9.1

 

Roisin ducked into a café and watched the scene from a distance as the police tried to disperse the crowd, then secured the scene and waiter for the coroner to arrive. She could tell it was a woman but couldn’t make out any details from where she was before she’d even finished her Americana – the cheapest item on the menu --  the body had been loaded into a unmarked white panel van and gone, the onlookers  had drifted away now all the drama had ceased, and the police were left taking statements and photographing the blood spatters, while a pair of women at the top of the steps chatted over their mops and pails, clearly content with being paid to chat in the morning sunshine while they waited for permission to clean the steps. She managed to eke out the last dregs of her coffee until the police had taken down the incident tape and driven off, by which time the barista was staring daggers at her occupying a whole table while the early lunch brigade began filtering in and filling up the shop. She took the hint and left, her aim of visiting the art gallery abandoned for the day in case someone recognised her as being present at the scene when the woman fell.

She walked further into town with no aim in mind as she pondered the death. Why had the man professed he only knew the woman professionally when they were clearly involved in a relationship and then begged her not to die? She hadn’t been in many romantic relationships before, but she’d watched enough Korean dramas to recognise a case of symbiotic romanticism between the two, or at the very least, a disparity of desire on the man’s part.

As she walked out of Lichfield Street into Queen’s square, which had been re-paved since she’d studied here, although the bank that had charged her so much interest on her student loan she’d been forced to move home after her degree was still occupying pride of place, and walked over to the bronze statue of Prince Albert on his horse, erected five years after his death in 1861 on the orders of his widow, Queen Victoria. There was something different about it. Had it been the subject of vandalism? She was aware of several statues of historical figures being damaged or altered to reflect the changing mores of modern society. Some had been torn down and, famously, thrown into harbours as a protest against the slavery origins of their fortunes, and some had been disassembled and rebuilt as memorials to the lives they had destroyed by embracing political beliefs which subjugated whole minorities. Not Albert, though. If he had been altered, it had been done subtly and cleverly. Both he and his horse were exquisitely rendered, musculature clearly visible under their metal skins and a hint of the bone structure further within. Yet there was something else the artist had not intended to sculpt; for she could see the complex structure of an eagle’s wings in the curve of sinew and vein.

She looked at the few people around her; shoppers with plastic shop-named bags or sustainable totes; students lounging on what the council termed ‘public seating’ but could be more aptly named as brickly-constructed torture devices, and a few suited and booted businessmen in long-paced hurries to purchase sustenance and return to the office. She sat on one of the raised brick walls, careful to maintain distance between herself and the old gentleman with a Staffie, who watched her warily and only relaxed when she stayed at what it decided was a safe distance. She could tell it was old. Both man and dog were old, with the fracturing she was beginning to associate with lived experience. The man had dozens of facets – too many for her to count – and his skin was all but translucent under her scrutiny and the more she looked the more obvious became his withered musculature, his failing organs, his brittle bones at the core. She pulled out her sketchbook and began to draw in quick, shorthand lines, outlining and then detailing his face, his posture, his hand casually touching the dog’s head. She silently thanked her past tutors for their insistence on her learning life drawing, both the extended sessions and the rapid, thirty-second poses they would charge their students to illustrate once every three or four sessions. She’d hated the practice at the time, preferring to spend her time experiments with painting techniques, but now she blessed the ability she’d learned to get the essence of a figure in just a few strokes of the pencil.

Sensing her gaze, he turned to look at her and she smiled sheepishly, caught in the act. She turned the book to show him her impression of him and he frowned. “I’m not paying you for it. I didn’t ask you to.”

“I’m just practicing,” she told him. “I’m a bit rusty with my drawing skills.”

He nodded, sucking his teeth and rolling his tongue as if his mouth were dry. “It’s quite good. You should go to Cleveland Street. There’s a gallery there you could sell to. I forget the name.”

“I’ll give it a look.” She turned the book back toward herself and closed the cover. “Thanks for the tip.”

“No worries, love.” His patronising tone was one of habit, not dismissal, but as  he turned away again she felt an urge to give him the portrait anyway. She stood, and as the dog began to curl its lip the man said something she couldn’t hear, and the dog relaxed. She approached and holding out her hand, gave him her name. “I’d like you to have this,” she said, shaking his hand. “No charge.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” He looked at the drawing and smiled. “I see that fissog every day, and there’s no-one who might want reminding of it after I’m gone.”