The Other Half Lives

5

I’m cutting glass when I hear footsteps on the path outside. I look up, see a man’s face through the window. I don’t recognise him. Aidan stops what he’s doing. His foot is on the pedal of the mitre machine, but he doesn’t push it down. Normally he stops work only when he has to, when a customer is standing in front of him, and to pretend not to have noticed for a second longer would be too rude even for Aidan to get away with. A lot of the people we frame for dislike him, but they don’t go elsewhere. When I first started here, he told me, ‘You can be friendly to clients if you want to, but friendliness takes time. Your job, our job, is to protect the art people bring in. Remember that. Think of a picture as being in danger until it’s properly framed. Protection is at the heart of picture-framing. That’s why we do it-it’s not for decoration.’

The wooden door scrapes along the ground as it’s pushed open. ‘Hello?’ a deep voice calls out.

I’m about to answer when I see another face at the window and my breath turns solid in my lungs. Charlie Zailer. What’s she doing here? Are she and the man together?

‘You must be Ruth Bussey. DC Simon Waterhouse, Culver Valley CID.’ He opens a small wallet and shows me his police identification. He’s a heavy, rough-faced man with big hands and too-short trousers that don’t quite reach the tops of his shoes.

Sergeant Zailer smiles at me. She says nothing about my coat and I don’t ask. She hasn’t brought it with her. When she tells Aidan her name, I will him not to look at me, not to let his surprise show. ‘Okay if we have a chat?’ she says.

‘I’ve got work to do.’ Aidan doesn’t sound surprised, only sullen.

‘It won’t take long.’

‘I talked to him on Saturday.’ Aidan jerks his head in Waterhouse’s direction. ‘I’ve got nothing to add to what I said then.’

‘Have a guess where I spent most of this morning?’ Charlie Zailer’s tone is soothing and teasing at the same time.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Fifteen Megson Crescent.’

This is followed by a long silence. DC Waterhouse and I look at one another, wondering if one of us will have to break it; at least, that’s what I’m wondering.

‘Fifteen Megson Crescent is where Mary Trelease lives. That’s who I spent the morning with: Mary Trelease.’

Aidan gives her a cold look. ‘How can a dead woman live anywhere?’ he says. ‘I killed her.’

Sergeant Zailer nods. ‘Simon-that’s DC Waterhouse-he told me you’ve convinced yourself of that. I can assure you, you’re wrong. I met Mary Trelease, spoke to her, saw her breathing and moving around.’

Aidan pulls the underpinner towards him, takes two mitred frame edges and puts them in the machine. Back to work.

‘Do you think I’m lying?’

I can’t stand the stifling tension in the air. ‘Aidan, answer her!’

‘If you hop in the back of my car, I’ll take you to her house so that you can see for yourself that she’s fine.’

‘No.’

‘How did you meet Mary?’ Sergeant Zailer’s voice is gently insistent. ‘You didn’t tell Simon the full story, did you? Will you tell it to me?’

‘No.’

‘Mary says she’s never met you. Which, if she’s telling the truth, means you’ve never met her.’

He looks up, angry to have his attention taken away from his underpinning. ‘If I killed her, I must have met her. It’s simple logic.’ How can he be angry? How does he expect the police to react?

‘Okay,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘So tell me about meeting Mary.’

Silence. I stare at him, silently urging him to answer, knowing he won’t. My last hope is disintegrating and there’s nothing I can do. Nobody can help if Aidan won’t talk, not even the police.

‘Aidan? How many times did you and Mary meet before you killed her?’

‘He hasn’t killed anybody,’ I say, starting to cry.

Sergeant Zailer turns her attention to me. ‘Did he tell you he strangled Mary when she was naked? That he left her body in the middle of the bed, in the-’

‘Shut up,’ Aidan snaps.

A violent, sick feeling tears through me, making me gasp. Strangled. Naked.

‘I don’t think he told her,’ says Waterhouse. ‘Something I don’t understand: you did tell Ruth that you killed Mary Trelease years ago. And you told me I’d find the body in the bed if I went to 15 Megson Crescent. Did you really think a dead body might lie undiscovered in a house for years?’

Aidan measures a length of nylon hanging cord and cuts it, as if no one has spoken. He isn’t ignoring Waterhouse-it’s more than that. He’s pretending to be alone in the workshop, wishing us all away. ‘Say something, Aidan!’

‘Why don’t you, if he won’t?’ Charlie Zailer asks me. ‘You lied to me. You said you didn’t know Mary Trelease, but she knows you. She told me she lost you your job, then felt guilty about it and gave you a painting. That true?’

I nod, forcing myself not to look at Aidan. I have no way of knowing how much of the story Mary told her.

‘So you first met Mary when?’

‘Last June.’

‘June. So when Aidan told you in December that he’d killed her years ago, you’d in fact met her six months previously. Presumably you told him he was mistaken. Ruth? Did you tell him that?’

‘I…’

‘She told me,’ says Aidan. ‘I told her she was wrong, same as I told DC Gibbs and DC Waterhouse.’

‘Mary Trelease is an artist,’ Waterhouse takes over, and I release the breath I’ve been holding. He isn’t interested in the Spilling Gallery, my run-in with Mary. No one can force me to talk about it if I don’t want to. ‘Your work must bring you into contact with lots of artists. What do you think of them?’

‘Some are all right.’

‘The ones who aren’t-what’s wrong with them?’

Aidan sighs. ‘They treat me like a skivvy.’ He raises his hands. ‘Manual work. It can’t be a skilled profession if you get your hands dirty, that’s what some of them think. You meet them in a restaurant in town and they stare at you blankly-they don’t recognise you clean. When you say hello to them and they make the connection, you can see the shock on their faces: a common labourer in a posh restaurant-who’d have believed it? Then you get the ones who paint the same picture over and over again and think they’ve got a unique style, rather than only one idea, and the ones who only paint in their favourite colours, the same ones they buy all their clothes and carpet their living rooms in.’

‘You really don’t like artists,’ says Sergeant Zailer.

‘Let’s have one thing clear: I didn’t kill Mary Trelease because of anything to do with her being an artist. I didn’t know she was one until Ruth told me.’

‘Where’s the painting she gave you?’ Waterhouse asks me. ‘Can we see it?’

Pressure builds in my head. ‘I haven’t got it any more.’

‘How come?’

‘I…’ I look at Aidan, but he turns away, lines up two more lengths of glued moulding. Why should I lie to protect him when he won’t tell me what I’m protecting him from? ‘I gave the picture to Aidan,’ I tell Waterhouse. ‘I haven’t seen it since.’

Aidan shoves the underpinner away. ‘Mary Trelease is dead,’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘Dead people don’t paint pictures. Ruth brought home a picture by somebody-it was ugly, so I took it to a charity shop.’ He’s lying.

Charlie Zailer takes a step forward. ‘The front bedroom at 15 Megson Crescent is full of Mary’s paintings. So full I could hardly get in. You say you didn’t know she was an artist. Weren’t the paintings there when you were, when you killed her?’

‘He didn’t kill her!’

I’m surprised when he answers. ‘No. No paintings, nowhere in the house.’

I catch the look that passes between Sergeant Zailer and DC Waterhouse. They’re about to give up.

‘I have to go out,’ Aidan says.

‘Where?’ I ask, at the same time as DC Waterhouse is saying, ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Aidan?’

‘No. I believe in the material world: facts and science. I don’t believe dead women come back to life,’ he says quietly.

‘Then, in your opinion, who is the woman that Sergeant Zailer, DC Gibbs and I have all met at 15 Megson Crescent? If you’re certain you killed Mary Trelease, then the woman who looks like her and owns her home and paints her paintings, who has her passport, driving licence and other documents-she must be a ghost, surely-a very well-equipped one at that.’

‘I told you: I don’t believe in ghosts.’ Aidan walks over to the small basin in the corner and turns both taps on hard. The workshop’s plumbing is ancient; there’s as much noise as there is water. ‘The next time you come looking for me, be ready to charge me, or I’ll have nothing to say.’ He washes and dries his hands.

‘You didn’t answer Ruth’s question,’ says Waterhouse. ‘You volunteer that you killed someone years ago, but you won’t tell her where you’re going this afternoon.’

‘Get out.’

‘I think we’ve overstayed our welcome, Simon,’ says Charlie Zailer.

‘You did that when you crossed the threshold,’ Aidan tells her. She gives him a contemptuous look on her way out.

Waterhouse lingers. ‘You came to us, remember? Or does your memory wipe out things that have happened as well as inventing things that haven’t?’

He’s gone. They’re both gone. Aidan slams the door, leans his head against it. Once he’s breathing steadily again, he says, ‘You said you went to the police. You didn’t tell me you went to Charlotte Zailer.’

I haven’t got the energy to pretend it was a coincidence that she turned up. Let him think what he wants.

‘She’s not your friend, Ruth. She might mean something to you, but you’re nothing to her.’

‘Where’s the picture? Abberton-what have you done with it? Tell me what’s going on.’

‘Do you believe what Waterhouse said? That my memory’s inventing things that haven’t happened?’ He starts to come towards me. ‘If it hasn’t happened, it’s not a memory. Do you think it’s possible to see the future?’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘A clear image-like a photo, or a film-of something that hasn’t happened yet but is going to happen.’

‘No! Stop it! You’re scaring me.’

‘Me strangling that bitch Trelease-putting my hands round her throat and squeezing…’

‘Don’t.’ I back away from him. He looks determined and, at the same time, terribly afraid. Like a man walking into a fire.

‘They say she’s alive. You say she’s alive. Maybe you’re all right. If you’re right, then what I’m seeing in my head can’t be the past. What if I haven’t killed her, but I’m going to?’

‘Aidan, don’t do this,’ I beg, putting my arms round him. He’s rigid, like stone. ‘What you’re saying’s not possible.’

‘Abberton,’ he mutters. ‘It’s part of a series. She hasn’t done them all yet-maybe only that one, the first. But she’ll do more. I can tell you how many there are going to be: nine. I can tell you what their names will be.’ He pushes me out of the way, pulls the lid off a blue marker pen and starts to write on the side of a cardboard poster tube. He reads aloud as he writes, like someone in a trance. ‘Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.’

I stare at him, wondering who he is, who he’s turning into. He’s sane. When I told Charlie Zailer that, I believed it. ‘Aidan, you’re making no sense,’ I say shakily.

He grips my arm. ‘Go back to Megson Crescent,’ he whispers, his face close to mine. ‘If it’s the future, it can change. It has to change. Tell her not to do the other paintings-make her stop. Tell her to get out of Spilling and go somewhere I won’t find her…’

‘Stop it!’ I scream. ‘Let go of me! It’s not true. It’s not possible to see the future! Why won’t you tell me the truth?’

‘Why won’t you tell me the truth? What happened at Hansard’s gallery that made you leave? What happened between you and her? You’ve never told me, not really. You want to know what I’ve done with Abberton? You want to know where I’m going when I walk out of here now? Tell me the story!’

‘There’s nothing to tell!’ I sob. No questions; we agreed. Does he remember how we used to be, how easily we understood each other?

He pushes me away as if he can’t stand to touch me any more, and heads for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way out. Alone in the workshop, I lock the door and turn off all the lights. I huddle in the corner by the electric heater and whisper to myself, ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ as if by saying it I can make it true.

I first noticed the Spilling Gallery because of a painting that was in the window. I’d only lived in the Culver Valley for eleven days at that point, though I regarded it as my home in the sense that I had no plans to go elsewhere. On the day I’d left Lincoln, I’d opened my road atlas at the page that showed a picture of the whole of Britain, closed my eyes and brought my index finger down on a random spot that turned out to be Combingham, a soulless town twelve miles west of Spilling, all precinct centres and roundabouts. I drove there and hated it on sight, so I got back in the car and drove away, with no idea where I was going.

I didn’t go back the way I came; I took random turns, drove random distances before turning again. All I had with me apart from my grubby VW Passat was one hold-all containing a toothbrush and other necessary items; everything else I owned was in storage, and I was prepared never to see any of it again.

I took a left, then a right, then drove straight on for a mile or so. Eventually, when it dawned on me that I would have, at some point, to stop, I set myself a limit: I would drive in any direction that took my fancy, and wherever I found myself after thirty minutes was where I would stay. As long as it wasn’t Lincoln or Combingham it would be all right.

I ended up on Spilling High Street, parked on a double yellow line only metres from Saul Hansard’s gallery and framing shop, though I didn’t notice it then. I don’t know if there were different pictures in the window, or whether my picture was there and I wasn’t paying attention, but as I walked up and down the road looking at my new home town, the Spilling Gallery didn’t register with me at all. At that point I hadn’t thought about paintings or art for more than about twenty seconds in total in my entire life, and most of those twenty seconds had been forced on me by the radio or the television, usually prompting me to change channels.

I noticed a wool shop called Country Yarns, lots of expensive boutiques selling clothes-separate ones for men, women and children. Those selling ‘ladies’ wear’ mostly had long, elegant names that sounded as if they belonged to princesses. I made a point of not looking at the tiny maternity-wear shop with its pistachio-green-painted front, knowing it would never be relevant to me. It was unlikely I’d ever be able to have a baby; I didn’t deserve one, in any case. There were three or four pubs that couldn’t have looked more traditionally English if they’d tried, each with a more elaborately worded sign than the last, advertising the landlords as ‘purveyors of fine quality fayre’. An independent bookshop caught my eye, and I decided I’d pay it a visit as soon as I’d got some accommodation sorted out; I didn’t know anyone in Spilling and planned to avoid all forms of socialising, so I would be doing a lot of reading, and the four books I’d packed in my black hold-all wouldn’t last me long.

In so far as anything could please me, I was pleased to see a market square with a church at one end, and, at the other, a music shop selling sheet music and instruments, a cheese shop and a gift shop called ‘Surprises and Secrets’. The church was a beautiful building and, as long as I didn’t have to set foot inside it, I was prepared to live near it and admire its contribution to the landscape. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people who attended its services did so by choice.

I walked into the first pub I came to, the Brown Cow, because there was a board outside it advertising rooms to let. The landlord seemed happy to rent one to me. He asked me how many nights I wanted it for. I opened my mouth, then found I had no answer ready. I didn’t have a plan. ‘Two weeks?’ I suggested tentatively, prepared to be rebuffed.

His eyes lit up. ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘And if you want to stay longer, you’ll be more than welcome.’

Tears pricked my eyes and I had to look away. He was being too nice to me. Not knowing me, he wasn’t aware that I deserved none of his kindness. Maybe I’ll stay here until all my money runs out, I thought, and then go and jump in a river. All the books I’d read over the past four years-since Him and Her-had failed to convince me that this wouldn’t be in many ways the best course of action. I’d made a decent profit from the sale of my house in Lincoln; it would take me a year, maybe two, to give it all away to the storage company in Lincoln and the landlord of the Brown Cow. It would be an interesting experiment, I thought: see how much I wanted to survive. If I ran out of money and wanted to live, I would be forced to do something about it. Or else I could not live. Five or six years after the event, no one would be able to say I hadn’t let a decent interval elapse. I’d have had more than half a decade, by then, to reflect on what I’d done.

My first eleven days in Spilling were unremarkable. I slept a lot, went out for little walks round town. Every day I went to the independent bookshop, ‘Word on the Street’. Never, I thought after my first visit, has a shop had a less appropriate name. Far from being hip and contemporary, Word on the Street-or Word, as everyone in Spilling seemed to call it-looked exactly like my idea of the perfect second-hand bookshop, except with new instead of used stock: low ceilings; creaking floors; several storeys, each a completely different shape from the others; not-quite-straight passageways leading from children’s books to poetry, from the fiction wall to military history.

Within a week I’d bought Word’s entire ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ section, and the manager had promised to replenish his supplies. I nearly bought a book called Shame, the memoir of a woman who had escaped the arranged marriage her parents had tried to force upon her. I took it off the shelf, then happened to glance up and see a label that said ‘Biography’ at the top of the free-standing bookcase. The word made me think of my father, and I had to put the book back, even though I wanted to read it.

On my eleventh morning as a Spilling resident, I went into the cheese shop, Spilling Cheeses-at least half of the local shops were called Spilling this or that-and its owner, instead of asking if she could help me, launched into a monologue. ‘I’ve seen you wandering up and down the high street,’ she said. ‘You do a lot of walking, don’t you? You look at all the shops, but more often that not you don’t go in. I’ve been wondering when you’d come in here.’

This was nearly enough to drive me out, and it certainly put me off buying any cheese, but I didn’t want to appear rude. People who have made no serious mistakes in their lives might not understand this, but once you’ve done something wrong and suffered as a result, good behaviour takes on the utmost importance. I’d resolved never to behave badly again, in my eyes or in the world’s. I knew there were people who were never condemned by anybody, not for a single word or deed: uncontroversial people, ordinary people. That was the sort of person I needed to be.

‘If you like a good walk, you’re crazy to march up and down the pavement, with all the car fumes and the noise,’ said Spilling Cheeses’ owner. ‘There’s lovely countryside less than five minutes away by car-nice and peaceful. Middle of nowhere, really. You won’t meet another soul. I can direct you if you want.’

I smiled, told her ‘No, thank you,’ and left in a hurry, my heart pounding. I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere, or even near it. I wanted other souls, plenty of them. I didn’t want to speak to them or strike up friendships, but I wanted them to be there in case one day I needed them. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong place, I thought. Maybe I should go to Birmingham or Manchester or London. I walked quickly up the street, careful not to look back at the cheese shop. Then I started to feel dizzy, as if I was going to fall. I stopped and leaned my head against the nearest window, hoping the glass would be cold.

It was. I pressed my burning forehead against it and imagined the coolness moving in waves from outside my head to inside. After a few seconds I felt stronger, and peeled myself off the window, embarrassed, hoping no one had seen me. There was an opaque patch on the glass in front of me where my breath had misted it, and behind that, a painting. The frame was black, but the picture itself was long and red. At first I thought red was the only colour, but then I saw small, uneven gold lines behind the red blotches. Standing back, I saw that they weren’t blotches at all, but textured circles and ovals, almost like oversized fingerprints. Each one was a slightly different shade and shape-some were more orange, some seemed to have a blue undertone.

There were dozens of colours in the picture, not one. When I looked carefully, I saw that every colour was in it. And, depending on how far away from it I stood, the intriguing shapes’ relationships to one another changed. From close up, a smeared-looking orange sphere appeared to leap forward, but when I stood back, some of the longer, oval-shaped forms seemed more prominent.

I felt something move inside me, pushing away the layers of fear, guilt, shame and anger that had piled up in my heart and stifled all my memories of past happiness and, along with them, any hope of future happiness, since if you can’t remember ever having felt a certain way then you can’t believe you ever did or will again. It wasn’t only that the painting was beautiful, or that when I looked at it, I felt that a bit of that beauty belonged to me; I felt as if someone was trying to communicate with me. It was a connection, a positive connection with another person, the artist-someone entirely non-threatening because I had never met them, nor was I likely to.

I had to have that picture. I pushed open the door to the Spilling Gallery and told the man I found inside-Saul Hansard-that I wanted the painting in the window and I would pay any price for it. ‘Really?’ He chuckled. ‘What if I said seventy-five thousand pounds?’

‘I haven’t got seventy-five thousand pounds. How much is it?’

‘You’re in luck, then. It’s two hundred and fifty pounds.’

I grinned. In luck. It felt true, for the first time in four years. ‘Who painted it? What is it? Do you know anything about it?’

‘Artist by the name of Jane Fielder. She lives in Yorkshire. It’s the only one of hers I’ve got, or I’d be trying to flog you some more. Something Wicked, this one’s called.’ He was taking it out of the window as he spoke. ‘See the faint gold writing behind the red thumbprints?’

‘Thumbprints,’ I murmured. So I’d been right, almost.

‘Well, not really, but that’s what they’re supposed to represent. The gold writing goes all the way down, see? Two lines, repeated: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes.” Agatha Christie, via William Shakespeare.’ Saul Hansard smiled at me and introduced himself. I didn’t mind telling him my name because he was so obviously harmless. He was short, in his mid-sixties, I guessed, with flyaway sandy hair, bifocal glasses and trousers that were held up by red braces. I didn’t know then that he wore the braces every day. He was thin and had one of those straight-up-and-down bodies, almost like a boy’s-like a ten-year-old, tall for his age.

I took Something Wicked back to my room at the Brown Cow and leaned it against the wall. Looking at it became my main daily activity. I also, from then on, went to the Spilling Gallery every day. At first Saul kept explaining to me apologetically that he wasn’t going to get new work in for a while. I didn’t care. I was happy to look at the paintings he had on the walls, however many times I’d seen them before and even though I’d decided I didn’t want to buy them. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. Most of them were good, I thought, but they didn’t make me feel the way Something Wicked did.

When I found out Saul framed as well as sold pictures, I started to spend afternoons with him in his workshop at the back of the gallery because it was a way of seeing more art. He was always behind with his workload, and while he got on with float-mounting and bevelling to a constant soundtrack of Classic FM, I would sift through piles of pictures waiting to be framed, looking for something that might mean as much to me as Something Wicked did.

After about a month, Saul said to me, ‘Forgive me if I’m being nosey, Ruth, but… you evidently don’t have a job.’

I told him I didn’t. Looking at art was my job as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t care if no one paid me for it.

‘You wouldn’t by any chance like to work here, would you?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’m losing customers all the time, with it being just me-people come in and they can’t find anyone because I’m here in the back, and so they turn tail and leave. I’ve been thinking that what I could really do with is a friendly face to welcome-’

‘Yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘I’d love to.’

Saul beamed. ‘What a stroke of luck,’ he said. He uses the word luck a lot; it was one of the things I liked about him. ‘You’re here anyway, so you might as well be paid for it. And you can be the first to see any new work that comes in.’

My life changed very quickly after that. I knew I couldn’t stay at the Brown Cow; I would need somewhere bigger, somewhere that could accommodate all the art I was going to buy. I rented Blantyre Lodge, got my things out of storage, raided Word on the Street’s art section and read as much as I could about famous artists and their work.

I took occasional days off to go to Silsford, where there was another gallery that sold contemporary art, and found the second picture I fell in love with there: Tree of Life by an artist called Lynda Thomas. It was a stylised image of a tree with black branches that twisted upwards like thick curls of hair. If you fixed your eye on it and moved around the room, you saw little metallic glimmers of red, gold and silver peeping out from between the leaves. The background was midnight blue, and the tree, though dark, shone against it, full of a hidden mysterious force, but nothing dangerous, nothing threatening. The painting wasn’t sentimental, though it might easily have been were the artist less talented.

I said all of this to Saul, not in the least embarrassed. I had known nothing about art for most of my life, but my sudden passion for it had given me confidence. I knew I was right because I felt it; I didn’t care about critics or experts, and whether they’d agree with me.

Gradually, I built up a collection. I branched out from paintings to sculptures. I relaxed my rule a bit and allowed myself to buy work that I didn’t love quite as much as Something Wicked and Tree of Life. In an art collection, I decided, one didn’t necessarily need or want to respond to every piece with the same intensity. Besides, I discovered, some pictures grew on you. I told Saul about my change of policy, explaining that, as well as soulmates, a person needs friends and acquaintances. He agreed. ‘Have you got any friends, Ruth?’ he asked me, looking concerned. In general he avoided asking me personal questions; I could hardly begrudge him this one.

‘I’ve got you,’ I said, eyes fixed on the art magazine I was reading.

‘Yes, but… apart from me. Have you got anyone else that you… see?’

‘I see you,’ I replied determinedly, starting to feel uneasy. ‘Why? You’re not planning on ditching me, are you? Closing the gallery and running off somewhere without telling me?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ said Saul. ‘With any luck, I’ll be around for a long time.’ It struck me that this was an odd way for him to put it. I looked up to catch his expression, but his face gave nothing away. I’d been working for him for two years by that point. Was he worried about what would happen to me after he died? Surely not. I didn’t know exactly how old he was, but he was certainly on the right side of seventy. I didn’t like to think about Saul dying, so I changed the subject back to art. It was the only thing I was interested in talking about, and Saul seemed happy to indulge me.

As it turned out, I was the one who deserted him, though it was the last thing I wanted to do; he was the only companion I had and I’d grown to love him.

On 18 June 2007-several dates are etched for ever on my brain, and this is one of them-I was sitting behind the counter, reading an art book called Still Life with a Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert, when a woman walked into the gallery. I recognised her, having seen her once or twice before, but didn’t know her name. She belonged to the category of Saul’s regulars that he and I called ‘the Rudies’-the people who, if they found me in the gallery, would ignore me and walk straight through to the back to find Saul.

I tried to smile, as I always did when a Rudie walked in, but got no response. The woman, dressed in a tasselled gypsy skirt and white trainers, and with a mass of curly silver-threaded black hair, was carrying a picture under her arm. I saw only the back of it as she strode past me without saying hello.

I shook my head at her rudeness and turned back to my book. A few seconds later she was back, the painting still under her arm. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got a picture I want him to frame-today, ideally.’

‘Isn’t he there?’

‘Not unless he’s invisible.’

‘Um… I don’t know. He must have nipped out.’

‘Did you see him go out?’ she asked impatiently.

‘No, but-’

‘How long’s he likely to be?’

‘Not long.’ I smiled. ‘He’s probably popped out the back and across to the post office. Can I help you at all?’

She looked down at me as if I were a piece of rubbish, contaminating her space. ‘You haven’t so far,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait five minutes. If Saul’s not back by then I’ll have to leave. I’m not wasting my whole day hanging round here-I’ve got work to do.’ She leaned the canvas board she’d been carrying against my desk and started to circle the gallery, looking at the pictures Saul and I had hung a few days earlier. ‘Lame,’ she said loudly about the first one she came to. Then she marched quickly past the others, offering a one-word comment on each of them: ‘Dismal. Lame. Pretentious. Vacuous. Hideous. I see nothing’s changed around here.’

The picture she’d brought in was tall, and she’d propped it up against the part of the desk I was sitting behind-perhaps deliberately to annoy me by obscuring my view of the room. On the back of the board someone had scrawled, in capital letters, the word ‘ABBERTON’. I wondered if it was her surname.

Her outright condemnation of every painting she saw made me curious to see the one she wanted Saul to frame. Whether she’d painted it or someone else had, she clearly deemed it worth spending money on. No one frames art they don’t value. I stood up and walked round the desk to look at the picture. She must have sensed me move because she whirled round, the bottom of her tasselled skirt whooshing out in a circle. It had a hole in it, I noticed. Her face was a mask of suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. Did she imagine I was glued to my chair? Why shouldn’t I move freely around the gallery, as she was? I worked there, after all.

When I looked at the painting, I had the same feeling I’d had when I first saw Something Wicked, except stronger. It was like instant hypnosis, a magnetic attraction. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The background-painted in dark greens, browns, purples and greys so that you could only just make it out, so that it looked as if it was in the shadows-was a residential street with houses all along it, a loop at one end, the shape of which had been massively exaggerated; it looked almost like a noose, with the rest of the road being the rope. The street was a cul-de-sac: Megson Crescent, though I didn’t know that at the time.

The rude woman must have noticed my reaction because she said, ‘You don’t need to tell me it’s good. I know it’s good.’

I was too startled by the picture’s power to say anything. At its centre, standing in the scene, was the outline of a person. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman. Apart from its shape, there was nothing human about the figure; inside the thin black line that separated it from the rest of the picture was a mass of what looked like hard feathers, scraps of material-gauze, perhaps-some white, some with colour painted on. A churned-up angel: that’s what it made me think of. It should have been grotesque, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. ‘Did you do it?’ I asked.

She told me she did.

‘It’s amazing.’

Flattery usually worked, even with the rudest of the Rudies, but it didn’t on her. Every few seconds she frowned at the door, as if willing Saul to walk through it. I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ruth Bussey,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, even though I’ve seen you before.’

‘We haven’t,’ she agreed.

‘Is your name Abberton? I noticed-’

‘No. Abberton is the person in the picture.’ She didn’t tell me her name. When I kept looking at her, she raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Do you want to make something of it?’

I turned back to the painting. ‘Is it…?’

‘No. It’s not for sale.’

‘Oh.’ I was horribly disappointed, and couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly challenge her-it was her painting, after all-but I knew I had to have it, had to be able to take it home with me.

‘I’m going,’ said the woman. ‘Tell Saul he needs a new business plan, one that knows the difference between being open and being closed.’ I was about to ask her name when she moved to pick up the canvas board, and I realised she was going to take it away.

I nearly cried out. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Even if it’s not for sale, can you… could you tell me something about it? What made you paint it? Who’s Abberton?’

She let out a long sigh. ‘He’s nobody, all right? Absolutely nobody at all.’

He. So Abberton was a man. ‘Do you ever make prints from your originals?’ I asked ‘Sometimes artists…’

‘Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘You cannot buy this picture, Ruth Bussey.’ Her skin looked like paper that someone had screwed up, then flattened out to find all the creases still there. I didn’t like the way she’d said my name, particularly since she hadn’t told me hers. ‘Get over it. Buy another picture.’

I thought she’d given me a glimmer of hope. ‘Have you got others I could look at, ones that are for sale?’

Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from me,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work-it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist…

She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.

She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That’s someone else’s picture!’

‘It’s someone else’s appalling picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’

She’d done it deliberately. I read her words, the ones she planned to leave for Saul to find. Most of them were obscenities. If he didn’t take one look at that note and decide never to frame anything for this awful woman again, there was something wrong with him. I looked at the bottom of the scrap of paper for a signature, but there wasn’t one-I’d interrupted her before she’d had a chance to sign her letter.

I decided I didn’t want to buy Abberton after all. It would have spoiled it for me, knowing the person who had painted it thought nothing of vandalising another artist’s work.

I felt more upset than I could justify to myself. The picture I loved, even though I’d only seen it for the first time five minutes ago, had been ruined for me. More than that: it was as if art had been ruined, the thing that had started to cure the ache in my soul. Now it felt tainted. ‘Why do you want to destroy other people’s work?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. ‘Can’t you bear the idea of anyone having talent apart from you?’

I turned round and walked back to the gallery area, shaking. A few seconds later my hair was yanked back, as if my ponytail had caught on something. I cried out in pain. It was her. She spun me round and pushed me against a wall, knocking me into a picture. It crashed to the floor and the glass broke, falling in pieces around my feet. She’s going to wreck the gallery, I thought-all our paintings, and it would be my fault. It’s always my fault. What would I tell Saul?

One of her hands was flat against my chest, the other behind her back. That was when I started to get frightened. What was she holding? She’d been in Saul’s workshop, where there were knives. Saws. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Nothing. I just… I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me. Let me go!’ A storm began to rage in my mind. The same words again, the ones I’d said over and over to Her when she yanked the tape off my mouth: don’t hurt me, please, let me go. I was no longer aware of the woman with the grey-black hair, or the gallery. The present dissolved into the past; there could never be anything but Him and Her; that one attack would last for ever, in one guise or another.

The wild-haired woman’s hand emerged from behind her back. I saw a canister: paint. Red. My body felt formless, as if it was breaking up. She held her weapon close to my face and sprayed. I screamed. It went in my mouth and eyes, and when I closed them, she carried on spraying. I felt a heavy wetness all over my face and neck, stinging, hardening. I tried to move, but I couldn’t.

‘What on earth…?’ Saul’s voice.

I heard a splash, then something rolling, a metallic sound. I tried to open my eyes, saw thin red ropes in front of them where my lashes had been glued together. Her hand released me. I mumbled, ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Saul and the woman were shouting over one another, saying things I didn’t want to hear. I had to get to the door. I had to get out of there. I didn’t pick up my handbag or my jacket. I was free to move, so I ran.

I didn’t stop running until I got home. I didn’t have my keys with me-they were in my bag-so I sat on the grass outside Blantyre Lodge in the rain, shaking, for what felt like hours. I could have sat in the porch but I wanted to get soaked, to wash everything away. At some point Saul appeared. He’d brought my things. He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I put my hands over my ears, hysterical, my face still covered in red paint that made my skin feel tight, like a mask. The downpour hadn’t shifted it. The paint that framers use to spray mouldings is thick, greasy; it doesn’t wash off easily. People hurrying out of the park, on their way to shelter from the sudden bad weather, stared at me, then turned away quickly. One little boy pointed and laughed, before his mother stopped him. I didn’t care. No one could get me here-the crazy artist couldn’t, Him and Her couldn’t. Not in the middle of a public park.

Eventually Saul went away. I haven’t spoken to him since, though for weeks after that awful day he left me regular phone messages. He said he understood that I didn’t want to go back to the gallery, and why I didn’t want to speak to him or talk about what had happened, but he needed to phone me from time to time, he explained, even if I never answered. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t forgotten about me, that he still cared.

The last message he left, early last August, was different. I heard that his voice had changed; he didn’t sound sad any more-he sounded determined. He gave me Aidan’s name and address, told me Aidan needed someone to work for him. ‘My loss will be his gain,’ he said. ‘And yours, I hope. Please, Ruth. Do this for my sake as well as yours. I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past-I’m not a fool, I know something must have. Maybe I should have asked… Anyway. I won’t let you ruin the rest of your life. Go and see Aidan. He’ll look after you.’

I remember I laughed at this, sitting in the dark in my house, smoking yet another cigarette. Look after me, with so many people intent on doing me harm? Him and Her, the crazy artist with the silver-black hair whose name I didn’t know, with her can of red paint… Everyone knew I wasn’t worth looking after, because I was too pathetic and helpless to look after myself. Aidan Seed, I was certain, would be no exception.