Bridge 3

Our ‘real’ house was on the other side of the bridge, 29 Church Road, but we rarely visited it. Gradually, like a process of osmosis, our clothes, our books, our most treasured possessions migrated to that little attic bedroom at the studio. Father seemed perfectly happy sleeping on the paint-spotted armchair in his work room.

I almost forgot about the other house, with its white Edwardian frontage, its pine shutters on the inside, which stuck out when the windows were open like a gentleman shooting his cuffs, and set it apart from its neighbours in the terrace, stitched on to either side, with their eyes wide open to the street. It was always cold when we went there to retrieve some thing that we could not do without (because, of course, they could not truly shift themselves). Cold, even in this festering mid-summer, and slightly damp. A ghost house, it hunkered down and bided its time, with its made-up beds and silent piano. It hugged the dust to it and waited for better days.

The studio was now home. Mab and I did our homework in the tiny sitting room on the ground floor, the TV on and the door open to the street in an effort to catch any passing breeze. Above us, while we worked, the models trembled in their static poses and my father filled canvas after canvas with their image.

The house always seemed to be full of models. Maggie, of course, was a regular, but there were also Susie, Elspeth, Daisy, Karen, Nelly and Lizzie, as well as a collection of other girls – the professionals, we called them – who didn’t care to be bothered with questions from the artist’s children. They would pass us by, unsmiling; part the curtains that covered the entrance to the stairs and climb to the work room without a word.

I think that I was a little in love with Daisy. She was a strange little thing, what Maggie would call ‘one of those painfully thin girls’. I have a picture of her, torn from one of Dad’s old sketchbooks. It was one of the few things I took with me when I finally left home. A charcoal twist of ribs and her bright wide eyes picked out in soft pencil. Her hair was left uncharted, but I could only ever see that upturned nest of tight blonde curls clinging to her brow.

My father was never bothered by our presence in the work room, so long as we were quiet and didn’t get in the way, and I took to timing my visits to coincide with Daisy’s sessions. She was always skinning herself; when she stripped it was to reveal scabbed knees, heels and elbows. Once there was a friction burn that ran the length of her face and dragged down across her tiny chest. She said that she had slipped on the doormat and slid the length of the hall. I remember the marks that her clothes would leave on her body, bra straps and knicker-elastic, even the buttons at her waistband and the corrugated grip of her socks. These marks would bloom forth, red against white, as she stood so still in front of the little blow heater that she needed even in the height of summer. Rows of bindings transformed into bright garlands.

‘Do you ever wonder what we think about?’ Daisy asked one day.

She was going to boil us some eggs for our supper and I was following her around the kitchen, filling the pan, studying the wire wool scratches magnified by the resting water. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, he grunted, slotting the weekend review’s pages between the crumbs and coffee rings.

‘Do you think about me, Daisy?’ I asked.

Daisy smiled and lowered an egg delicately into the now shuddering water with a metal desert spoon.

‘Yes, my darling, only you.’

What did they think, these women who shaped my life? Statues trembling with caught breath and tension. What did they think about? All I can see are their blank eyes staring into space, the spaces between things, never meeting eyes. And my father watching, recording their every detail.

***

There was one evening, long before Daisy’s eggs or even Maggie’s bacon, one of the first nights that we spent at the studio. We had been banished to our room because of one of Mab’s games, but were nervous in our new attic and restless in our unconventional beds. Mab crept down to the work room to beg forgiveness and I followed after. But our father wasn’t there.

The doorway to the stairs leading from the living room had a curtain strung up across it, a heavy velvet skein that kept drafts out in winter months. The curtain was old before it was hung. I suspect that father had found it among the possessions left by Miracle, the old man who had tenanted this cottage before us. It was behind this curtain that Mab and I sat. Close enough to breathe its musty perfume, bruising the fabric with our dirty knees.

‘Mother’s,’ Mab whispered in my ear. Her lips were wet.

We watched our father sit cross legged on the living room floor and cut our mother to pieces with a pair of dress-maker’s scissors. I sat on the second step. My legs were too long for the bottom, so Mab graduated a level too, cramming herself into the step above me. We could not be seen, but we could see: a worn patch in the velvet curtain opened like a confessional grille. In the room beyond, sweat gathered on the lenses of my father’s glasses; his mouth was full of pins.

I’d never seen the clothes before; he must have had them well hidden. We got everywhere, that’s what Maggie was always saying, but I’d never met these dresses, these blouses and skirts, these strange slips of silk and satin, before they slid between my father’s rough fingers and succumbed to the steady crunch of the scissor blades. Every now and then he would pause and pull the severed pieces up to his face; run their cut edges under his nose. The fabric snagging on the pin heads that still glittered between his heavy lips. It was as if he hoped to catch some scent, some hidden fragrance that had been trapped in the stitching and liberated by the scissors’ cut.

‘Might as well sniff her fucking underwear,’ Mab muttered behind me.

I shouldn’t have understood her, but as I watched my father gather up an underarm, a worn shirt cuff, the lace collar of a dress, I knew the intrusion, the perversity of his actions. I knew we shouldn’t be watching.

But we watched, me on my step, Mab on hers, as my father sifted through the fabric and pulled out scraps of every colour and texture. We watched as he began a new project: There were fragments of card under mother’s clothes, he cleared the material away and revealed them. Little jigsaw pieces stuck haphazardly in the shallow carpet pile.

‘They were mother’s photographs,’ Mab would reveal to me later when we were tucked up in bed. Whispers to the darkening attic beams. ‘I saw him burn them; I thought they were all gone. He piled them all up in the fireplace of the old house the night after it happened and threw a match in. I think he knew I was there, but he didn’t say anything. He just burnt the lot. There was nothing I could do.’ There was a strange sound from the bed next to me, a kind of snuffling choke. If it hadn’t been Mab I would have taken it for a sob. ‘Do you remember her, Patty? She was perfect; she was everything. He’s ruining her now.’

Our father had burnt every photograph that he had of our mother, but they had not all been destroyed. He must have gone back, when his anger cooled, and searched the grate for what remained. And now there they were, nestled in our filthy living room carpet, surrounded by spilt threads and wounded clothes – all that remained of our mother’s image.

He started to pin them together, the charred pieces of photograph and the morsels of material. I couldn’t see the pictures, but father was whispering to himself as he warmed to the task in hand, his voice whistling through the pins.

‘Left leg – that’s Paris, ’83…the white dress with the blue flowers – Julie will do for that.
‘Her hair, dear Lord, her hair. Where’s that? Is that the garden...?
‘Peach slip and red scarf…
‘London…that little restaurant…that party we hated…
‘Maggie, of course…
‘Lizzie…
‘Elspeth…
‘Our first row…Daisy…
‘Now where’s that tweed…?’

Pieces of cloth; pieces of days: pieces of her. He knitted them together in neat swift movements and gave them names: Daisy, Maggie, Susie, Elspeth, Nelly, names we knew and names we were yet to meet. This was my father’s vision. There was only one female image he was interested in and he had lost it. Careless of him. But now he would use these fragments of her, all that remained, and the living girls could be used too. They would take the place of the missing pieces, with their poses and their turn of heads, their blood-filled limbs. Dr Frankenstein would have his monster.

The whispering stopped and I realised that father was weeping. His head was pressed down onto his chest; heavy tears splashed his glasses. It was the only time I have ever seen my father cry.

Mab nudged me. ‘Time for bed, sleepy head.’

She took my hand and led me back up the stairs to our room.