Drawing with Light (2 page)

‘It's, like, totally fine,' Kat says. ‘Any time! Not that I'll be here. I'm off to York tomorrow.'

We watch him go. The darkness swallows him up.

Kat gives a big sigh.

‘What?' I say.

‘He's gorgeous! Isn't he?'

‘Yes.'

‘Typical. Just when I'm leaving home, the most good-looking guy in the world shows up.'

‘You'll be back at Christmas,' I say.

‘Suppose.'

‘And there will be millions of good-looking blokes at university, won't there?'

‘Yes. And he's a bit young, and he doesn't have a proper job. So he's not The One.'

We pull the door closed. It's so ancient and rotten it doesn't lock. We get our bikes from the side of the house.

‘Did you bring lights?'

‘No.'

‘Me neither.'

‘It's not far. It won't matter.'

A strange thing happens to me that night, cycling in the total dark. I keep thinking I'm going to bump into a wall or a tree or something. The dark is so thick it seems solid, a physical thing. It's as if all my other senses have gone too, along with my sense of sight. I wobble and fall off a million times and Kat gets the giggles. But after a while she realises I'm serious: I really can't see where I'm going, and I can't balance, either. We end up walking side by side, pushing the bikes.

‘If we hurry,' she says, ‘we might catch up with Seb.'

But we don't. There's no sign of him the whole length of the lane. We could just as well have dreamt him up: the product of our own imaginations. Or was he a ghost, after all?

We turn left on to the main road for a short distance, then left again down the narrow tree-lined lane to the camping field. In the far corner, the white caravan glows in the dark, all lit up within. Dad and Cassy must be back with the takeaway. It's our last night with Kat. She's going on the train to York in the morning, and I won't see her for eleven weeks. It's the longest we've ever been apart.

At bedtime, I'm still thinking about the boy. Seb.

His dark hair, and his olive skin, and his brown eyes. And the way my heart beat faster, and my skin started to dance, little shivers running up and down my spine.

3

Right now I'm typing with my laptop on my knees, perched on the seat that runs along one end of the caravan. Dad and Cassy aren't home from work yet, which makes it easier to get on without interruptions, questions, Dad looking over my shoulder with suggestions for improvements (spelling, grammar, style). I've just pulled the curtains at all the windows. When the lights are on, the caravan's a bit like a ship lit up in a sea of dark, and I start imagining someone watching me, seeing I'm here by myself. From the inside, looking out, I can't see a thing, so I wouldn't be able to tell if someone was out there or not, would I?

I'm missing Kat.

She left on 29th September, which is exactly one month ago.

The clocks went back at the weekend. It was already beginning to get dark when I was walking back from the bus stop after school this afternoon. I have to walk by myself, of course; no one else at school lives way out in the middle of nowhere like this. And no one else has a dad mean or crazy enough to make them live for six months cramped up in a tiny caravan in the middle of a field while he works on renovating a house.

An ordinary newish caravan with a proper toilet and shower would be bad enough, but this is beyond a joke. Like Kat said, he found it on eBay: a bargain. Orange decor. Plastic table. Baby Belling cooker with two electric rings. No running hot water. A chemical loo that stinks, so we have to use the site toilet – and shower block – instead, which means going outside. The living room is tiny: if I hold out my arms I can almost touch both walls. Dad and Cassy have to sleep on the pulled-out sofa seat because there's only one bedroom, with bunk beds. Dad thinks it's fun, like being on holiday, but that's because most of the time he isn't here. He's at work, in a warm office, or doing site visits or whatever.

Even with my feet hunched up under my big woolly jumper I'm still cold. Back in sunny September, the caravan was too hot all the time. Now it's freezing. We're the only caravan left on the site.

I switch on the kettle, make tea so I can warm my hands up on the mug. I ought to be doing homework. I've got loads. I'm doing three subjects for AS level: Photography, English, Geography. I check emails: nothing from Kat. I check her out on Facebook and find a load of new photos: Kat at parties, mostly, looking slightly drunk and happy, with her arms round different people. Friends I don't know.

It's pressing on my mind, what happened in the Photography lesson today. Something my teacher said . . .

I start off by doing the actual homework, which is researching a famous landscape photographer: Ansel Adams. Millions of sites come up. I make some notes in my photography journal:

1902–1984
California; B & W photographs; landscapes (wilderness)
Realistic approach: sharp focus; heightened contrast; precise exposure.

And then I type my own name in, the way you do: searching out different identities, the other Emily Woodmans I might have been. The zoologist Emily Woodman, or the one who won a sailing regatta, or the daughter of some peer . . . and then I look at Emily Carr, because she's one of the famous Emilys I'm named after, along with Emily Brontë (novelist) and Emily Dickinson (poet). According to Kat, it was my mother's idea. My real mother, that is:
Francesca,
not Cassy.

Cassy's our stepmother, but we don't call her that because it makes her sound wicked, like in stories, and she's not at all. She came to look after us when I was about four and Kat was six. She married Dad when I was seven. She's much younger than Dad; people sometimes thinks she's our big sister, even though she's got wild, wavy red hair and pale skin with freckles and doesn't look anything like either of us. Kat's hair is long, golden and gorgeous; mine is short, dark and spiky. When I was little I wanted it long like Kat, but Dad said it took too much time in the morning, what with all the combing and plaiting for school.

I scroll down the screen, to check out the postage-stamp-size photos of paintings by Emily Carr (1871–1945). I start clicking on the images to enlarge them. Fir trees. A log cabin. Totem poles. A child sitting on her mother's lap. I love her paintings of trees. My favourites are
Above the Trees
and
The Little Pine
: young trees full of light and happiness against a darker background of mysterious forest that looks as if it is alive and moving.

A car bumps across the rough field. Headlights sweep across the curtains. The car brakes; doors slam; voices. They're back.

Cassy stumbles in and dumps two carrier bags on the floor. She swings her hair back, smiles. ‘Em! You OK? Sorry we're so late!'

Dad flicks the kettle switch as he walks through the kitchenette. He nods at the laptop. ‘Homework?'

I've logged off the website already. I feel weirdly guilty, as if he could tell what I was about to do. My next search . . .

Cassy lays out the foil dishes on the Formica tabletop. ‘Prawn korma, vegetable biriani, onion bhajis and rice.' She hasn't looked so happy for ages.

‘What's this in aid of?' I ask.

‘Nothing.'

‘Just a rest from cooking,' Dad says.

I get out some cutlery; Dad opens a bottle of beer. He pours two glasses. ‘Want some, Em?'

‘No thanks.' I don't like beer much, and in any case, drinking with your parents just seems weird.

‘So,' Dad lifts his glass. ‘Here's to us, and
la dolce vita
.'

‘La what?' Cassy wrinkles her nose up, which makes her look about ten.

‘The sweet life. It's a film,' I explain.

Dad smiles at me above Cassy's head. He still finds it amusing, the things she doesn't know, even after all this time.

The rest of the meal, they talk about the house, and then about work, and laugh a lot. I just want it to be over. I can't work out why they are so over-the-top cheerful. Without Kat here, it's as if the balance has shifted. I'm the odd one out. They egg each other on, and think everything is funny. Even after we've cleared the table and Cassy and me are watching TV, Dad keeps looking at Cass. He's only had two beers. It's gross. I take the extension lead, so I can plug in my laptop on the bunk bed, and leave them to it.

Alone in here, lying on the bottom bunk, I pluck up my courage and try again. The internet connection is painfully slow. I type the name in a second time. Francesca Woodman. I press S
earch
. But nothing comes up. Nothing relevant, I mean. No photographers, no famous artists, no one who might be my real mother.

Today is the first time I've thought about her for ages. I was two when she left; I don't even remember her face. But something Mr Ives said in Photography, earlier today, has started me off again. One tiny throwaway remark.

‘Wonderful work, Emily. You've got a particularly good eye for light. An artist's attention to detail.' He was leafing through my photography journal, where we stick in our most interesting photos, and write notes on the processes and stuff like that.

He turned over another couple of pages, to my sequence of black and white photos of the trees on the lane down to our field. And then he said the words.

‘These are so like Francesca's work! Remarkable. It must be in the genes!'

I went cold.

Mr Ives didn't notice, of course. He was already moving on, to someone else's table, picking up another journal and leafing through.

Dad and Cassy are giggling. The walls are paper thin: I can hear everything in too much detail. I put on headphones, listen to music. I give up my search on the internet, email my friend Rachel and Kat instead. There's a message from Rachel:

come and stay over at the weekend?

yes,
I type back.

At some point, the whole caravan shakes when Dad or Cass goes out for a pee, and the door bangs back on its hinges. The wind's got up. It rocks the caravan and whistles in around the loose metal window frames. I feel a second blast of cold air when the door opens again and Dad/Cassy comes back in. I check the time: 11.40.

I turn out the light, get properly undressed and snuggle under the duvet. On this top bunk, I'm only about ten centimetres from the ceiling. It gets claustrophobic if you start thinking about it too much. I lift a corner of the curtain and stare out into the darkness. A thin crescent moon is rising:
a sky canoe.
Is that from a poem? Wordsworth? Coleridge? Cassy's voice murmurs something to Dad; I can't hear her actual words, just the low whispering. Finally it's silent, apart from the wind. Still I can't sleep. My mind is racing.

I lean over and scrabble in the box on the shelf next to Kat's bunk. I know it'll be here somewhere. My hand finds the hard edge of a book, the raised pattern of letters on the cover. I pull the curtain back further, so I can see better in the silvery moonlight.

Kat and I looked at this book so often when we were little that the pages became unstitched. On the inside front cover, a bookplate shows a lion and a unicorn holding an open book between them, and in the middle are printed the words:
This book belongs to__________.
In the space, the name
Francesca
is written in blue ink, in careful joined-up writing.

My finger traces around the letters, the loops and curls. This is our mother's book, from when she was a little girl, which she left behind with Kat all those years ago (fourteen years, nearly fifteen). The paper's soft, yellow at the edges and mottled, from damp. It's all I have of her, and so very little to go on. Over the years, even her name,
Francesca,
has become this unmentionable secret in our family.

I turn the pages. In the faint silvery light, I begin to read the story that Kat used to read aloud to me.
At the edge of a big forest . . .

The words are stepping stones, taking me back to the feeling of being very little, and afraid. The words are white pebbles glowing in the moonlight, showing the way back . . . and I'm not sure I want to go there, after all, or what I will find if I do.

But before I have gone very far, I'm already drifting into sleep, and dreaming . . . and it's not my mother, Francesca, who comes to me then, but Seb.

4

He's like a magnet, pulling me in.

The second time I see him, it's at the house, again. It's a Friday, so I get home early, while it's still light. I don't have any lessons Friday afternoons and you're allowed to go home to study.

I change into jeans and trainers, sling the camera in my shoulder bag and pull my bike out from under the tarpaulin behind the caravan. I have to wipe the saddle and brush the cobwebs off from under the seat. I haven't used the bike since we last went to Moat House, Kat and me, over a month ago. Kat's bike's there too, with a flat tyre.

It's uphill all the way to the main road, then along a bit on the level, and then downhill the rest of the way. Whizzing down the lane under the trees with their autumn leaves all orange and red is amazing, like travelling through a tunnel of golden light. I stop at the beech tree near the gate to take some photos: the trunk and branches are black silhouettes against a blaze of coppery leaves, the whole thing lit from behind by the sun, low in the sky.

I can't see any vans, or hear the
tap-tapping
sound of chisels on stone: perhaps the workmen knock off early on Friday afternoons? I park the bike up against the farm gate, push through the smaller wicket gate beside it. The low sun casts long, deep shadows over the grass.

I walk slowly up the steps to the front door and push it open. All the rubble has been cleared away. The floor is just earth, but clean-swept. I can see for the first time what it might be like when it's finished: the big, airy living room with its huge fireplace, the kitchen looking out on to the river. Once the new French windows are installed it will all be flooded with light.