Chapter 1.2

 

She allowed herself a deep breath to cleanse her pent-up anxiety and sank into the seat. Leaving her old life was the easy part and now her new life was just beginning. Or at least it would soon. She checked her watch. Three forty-four meant she would arrive in Wolverhampton a little before eight AM. She'd trained at the university there not three years ago, but not one of the tutors there would recognise her name, not even the two she'd been intimate with. One with his knowledge and one anonymously in the darkness of a private room above the Lucky Diamond Casino on Temple Street. She wasn't supposed to know who he was; she just recognised the scent of linseed oil and encaustic wax he exuded from his pores no matter how often he showered or tried to cover it with cologne.

In a flash of panic, she pulled open her shoulder bag, disgorging a small avalanche of pens, pencils of different grades of graphite two sharpeners and a scalpel (in case the sharpeners were blunt) and a brown envelope of documents. It was this with which she was most concerned. She leafed through the contents. Birth certificate, passport, driving licence, bank cards, Employment Support card and the letter from her new landlord with the receipt for the deposit and first two month's rent for her part of a house on Dunstall Road, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the station. Bedroom, garage and a kitchen and bathroom she'd be sharing with two other people. Students, probably. She hoped they were nice, or at least not complete knobheads. The landlord seemed nice enough, though how he'd react when he found out she wasn't employed as an engineer at the Post Office and was actually a self-representing artist with almost no sales to her unknown name was anybody's guess, though her innate pessimism suggested she'd better find something to provide a better income than Employment Credit before the rent was due again.

On the back of the envelope was a sketch she'd done of her mum a few days ago. Nothing special, just the stub of a pencil while the light from the TV threw shadows across half of the older woman's face. Unfinished, of course, because during the advert break her mum had noticed what she was doing and reached to tear the paper away, forcing her to stop sketching and tuck the nub of pencil away.

"Go and make a cup of tea if you're not watching this," she said, craning her neck to look at the drawing, though the room was too dark to see. "I don't know why you'd want to us me as a subject, anyway. I'm past the age where anyone ever wanted to paint me."

"I'm sure that's not true." She unfolder her legs and stood, stumbling slightly where her left had gone to sleep from being in the same position for thirty minutes. Recovering her balance, she reached for her mother's mug and trooped into the kitchen, pulling the sleeves of her jumper over her cold hands. She might not have got on with her did, but she missed him now he was gone. He wasn't dead, although he might as well be for all the contact she'd had with him for the last four years. Not even a birthday card for the last two. Her parents had kept up the pretence of a happy marriage for nineteen years, then split up the day after she'd left for university. Her dad blamed her for the extra year. "Why couldn't you have done a proper degree?" he'd asked. "Something that might have led to a job afterwards. Not this bloody art lark. Art is something to do in your spare time, not make a living out of. Not without cutting your ear off or going deaf. Why couldn't you have learned something useful, like computers or doctoring?"

She studied the sketch before she tucked her documents away again. She'd caught the essence of her mum well enough, but it was a far cry short of something to be proud of. Three years in Art School, four if you counted the Foundation year at Laverstone Tech, and she was still rubbish at faces. Why had she larked about so much? All the time she'd squandered fucking about with wood and clay and printmaking when she could have been in the life room all day, perfecting her depiction of the figure. She regretted the wasted time. Two of her friends had become actual gallery-represented artists in the three years since they'd finished their degrees, one of them had even had a solo exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery in London. Not Gallery One, admittedly, but still a solo show in the heart of London.