Paul Bradley stood on the dead tracks and gazed at the walls of the abandoned railway tunnel. His mouth was drier than the brick dust in the air. He’d run from picture to picture, street to street, scouring walls, phone boxes, billboards — anything that Beth might have used as her impromptu canvas. Once he had grown accustomed to her style, he could instantly spot when graffiti was hers.
He’d followed a running ostrich here, a flamenco dancer in a black hat there — there must have been hundreds of them, always half-hidden, coyly poking out from behind bushes or imprisoned behind drain-gratings. Their sheer number shocked him.
He was surprised at the jealous ache that suffused him, for the time his daughter must have spent with the pictures, then sneered at himself, Why? You were hardly clamouring for her attention at the time, were you?
Exhausted and enervated, he’d entered a kind of fugue state, aware of the pattern of every manhole cover, the thin shadows cast by the naked branches of every tree. Beth’s paintings had been hidden in the random jumble of Hackney’s mass of graffiti like code words in a cipher text, but now he knew how to decrypt her. There were places where the pictures were more numerous, places where he’d felt her presence more strongly, and he’d followed those feelings like a pilgrim.
Eventually the trail dead-ended at the fenced-off abandoned railway. He had threaded his fingers through the wire loops and gazed blankly up the length of the tracks, to where they disappeared into the tunnel under the main road, when he had spotted one of the stones between the sleepers had been painted with a tiny, stylised black rabbit, scurrying into its burrow.
Paul had smiled, wedged his toe into the fence and started to climb.
Inside the tunnel he’d found a torch, still working. When he’d switched it on and seen the pictures he’d swayed a little on his feet — so many fragments of Beth’s mind — but none of it meant anything to him. In that moment of panic, an impossible distance seemed to stretch between them…
He remembered fretting when she’d been late learning to talk, lying awake, imagining his daughter grown but still emitting the same baby-gurgles, trying to work out how he’d cope if he couldn’t talk to her. Marianne had laughed at him, but his fear had felt so real.
And now, here in this strange deserted tunnel, there was so much violence in the shapes on the walls, as though Beth had discharged all her anger into the bricks. Here was a black bull charging, there a snake coiled around a clarinet, and skeletons and stars and butterflies danced across mountain-ranges, and Marianne.
He exhaled hard, as though he’d been punched. Marianne, his wife, Beth’s mother, appeared over and over again, smudged and pale as a ghost.
The other graffiti was a garden of bright neon dreams, and amongst it, the white chalk lines that brought Marianne to life were so unassuming that he’d almost missed her — he would never have believed that, but he’d missed her.
He looked again at the charging animals and flying planets and soldiers and monsters, and this time he saw the battles Beth had fought, the world she’d escaped into, and the memory, etched in chalk, that haunted it.
He reached into his jacket pocket and his fingers brushed paper. He pulled out a crumpled paperback from his inner pocket. Yes, he understood.
He exhaled hard into the tunnel’s chill. ‘Beth,’ he began, ‘I’m so-’ Then he stopped and bit the apology back. When he said sorry, he promised himself, he’d make sure she heard it. He looked up at one of the chalk sketches of Marianne and swallowed.
‘I’ll find her,’ he said. This time his voice didn’t waver. He knew he wasn’t the first person to have spoken to that image of Beth’s mother, and warmth spread through him. For the first time since she’d disappeared he felt like he understood a little bit of the girl who had drawn her, over and over again, in this dark, safe place.
He turned off the torch and started for the mouth of the tunnel. His wife’s chalk gaze watched him go. Despite the tiredness settling like silt in his limbs, he found he could manage a shambling run. He had a lot of ground to cover in his search for fresh paint.