I Live Here Now

Product Information

A voice that we have harboured without being aware of it but that suddenly speaks, as though to comfort, to question, to seek our response? Here, it was clear, on our street, there had been a failure of care — a blanketed stretcher brought out in the early hours of Christmas morning.

Tonight we rebuild the strange slope-roofed triangular room that was full of suitcases, half way up the stairs. It is huge, with a row of old houses on two edges, and the carved articulations of a municipal façade on another. The curtains are drawn back on their neat dark spaces and the railings make a patterned shadow diagonal under the street lights. The police vans were driven into a wall to block the street and officers sprang into an obedient crocodile, double file, and marched off to block another exit.We had laboured and given birth in the hospitals, and kept watch over people close to us on the wards: friends, partners and children, through times of extremity, fear and danger. We exclaim a little at this bewildering card shuffle of years, of decades, of the incredible ages of our parents, and of our children. Down the corridor, smashed glass, the washing up still in the sink, a whisk in a milk pan, and below the window, a child’s toy hard hat on the floor with the real rubble. The professor even allowed me a moment’s nostalgia for the Soviet produced three and five litre glass jars that were such a ubiquitous detail of my Moscow year — thick blue-green glass vessels packed with pickled cabbage, or marrows, or mushrooms become slimy and viscous, too large or many for the fridge, they sat out in rows on frosted balconies, in easy reach of the kitchen table.

Snipers are stationed on the top floor of the old Children’s Hospital that looks over the river, training their guns on the ground below, taking aim all day long. Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line. I wondered if this was intentional, to leave the light on, or if the forensic team were just too exhausted and forgot to turn it off. I also began to spray water onto the page in later stages of the drawings to see what effects would come from the dry marks reacting to the water. There were many activities which used more controlling factors than you describe, such as making a drawing of a distant object, walking a set number of paces forward and repeating until you are very close.The island is in the bay, on the edge of a Scottish town, but just now in this storm light, it transforms itself into something like a dream — an island of light. Friends have travelled from other cities and peopled my rooms with stories of places long unimagined. Suddenly my life when I was their age is in full ruck and flow, with night streets and lights and traffic smells alive and moving through me — the Archway road, Kentish Town, all the people and all the walking, here to here to here. A young man was in the room, walking about on the new laid carpet, smoking, moving things from place to place. I swim with my nose at the level of the water, perfectly held between the air and the underwater, my eyes fixed on the island before me that is transformed, transcendent — the real world before me holding within it the dream, the idyll of the painting.

I look out at the flats opposite, whose windows sealed me in for so many months, whose rooms set the pace and provided daily diversion.And I look on, making notes, remembering watching the woman of the basement, reading that morning on her bed, wishing but doubting that she could be more peaceful now, resisting imagining that darkness. The building and its last active clinics has been closed for the week, as has my children’s school for the opening days.

Because I kept my eyes on the world, essential for safety and avoidance of oncoming objects (small wayward dogs a particular hazard), I couldn’t look at my paper as I drew, so the drawings were blind drawings with the occasional quick glance down at the drawing to see what was happening.The economy is described as “in hibernation”, a sort of deep freeze, from which it should emerge as fresh as peas. I thought it was someone she knew, but it turns out the clip was widely circulated at the start of the war. Later I think about truces and conflicts, in families as well as in war, and the ways that we try to resolve them.