8.4

 Her steps slightly lighter, now she had accepted the duality of her vision as a creative lens for her ongoing work, Roisin left the stone paved square of St Peter’s and trotted through the walled pedestrian path through what remained of the gardens. Less extensive than they might have been in Lady Wulfrun’s day, it now consisted of a few trees and shrubby tangles interspersed with swathes of council-short grass. She turned left into Lichfield Street, where the impressive red granite columns announced the entrance to the Art Gallery and Museum. Around her, the town moved with its usual rhythm: footsteps echoing on wet pavement, buses grinding into stops, and constant gull-cry of voices rising and falling in fragments of conversation. Roisin carried her sketchbook close, seeing in her mind the columns as blood swathed bone surrounding the heavy wooden doors of the gallery’s lungs. On her left, the stone balustrade of the building’s surrounding wall became a connected line of short bones holding the soul of the gallery captive inside its traffic-stained Oolitic limestone.

It was in this heightened state that she reached the foot of the short flight of marble stairs and looked up just as the building exhaled and an older lady stepped through the doors. She was smartly dressed in a calf-length, A-line camel overcoat, her stockinged legs thin but muscled like a dancer’s and terminating in a pair of matching leather loafers with a tiny heel which emphasised the graceful but speedy elegance of her walk. Her gaze was even, looking across the street at the building opposite. Roisin could see a gentleman emerge behind her with the gallery’s next breath and the thinness of her frame and the way her shoulders jutted out despite the covering coat suggested the bones trying to escape their surrounding puppetry, yet the swirl of her coat as she turned to say something to the man behind her suggested the ever-present theme of unfolding wings.

Something the man – presumably her partner – said caused her to laugh, and Roisin could hear it above the general whine of the traffic like the sweet rise of a clarinet against the dull roar of violin strings. Still looking at the man, she held her right hand back a little, encouraging him to jog the two or three paces between them to catch it in his own. She stepped forward just as her shoulder bag completed its forward swing from her torso, the weight counterbalancing her and pitching her forward into a step onto the marbled portico in front of her, except her attention on her partner meant she stepped onto air instead the top stair. Her hand was never grasped and she fell, trying to check her forward motion by stepping with her other foot, but her knee hit the stairs before it completed the arc, and even from ten feet away the snap of bone as it connected with stone rent the air like a thunderclap.

Roisin’s breath caught in her throat as she witnessed the fall in slow motion, the lady’s left leg erupting to send a spray of blood against the rain-washes steps; her hand went forward to check the fall but met the edge of the next stair down and twisted a full ninety degrees to one side as the wrist snapped; her face hit next, halfway down the step and sent another spray of blood across the marble, then her legs caught up and cartwheeled over in a balletic spin, landing her on her back on the wet tarmac pavement. Roisin rushed forward, her sketchbook clutched against her chest, heart pounding.

The woman lay on the ground, her breath shallow, her eyes wide under her blood-shrouded face. Roisin knelt beside her, reaching out, but the woman’s gaze was already fixed on hers. A terrified look spread across her face, not of pain alone but of recognition, as though she had glimpsed something no one else could see. The world shifted out of slow motion, and Roisin knelt on the pavement. “Don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance. You’ll be alright.”

The lie felt fragile, inadequate against the enormity of the moment. The woman’s chest rose once, faltered, and stilled. The silence that followed was immense, pressing against Roisin’s ears, her bones, her breath. Before she could even reach for her phone, she saw the woman’s flesh erupt, ripping away as a winged creature pushed through the bloody cloth and shot like a missile into clous-speckles sky. She tried to follow it with her eyes, but it vanished before she could even turn her head in the direction it travelled. The man reached the bottom of the steps and regardless of the broken wrist, reached for the woman’s hand. “Angela,” he said, his voice breaking. “Are you all right?”