8.3

 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, to the local lads for whom this was the nearest they would get to touching real ones for many years, if at all. She had never stopped to look closely, but today she reached out, her fingers tracing the contours. The brass was smooth, its lines worn by however many years it had stood here, and her face stared impassively outwards across the civic square. She wore what Roisin assumed were mock-medieval clothing, the sort displayed by every historical film since 1912’s “Quo Vardis?”. Yet the drop of her cape and how it curved and billowed around her arms gave her the suggestion of softly unfurling wings. The bronze held both mortality and divinity, assisted by the scroll she held, which granted the thousand acres she held at Hēantūn, to the Church.

Closing her eyes, she let her fingertips linger. The hubbub of the square behind her faded as she lost herself in sensation, imagining the angel’s trumpet pressed to its lips, poised to sound. She could almost hear it in the wind blowing from the Civic Centre but it was note not of judgment, but of recognition, a call for her to see the fragmented parts of herself become whole.

When she opened her eyes, the bronze figure seemed doubled. One moment it was the familiar rendition of how the artist had imagined a woman of high birth a thousand years ago, and the next it was radiant, a young member of the Elohim about to rise. It took her a moment to realise her perception was not fixed but shifted with her gaze and her ability to hold the two separate viewpoints.

Two lads walked past, taking a shortcut from the university refectory into town, and she felt is if their smiles were too wide, as if the skeletons driving their body-puppets had elected to eject from their throats and were leery of onlookers lest it begin a world-wide migration of souls leaving the mortal world behind. She smiled ruefully. The earth would survive. It certainly had when there was a public curfew during lockdown.

She walked on, noticing how the motif extended into every corner of the city. A church tower loomed above, its spire skeletal, structural reaching skyward. Bells rang within, their sound carrying light, turning the tower into a trumpet. Skeleton and angel, fused. Even the pavement beneath her beneath her feet seemed fractured. Cracks in the stone were bones breaking, letting weeds grow through, rising like the wings of life pressing ever upward. Mortality and transcendence, cage and flight, etched into the ground and everything that grew, walked or flew toward salvation.

Roisin felt both unsettled and elated, her heartbeat hammering out an Ode to Joy inside her chest. The city was no longer neutral; it was alive with duality. Every structure, every statue, every detail carried both mortality and radiance. It was not confined to her sketchbook or her wall or to Paul’s pontification; it was a communal spirit, woven into the fabric of the world.

She paused again, sketchbook in hand, and began to draw. The church became hands opening for wings to extend. Lampposts became skeletal figures with halos. The statue became both mortal woman and angel. Her pencil moved quickly, capturing not resolution but tension, not certainty but ambiguity; a network of lines mapping out the connections between earth and Heaven.

As she drew, her gaze at once inward and outward, she thought of Paul. He would have seen only the angel, only the wings, only the light. She saw the skeleton beneath, the cage of flesh, the mortality. Together they had created something larger, something outlining the interconnectedness of all things.

The city breathed around her, its bones and wings pressing against her senses. She closed her sketchbook, held it against her chest, and set off again, carrying the vision with her.