10.7

“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. Something… I want to say ‘darker’ but that’s not it. Something distinct, maybe. Something not-angels.”

Paul leaned back slightly, his gaze drifting toward the window as though he were looking at something outside, in the rainy night. “Tell me what you saw.”

Roisin took a deep breath, putting herself back in the dark shop, the smell of linseed oil and bleach as strong now as it had been twelve hours ago. “Every painting was at least as big as me, two… two and a half metres by one and a half, maybe, and once I was within them – they were displayed in an alcove like they were in a separate room – they shut out everything except themselves from my senses. I wouldn’t have been able to bring another painting to mind if I tried. Not my own. Not the Mona Lisa or Botticelli’s Venus. Just them, and only them. I thought they were abstracts at first, abstracts with such a depth to them that you know they had part of the artist in them. The first one was in swirls of yellow and earth tones; and they looked a bit like Theres Oulton’s work from the eighties, or the landscape in a John Martin epic, but as I looked, it was like looking at one of those IQ puzzles where you see one thing for ages then a different image rises out of the background and you can no longer see the first one, no matter how hard you try. The next painting was almost like one of those ‘artist’s impression of the Osiris Nebulae’ or something; all rendered in blues and crimsons, then just as you’re making out a distant galaxy the whole thing shift and you’re looking at the curve of a rib and a beating heart at the centre of the nest. Another was reminiscent of the paintings of Max Enst, except instead of the mucus-like strings that make up the landscape you have clusters of muscle fibres twisting down to an anchor point on bone. The fourth one… The fourth had the palette of a Gainsberg or a Georgean romantic study, but the swirls of pink and yellow and lace weren’t some rich woman’s dresses but a loose flap of decaying skin, slipping free of its mooring as the flesh beneath it decomposes, shrugging it off to weaken the cage that holds the spirit captive.” She opened her eyes; her gaze locked onto her flatmate’s incredulous expression. “What if they aren’t what I’m painting but something else? What if they’re paintings of the body after the spirit has gone? What if they’re what my sight is leaving behind; the part of the angel that will be forever a product of the mundane world?”

When she finished, the room felt heavier, as though her words had thickened the air.

Paul was silent for a long moment then he abruptly got up and took his plate and cutlery to the sink. He kept his back to her as he spoke. “Did you recognise them?”

Roisin looked up. “What do you mean?”

“You recognised what they were showing. Not because you’ve seen paintings like that before. But because you’ve seen the transformation. You’ve seen the other side of the  transition. You knew what they were because you’re seen their subjects in real life.”

Roisin felt a chill crawl up her spine. “The woman on the steps.”

“Yes. And the self-portrait the other night.”

“But these paintings weren’t of me.”

“No,” Paul agreed. “But they were of the same human condition, and you were seeing them from the outside of that experience, almost as if the whole concept of being human was of a huge, multi-dimensional TV screen. .”

Roisin shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

Paul folded his hands on the table. “You think of death as an ending. A closing. But what if it really is like you said before?  What if the moment after the body falls, after the breath leaves, is not destruction but the transition you’re seeing in everyday life?”