Page 45 of Days You Were Mine

Instead, I make my sandwich, clearing up the debris – plate and knife washed, dried and returned to the cupboard, crumbs swept from the worktop – and then walk out into theearly-afternoon sunshine. I look at my watch. All this and it’s only 1.30; there is still time to take a quick stroll around the park before I go back to the office.

Our house is a ten-minute walk from Clapham Common, depending on which way you go. I take the shortcut through Grafton Square, a classical square with white Regency houses facing out onto a little playground, quick scout around to see if anyone is there, before coming out at the zebra crossing on the outskirts of the park. By entering the common here, you pass the hippy café, purple walls with spray-painted flowers on the outside; ramshackle furniture, vegan brownies and breastfeeding mothers on the inside. A cluster of mums at the picnic tables, chatting over bowls of lentil soup while their toddlers fight over the Little Tikes seesaw. That will be us soon. I love Samuel at six months so much, his perma-smile, his wild, addictive laughter, his solemn brown eyes and fat pink cheeks. I know I will mourn the passing of each stage.

At the new skate ramp there are two teenage boys – fifteen? sixteen? – passing each other like synchronistic weathermen as they execute their perfect mid-air turns. I wonder why they aren’t at school, then wonder why I even care. I’m twenty-seven, not fifty. I can imagine Hannah laughing at me: ‘So go report them, Grandpa.’

Just beyond the skate park is the pond, filled with fat brown ducks gliding above a sheen of emerald scum. I search its perimeter casually, looking out for a tall, dark-haired woman pushing a buggy; she’s easy to spot, this head-turning mother of mine.

And at this moment, just as I’m about to leave, Alice and Samuel come into view. They are too far away to see me, loitering under a tree on the other side of the pond. From thisdistance it looks like Samuel is asleep, Alice walking slowly behind him, steering the pram with one hand, taking her time. The obvious thing to do, theonlything to do, is go and meet them, say hello, a quick chat with Alice, a cuddle with my son if he happens to wake up.

Instead, I stand, rooted in the shadows, watching until my eyes hurt. For it’s like watching a video of the missing weeks of my childhood, this unguarded view of my mother and the small child in her care. I am silent, motionless, transfixed, addicted to this fragmental scrutiny of everything I lost.

Then

Alice

The months in Italy are, without question, the happiest time of my life. Here, in a country that celebrates pleasure in all its forms, Jake is in his element. Although the band are writing and recording much of the time, we always walk to the café in the little square in Fiesole for our morning cappuccino, and at night Jake cooks pedantically Italian food – polenta, beans, pasta or risotto – and we drink Chianti that we buy from a vineyard in five-litre flagons.

This is the time when the band become my new family. Tom has always been warm and welcoming, but now I am becoming closer to Eddie too. I have understood his initial coolness towards me was fuelled by a wariness that comes from having known Jake most of his life. He knows the troubled boy who once tried to take his own life, and at times he seems to watch over him with the intentness of an overanxious parent. One morning when we are both up earlier than the others, Eddie and I go for a walk through the hills of Fiesole. At this time of day there’s a coolness in the air and the surprising ripple of a wind feathering through the Italian oaks, still clinging to their greenness despite the months of sun.

Eddie finds a porcupine spike on the dusty trail we’refollowing and he hands it to me, ceremoniously, as if passing over a gift.

‘You’re good for Jake,’ he says, out of nowhere. ‘He’s more stable than he’s been.’

‘He still drinks too much. That worries me.’

‘We all do.’

‘But with him it’s different. It’s like a mood comes over him.’

‘He drinks to block things out. His childhood specifically.’

‘What happened, Eddie? Will you tell me?’

‘His father was absent and his mother didn’t care much. The real calamity was that he got left with his grandparents a lot of the time and his grandfather was not a nice man. But you know that, don’t you?’

‘Not the details.’

‘I’m sure Jake will tell you when he’s ready. But there’s more to it than that. Depression is part of Jake. He needs to control it but he also has to tap into it sometimes because those intense emotions feed into his songwriting. You help him, though. I hope you stay together,’ Eddie says, and I wonder how he could even conceive of a time when we might be apart. This is no longer a mere love affair; we are everything to each other now, soulmate, lover, mentor, muse, all of it.

There is no darkness in Jake in these weeks; instead he is inflamed by the writing and recording of new material, the dedication to music, to self-expression, that is his holy grail. If life allowed him to exist like this, in a cocoon where he is loved and nothing is expected of him, I think his despair would be lifted for ever.

He throws himself into his work, so that even when we’re talking or drinking coffee or making love, his mind is only half there; less than that. He switches to autopilot, he is present inthe smallest way, yet this, to me, is an inspiration. I want to live like this too, fully absorbed, selfish in my commitment to drawing, to art.

During the days, I often take the bus to Florence and immerse myself in the Renaissance. At the Uffizi, I spend whole hours looking at the flat, two-dimensional paintings of the twelfth century, amateurish alien eyes drawn into foreheads not faces, perspective that is clumsy and unsuccessful. Only once I have fully understood the failings of these paintings – still miraculous and rather beautiful on one level, not least for their immaculate preservation – do I move on to Michelangelo, Botticelli, Leonardo, Caravaggio. This intense study of the Old Masters teaches me more, far more, than my first year at the Slade.

I stare at these paintings – Botticelli’sBirth of Venus, Caravaggio’sMedusa– until they are imprinted behind my eyelids. I dream of them at night. I wake thinking of the vividness of Caravaggio’s work, smiles that are twisted and cruel, toenails that are ragged and dirty. I am infatuated with his rendering of Italy’s seventeenth-century streets: dark, dusty, full of shadowy corners. Doorways with worn-away lintels and peeling paint, rooms with bare walls and rough brick floors, the raw underbelly of Italy painted with a photographic precision. Gradually my style begins to emerge. I have listened to Robin’s advice, and my sketches and paintings combine the informality of a frozen moment with the classical influence of the Renaissance masters. I paint Jake, bare-chested, in his faded, patched jeans, leaning against a womb-pink wall in the garden of our villa. He has one knee bent, foot pressed up against the wall, and he looks off canvas, his face in profile. I photographed him in the early-evening sun and I work hard to capture the theatrical interplay of light and shadow that characterises Caravaggio’swork, with my futuristic beam of gold picking out the boniness of his chest.

During these months, there is one painting I am drawn to inexplicably. Every time I go to Florence I find I must revisitThe Deposition of Christby Stefano Pieri, which shows Mary holding up the dead body of her son. There is something about the sorrow on Mary’s face and the beautiful, naturalistic slump of Jesus’s body curved into her lap that I find irresistible. That concentration of emotion, a melancholia I love to immerse myself in. When I show Jake the painting, he proclaims it ‘utterly depressing’.

He indulges me, though, when I want to make my own version of it. I ask Eddie to photograph me leaning against the terracotta garden wall with Jake asleep, his head in my lap. Wearing only his ripped jeans, his dark hair wilder and longer than I have ever seen it before, with a long, beaded rosary around his neck, there is something of the modern deity about him. Unlike Pieri’s Jesus, his corpse a depressing greenish grey, my Jesus is suntanned and there is an almost imperceptible smile on his sleeping face, there only to those of us who know.

‘Take the fucking shot, Eddie!’ he shouted after half an hour of posing.

Catholicism was inflicted on Jake by his grandparents, theirs the menacing, unforgiving kind, but he is still drawn to its trappings. Rosaries, incense, crucifixes, candles. Iron grilles for confession, the gilded robes of the priest. He loves this canvas, loves the fact that he is immortalised in a 1970s rock-and-roll pietà.

He takes a photograph of the painting and mails it to Robin in London, and a few days later we receive a telegram.

Congratulations. Your album cover, I think? Call itApparition.

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