8.2

 

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 to convert, the higher up the pyramid they stood when the End Times came. Despite her ambivalence toward their beliefs, she could see the angels clawing at the insides of their flesh, desperate to attain redemption from their temporary mortality. She felt tempted to stop and get out her sketchbook, but even slowing would give them the impression she wanted to talk, and she knew from experience they were wolves when it came to the Hard Sell and instead quickened her pace. They watched her as she approached and passed, and she could feel their gaze all the way through the underpass and out the other side.

On the other side, the path took her back up to street level and into Princes Street, where the newly pedestrianised area allowed a vendor to set up a hot food caravan. Despite the enticing smell of fried meat and onions, especially since she’d eaten nothing since lunchtime yesterday. She walked past, her stomach rumbling in complaint, a passed a child engaged in the endless game of chasing pigeons across the reconstructed cobbles, his limbs stick thin as if he were recovering from something debilitating. She tried to freeze the image in her mind. To her, he was already skeletal; bones in motion animated by laughter and serenaded by the clatter of wings. As they lifted into the air, the birds mirrored the boy beneath them; their wings effortlessly lifting their shimmering bodies toward the heavens before circling and falling once more to earth. Perhaps that was why humanity was doomed; to become an angel meant the increasing likelihood of a fall back to the earth. Was it possible she’d already travelled the circle, and her insights were because she had once been an angel and was earthbound for another cycle?

Fractured angels were everywhere, pressing against her vision, reshaping the city. Dual perception, she realised, was not only about art or self. but living with the ambiguity of both; holding contradictions without resolution. To see both skeleton-bound human and angel together was to admit to herself that the truth was layered, unfinished, and open to change. The city itself seemed to echo the motif that had taken root in Roisin’s mind. As she walked further from the square, she noticed how even the structures around her seemed caught between mortality and transcendence. Buildings rose like ribcages, their beams and girders exposed in places where construction was unfinished or repair work had stripped away plaster. She saw vertebrae in the repeating columns, sockets in the darkened windows. Yet when the sun broke briefly through the clouds, light caught on the glass and steel, turning surfaces into feathers, and structural frames into wings. With her new concept of vision, the city was both skeleton and angel too, its bones holding it upright, reflected light suggesting a perpetual yearning for flight.

She paused at the square surrounding the central church of St Peter’s. Its buttresses curved like spines, each rib of stone supporting the weight of the wing-like roof and trumpeting tower. Beneath it, the wet flagstones shimmered, carrying reflections that seemed to lift the structure upward. Her pencil skimmed the paper, detailing the structure against the bones of dark granite: Here is endurance, here is mortality. But she could see the wings rising from the skeleton, the breath of the faithful filling them with warm air, and the church fulfilled its purpose and became angelic, a passage not of mortality but of salvation, taking itself away from earthbound affairs.