Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

12 - A Long Lost Friend

      I twisted my face into a map of perplexed confusion. “Who are ‘they?’” I asked. He had mentioned them a few times already, but I still wasn’t any closer to deducing who these people – if they were people – were. I didn’t expect an answer straight away, and I was right not to expect one; the boy remained silent through and through. “It’s okay,” I said, to break the tension. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

      I returned to the job of fixing the sheet cloth, a makeshift hammock, to the walls of the office. As I looped the last length of blue rope around a hole in a metal shelf-stack, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the boy had been going through the pieces of cream-coloured paper he’d gathered together from the ruins of the cellar of the shop from which Victor and I had just rescued him. “What have you got there?” I asked, just as the loop fastened itself together. Yet again, I expected no answer, but this time the reply came almost instantaneously; “They-They’re just some drawings I made while I was living in the shop you saved me from and while I made home at a few other places."

      As soon as I was satisfied that the hammock was hanging securely enough to sustain a sleeping body, I made it my duty to make the boy comfortable in our presence. Making sure not to touch any part of him, I once again sat myself down next to the boy and took a look over his shoulder at the pieces of charred paper, all containing surprisingly elegant pencil-and-watercolour drawings. “These are astounding!” I remarked, in a kind of stupefied awe. “How could you have produced work like this?”

      “Before I moved on to the shop you saved me from I lived in what used to be an art studio near a tall white building (which I interpreted to be Centre Point) and a few other buildings, all beautifully coloured in orange and yellow,” he said in a quiet hum of a voice. “I found a few pads of paper, some pencils and a paint-box, and just started painting.”

      “What did you paint?” I asked, trying to get a better look at the images which, unfortunately, were being shuffled about in the boy’s hands.

      “Anything,” he replied. “I started off just drawing the room and the small square outside – there were some boxes and wires smashed up on the floor near some of the windows – then I started drawing from some of my own memories.”

     “May I take a look?” I asked.

     “O-Okay,” he replied nervously, handing me the pieces of yellow paper. I took a long, leisured look over the images the boy had produced. They were even more intricately detailed than I’d believed that they were when I first manage to catch a glimpse of them. Every single inch of the studio he had been living in was depicted in colours I didn’t even know existed. Images and books lining the walls were reproduced to look more vivid than an image created by the eyes of a first-hand onlooker. Even the bleak skies and the ‘boxes and wires’ – really just a pile of destroyed filming equipment and wires from the buildings which surrounded the square in which they were found – had a certain beauty to them. However, as I found out when I flicked between two of the pictures in the pile, the images were not limited to the confines of the tiny area around his old hiding place. To my surprise and shock, the location of the images changed about halfway through the pile of papers in a way that left me stunned. Unbelievably, the image leaping out of the piece of half-burnt paper in front of me was not of an art studio, an empty square or a mound of discarded electrical equipment, but my parents’ old home in Clapham Common.

     I stared at the image for an eternity. Every single speck of colour, showing off the crimson and brown brick, titanium white window frames and black iron railings of the house shone from the paper far more vividly than the image my broken brain had kept of the three-storey townhouse shone from the little hovel in my brain where the last hopeless remnants resided, an image that had been slowly fading from my head and out of my ears as pure dust ever since the blockades went up. Even the cast-iron street signs on the front and  side of the building, proudly displaying the names of Clapham Common West Side and Thurleigh Road, and the tiny posters on the walls of my second-storey bedroom could be made out in perfect detail as, curiously, could five figures waving a fond farewell to each other at the burgundy door beneath the parchment-coloured arch of the house. He had, unbelievably, managed to paint my entire family using only a photographic image that I couldn’t believe he’d ever seen before. Everyone was there; my Dad, Peter stood beside Carrie, my Mum, wrapping one arm around me and one around her as I shook hands with Patrick, who had one eye on the black-and-white chequered path leading to the West Side of the Common. It was all too weird. It was as if finding out that a young boy that had been plucked by chance from the dark alleys of Soho could draw your childhood house from memory wasn’t strange enough. I had to ask; “Did you draw this entirely from memory?”