Chiaroscuro

 He held up his hands in a show of defeat. "I don't know what game you're trying to play here, but I'd rather not be part of it. You're off your meds or something. I haven't got a sculpture of you. I haven't been carving stone since you arrived and I certainly haven't been lying to you. I have never set eyes on you before you knocked on the door." He drew his hands together in a prayer-like beg. "All I want is for you to stop the banging at night. I've got another full day starting at six tomorrow and I'd really like to get a few hours sleep before them. Will you please act like a responsible adult and let me and the rest of the street get some rest?" Roisin could feel tears pricking at the back of her eyes. "You're lying right now. I've seen the sculpture in your room and it's not an angel at all." Her lips hardened as she fought to bite back the sobs of frustration. "All I want to do is get on with my ...

    "This is my room, though." She finished hammering home the nail she'd just started. "I pay rent for it." "That's not the point, though. The point being is that making a racket like that is being socially irresponsible, and there's a clause in the contract that says no disturbing noise after eleven PM." "I've heard you banging away at all hours of the night." She winced at her own turn of phrase. That could have come out better. "Nobody seems to complain about you." "You've been here two nights. I haven't even worked on my art since you got here. It's all been my part-time jobs, eating, sleeping and looking after you. I don't know why I've bothered, though. You don't seem very conscious of other people's needs." Roisin stood and crossed to the door to open it. The hall outside was dim, and Paul was backlit by the light from his bedroom bulb spilling out from his doorway ...

  Despite her burning curiosity and simmering anger, Roisin managed to keep it together after a scalding cup of the strongest coffee Paul's personal, don't-use-this-food kitchen cupboard could provide. She didn't feel the slightest bit guilty about it, either, deeming it the least he could do for all the lies he'd given her since she stood on his doorstep. How could he pretend he didn't know who she was when he'd been staring at a magic statue of her for who-knows-how-many nights? She felt a complete twat about her acceptance of him now. No wonder he'd been so generous with his spare bedding and his free bag of chips. She spent the afternoon rage-painting a portrait of him being inflicted by boils, is a vague homage to William Blake's 1826 watercolour, but casting herself as Satan and the block of weird stone as the weeping onlooker. It used up one of her treasured canvasses, true, but it made her feel better. That, at least, was a benefit of being an ...

  Not the name she was using now, but the one her parents had put on her birth certificate, the one she was so desperate to be rid of, she'd paid a solicitor an absurd amount of money to write and submit a deed poll to change it legally, then sent certified copies of the document to every institution that mattered, from her bank and all the governmental identity documents to her old school, the latter partly in case she needed to use then as a reference, but mostly to annoy them because she'd removed the name that, according to them, God had granted her with. By their definition, Roisin was not her Christian name at all, but her Satanic one. Which was fine by her. Looking closer at what was, in essence, an animated block of stone, she could make out two distinct forms the figure changed to as it rotated. One was her face and figure as she wished it to be: slim, athletic and undeniably female and the other was her as she was before; heavily overweight, large breasted, short-...

  Dressing in her last set of clean underwear, her last clean top and the same jeans she'd taken off to have her shower, she put her boots back on and stomped into the kitchen. Her foray into town for bedding yesterday had also been a day to purchase some basic foodstuffs, and she made herself tea and toast with margarine. She would have bought butter, but her overdraft was approaching her maximum far too quickly for her liking and since margarine was half the price of butter, she decided that was a good place to start economising. At least the toaster worked, even if the oven was what might be described as an Object d'Art had it been anywhere but a kitchen, and since she'd missed the bus on the Dada movement by almost a century, it was destined to stay a broken oven for ever. Disdaining the use of a plate, since it would mean extra washing up and toast crumbs falling on the floor were negligible compared to all the dirt and gravel that was already there, she wandered thr...

  Paul had already left by the time she rose the next morning. Unsure of his work schedule, she assumed him to be at his studio, beating the living daylights out of a chunk of masonry. Still, she knocked on his door and waited, hoping he'd have a power tool she could borrow to adjust her sign stand. There was no reply to the first knock, or the second, so she gave up and went into the bathroom to perform her morning ablutions, and with the adjustment of the mirror, managed to avoid looking at the reflected image of her body while showering. 'Body Dysmorphic Disorder,' the psychologist had called it, advising her to go to a medical practitioner as soon as possible for a clinical diagnosis and their permission to administer anti-depressants. She'd had it for years, the teachers at St Mary's dismissing her as fat and lazy, rather than admit the possibility she might need professional help with her state of mind. "God is omnipotent and therefore doesn't make ...

  This time of the morning, when the evening traffic had dispersed and the last ejection from the pubs had fallen into oblivion in homes, police cells and bus shelters, there were so few people about she could have been walking street in the post-apocalypse, but for the profusion of fast food wrappers, take-away carrier bags and neatly tied bags that didn't proclaim what the contained, but you knew it was excrement of one kind or another. Dog owners had finally been trained well enough to bag up after their dog, but not yet to dispose of the bag afterward. Quite how they would feel if the council subjected them to the same treatment in their own homes was plainly observed by the outcry when water treatment centres discharged their waste directly into rivers and coastlines. Roisin had once enjoyed wild swimming in the River Laver, but when Southern Water got into financial difficulties, she just found herself going through the motions. The trick to stealing, she had found until th...

  When Paul rolled his chip wrapper into a ball, wiping his greasy mouth and fingers with whatever bit looked cleaner than the rest he stood, offering to dispose of Roisin's. She nodded, digging into the ever-widening hole to dredge out the last of the potato-y goodness before adding its bulk to his outstretched hand. He crossed to the sink and dropped both packets into the bin in the cupboard beneath. "I'm going to bed," he told her. I've got to be up at six for my other job." She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "You have two jobs?" "Three, if you count the stone carving, which I do," he said. "I'd do that full time if I could, but you've got to pay the bills somehow." "Yeah, I suppose so. What do you do in your morning job?" "Shop assistant in a newsagents on Sherwood Street. Not sure how long I'll have it, though. There's precious few sales in newspapers these days. Everyone gets their n...

  By the end of the following day her back account had reverted to it's normal state of being in the red, just not as much as it usually was, although she'd had a text from the bank to tell her that since she'd managed to clear her overdraft yesterday, they had reduced her maximum down to five hundred euros, rather than the thousand she'd become accustomed to. A bit of a blow, since she'd have to procure the means of supporting herself a little faster than expected, but that was a problem for tomorrow. For now, she had two sets of sheets, a new pillow and duvet set, and a false wall in her bedroom comprised of two curtain poles fixed to the ceiling with second-hand drapes cutting off her bed and sleeping area from the rest of the room, which was now her studio, until she could negotiate something more spacious and permanent. She'd also purchased two old double sheets of dubious heritage for use as drop cloths, and three pre-prepared canvasses from a EuroWorld ...

  Roisin walked into the room. At the far end, by the west-facing window, the floor was covered in an old sheet upon which stood a four-legged wooden pyramid, braced every thirty centimetres with a wooden shelf and supporting a flat surface. Mounted on top of this was a metal turntable with pegs to allow to be fixed in place. A small side table held a selection of heavy-duty metal chisels, a smaller number of hammers and mallets and a Bluetooth speaker connected by a USB cord to a socket under the gas fire. Mounted on the turntable was a block of stone with a face half-emerged from the round-edged cube. Around the stand were piles of dust and rubble, and a large plastic bin of the sort her mother used for weeding in the garden had been half-filled with chippings. She approached the sculpture. "You don't always work at the studio, then." "No." Paul crossed the space to his work and ran a thumb over what would be the figure's cheek when it was finished. ...

 Paul frowned. "Is there something wrong?" No." She couldn't quite believe the contrast between this and the rest of the house. "Quite the opposite. It's pristine. I wasn't expecting this level of cleanliness." "It's the only house rule me and Barry had, really, was keeping the bathroom clean." Paul patted the edge of the sink unit as if he were particularly proud of it. "What your own room is like is up to you and we kind of took it in turns to clean the communal areas but the bathroom and kitchen had to be as spotless as when you found it." She looked at him and he shrugged. "He's been gone a fortnight. It's hard to keep up with the kitchen on my own. Between the studio and the pub, it's all I can manage to sleep, eat and bathe. Especially since I walk everywhere." "Fair enough. I can live with that." She pointed at the lavatory. "Is that the only loo?" "Yes. You have to ask if...

  She stood on the metal platform, which only swayed slightly under her weight. If Paul could sit out here, it was probably safe, since he was a good twenty or thirty kilos heavier than she was. The fixings that bolted it to the brickwork had been painted over long ago, but there was obvious bubbling of rust below the shining paint. She took a step back, away from the edge. "Cannock Towers? I didn't think you could see Cannock from this far away." "You can't." Paul pointed to a set of tower blocks a kilometre or two away. I meant the tower blocks on the Cannock Road. They dismantled several of them but there are still two left. Barry used to go over there once or twice a week to get... well, things you can't easily get through the internet." He mimed smoking a cigarette and she nodded. Something she'd tried as an undergraduate and never gone back to. It was, she felt, akin to burning money unless you were suffering the sort of pain that parace...

  "Our landlord, or the one at the pub?" Paul cocked his head to one side, as if he was considering the two. "Both, actually, but I meant the one at the Kentish. He'll bar you for no reason whatsoever and forget--" he performed finger quotation marks -- "to pay you until you check your bank account and ask for it." He shrugged. "He's okay most of the time, just props up one end of the bar talking to his mates, but he's a real tightwad with money. He once sacked me in the middle of a shift because I served someone who was clearly drunk, then phoned me up the next day to ask why I hadn't come in to work." "He does sound a bit of a Kentishman." Roisin dropped the sheets on the bed and sorted them out, grateful to be covering the slightly stained mattress although she knew it would nag at her from the depths of her mind every time she lay on it. She imagined germs creeping from the stains like ticks and bed bugs coming t...

  She cocked her head to one side. "Ah. Yes. That would have compounded the whole problem." She laughed. "Did he intend for it to come out like that?" Paul smiled, the corner of his mouth going up further on one side than it did on the other. The lower side revealed a scar that split his lips from nostril to the bottom premolars on his left. She wondered how it had happened. It was a question for another time, one when they knew each other better. "I don't think so," he said. "I think he was trying to be really impressive to a girl from his course he'd just cooked a meal for, only she was far less impressed when he turned around with his finger still on the nozzle of the can and sprayed her face and chest with Metro Royal Blue." "Oh God!" "Needless to say, she did not succumb to his charms and wiles that night. Or any night thereafter." He chuckled. "She cleaned herself off as much as she could and phoned ...

  "You did say not to get him riled up." She pushed open the door of her new room. "No lock on the door?" "You're welcome to put one on yourself, if you think you need to." Probably-Paul raised his hands in mock surrender. "As I said, Steve's almost never here, and I'm trustworthy." "I'm just supposed to believe that after meeting you five minutes ago?" "Look, I'm not stopping you buying a lock for your door, I'm just saying you have nothing to fear from me." "Even if you are gay, how do I know you're not going to try on all my dresses?" "One, I'm not into that and two, I don't think you even have any dresses. You don't look the type that likes to be seen in a dress." "My type?" There was a line in this conversation where she would get either really angry or really upset and not only was Probably-Paul rapidly approaching it, but she didn't kn...

  "Oh, there is." Probably-Paul nodded several times. "It's separate. You can get to it through the back garden, or take the next right, then right again if you're driving." His eyebrows raised hopefully. "Have you got a car, then? Only you can't park outside here." "Is it double-yellow lines?" "No. The neighbourhood kids will smash it up for a lark." "Good job I don't have one, then." She frowned. "My rent is supposed to include use of the garage." "Yeah. Good luck with that. Steve's got the only key." "That's hardly fair if I'm paying extra for it. I'll contact the landlord." Probably-Paul laughed. "You can try. The landlord is Steve's dad." "The more you tell me, the more I feel I've been completely ripped off." "It's not all bad. We get a discount on the council tax and bin levy because a resident has disabili...