9.3

 

The paintings on the far wall were enormous—each one taller than she was, stretching nearly from floor to ceiling. They dominated the space in a similar way to the enclosed Rothko room in the Tate London, their presence almost oppressive in their demand for attention. At first glance, they appeared to be abstracts: swirls of ochre, bruised purples, streaks of grey and black. But as Roisin stepped closer, the shapes began to resolve into something disturbingly familiar.

A curve that might have been a rib.

A cluster of mottled colours that resembled decaying muscle.

A pale smear that looked like skin sloughing away.

Her breath caught. She leaned in, her eyes tracing the brushstrokes. The recognition was immediate and visceral. These weren’t abstractions. They were bodies—decomposing, dissolving, returning to something primal. And yet the paintings weren’t grotesque. They were strangely tender, almost intimate, as though the artist had loved their subjects as much as Rembrandt had loved his wife.

Roisin felt a shiver run through her. The images echoed the woman on the steps—the stillness, the veiling, the moment when the body becomes something else. They echoed Paul’s words about transformation, about the skin remembering light. These paintings felt like the moment after the fall—what the body becomes when it is no longer held by breath.

She stepped back, unsettled but unable to look away.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” a voice said behind her.

Roisin turned. The shop assistant had appeared at her side. She was young, maybe nineteen, with a nose ring and a knitted jumper that looked handmade.

Roisin swallowed. “Who’s the artist?”

The assistant shrugged. “No idea. I only work here three afternoons a week. They came in with a batch from one of the agents we use. We sell what we can and return the rest every six weeks. I don’t think the artist left a card.”

“No name?” Roisin was surprised. “What if one sells?”

“Nope. Bit mysterious, I guess. Any sales are collected by the agent anyway, so it’s not like they lose any money over it. Half the time they don’t even know their paintings are here. I was working a couple of months ago and someone was really cross about their work being plagiarised until they realised it was their own work we were showing. It was quite funny, really.”

Roisin turned back to the paintings. The brushwork was too deliberate, too intimate, for anonymity. Whoever painted these had seen something—something most people turned away from. Something Roisin herself had only glimpsed in the moment the woman’s body hit the stone.

“Do you know what they’re meant to be?” she asked, though she already knew.

The assistant tilted her head. “Abstracts, I think? People seem to like the colours. They’re very… atmospheric.”

Roisin almost laughed. Atmospheric. As though atmosphere could explain the way the shapes tugged at her memory, the way the colours seemed to pulse with the slow rhythm of decay. As though atmosphere could explain why she felt as though she were standing in front of a mirror that reflected not her face but her soul.

“They look like…” Roisin hesitated. “Like viscera.”

The assistant blinked. “Oh! I thought they were landscapes. Like cliffs or something. I didn’t think of… what you said. That would make them a bit morbid. Do you think the artist is a serial killer? Should I call the police?”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Roisin stepped closer again, her eyes narrowing. Whoever the artist was, they were like her and, like her, they needed to be protected at all costs. “Look.” She pointed out a curve rendered in brushstrokes of viridian and Payne’s grey. “This is the curving spine of a cow. Are you familiar with the works of Francis Bacon? He used to paint a lot of meat, usually alongside his portraits of Popes.”

The assistant shrugged. “I’ve heard the name before but I’m a classics student; literature, not art.”

“Worth looking at, though. Especially if you study twentieth century work. Nothing appears in a vacuum, after all. Art influences culture and culture influences art.” She looked again at the closest painting. The assistant’s interpretation wasn’t wrong. They could be cliffs, or storms, or the inside of a cave. They could be anything. That was the unsettling part. They hovered between forms, refusing to settle, refusing to declare themselves. They were unfinished, in the way a body is unfinished when it is in the process of becoming something else.

“Do you mind if I take a photo of the label?” Roisin asked.

“There isn’t one,” the assistant said apologetically. “We tried to track down the details, but no luck. The agent wouldn’t release the details. If you ask me, they’re by someone who wants to be recognised for their art, not because they’re famous for something else. A bit like writers using a pseudonym when they write in a genre they’re not famous for.” She looked hard at the sweep of colour. “Like when Charles Dodgson wrote his paedophilia fantasies under the name Lewis Carroll.”

Roisin felt a flicker of unease. “Whoever painted these has a depth of knowledge of art that I can only aspire to.”

“If you say so. I wouldn’t know a good painting from an AI rendition.”

Roisin stared at the paintings again. The colours seemed to shift as she looked, deepening, darkening, as though the images were decomposing in real time. She felt the same sensation she’d felt on the steps—the sense of standing at the threshold of something she didn’t yet understand.

“Do they sell?” she asked quietly.

“Not really,” the assistant admitted. “People say they’re too intense. But I like having them here. They make the place feel… alive.”

Alive. Roisin almost whispered the word. The paintings felt alive, but not in a comforting way. They felt alive the way a wound feels alive, or a memory that refuses to fade. They felt like the moment between breath and silence, between flesh and whatever comes after.

She stepped back, her pulse quickening. The gallery suddenly felt too small, the air too warm. She needed to leave, to breathe, to think.

“Thank you,” she murmured, already moving toward the door.

“No problem!” the assistant called cheerfully, oblivious.

Outside, the cold hit her like a revelation. She stood on the pavement, staring at her reflection in the gallery window. Behind her, the paintings loomed, their colours shifting in the dim light.

Roisin felt the pull again—the sense that she was being shown something, guided toward something. The woman on the steps. The veiling. The silence. And now this: bodies dissolving into abstraction, into colour, into something beyond recognition.

She turned away, her breath sharp in the air. The city gallery was forgotten. The town felt different now, as though its streets were rearranging themselves around her.

She walked on, carrying the images with her—unfinished, fragile, waiting to be named.

Waiting for her.