Unpregnant

Egbert the St Lucian Rasta

soliloquises in his hypnotic voice then begins a rapid dive into sleep. As his head droops I start another drawing. Neither is finished, even by my hazy speed-freak standards: he wakes and has to keep an appointment.

Adam, the skateboarder from Day Eleven, arrives.

'It all comes down to being a tree trunk or a cavity,' he says. 'I always say a bird in the hand is worth 82 million in the bush. I'd have been lost without my three sisters and my mother. My sisters were all undone by childbirth. They used to sit around the kitchen table talking about how to get unpregnant, or not pregnant in the first place.'

An ancient man in a yellow jumper cycles past glumly. 'Oh look,' says Adam, 'there's Rupert Murdoch. No, he's a Portobello trouble-maker. I'm so glad I don't pick up dog-ends any more although they're a feisty smoke. I was in the park once and saw a clear blue sky with just one cloud that looked like a cameo of my friend's dog. Not a fluffy cloud, striated. I asked someone to reproduce it on his computer but he couldn't so I just drew the shape of the cloud with a candle and washed over it with pale blue watercolour to show the underdrawing of the dog.

'In the sixties I was all ban the bomb and Yanks go home but the more LSD I took the more poetic I got. I was the premier wall-painter in the neighbourhood until Banksy came along. In 1974 some revolutionary in France started using stencils because posters could be torn down. Someone around here is doing fox stencils. I do white surfers on a triangle, at the top of a wave. I've put four of them at the top of St John's Hill. I like skating uphill, it's much more fun. Then when you go down it's quite a shalom. I mean slalom.'

Day 14 - brandy and Special Brew

Egbert the St Lucian Rasta found a safari jacket yesterday; he's wearing it under his cannabis-patterned hoodie. I wish he'd find one for me. I dash home for my winter coat the colour of gloom.

Jeffrey strolls over in the same blue string vest as yesterday and sits for me again. He contentedly watches the image evolve.
'Very nice,' says a passing drunk, patting me on the shoulder. 'That's you, man.'

Look, I know there's room for improvement. A friend writes to me: 'I like the way so many of your sitters decided to give their portraits to their mothers. Curiously touching. Or possibly a veiled insult?'

But it isn't just about drawing. My friend adds: 'There is something special about the process of drawing/painting a portrait, isn't there? A temporary intimacy. Taking the time to really look at a person - even if only for two minutes, it is a concentrated, focussed kind of looking, making a space where you have the possibility of connecting in some way.'

'Will you sign it please,' asks Jeffrey. What do they do with the pictures? Please don't throw it away until you're out of sight. I think a lot of them end up as roaches.

As I draw, several tons of solid rain are dumped on the canopy. Some of it is hurled in sideways. Police and passers-by rush under for shelter. My hair flicks my face in the wind.

Egbert appears for the second time today, in one of his prickly moods.
'How are you, Egbert?'
'You ask me that already, young lady.'
So I did. I didn't mean to be patronising, I'm just a bit vague.

Jacqueline drops in for a chat, en route from the London Print Studio where she's preparing for an exhibition. This open-air daytime salon is far more sociable than my normal feral freelance existence. 

 

I'm forever berating my friend Rebecca for holding her exhibitions in inhospitable places such as freezing belfries, lifts and wardrobes. My heart soars to see her striding towards me across the arid, storm-tossed asphalt.

She looks up at the canopy: 'Ooh, it's just like the Sydney Opera House.' She pours out a cocktail of hot chocolate, brandy and orange juice from a thermos, even bringing a white china cup for me because she knows I don't like sharing cups. 'I always take it on demos,' she says. 'It was very popular on the 2003 Stop the War march.'

She points at Jeffrey: 'I recognise him from the blog.'

Rebecca once worked at a shelter for the homeless. The residents were asked to write a job description for homelessness, such as knowing where to find warm air vents and sandwich rounds. Rebecca then asked them to write a job description for the staff of the shelter.

A boy walks past in Cardinal Vaughan School uniform and a baseball cap with NY on it. 'No one has Totteridge and Whetstone on their baseball cap,' she says.

She points out a public employee carrying gardening tools. 'He's walking backwards and forwards with his hoe. Very Westway.'

Kilimanjaro and Dee are sharing a can of Special Brew. I beckon Dee over.
'Don't make me look old, ' she says.' I haven't been drawn for years and I was made to look 160.'

The conversation turns to a sexual encounter Dee had in the bandstand in Hyde Park. 'Then this man was watching me getting dressed through the railings, yeah.'

She uses an embellished walking stick with a heart-shaped conker swinging from it. 'One of the things I set myself to do before I was 40 was to find a nice Welsh guy. He took me into the bluebell woods and we found this stick. He was a rugby player with thighs as thick as both my legs. He weighed 16 stone but I made him lose three stone so I could see the real him.

'It's nice to get a man in for the winter with a good bottle of wine and a spliff. My mother always asks: "Which nationality is he this time?" Travel through the male population and you'll be surprised what you might find.'

Day thirteen

Egbert arrives, this time with his supermarket trolley: 'That trolley don't answer me back.' Inside it is a hand-written notice:
CAR WASH MAN VERY CHEAP.
THIS TROLLEY IS NOT A RUBBISH BIN.
SINGED [sic]
ST. LUCIAN RASTA.

I've no idea why we start talking about the royal family. 'Oh, Margaret, she was a raver. She'd go where royalty is not supposed to. If there was a problem she'd sit down with a bottle of wine or Champagne and deal with it. When Diana died I cried, yes.'

He points out that the Notting Hill riots of 1976 began just round the corner, after some boys had stolen jewellery in Queensway: 'Instead of takin' it home and hidin' it they were flashin' it off. A policeman said what's that and the youth said mind your own effin' business. Then it started.'

Egbert peers around. 'That man is lookin' at the circumference of that woman.'

He holds his picture at arm's length and talks to it: 'You look as ugly as sin. But I like you. You are me. Who said I was as ugly as sin? Oh, I know. My mother.'

Benjy [left], profoundly courteous, limps over slowly; I've seen him most days, always elegant with a hat and stick. He arrived here from Dominica in 1960. He announces: 'For deviosity, women are the champions.'

Jacqueline turns up for a chat. I like being generally available, out on the asphalt - a geographical reference point. Turn left at the windswept woman with the drawing board. We talk about drawing children and the risk of making them look like little adults. Study the proportions, she says; there's a roundness to their faces.
'That guy over there,' I say. 'Interesting trousers.'
'I heard him talk on the phone when you went to the lavatory,' she says. 'He's a tosser.'

 

Day eleven

 

Egbert from St Lucia comes to sit for me again, my spare plastic chair being the main attraction. This time I'm ready for him so I scrawl his head frantically just before it slumps forward in sleep. 

Someone wanders over and peers under Egbert's hat. 'You can't get the models these days,' he says.

'He's my favourite,' I say, and he is, because he allows more time than a restive wide-awake one.

Day nine

Jacqueline arrives, raring to start drawing life under the canopy.

Duncan Anderson comes over (long white hair and beard, the one who said I made him look deranged on Day Seven). 'I've lost my soul,' he says. He points to his shoe. Oh, sole. It's peeling off.

'This is the canopy of lost souls,' says Jacqueline. I hear it as 'canape'. I automatically start sketching him but he moves on. 'No,' he says, 'you're gonna capture my soul. I'll have nightmares.'

I scratch my forehead with the tip of my pen. It is a double-ended brush-pen. 'You've just drawn on your forehead,' says Jacqueline.

Kilimanjaro, whom I drew yesterday, wanders by, disturbed. 'Someone tore my picture last night. There was a fight.'
'Stay for a couple of minutes and I'll do you another one.'
'Not now, I've got some business.'
He goes to have a bitter row with someone about a supermarket trolley.

'I'm the same age as the Westway,' reflects Jacqueline.

'You're holding up better,' I say. 'And you aren't covered in graffiti.'

'Give it time,' she says.

My phone vibrates. An email from Woking Freecycle. Wanted: a franking machine, drum parts. Offered: stick insects, Trivial Pursuit. Taken: a wormery. It all speaks of home and safety.

Yesterday's heatwave has given way to biblical thunderstorms. 'What I like about this time of year is that people don't know what to wear,' says Jacqueline.

A girl in a yellow crash-helmet, flimsy flower-print dress, bomber jacket, wooden wedge heels and a yoga mat protecting her lap sets off on a pink scooter through horizontal rain. Another client from yesterday, Egbert, turns up in a black hoodie with cannabis plants emblazoned on the back, a herringbone tweed jacket, a striped shirt and a Haile Selassie sweatshirt. The rain is practically opaque.

More thunder. Egbert addresses heaven: 'I hear you. Thank you. Rastafari Jah. Lion of Judah.'

My friend Oliver turns up to sit and talk. His beautiful angular nobility eludes my chalks, not for the first time. I wonder if I should practise on his identical twin whom I have never met.

Day eight

I feel like a windsock.

I'm introduced to Clifton, aka what sounds like Killer.

He doesn’t look like one.

‘Short for Kilimanjaro,’ he says.

‘Ah, I say, ‘snow on the top.’

‘And everything else all the way down,’ he says. 'What’s your name?’

‘Isobel.’

He laughs. ‘Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus!’

He accepts his picture. ‘You make me look handsome and I’m gonna get some girlfriends.’

He takes the picture over to a group of lean weatherbeaten Rastas. I hear raucous rasping laughter.

Egbert detaches himself from the Rasta group. ‘I saw what you did for my friend,’ he says courteously, resting his black spoon on the concrete slab. ‘I clean vehicles for a living and play reggae very loud.’

I draw; he falls asleep with dignity and gradually folds into himself. Perfect. I want to draw the comatose, the departed, the flayed, the anatomised. We are peaceful together.

He coughs himself awake and I give him a bottle of water. ‘People say to me why do you speak to all people? I try to read,’ he says. ‘They say I should write my life story but too many people gonna get hurt. I speak the truth. My grandmother says speak the truth and shame ol’ Beelzebub himself. I left St Lucia on the eighth of January 1959 by boat. My first address here was 19 Colville Square.’

A woman stops her car and asks him to clean and vacuum the car on Friday.

He studies the picture. Harsh lines let me down but he says: ‘You’ve captured the essence of me. My mother would have been proud of this.’ I go to shake his hand but he says, ‘No, I am from St Lucia,’ and kisses my hand three times.

He takes the picture back to his companions and I hear more cackling.

Day six

Foul weather. Phone goes on blink. Faff around with it for an hour, don't ask.

Delve into bag for healthful snacks. Have forgotten to bring them. Buy hot chocolate and chips at corner cafe where the salt has gone missing. 

Stare out at first-week-of-Wimbledon downpour. Wonder what to push for with drawing. Listen hard for what my teachers would be saying.

In Kipling's story The Man Who Would Be King, the destitute cripple Peachey is guided by an illusion of his comrade whose head he carries wrapped in rags. I think the teacher-pupil relationship is a bit like that. It wasn't Peachey who killed his comrade, although that can sometimes be one aspect of the relationship.