Chiaroscuro

“No.” She scowled. “I think I’d know the difference between a gallery and a market stall. This was a proper gallery, built in the remains of what used to be a factory or something. I don’t remember what was there before. A casino? Or maybe one of those cut-price warehouse outlets? Anyway, the front of the shop was nothing special, kind of like what you’d see in an exhibition of local artists, but at the back…” She shook her head; her inner vision filled with the magnificence of the art. “There were paintings. Large ones. Abstracts, at first glance. But when I looked closer…” She swallowed. “They weren’t abstracts.” Paul’s eyes sharpened. “What were they?” “Bodies,” Roisin whispered. “Or parts of bodies. Decomposing. Dissolving. But not grotesque. Not violent. More like… like they were becoming something else.” He didn’t flinch. “Becoming what?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Something unfinished. Something in between. Not quite the angels I keep seeing inside people, but something else. So...

  After Paul’s footsteps faded down the hall, Roisin stayed where she was, sipping what was left of her coffee with the blanket wrapped around her like a cocoon. The room felt too still. The silence wasn’t comforting; it was watchful, as though the walls were listening and a thousand angels were silently waiting for her attention. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about the paintings she’d seen. Naming her thoughts about them felt dangerous, as though it might solidify something that was better left fluid, but she needed to tell someone. And Paul—Paul was the only one who might understand. There was a line of light around her closed bedroom door, and in the light, where surely everything was safer than in the dark, was currently her only friend. She pulled the door open and stood blinking in the light from the overhead bulb. Her stomach rumbled as she smelled the distinctive aroma of toast from the other end of the house and she could hear her flatmate rattling a pan in the kitc...

  She nodded. “They’re not leaving me alone. Every time I open my eyes, they’re there. Shifting. Moving. Like they recognise me as one of their own. Like they’re trying to tell me something.” Paul glanced around himself, then crossed one foot over the other and sank to the floor in a cross-legged position, all without spilling another drop of coffee. He cradled his mug with both hands, as if warming them by contact with the heated stoneware. “Maybe they are.” Roisin looked down at him sharply. “Don’t say that.” “Why not?” “Because it feels true.” She couldn’t stop her voice from trembling. “And I don’t want it to be.” She sat down suddenly, as if she was a marionette whose strings had been cut. Her descent was more like a sack of potatoes than Pauls graceful movement, and she finished up sitting on one hip, her legs splayed awkwardly beneath her and out to one side. Paul nodded. He didn’t argue or offer reassurance or a snatch of logic harvested from comic books or films....

  The knock was soft—so soft Roisin almost mistook it for the downstairs neighbours. She lifted her head, listening as the rain tapped steadily against the window in a thin, persistent rhythm. Then the knock came again, a little firmer this time. “Roisin?” Paul’s voice, low and careful. “Are you awake?” She didn’t answer immediately. She wasn’t sure she trusted her voice. Her thoughts still felt waterlogged, heavy with the images she’d been trying—and failing—to shake loose. She pulled the duvet tighter around her shoulders. The light had completely gone, leaving the room dim with only the pools of streetlights to illuminate it, and the soft glow if her bedside light trough the curtains closing off her sleeping area. She felt suspended between the warmth of the duvet and the cold that clung to her bones. Another pause. Then, gently, “I’ve brought you a cup of coffee. Can I come in?” Roisin swallowed. She wasn’t ready to talk. She wasn’t ready to be seen. But something in hi...

  She stood abruptly, pulling her leggings up and her jumper down then ducking under her makeshift partition into the part of the room she thought of as her studio. She pressed her palm against the rain-misted window, feeling the cold seep through and condensation form around the warmth of her finger. Outside, streetlights awakened by the heavy cloud blurred in the rain, their halos trembling. The world looked distant, softened, as though she were viewing it through a veil. She rested her forehead against the glass. A moment ago she had been eroticising the decay of flesh and the release of the spirit held captive by the bone cage around it. Did that mean she was a necrophile? She didn’t think so, for it had been more a fantasy of the spirit animating the flesh than the actual sexualisation of a corpse. She had no desire at all to desecrate a corpse. Not sexually, anyway. She’d love to be able to draw and paint the stages of decomposition, but it was hardly the same. Was it? ...

  She shivered, goosebumps riding up her legs and torso like ants racing for a dwindling source of sugar. There was no ambient heating in the flat, and without any way of contributing to the gas bills she dared not put the gas fire on just for herself. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and, in a moment of selfishness, clicked on the immersion heater so there would be hot water for a bath soon. She pressed the towel to her hair, her arms, her legs, while dancing on the cold bathroom tiles. The cotton felt rough against her skin, grounding her. She fended away a wase of homesickness. Her mother’s house was always warm, and her towels were soft as a new plushie thanks to her near-constant use of a tumble drier and under-floor heating. She wrapped it around herself and returned to her bedroom, where there was at least threadbare carpet over the old wooden floors. The few clothes hung neatly from hangers, the familiar shapes and colours offering a small comfort. She chose her over...

  Roisin’s breath caught. It looked familiar, this silhouette, but she couldn’t remember from where. Tall despite the hunched shoulders, a crooked lean to one side and the odd stance. Had it been a film she’d seen? Something on the internet? Babbadook or Slender Man ? Something from Creepy Pasta ? She blinked, and the figure dissolved into nothing—just a trick of the light, a shadow cast by a passing car, a shape made by branches and rain. She exhaled slowly, her pulse settling. She kept walking. The rain softened again, turning to a mist so light it was hard to know whether to keep the umbrella up. One the one hand the rain was so light the weight of an open brolly was an inconvenience and on the other – well, she was still getting wet. The mist was almost worse than the downpour, since it penetrated even the dense fibres of her clothing and shoes, which clung to her, heavy and cold. By the time she reached the bandstand the rain had stopped altogether, and although the sun...

  With rain spattering against the unfurled umbrella, and her sketchbook safely clutched against her chest with her free hand, Roisin headed along Chapel Ash in the same direction as the women had gone, though they’d vanished into a side street somewhere. The rain was cold now, the warmth of the earlier sun obliterated by a hour or more of downpour, although it was less intrusive than it had been, though the hammering against the taut skin of the umbrella left her little room to think. She looked upward. Was the umbrella part of the whole spirit of life, too? Native American belief would say yes; that all things had a spirit. When the contraption died its spirit would join the Great Spirit of which it had been a part all along. How did it know when to effect the transition, though? It would be rendered inoperative if the mechanism broke, if the wind turned it inside out, and the carefully cantilevered struts collapsed or became detached from the fabric. If she threw it away, did it...

  Roisin laughed as she touched in arm in thanks. Just from the brief touch, she felt his strength and, through the skin and musculature and blood vessels, the bone beneath. “Not vegan, no. I don’t have the discipline.” “We all need a bit of discipline.” He winked, but if he thought this line of flirting would appeal to her, he was sadly mistaken. Her smile faded, and she looked at him with an artistic eye. Behind his hopeful expression she caught a glimpse of emerging feathers. She didn’t know how she knew, but this young man’s spirit was already fractured; the angel inside him ready to jump forms and soar away like the woman this morning. Despite the protestations of her stomach, she pushed the plate away. “On second thought, I don’t want to spoil my appetite.” His hopeful look faded into a scowl. “Suit yourself,” he said. “It’s not like I was going to ask for your number.” His free hand waved up and down, indicating the whole of her. “I’m not into this tranny granny scene ...

  When the rain began, Roisin took note of her surroundings. She’d wandered aimlessly, letting her feet take her wherever the pavement led. She had, by sheer habit, walked all the way to the bottom of Darlington Street and into the underpass toward Chapel Ash. She used to live this way, a long time ago and only briefly. She’d had an affair with the bar manager of the Hare and Harper on St. Marks, five minutes from here. Had it not started raining, she would have been tempted to see if it was still there. It wouldn’t have been the same manager, of course. The fallout from the affair and their subsequent divorce, in which she’d been named as co-respondent, had seen to that and was partly responsible for her decision to change her name before returning. Not that she would dare work behind a bar again. A broken bottle to the face can be a great motivator for a career change. Considering the rain, she turned right onto Chapel Ash proper, and hesitated at the last few yards of tunnel, ...

  The paintings on the far wall were enormous—each one taller than she was, stretching nearly from floor to ceiling. They dominated the space in a similar way to the enclosed Rothko room in the Tate London, their presence almost oppressive in their demand for attention. At first glance, they appeared to be abstracts: swirls of ochre, bruised purples, streaks of grey and black. But as Roisin stepped closer, the shapes began to resolve into something disturbingly familiar. A curve that might have been a rib. A cluster of mottled colours that resembled decaying muscle. A pale smear that looked like skin sloughing away. Her breath caught. She leaned in, her eyes tracing the brushstrokes. The recognition was immediate and visceral. These weren’t abstractions. They were bodies—decomposing, dissolving, returning to something primal. And yet the paintings weren’t grotesque. They were strangely tender, almost intimate, as though the artist had loved their subjects as much as Rembran...

  The sky turned a pale, washed-out grey as the sun became occluded by scurrying clouds, turning the streets from the scintillating jewels of wet pavement to a dull litter-strewn gleam beneath the unshine, and casting the kind that made the buildings look flattened, as though they were part of a stage set rather than a real place. The breeze had a thin, metallic edge to it, and Roisin pulled her collar up against her neck to keep it out. She could only vaguely remember Cleveland Street. There had been a council office there when she was a student. She’d claimed housing benefit once, before the rules changed to count a student loan as extra income even when the student was on a summer break. She consulted the live map on her phone and traced where she needed t go. To the end of Queen Street, then south along Market Street until she reached what used to be the library and then right into Cleveland. She didn’t know where this gallery was, but she could walk the whole length until sh...

  Roisin ducked into a café and watched the scene from a distance as the police tried to disperse the crowd, then secured the scene and waiter for the coroner to arrive. She could tell it was a woman but couldn’t make out any details from where she was before she’d even finished her Americana – the cheapest item on the menu --   the body had been loaded into a unmarked white panel van and gone, the onlookers   had drifted away now all the drama had ceased, and the police were left taking statements and photographing the blood spatters, while a pair of women at the top of the steps chatted over their mops and pails, clearly content with being paid to chat in the morning sunshine while they waited for permission to clean the steps. She managed to eke out the last dregs of her coffee until the police had taken down the incident tape and driven off, by which time the barista was staring daggers at her occupying a whole table while the early lunch brigade began filtering in an...

 The siren came first, a thin wail threading through the air, bending the silence into something taut and followed up with the scream of a bean sidth. Roisin rose and stepped back to make room, the onlookers shifting around her like a shoal of minnows around a shark until she stood at the edge of the pavement, next to the car the woman filming had got out from. It was unlocked and still running, and if Roisin had not been so law abiding, she could have just opened the door and driven away. She didn’t, but instead remained where she was, her eyes fixed on the stillness of the woman’s body. The sound grew louder, closer, until it seemed to press against the walls of the street itself, as though the day itself were being split open. The ambulance swung into view, its lights stuttering across the wet pavement. Red and blue painted the stone steps in alternating pulses—alive, then extinguished, alive again. The rhythm was almost disrespectful; a heartbeat imposed upon a body that no l...

  Roisin knew the answer already. Should she tell him the woman – Angela – was dead? She could answer herself without a second guess. She was no medical expert so telling anyone she had seen the woman break out of her mortal flesh and fly away would get her a long stay wearing a tight jacket in Wednesfield’s Cygnet Hospital. She looked at him and shook her head, glancing down at the flash of creamy-white as he stroked her broken hand, each movement of his palm causing the wrist to flex and expose more of the underlying bone structure. This was what Art school had lacked. The traditional dissection of a body while students watched and sketched the details. It was all very well to examine the skeleton as a dry, lifeless study model but to see the musculature covering them, and the flesh and veins layer around them tighter than cables in a public server was another lever of artistry. Had Virtual Reality come far enough to give her that level of detail? Laverstone’s local hospital had ...

 Her steps slightly lighter, now she had accepted the duality of her vision as a creative lens for her ongoing work, Roisin left the stone paved square of St Peter’s and trotted through the walled pedestrian path through what remained of the gardens. Less extensive than they might have been in Lady Wulfrun’s day, it now consisted of a few trees and shrubby tangles interspersed with swathes of council-short grass. She turned left into Lichfield Street, where the impressive red granite columns announced the entrance to the Art Gallery and Museum. Around her, the town moved with its usual rhythm: footsteps echoing on wet pavement, buses grinding into stops, and constant gull-cry of voices rising and falling in fragments of conversation. Roisin carried her sketchbook close, seeing in her mind the columns as blood swathed bone surrounding the heavy wooden doors of the gallery’s lungs. On her left, the stone balustrade of the building’s surrounding wall became a connected line of short b...

 The pattern pressed against her vision, reshaping everything she happened to glance at. A row of lampposts became a procession of skeletal figures, their thin bodies rising from the pavement, their necks bent with despair. Yet when the lamps flickered on, their glow spread outward like halos, turning each into a downward gazing angel. Halfway up the steps to St Peters, near the war memorial with its bas relief of four servicemen, or four proto-angels commemorating those who had been literally and metaphorically fragmented by the two world wars, was a bronze of Lady Wulfruna, the lady who was given a thousand acres of land by King Ethelred II and founded the church and town at its highest point.  The name, Wolverhampton, took its name from her, literally Wulfrūnehēantūn , which in the prevailing Angle-Saxon of the time meant “Wulfrūn's high land or farm.” The brass was dull with oxidation, though polished to a fine sheen over the lady’s breasts and buttocks thanks, she assumed...

  Outside the newsagent, a young man was selling Big Issue magazines, his hands rough, his voice so hoarse his calls sounded like “Bug Shoe.” His whole frame seemed carved from endurance, bones holding him as solid as the sycamores dotting the pavement every fifty metres. He lifted his arm to wave at a passer-by, holding a copy of the homeless publication aloft, probably in the hope of a sale, Roisin saw the gesture as trumpet ‑ like, as though he were announcing something larger than himself. Skeleton and angel, fused in motion. Further into town, where the pavement dipped down into an underpass below the dual carriageway ring-road. Despite the graffiti and the enduring smell of old urine, an older man and, presumably, his wife had set up a mobile stall made from a shopping trolley in order to peddle religious pamphlets. A well know sect of Christianity who were bent on a pyramid scheme wherein they believed Heaven could only hold 180,000 souls, and the more people you were able...

  Roisin was in the bathroom when Paul left the following morning and she had no chance to ask him if he meant anything he’d said about the transition of human into angel, or whether he just messing with her and spouting Artistic Justification last night. Artistic Justification is a skill developed by all serious artists and although not taught as a subject, is a crucial skill to learn. It begins when a child produces a piece of artwork and their parent or teacher asks them about it or -- God forbit – says something like “I love the way you’ve drawn that tree” when the what the child had pulled from their imagination was actually their mother line dancing at their birthday party. What happens is that the student learns to re-interpret their own work for the eye of the consumer, altering and refining their knowledge and justifications the deeper into the subject they travel. What could have started with a simple “I felt like putting some yellow on” can then become “I tried to interp...