute man, he was, previously rendered speechless by a stroke, and afflicted now by an incurable cancer. Untidy stubble on his hemi-drooped face. Dried egg yoke at the corner of his mouth. It was Mummy who wheeled him down – the first time I’d laid eyes on her. She was wearing a replica England rugby shirt over jeans; no uniforms for those in that unit. Watching him swirling and blending different gouaches in a dense kaleidoscope – streaks of ultramarine, brilliant yellow, sap green, primary red – like palette-washing water swirling down a sink’s plughole. How eventually all brightness darkened, all vibrancy was consumed. If he’d had speech he could have tried to put words to it, words like rage, confusion, grief at all that was being lost. But words would have been inadequate, hollow – wrung out of any but the most banal meaning by centuries of overuse. Like trying to encompass the experience of a storm by naming wave, white horse, gust, lashing rain. Those ribbons of colour and pattern and form, they expressed his whole, the raging in his soul.

  That’s when I knew this was something I could do. More than a job to keep me in funds while I developed my own career. Art therapy, an arena in which I could be of use.

  Prof laughed, you know. We’re all doing it, she told me, all us empaths, trying to heal the old wounds by care-taking in the here and now. If I’d been like you, with a talent for science, perhaps I’d have wound up a doctor. Art. The one thing I excelled at, and I managed to find a way to put it to healing use.

  You were good across the board, mind, not just at science. Excellent at History, English, RP, all the subjects where there is no single answer. All the subjects where one has to account for different points of view. It fills me with hope for your future, that you will eventually over
come the black and white thinking of the splitting defence. But it was science that you chose to pursue. Medicine. Care-taking. The way in which you will put yourself to use, too.

  I can hear you ask: Was that not what Mummy was doing? Care-taking, helping all those frail old people? On the surface, it looked the same. But there was, I think, an added dimension. The gratitude and admiration of the gravely ill, and their family and friends – that is a constantly replenishing supply. Don’t get me wrong: all caring people get satisfaction from what they do. But for some it can become much more: a life-sustaining thing.

  Would I have listened, if someone were to have warned young, naïve me: among the legions of carers there are some with very deep wounds indeed? Would I have known what that might mean? Would I have believed it would ever affect me? Those are questions for another life. Those are things I will never see.

  ❦

  My abstracts are studies in colour. How the same square of flame red, blocked in a sea of brilliant green, becomes another shade entirely when, across the canvas, it is reproduced surrounded by intense blue. Different undertones drawn out. We are changed by the background around us; only against white is our truest hue revealed. As for the observer: we rarely perceive things in isolation, unadulterated by the interference of adjacent pigments. Only rarely do we see truth.

  Something else I play with. Two thick slathes of contrasting pigment, their edges opposed. Gouache is best; watercolours bleed too readily, acrylics and oils hardly at all. Gradually the wet colours seep into one another, the border between them becoming less and less distinct, their entwinement producing some entirely new pigment at the interface – an insipid green, a murky brown. What should be two individual colours merge, enmeshed in each other, the purity of their selves sullied.

  What am I in this study in colour? The palate knife, shaping what the eye sees. The artist, composing, juxtaposing, creating effect. I cannot help but have agency. Perhaps you will reject what I paint, suspicious of my motives even for having started to daub this canvas. Or perhaps you will decide, regardless of my artistry, that my picture has authenticity. Conceivably, in weighing the actions of my own hand, you will start to discern the brush marks and blade strokes of other implements that have hitherto been hidden from you. Those are questions for you alone, and maybe ones that will seem differently important to you at different stages of your life – your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. All I can do is paint my own picture. The artist, creation done, retires to their studio, and leaves their work to make its own way in the world. The effect it has on any given observer is ungovernable and unique.

  THREE

  Triangular Life

  Along from the station there’s a modernist edifice, towering walls of pale brick and glass intersecting at surprising angles, block chrome lettering declaring it to be the Saïd Business School. The Royal Oxford Hotel was once the imposing welcome for disembarked arrivals to this fabled city. Now it looks puny and insignificant, stranded between bifurcating traffic streams.

  I walk on along the Botley Road. What was once an artists’ materials shop is a pizza takeaway. Revivre secondhand clothing is now an outlet for the British Heart Foundation. So much is unfamiliar from when I lived here. So many years in the city. There must have been demolition, construction, closings and openings, improvements to the roadways going on all the time. But we don’t notice, not really, not when it’s happening around us gradually, incrementally, day by day. The starkness of the change you see, once you’ve been away.

  In some ways I feel like a trespasser, an interloper. This is your city now. The things that jar my eye will be just-how-it-is for you. You’ll have no idea of the layers of past buried under what you see – the faded-paint lettering and the rawlplug-filled holes pocking the stonework beneath each shiny new plastic shop frontage – the hopes and disappointments, the lives and the losses, the stories that the very brickwork could breathe.

  How would it be to see you, were you to make this rendezvous? Five whole years since I last laid eyes on you, and that from a distance during your Year 11 passing out ceremony. An unwanted presence. But I came, to clap along with the rest of the mums and dads as you received your certificates; and to laugh falsely, along with everyone else, at your head teacher’s résumé of your year group’s antics through the years of your GCSEs. It was almost difficult to recognise you: six inches taller since my previous sight of you; braces on your teeth. Sweet sixteen. Your uncertain air. Your adolescent gawkiness and nascent grown-up grace, coexisting. As I watched you climb on to that stage, I was struck by the forcible realisation: I knew as much about your life now as I did the lives of any of the other pupils there. My daughter. You.

  Did you notice me, sat towards the back of the hall? I thought a few times that you looked my way. Prof says you most definitely would have. That my having come would have dripped a quantum of love into you. That – even when, back home, for Mummy’s consumption, you probably made a show of scorning my temerity in having shown my face – somewhere else, in some walled-off secret place adjacent to your beating heart, you would have been unspeakably pleased. I have dared to believe Prof, with her shelves laden with the weight of knowledge, and all that her myriad YouTube testifiers have to say.

  George Street. What used to be a cheap homeware emporium – where I used to buy sheets, curtains, kitchen gear – now reinvented as a swish eat-outerie. The old Lloyds bank an urban outfitter.

  Who are you now? Medical student, starting your third year. Cycling about town. Late-night essay-writing. Pubs and clubs with the gang. What do you tell friends when you are swapping life stories? What do you say about your dad? Do you have a prepared narrative: the bullying, the betrayal, the wastrel he proved to be? Or do you do what Mummy did with Ted and Gloria: look upset, as though swallowing back something painful, and explain that I’m no longer around. No longer around. The simple truth, concealing so much. It’s a brave soul who will trespass further. But if any ask what happened, do you shake your head just the once, say it was very messy and traumatic, and say can you leave it. Cancer, they’ll conclude. Maybe a horrific accident. You’ll be the girl with the dead dad. #deaddad. The girl whose dad can never then be allowed to be seen.

  Je me rends. Rendez-vous?

  Somehow, I can feel your presence distributed throughout this city, as though, from some far vantage, you are monitoring my progress. I don’t know – is that a yearning? After our last pell-mell airborne dash of the train journey, my abject failure to follow through, I thought you would never again rejoin me in flight. Now though. I have a strong sense of you; a sense that, despite the setback, you are still hankering to learn more. It’s warmer here than it is out west, the sun feels stronger. The Oxford Retreat is still there on Upper Fisher’s Row. There’s the patch of grass, sloping down to the canal bank, where in summer months drinkers take pints from the pub, and pretend they’re in the country.

  A brief diversion. No need for flight; we need merely step through the gate that leads down to the towpath. My feet land on turf. I stop, trying to sense if you are with me. Yes, I can feel you at my shoulder, suddenly with, if a little behind, me. I keep a tight lid on my emotions; neither relief nor elation would be helpful. Come and see us, me and Mummy, stretched out and facing each other near that draping willow. Tartan travel rug. A couple of wasps buzzing near our drinks. That’s her, lying on her side, propped up on her left elbow, her hand disappearing into her mass of blonde curls. Her skin young and smooth. Her eyes of green. And me, propped up on my right elbow, mirroring her posture, as though a mismatching reflection. I’m in jeans and a grandad top; she’s in jeans and a T. I’m so much younger than you could ever remember, mid-twenties or thereabouts, my wire-framed John Lennon’s not yet replaced from art-student me. We’re here on a date, not too long since I met her. We’re still revealing those bits of ourselves that we want to be seen.

  Cross the grass with me. Traffic no
ise fading behind us. Birdsong above. Till at last we are close enough to hear.

  She’s speaking, is Mummy. She’s telling me about Ellen at work. I’ve met her a few times myself, Ellen; she seems nice enough. But now I’m hearing another side. How she’s taken against Mummy, how she cuts her out of things, spreads lies and gossip about her behind her back, how she has recruited various of the other OTs against her. It’s spiteful stuff, going on well below the radar, so nothing is provable, everything deniable. An absence of evidence. There is nothing your mother can take to management, nothing she’s able to do to turn back the tide. She’s so miserable, she used to adore the job, but this bullying by Ellen is making her think she’s going to have to leave.

  Her eyes are frequently downcast. Other times they meet mine, her expression bewildered.

  What do you think, listening to her? Does your heart go out to her, yet one more instance of the cruelty the world has doled out? Maybe you don’t think, maybe you simply feel. A familiar wrenching inside, an admixture of anger and pity and empathic grief.

  What I am thinking? The me of then is thinking it sounds truly horrible. I’ve witnessed your mother’s kindness and lovingness with the patients she brings to and from my art therapy room. She simply doesn’t deserve to be treated this way. The me of then is experiencing powerful urges, the feeling that I should do something to help. And if I can’t help, then at least I might make her feel better. Cheer her up. She looks so abject. Beleaguered. At the same time, I’m puzzled by Ellen’s behaviour; I can see I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m beginning to see Ellen in a new light. Like Mummy, she also is a good-looking occupational therapist – though tall against Mummy’s petite stature. Perhaps Mummy feels to her like a rival, a threat to her ruling of the roost at the unit. Perhaps that’s why she has unleashed such a campaign. She’s not my type, Ellen, but when I think about it, I can remember her flirting mildly with me. Packs and animals. The dominance of the alpha. The sorting of hierarchy.