Chapter 12.1

 

Putin's Sheffield

By morning, the urge to return to return to the gallery had become a pressure behind her sternum. She tried to ignore it, but the ever-changing paintings, never mind the coruscating prisms in her bedroom ceiling, made it impossible. She made tea. She sat by the window. She opened her sketch book and tried to draw portraits like the one the man on the train had liked so much. But whatever she put to paper – be it pen, pencil, pastel or charcoal – ending up being an anatomical study of skeletal parts: a spine curling out of the rim of a toilet bowl; a femur inside a ribcage; a ram’s skull with forward-facing human eye sockets. She’d drawn skulls and bones in still-life art classes, certainly, but where the detailed knowledge of the precise nodules of human bones came from, she’d no idea. Eventually she gave up drawing and a bad job but her attempts at continuing her painting were no better. The gallery tugged at her like a thread caught on her sleeve.

By noon, she gave in.

The sky was the same washed-out grey as the day before, but the air felt heavier, as though the town were holding a collective breath. Roisin walked quickly, her steps sharper than usual, her pulse a little too fast. The smell of the brewery cloaked the air, an invisible miasma of boiling hops and Marmite. She told herself she was only going to look again, to confirm what she’d seen. To prove to herself that the paintings were just paintings.

But beneath that rational veneer was something else—something like anticipation, or dread, or recognition. Deep down she knew they weren’t just paintings. There was something extraordinary about them. Something kaleidoscopic.

The gallery appeared between locksmith and soapmaker, like a memory she had stepped back into. When had she last seen a shop selling soap outside of Etsy? Handmade soaps were a luxury item from bygone times; the only time she ever saw them now was on craft market stores and budget stores at Christmas time. The gallery’s deep green façade absorbed the light just as before. The vulva-shaped stone still held the door open. The handwritten sign still hung in the window, though the ink looked smudged, as if caressed by yesterday’s rain.

Roisin paused at the threshold. The warmth inside drifted toward her, carrying the familiar scent of varnish and old wood. She stepped inside, barely glancing at the window display of West Highland Terriers and old-timey Wolverhampton.

The gallery was quiet. Too quiet. The work-experience shop assistant wasn’t at the counter. The lights were on, but the space felt as hollow as a desecrated tomb, as though someone had just left in a hurry. Roisin hesitated, listening. No footsteps. No voices. Only the faint hum of the heating system.

She moved deeper into the gallery, her boots soft against the floorboards. The first few paintings were unchanged: landscapes, still lifes, the mournful dog. But when she turned the corner toward the far wall, her breath caught.

The large abstracts were still there. But there was something different about them.

She stepped closer, her eyes narrowing. The colours seemed darker than before, as though they had deepened overnight. The bruised purples had turned almost black. The ochres had taken on a sickly green tint. The pale smears had spread, like mould creeping across the surface of a fruitcake.

Roisin blinked. She leaned in. The brushstrokes were the same, but the shapes had shifted. The curve that had resembled a rib now looked more like a spine. The cluster of mottled colours had rearranged into something unmistakably like a shoulder. The pale smear had elongated, forming the suggestion of a face—half-formed, half-erased.

Her stomach tightened.

She stepped back, then forward again, as though testing whether the change was real or imagined. The paintings seemed to pulse, subtly, as though breathing. She felt the same sensation she’d felt on the steps the night the woman fell—the sense of standing at the threshold of something she didn’t yet understand.

“Hello?” she called softly.

Her voice sounded too loud in the quiet space. No answer.

She turned toward the counter. Still empty. A mug sat beside the till, the coffee within long gone cold, a ring of scum around the lip, just beginning to bloom with bacterial fungi. A shop-wrapped sandwich lay on a shelf beneath, out of sight of any customer in front of the counter. Roisin could clearly see the bloom of mould over the white bread and the sickly green tinge to the filling. She bent to read the label. Ham and cheddar had become jerky and stilton, though the sell-by date was listed as tomorrow. A scarf lay draped over the back of the chair, as though the assistant had stepped away only moments ago, except it was tattered, like a flag still hanging over a battlefield long after every soldier had died.