Invisible River Read online

  Zeb says that around every river is an invisible river. It extends all around, down and to the side for 500 feet, and it’s full of micro-organisms, and the health of the river depends on the health of the invisible river. And I suppose that around every city is an invisible city also.

  Chapter 7

  We walk into the dark courtyard, and through the glass wall we see Bianca and Cecile having tea in the lit-up canteen.

  ‘They look like they’re in an Edward Hopper painting,’ says Rob.

  Bianca sees us, and waves us in to join them.

  We sit down in the canteen with the bags of mud.

  ‘Where have you been?’ says Bianca.

  ‘Oh, don’t ask!’ says Rob.

  ‘All right, I won’t!’ says Bianca, and turns back to Cecile. ‘So anyway, what happened? She’s telling me about the portrait commission. That awful woman’s husband, and the photo of her smiling, with all her teeth showing?’

  ‘Oh,’ Cecile groans. ‘He came to collect it, and said I’d made her look like a horse! I had to go to her gilt house with chintz everything and paint her lips again, this time closed, so the horse didn’t show!’

  ‘Oh my God, the horse!’ Bianca squeals in a high-pitched voice.

  ‘She wants a portrait that makes her look ten years younger!’ says Cecile, who is so poised and demure-looking it is surprising when she swears. ‘And fuck him! I changed it three times and he didn’t offer me a penny more!’

  Zeb walks past our table with his empty tray, and Bianca catches his arm.

  ‘When are you going to show us your sculptures, Mister Zebedee?’

  ‘When do you want to see them?’ he says.

  ‘Anytime!’

  ‘Come on up, then!’

  So we all troop up to the mezzanine, in a row, with Bianca making faces at us.

  There are skylights in his space but no windows and the sink faces a wall. It is a big low sink with taps underneath it in the pipes. His space is crammed with bits of television sets, plugs and wires, old radios, their inner wiring exposed. There are projectors and canvases and cameras, some half taken apart. There are hammers and screws and rolls of steel wire, and copper tubing, and then there are his sculptures, which light up and tinkle. Strange otherworldly beings that have a logic of their own. Zeb’s logic. Some ping rubber bands, some project light through bottles of different coloured water which quivers on the wall in a slow rotation.

  ‘Wow! they are so fantastic,’ says Bianca, touching them with her thin fingers, and looking them up and down.

  Zeb stands in the corner, his hands in his back pockets and his head leaning over to one side.

  He likes artists called Tinguely and Twombly and scientists who propose eleven dimensions.

  He says he’s seen his sculptures when he travels in dreams to other planets, but his don’t work as well as those did.

  ‘You like putting things together?’ says Bianca, examining the constructions.

  ‘And taking things apart,’ he says, laughing.

  ‘I wish you’d take apart my washing machine!’ I say.

  ‘I’ll come and have a look if you like,’ he says.

  I didn’t expect him to say that.

  ‘That would be great!’ I say.

  Bianca looks at me out the side of her eyes. I glare at her. Bianca likes making up stories, even if she knows they aren’t true.

  ‘Well, I could come on Saturday morning,’ he says, crouching down and looking through a box of tools.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Well, how late are you?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Since it should have come, or since your last one?’

  ‘Since my last one.’

  ‘But that’s not long, it’s only two weeks.’

  ‘I’m never late.’

  Rob looks down at the bags of mud, and puts her hands on her head.

  ‘I suppose I better take them home.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Bake it, then sieve it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The earth. Make it into pigment!’

  She looks at me and realizes, and we both laugh.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ she says.

  I nod. ‘Course it will.’

  ‘I’ll have a baby, I mean, why not?’

  ‘You’d be a great mum, Rob.’

  ‘Just didn’t expect it quite so soon.’

  ‘You might not be, though. It’s only two weeks.’

  Chapter 9

  On Saturday morning I am sitting in my kitchen, and the doorbell rings.

  I run down the stairs to let Zeb in.

  ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ I say, showing him into the kitchen.

  ‘No no,’ he says. ‘I’ll get on with it,’ and he has soon pulled the machine out from the wall and begun to undo it. I leave him to his deconstruction and sit next door, hearing all the little noises and clinks and thuds of the washing machine being taken apart. When I look through the curtain of plastic strips the washing machine is all over the floor, lined up in little rows, all the cogs and tubes and washers.

  He looks up.

  ‘I’m working out how it works,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ I say.

  ‘Well, no, I’ve never taken a washing machine apart before,’ he says, moving the pieces slowly along the floor. His tall body is folded, and he is crouching on one knee. There is something graceful about his movements.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, looking up and smiling at me. ‘It’ll work fine!’ and within an hour it is chugging away.

  I watch him unfolding himself, standing up and stretching. He has to lay his hands flat on the ceiling.

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it, your little pad.’

  ‘Yes, I like it. Look, you can see the river,’ and I show him through the gap in the houses, and the rain pouring in slants.

  ‘And you’ve got the market,’ he says, pointing behind his head.

  ‘Yes, I’m going there in a minute.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’ve got your canoe!’ he says, and I laugh.

  ‘Look, Zeb, can I give you some money for this?’

  ‘No-oh!’ he says in a cascade of notes. ‘It was fun!’

  ‘Fun?’ I say, thinking of my panic at all things mechanical.

  ‘Yes, some people do crosswords,’ he says, patting me on the shoulder affectionately. ‘Anyway, it was my pleasure. Right! I’m on my way!’

  ‘You’re going to get soaked!’

  ‘I will survive!’ he sings as he walks down the stairs, and shouts ‘See you!’ when he slams the front door.

  So I give him the magic shells instead. I leave them in his space wrapped up in a small drawing of a washing machine.

  They open under water. I bought them in Chinatown when I was drawing pictures of Cambridge Circus.

  I’d been lured down Gerard Street by the glowing lanterns and coloured paper decorations in the windows of the little shops, and out of the icy wind that was biting my face with cold rain, and making my fingers numb.

  The lady in the shop couldn’t speak English but she nodded at me and smiled and spoke Chinese and made delicate movements with her fingers and managed that way to explain what the little shells contained. I took them home and put one in a glass of water and waited. Nothing happened.

  But next morning, I looked up and saw the shell had opened; the pink and yellow and blue paper flowers had unfurled, along with green fronds, and there in the glass was a miniature underwater garden.

  Chapter 10

  Rob is preparing big pieces of paper seven feet tall, painting them with a wallpaper brush and PVA to coat the surface, and the smell of baked earth fills the studio, sweet and soft. Rob took the earth home, and baked it in her oven, while she waited for the line to turn blue. By the time she’d sieved the earth to a fine raw umber powder, and ruined the sieve, it was definite
ly dark blue. She said Mick was over the moon.

  She is going to mix the earth, baked and sieved, with cold-pressed linseed oil.

  ‘So you’re sure?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ I said smiling, and I could tell by her face that she was glad too.

  ‘But I want to keep it quiet for a bit,’ she says, her eyes looking upwards to the ceiling, and I nod.

  Behind the muslin curtain, on my table next to the window, I have a piece of smooth wood for mixing colours.

  I notice a matchbox sitting there. I pick it up and push it open. A little yellow jack jumps out attached to a spring. It startles me and makes me smile. It must be from Zeb.

  I make it ping out of the box a few times.

  Then I leave it on the windowsill and pull a canvas out from under the table and get to work.

  I rub the white surface of the canvas with rose doré, a translucent pink pigment made with gold. It is a delicate pigment; if you mix it with even the tiniest amount of another colour it disappears into it.

  The colour prefers not to be mixed but to be laid over a white ground so the white shines through it and lights up its delicate pinky orange hue.

  The surface is ready. It is a colour field.

  I squeeze the tubes of oil paint on to the palette, one by one.

  I love the colours and their secret singing.

  Aureolin, a gentle golden yellow that is soft and hums, and high-pitched lemon yellow, sharp and startling, then the low velvet tone of alizarin crimson, and the seductive cobalt blue. It fills me with longing, if cobalt blue was a man I’d run away with him. He calls with a longing to far away. Blue is a calling-away colour and its sound is a sound so beautiful it makes you want to leave the earth. Not red though, red pipes up, especially cadmium scarlet. ‘Do-do-doooo,’ it says like a trumpet, it runs in your blood the same sound, ‘yes, this is life!’ It gets hot and passionate. If you put it in a painting it jumps forward, ‘I am here!’ it says, ‘right here, ME!’ and I love red for that. Then the beautiful violets, half red, half blue. Cobalt violet, singing in the range next to pink, but with more majesty, more mystery, and ultramarine violet, gentle, tender, like the shadows in twilight, but deep, with dignity and a hidden depth, like someone who walks among people but knows they are really a seraph.

  Then translucent golden green that is like the sun shining through leaves, cinnabar green, spring leaves unfurling in the new light, chrome green, heavy like a green stone washed by the waves.

  I couldn’t work in the studios with music blaring because the ideas can’t gather in the silence, and besides, you can’t hear the colours.

  I mix them on the palette.

  The rose doré ground is ready. Orange pink. It is a small canvas, a foot square, but big enough for a world. I put some cinnabar green, some rose pink mixed with white, some royal blue. The colours sing together on the surface and already there is a space and a distance, a place for something to arrive.

  I love the feeling in the studio, of the presence of the reality that we call into our pictures. It fills the empty space with invisible threads of light that touch that other realm. The ideas hang in the air, becoming more real with imagining, more robust and less wispy, until they are so real that they come and sit on the end of the paintbrush and get mixed in with the colours and appear on the canvas unexpectedly. An idea you might have had months ago will suddenly appear fully formed and look at you from the primed surface. The threads gather in the corners and on the ceiling like spiders’ webs, but they aren’t musty, they have a singing presence. You can feel them. They are halfway in, half out, between realities.

  Roberta makes a quietness around her when she works. It is deep and palpable. I can feel it on the surface of my skin. She breathes and concentrates and the concentration makes a deep feeling that draws you into it; without her the ideas fly about untethered, with her in the room everything gathers and is brought down. We fall into deep concentration together, like a stone falling to the bottom of the sea, down and down, to the forest of coral, the flashes and flits of colour, the rippling underwater light.

  I tell Rob her baby must be influencing us from his underwater world; half in and half out of this reality, his spirit still resident in the place where anything is possible. I think he must dart about among the ideas, spinning them around like toys.

  Chapter 11

  ‘What happened? What happened?’ says Bianca eagerly, when I walk into her space.

  ‘What d’you mean, what happened?’

  ‘On Saturday with Zeb!’

  ‘He fixed my washing machine!’

  ‘Nothing happened?’

  ‘No. Nothing happened, Bianca’

  ‘If you were Italian something would happen,’ she says, looking dejected.

  ‘Look, he’s a friend. I like him,’

  ‘Ah, how dull!’ she says, waving me away.

  I laugh and sit down on the windowsill, but I don’t tell her about the jack-in-a-box.

  There is a smell of resin. She is using egg yolk mixed with pigment. There are brown bags of pure cobalt blue, and ultramarine. The colours jump out at you when you open the bags.

  The eggshells quiver as she walks across the floor, to place her pictures on the nails to look at them.

  Her work has become more sturdy, on wood instead of paper.

  As her collages have become more robust it seems she is getting fatter.

  ‘Have you put on weight, Bianca?’

  ‘Do you think so?’ She turns round delighted. ‘Have I? I hope so. I want a nice fat bottom.’

  I love the smell of wax, it’s like churches, and Bianca’s paintings glint and glow like icons.

  She goes out on Sunday mornings in Brixton with her dustpan to sweep up the hundreds of little green-tinted cubes of coloured glass from windscreens that have been smashed the night before, to use in her work.

  ‘Are you religious, Bianca?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I want to sell my pictures to rich women in fur coats who wear too much perfume! They like things that glint!’

  ‘You only pretend to be a cynic!’ I say.

  Cecile comes in with Rob, who has a big library book under her arm.

  ‘Time for coffee!’ says Bianca.

  Cecile sits down next to me on the windowsill and Rob sits on the chaise longue, while Bianca unscrews the silver coffee pot and heaps in the coffee.

  ‘Look!’ says Roberta, opening the book and smoothing the photograph with her hand. ‘They’re amazing, don’t you think they’re just amazing!’

  Bianca shrugs. ‘You aren’t interested in anything after 2000 BC.’

  Roberta closes the library book of megalithic stones and puts her hands on her hips even though she’s sitting down.

  ‘Our history didn’t start with ROME, you know!’

  I start laughing. ‘You two! Honestly!’

  ‘All history books start with Rome!’ says Roberta, turning to me. ‘You should know, your dad’s a historian.’

  ‘Really, is he?’ says Cecile, turning to me.

  ‘Yes.’ I nod, and think of the stacks of dusty books and the typewriter with its red and black ribbon, and the rubber bands he used to give me, that he kept in a box, lots of different-coloured rubber bands.

  ‘There is a whole history of art!’ says Bianca.

  ‘Here we go! The Italian Renaissance!’ says Rob.

  ‘All over the world!’ says Bianca, gesturing the whole of the world. ‘You can’t just ignore it!’

  ‘I can do what I like!’

  ‘There’s a standing stone in London, did you know?’ says Cecile, but Rob isn’t listening.

  ‘For you the only art is Italian art!’

  ‘Actually, the period I like is Byzantium.’

  She has postcards of the golden mosaics in Ravenna on the wall.

  ‘Where is it?’ I ask Cecile.

  ‘It’s opposite Cannon Street Tube station, under the Bank o
f China.

  It used to be as tall as two grown men,’ says Cecile, ‘and it’s been there for thousands of years. It’s supposed to keep London safe. I’ll lend you the book.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Maybe your dad knows about it. Did he tell you any stories about London?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, he did, he told me stories all the time when I was little.’

  I look out the window at the huge sky.

  I remember a dragon dancing on a floating stage, and men pulling oars through water lilies in time to flutes. I remember the pigeons falling out of the sky with their wings on fire. I saw the city in the flames with the wind blowing outside after the twilight had turned the sea pink. I looked into the orange flames and saw it burning, and after that it was always there. I looked for it even if the story was from another time.

  ‘All I’m saying is, open your mind. You only see one thing.’

  ‘Well, same to you, Empress Theodora!’

  ‘You can like whatever period you like!’

  ‘And so can I!’

  Roberta opens her book and turns the pages slowly. The coffee pot begins to hiss.

  Cecile gestures with her eyes about the other two, and smiles.

  ‘Has he published a book?’ she says.

  I look at the bottom of my empty cup.

  ‘He hasn’t finished it.’

  And I remember the pages stuck together and the blurred writing where the whisky had spilt and the words had run into each other.

  ‘Well, I’m sure he will,’ she says kindly.

  He’s on his own now. On his own in that house. Alone with the wind blowing against the windows. And I don’t want to think about my dad all alone in that house by the sea with the wind blowing against the windows.

  ‘Can we change the subject now, please?’ says Cecile.

  ‘Of course!’ says Bianca, who will have an argument about anything and forget it.

  I look at Rob sitting under a brooding cloud of silence, and catch her eye.

  ‘I’m in a bad mood,’ she says.

  ‘We don’t mind,’ says Bianca.

  ‘I’m not in a bad mood actually, I’m pregnant!’

  Bianca and Cecile open their mouths at the same time.