10.3

 

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?

Is that what the artist in the little gallery had thought. Just drawing and painting a corpse? Did they know their paintings would become eroticism? The curve of a rib. The twist of a spine. The deep viridian hue of a bacterial explosion. She lifted her head from the glass, leaving a smear of grease from her skin that blurred the fading daylight outside even further. She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts from her mind and think of something more positive

“Stop thinking it’s a deviance and think of it a strength.”

She spun round, expecting Paul to be standing at her doorway again, despite it not being his voice. There was no-one standing there. She crossed the room and looked into the hallway, but other than the stead red light of the immersion heater switch, the flat was otherwise empty. Was she imagining voices now? Wasn’t that a mark of schizophrenia? “Hello?” She called out into the gathering darkness, then stepped forward two paces and clicked the hall light on. Still no one there, though fewer shadows meant fewer things to give her the heebie-jeebies. She turned the immersion heater off. The water would be hot enough for a bath now, but she’d changed her mind about wanting one. Just imagining someone else in the flat while she was naked and vulnerable was enough to put her off, let alone the demons she’d let loose inside her head.

But the images she’d seen clung to her. Not just the paintings, but the feeling they had stirred—the sense of recognition, of inevitability, of being seen by something she couldn’t name.

She walked back into her room and flicked the overhead light on, sending whatever was left of the day outside into the invisibility of contrast. She opened the wardrobe door and examined herself in the mirror on the inside of it, untwisting the towel and letting it drop to her shoulders. Her reflection looked pale, her hair damp and tangled, her eyes too bright. She studied her face, searching for something—she wasn’t sure what. A sign. A crack. A shadow.

She lifted a hand to her cheek.

Her skin felt warm. Solid. Human. But she could feel the bones beneath the firm flesh. The zygomatic bone defining the curve of her cheek; the ethmoid bone creating the eye socket; the maxilla of her upper jaw, so adept at crushing lips between kisses and leaving a bruise like an unfinished moustachio. But the memory of the paintings whispered beneath the surface, like something waiting to emerge.

She turned away from the mirror. On the wall her skeletal self-portrait stared defiantly outwards. This is what she was. She was the product of everything she saw, everything she felt, everything she thought. The paintings in the gallery had been absorbed by her whether liked it or not. The experience of them was inside her now; inside the spirit resting inside her flesh.

Her room felt smaller now, the walls closer. She sat on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn to her chest. The quiet pressed in around her. She tried to focus on her breathing, on the rise and fall of her chest, on the warmth of the jumper against her skin.

But the images returned again and again, insistent.

The torso twisting.

The hand reaching upward.

The wings—broken or forming, she couldn’t tell.

She pressed her palms to her eyes, as though she could push the images out.

It didn’t work.

She lowered her hands slowly, letting them rest in her lap. Her breath trembled.

She whispered into the quiet, “Why me?”

The room didn’t answer.

The rain continued its steady tapping against the window, patient and unhurried. The lamp cast a soft pool of light across the floor. The air smelled faintly of damp wool and lavender.

Roisin closed her eyes again—not to escape the images, but to face them.

They came, as she knew they would. But this time she didn’t flinch. She let them rise, let them shift, let them settle into the space behind her ribs.

She didn’t understand them. She didn’t want them. But they were hers now, whether she liked it or not.

She opened her eyes.

The room was unchanged. Quiet. Dim. Safe.

But she wasn’t.

She pulled the duvet from the bed and wrapped it around herself, sinking into the corner between the wall and the dresser. She rested her head against the plaster, listening to the rain, letting the quiet hold her.

She didn’t sleep.

She didn’t expect to.

She simply sat there, wrapped in warmth and unease, waiting for her mind to settle, knowing it wouldn’t.

Not yet.