5.6

 

Closing her eyes once more, she felt as if she had a bird’s eye view of the town below her, the little house on Dunstall Road picked out in ultra-HD while the rest of the lands became increasingly pixelated the further away they were. Almost like a video game, she could see individual people, some picked out in exquisite detail while others barely registered on her perception. An old lady, dressed in a heavy tweed coat and her hair wrapped in a colourful cloth, was crossing the Cannock Road a couple of kilometres away and as Roisin looked at her, she zoomed in, as if pinching the area on a camera screed, but instead of becoming blurred, her face remained in full resolution, until she could see every line on the woman’s face and understand what event had etched each of them so deep. She felt the old lady’s pain, the grating of cartilage in her knee joints, the dull but constant ache of the hip she broke when her son Peter fell from the second floor and she caught him before he touched the ground. Imani Abdimah – for she could taste the name in the woman’s throat – was tired. Even at seventy-two years old she still worked at the launderette, putting in service washes for students were barely able to thank her for after she’d ironed and folded their clothes. There was constriction in her chest, a loss of breath as she struggled to inhale, and she dropped the oversized handbag she been using for years, sending her purse and keys out of the open zip and onto the tarmac. She bent forward to pick them up, toppling to one side in a brief moment of respite as the Honda Civic ploughed through her, sending her thirty metres further than her bus stop, breaking both legs and one arm in three places, and pressing her skull into a sign advising drivers there was a speed camera ahead.

She pulled away, and instantly the details were forgotten but she was left with a sense of the whole world just at the reach of her fingertips. She was flooded with vertigo and opened her eyes again, convinces she was about to puke and forcibly biting it back, willing not to appear so weak in front of this young but angry man.

She coughed, then laughed. Paul was several years older than her, so she was hardly in a position to think of him as an angry young man, even if he did keep her awake half the night while in return, she kept him awake for the rest.

“What’s funny?” He looked a mixture of concerned and angry, if that was possible. “If you’re finished fondling my stone, I’d like to get back to sleep. I still have an early start tomorrow, even if you can lounge about all day.”

“Sorry. I’m just overtired and overthinking.”

She opened her eyes again and looked at the sculpture. There was no sign of her gloved fingers on the old stone, but she felt branded by the touch of the angel on herself. Stone it might been but whoever had carved it had imbued it with something special; something that could only be released by touching it. She turned to Paul, peeling the gloves off her fingers. "Did it show you anything? An old lady carrying a bag of shopping?"

"Did the stone show me anything? It's a piece of stone. What is it going to show me? Some Polaroids it took while holidaying in Ibiza?"

"No, of course not." The angel hadn't moved in all this time, though it still cycled through one image after another. "Where did you get this from?"

"I told you. An old junk shop. Did it call to me while I was passing on the street? No. Did it look like a nice bit of sculpture? Yes. Did I think I might made a tidy profit from it? Also yes. Have I been able to pass it on to someone with sufficient spare cash. Alas, no. I don't seem to be able to part with it." He folded the gloves carefully. "And as that bloke on the telly always says: potential profit is nothing if you never sell anything." He shook his head. "What did it show you then? Old lady's shopping lists?"

"It showed me her being run over. Not only showed me, but I lived the experience. Kind of. I felt the car hit her and then I was like a bystander watching her bounce down the road."