9.6

 

With rain spattering against the unfurled umbrella, and her sketchbook safely clutched against her chest with her free hand, Roisin headed along Chapel Ash in the same direction as the women had gone, though they’d vanished into a side street somewhere. The rain was cold now, the warmth of the earlier sun obliterated by a hour or more of downpour, although it was less intrusive than it had been, though the hammering against the taut skin of the umbrella left her little room to think. She looked upward. Was the umbrella part of the whole spirit of life, too? Native American belief would say yes; that all things had a spirit. When the contraption died its spirit would join the Great Spirit of which it had been a part all along. How did it know when to effect the transition, though? It would be rendered inoperative if the mechanism broke, if the wind turned it inside out, and the carefully cantilevered struts collapsed or became detached from the fabric. If she threw it away, did it know it was time to lets its angel out? Or did it have to wait until the bones of its struts were washed bare and clean by the passage of time? She moved it out of the way and let the rain hit her face, trying to keep her eyes open but failing with every drop that came near to her eyeball. What of the rain? Did each drop have a spirit that would be released on contact?

The cold drops gathered in her hair, slid down her temples, traced the line of her jaw. The traffic lights of Tettenhall Road blurred into halos, each one trembling in the wet air. She walked slowly, as though the rain itself were urging her to move with caution. The pavement shone like a sheet of dark glass. Cars hissed past, their tyres slicing through shallow puddles. The shops she passed – those not permanently shuttered – were lightless as though everyone else had retreated indoors, leaving her alone with the weather. She passed a church, and it was only when she spotted the company logo that she realised it had been deconsecrated and sold off. Did it, too, have a soul? And was it straining against the shackles of an earthbound corporate identity?

The barista had shaken her confidence. How fast someone could change from pleasant and flirtatious to rude and insulting. And why did he call her a tranny? She got the concept. Condemning someone to a minority group was a way of Othering them; a way of assigning a value to them that was inferior to the one you, and your social peers deemed fair and right to assign yourself. This was a way of corrupting the angel within and deny it it’s true nature.

She passed the brewery on her right, the heady scent of yeast and mash hanging like soggy cornflakes in the surrounding wet air. She looked down each side street as she passed it, trying to remember which of them led to the park, for going through it would half the distance she had to walk home. If she could find the park, she could use the bandstand to shelter from the downpour and use her phone to find the right path home, but until she found shelter she was unwilling to risk her sketchbook getting ruined. Walking on automatic pilot allowed her thoughts to fly like a knot of sparrows; each one an individual entity but combined to a single whole, with the aim of pinning down a coherent direction for her work. Each thought darted past, refusing to land.

The paintings.

The shifting colours.

The shapes that had rearranged themselves when she wasn’t looking.

Roisin swapped her arms around, clumsily swapping the umbrella from her left to her right to give her left some temporary succour against the warmth of her body. The rain soaked through her sleeves, her clothes growing heavier with each step. She didn’t mind. The weight felt grounding, almost necessary, as though her body needed something to anchor it.

She passed another café, its windows fogged from the warmth inside. The scent of coffee and conversation drifted out when someone opened the door, a brief pocket of comfort swallowed quickly by the rain. She kept walking.

The gutters overflowed, water rushing toward the drains with a low, constant murmur. It sounded like whispering. Or breathing. Or something trying to form words it couldn’t quite shape.

Roisin shook her head, trying to clear the thought. But the rain made everything feel porous—streets, buildings, her own skin. As though the boundary between inside and outside had thinned.

She turned into Bath Road, recognising the back of the brewery, then left into Summerfield. She could see the park ahead, through the misting rain. The trees overhead made the street even darker, their branches dripping, their forms sentinels against the grey sky. Water pooled in the dips of the pavement, reflecting the branches like veins.

Her footsteps slowed.

She felt watched—not by a person, but by the day itself. By the rain. By the memory of the paintings that clung to her like damp fabric.

She stopped beneath a streetlamp. The light flickered on, confused by the early dimness of the afternoon, casting her shadow in brief, stuttering fragments across the pavement. She took advantage of the meagre shelter to check the map function on her phone, reassuring herself of the best route back to the house.

For a moment, she closed her eyes and  imagined the rain washing the painted images away—the rib, the spine, the dissolving face. But they remained, etched behind her eyes, luminous and unsettling. When she opened them, a figure stood at the far end of the path.

Still.

Unmoving.

Half‑obscured by the rain.