Chapter 8.1

 

Roisin was in the bathroom when Paul left the following morning and she had no chance to ask him if he meant anything he’d said about the transition of human into angel, or whether he just messing with her and spouting Artistic Justification last night. Artistic Justification is a skill developed by all serious artists and although not taught as a subject, is a crucial skill to learn. It begins when a child produces a piece of artwork and their parent or teacher asks them about it or -- God forbit – says something like “I love the way you’ve drawn that tree” when the what the child had pulled from their imagination was actually their mother line dancing at their birthday party. What happens is that the student learns to re-interpret their own work for the eye of the consumer, altering and refining their knowledge and justifications the deeper into the subject they travel. What could have started with a simple “I felt like putting some yellow on” can then become “I tried to interplay the dichotomy of sunshine on a frozen lake with the controlled burn of a wheatfield after harvest” which sets the viewer into a dalliance with their own perceptions of memory.

She ran to the top of the stairs, but the front door was already closed, the whine of a passing number fifteen bus squeezing in through the ill-fitting glass. She mentally kicked herself for not setting her phone alarm in time to catch him. She should have realised ‘work at six’ meant he would be leaving the flat well before that. She returned to the bathroom to finish brushing her teeth and plucking the odd hairs from her eyebrows and top lip. Alone once more, she wandered into the kitchen to make coffee, only to find he’d thoughtfully left half a potful, still piping hot, over a low-burning flame.

By the time she left the flat, her materials bag and sketchbook under her arm, last night’s rain had already been gathered up by the impatient clouds and moved on toward the west, where no doubt it would soak the residents of Shrewsbury and Hay-on-Wye for the rest of the day. He glanced up at the sky. Although not clear, the clouds were no longer of the pendulous nimbus variety but had instead morphed into the fifty shades of cirrus grey, backlit from the early sun to give a flattened quality of light she generally referred to as ‘unshine.’

She could feel the city pressing against her with its usual indifference. Even here in the suburbs everything felt more claustrophobic, as if the world had shrunk by a miniscule amount, or everything within it took up a little more space. Such a thing was impossible, yet something had shifted. The skeleton she’d drawn, and the angel Paul had seen, or pretended to see, lingered in her mind like a Muybridge exposure. Every face she passed seemed caught between bone and soul, mortality and radiance.

The pavement glistened, reflecting fragments of sky and the building trying to reach it. Cars hissed past, their tires slicing through puddles, their drivers ignorant of the humanity around them as they hustled and jostled to get to work or drop their youngsters at school to leave them running riot for the hour before the school gates opened. Another bus rattled past, this one going in the other direction, into the city. She debated running to the next stop to catch it, but the combination of her weight making it hard to run and the pleasure she was getting on her walk was enough to persuade herself to save the two euros it would cost to be dropped off outside the art gallery and museum.  She stood next to a lamp post, mindful of the small mound of dog faeces a careless owner had avoided picking up and disposing of. Its brakes whined as it came to a stop outside the Chinese Takeaway, the sound like the one her vertebrae made when she craned her neck.

Roisin walked slowly, her eyes alert, her mind tuned to the motif that had taken root. She had not expected it to follow her beyond the conjecture of the night flat, but now it seemed to shape everything she saw.

At the bus stop, a woman leaned against the glass, her shoulders hunched, her eyes shadowed. To Roisin, the woman’s frame was skeletal — ribs visible beneath her coat, cheekbones sharp, sockets hollow. Yet in the tilt of her head, in the way her breath fogged the glass, Roisin glimpsed wings folded tight, the transition pressing outward and threatening to crack ribs. She wondered if Paul would have called her an angel, if he would have seen blessing where she saw fragility.