Chapter 3.2

 

Sandwell and Dudley came and went with no foot traffic on or off the train. Hardly surprising Róisín thought. Those who lived here couldn’t afford the vast amount a train ticket cost these days and the twin towns had little to offer tourists, other than black peas and mash (with or without bacon) and an often-incomprehensible local dialect. Ahead lay the city of her undergraduate years, where if not happy, she had at least been able to life free of the heavy shadows of her childhood. There would be the promise of a new beginning, a reinvention, a chance for life to etch different patterns across her personal landscape. She imagined its streets as blank canvases, waiting for her to sketch herself into them. In her mind, she saw avenues as brushstrokes, windows as frames, crowds as shifting palettes waiting to be dipped into and blended across a new sheet.

Now the landscape outside consisted of the familiar housing estates and traffic-clogged roads she’d spent three years of her life as an independent person, free of her history and the shackles of her childhood, the misery of her mother and the struggle of trying to fill the crevasse left by the passing of a sister she didn’t even remember except through old photographs and her mother’s ever-present yearning for her return.

Yet beneath her resolve, a quiet ache pulsed: the knowledge that starting over was not the same as starting again. If she was a canvas, then she was a one that had been scraped at, sanded down and re-primed; a palimpsest ready to be rewritten, yes, but also one that was scarred and pitted with the history of what had gone before. The past was stitched into her, thread by thread, woven into every gesture, every unfinished painted she’d ever started. She could not cut it away; she could only learn to paint with it and around it; to let it bleed into the colours of whatever she painted next. The ache was not weakness but a reminder that even beginnings are a freshly painted house where every room was haunted, and that whatever she made of herself was subject was subject to her personal experience and the long shadows of the dark side of her past, for no matter how much she sanded, reprimed and resurfaced a board, the wood below remembered being a tree and the ignominies of what it had been through ever since.

For the first time since closing her mother’s glass panelled front door, she allowed herself to breathe deeply. The air tasted different—sharper, almost metallic, as though she had crossed an invisible threshold. She leaned back against the seat, her eyes closing for a moment, and felt the rattle of the steel wheels as they clattered across points and sidings on the final approach to Wolverhampton. Each vibration through the carriage floor seemed to resonate withing her core, as if the train were not only transporting her but remaking her, bone by bone and sinew by sinew, into someone who belonged to the Black Country rather than the stifling passivity of Laverstonian isolation.

And in that fragile pause, between the silence she had left behind and the noise of the life ahead, she understood that beginnings were never clean. They were stitched from fragments, from unfinished lines and half-remembered shadows. She would carry them all with her—into the city, into the studio, into the canvases that waited like unopened memories of a future she hadn’t yet experienced. The thought was not comforting, but it was honest. And honesty, she realised, was the only foundation course she had for whatever came next. To deny the fragments would be to deny herself; to embrace them was to admit that art, like life, was always incomplete and ready to be reimagined.

She opened her eyes again, watching her horizon widen. The night had been stripped away entirely, and light, while only the pallid, heavy cloudscape of the north and not the sunlight she’d been expecting to imbue the new day,  had bleached away the darkness and reimagined everything in glorious three dimensions. Róisín lifted her hand to the window, tracing the faint outline of her reflection. For a moment, she imagined she was drawing herself into the glass, sketching a figure that was both shadow and light, unfinished yet alive. The gesture was small, almost childlike, but it steadied her. As the train drew to a stop, her reflection was overlaid onto the face of a lad not much older than her, dressed in the danger colours of black and gold; a wasp waiting to infect and devour the apple of her new Eden. She stood just as the brakes bit, pitching her forward until the edge of the table bit into her thighs, leaving them numb and sore as she scrambled to gather her rucksack an bag, and retrieve her portfolio from between the seats before the whistle blew and she’d be whisked off to the terrors of Stafford of the concrete dystopia of Telford. Her legs felt stiff from the four-hour journey, and if her new life were a canvas, the first thing she had to do was stretch.