‘Orla?’ he shouted.
She didn’t turn: couldn’t hear him.
He shut the door, so as not to wake the old folks.
He walked forward, switched the music off.
Orla stopped what she was doing and turned, startled.
‘Orla?’ he said more softly. He looked at the canvases, back at her face, then again at the canvases. They were propped up all around the walls, in colours so vivid they were shocking. And… they chilled him, these paintings. There were swirls and huge great gouts of colour. The pictures were awash with an anguish that seemed to scream out at him.
‘Sorry,’ she said, turning away from him, back to what she was doing. ‘Did I disturb you?’
He looked at her. Everything she did disturbed him more, every day. He was getting a sinking feeling, and that saddened him. He’d been so thrilled to see her again. But… oh, something was wrong here. Something was terribly wrong.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, although it was obvious. He stared around at the paintings, the violent clashing colours, and he thought, My God, what is this?
Every single painting was of a man – tall, slender, handsome and pale, with neat red hair. The man was enveloped in a swirling tornado of colours, or down a dark tunnel, falling; smiling out of a canvas here, screaming out of another one there. She was painting Redmond, her twin, over and over again, like a stuck record.
Rufus didn’t know what to say.
He was seriously spooked. Orla’s old dad had spouted nonsense ever since he’d arrived, saying things like Redmond called today, while you were out.
Ah yes? his wife would say, with a smile that didn’t reach her sad eyes. Is that a fact?
But of course it wasn’t. Redmond was dead, and so were Tory and maybe Pat and even young Kieron. All dead, all gone.
This is a haunted place, thought Rufus with a shudder.
‘What do you think?’ she asked, and her smile had a manic edge to it that unnerved him. ‘Kieron was a painter, you know. Exhibited in Dublin and then in London, he was big news. Of course I don’t have his sort of talent, but I enjoy it. Whenever I can’t sleep, I come out here.’
Yeah, he thought. If someone’s in bed with you, someone you’re supposed to love, you can’t sleep. So you come here and do this.
His heart felt chilled in his chest. This wasn’t right. This behaviour… it was beyond him. He couldn’t understand it.
‘That’s Redmond,’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’ She paused, gazing at the canvas she was working on, her eyes caressing it. ‘It is.’
He moved closer. ‘You’re very talented,’ he said. He didn’t mean it. He was… horrified. Yes. That was the word. Horrified, and trying to understand where this madness might have come from. He hated the paintings. They made him think of Van Gogh’s mad desperate eruptions of colour, and of that one they called