3.11

 

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. "I took advantage of there being nobody here. I can stop if you like. I can get a bit focused when I'm working."

"No, it's okay. I don't have a problem with you working here. It's not like I have any furniture I want to store."

"Thanks." His hand moved in an uncertain wave. "And if you want to work here, that's fine, too." He motioned to the wall by the door. "You could put a drop cloth and easel there."

"No, but I could use a space in the kitchen." She released the brake and rotated the sculpture, admiring the smooth surface of the cheeks and emerging eye compared to the deep rivets left in the gouged stone around them. It reminded her of someone, but she couldn't fit the few details on the sculpture to any image in her head. "Who is it going to be?"

Paul shrugged. "No-one in particular. It'll probably crack before I finish it, anyway." He traced a finger across the back of the bust. "Do you see this blush of darker brown running along here? That's a seam of iron inside the stone. I've got to be massively careful around this bit or the whole thing with crack apart like a choirboy under a drunk priest."

She stared at him as he blushed, the reddening cheeks causing his freckles to stand out like spackled paint out of a near-empty aerosol under a Laverstone bridge.

"Sorry," he said. "I should engage my brain before my mouth rolls away."

"It's okay. I'm not religious." She shrugged, taking a last, long look at what had been revealed of the face. "Not anymore, anyway."

"Nor me, as you can probably tell." Paul laughed as he picked up a piece of dusty canvas an covered the sculpture with it. "Unless you were to ask my mum, because I still have to pretend to be a good Catholic lad whenever I go home."

"Where's home?" The bust looked more sinister covered with a cloth than it had with just the eye and cheek visible. She had the impression it would breathe if she looked away. She shook her head free of the notion. Too much television in her past.

"Listowel in County Kerry. It's fine if you haven't heard of it. Its only redeeming feature is it's away in Ireland and too far to go home for the weekend."

"I don't even know where County Kerry is," she confessed.

"Oh. If you think of Ireland as a clock face, Kerry's about at seven-thirty, and if Kerry was a clockface, Listowel is at two o'clock." He shrugged. "It's about as memorable as a fist-sized lump of granite in a quarry. Its main tourist attraction is the Teampaillin Bán, which says a lot about the town right there."

Roisin shook her head. "I don't know what that is."

"Any you with an Irish name?" Paul laughed and shook his head. "It's the famine graveyard, where the Brits dumped all the bodies when the left. Naught but a green field, now, covered in metal detectorists in the summer and sheep the rest of the year."

She pursed her lips, trying to look neither shocked nor amused. "Sounds fabulous."

"It is that." He nodded solemnly. "On the plus side, we threaten to dig it up whenever a Brit tries to buy a house in the area."

"Why?"

"To scare them off, like. We tell them it's where we buried the plague victims, too." He grinned suddenly. "Do you fancy a cup of tea, then?"

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