Telling tales of ordinary and extraordinary women

Embroidered mantel pelmet made by Catherine Dickens, 1853 © Charles Dickens Museum

These stories have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.

Two Portraits

I

There is no heartbeat. Her hand is pressed against his chest but the cavity is hollow.

A muscle in her cheek jerks. There is a razor ache in the tendons of her right arm from holding the doorknob. She tries to empty her mind, to think only of the scene. She is losing her love to a doomed battle. She is using the force of her body to hold him back and knowing, even in the movement, that it is hopeless.

But now she is thinking of Charlie in the grove, the violent bruised shadows under his eyes. There were sprays of blossom on the ground and, every time he moved, the flowers released a deathly perfume.

His whole body was wired with tension. He was saying, do you understand, Katey, and holding tightly the tender place between her thumb and forefinger. How could she explain that she was the only one who could understand, that she was happy to be used by him, because she was using him in turn.

There is a thick silence in the room. The only sounds are the stroke of the painter’s brush, or the old lady’s occasional dry cough. Sometimes they break into casual chatter. She stays silent. She likes to hear the painter talk. His strange tufty hair moves above the canvas like fungi sprouting.

A yawning feeling of dread is in her now, for the painting is almost finished, and she never wants to leave the studio. To leave means going home, to the poisoned house and the empty space where her mother should be. To the splayed silk carcass of her wedding dress, and the white corset like a network of fish bones on the bed. If only they would leave her here, in the room as it darkens, lying on the breast of her wooden love.

By Rosa Chalfen