The words were written in soft pencil, in slightly cramped, amateur cursive, at the top right. Beneath that, her name had been written in pencil again, with the intent to fill the whole of the wood board with more detailed flourishes: a looping M, a spiral on the g.
Picking up the painting, Meredith examined it as if for the first time. She flipped the canvas. Bold geometric shapes painted in a symmetrical pattern. It was not terrible, but she saw where the white had overlapped the black and remembered how its lack of perfection had annoyed her at the time.
She’d have been thirteen or fourteen when the painting was returned to her at the end of term. A shy girl in an oversized school cardigan, the sleeves forcefully pulled long, perpetually tethered in her fists. Her teacher congratulated her on her work, remarking that styling the circles like eyes had "brought the canvas alive". Meredith hadn’t done it on purpose, but she smiled anyway and accepted the generous grade. Afterwards, she felt slightly disappointed that the teacher was so eager to find depth, in places where none was intended.
She could bring to mind that version of herself, but it seemed like someone she’d witnessed, not inhabited.
She continued to pull dusty items from the storage space under the eaves: a printed canvas of a Banksy rat that made her snort with derision, and a cheaply framed poster for a documentary that had once been a favorite among the trendsetting crowd. These were definitely not keepers.
She felt a sting as her cigarette burned down to her middle finger. She groped for the ashtray that was now hidden amongst assorted debris on her floor. Finding the heavy blue ashtray, branded with Ruddles Best Bitter in blocky caps, she roughly stabbed the cigarette at its base, although it was all filter now.
Standing upright, she grabbed two plastic bags of clothes in one hand and awkwardly arranged the three pictures under the other arm.
As she descended the three flights, the chill of the stairwell enveloped her, and the sound of her flip-flops echoed against the concrete walls.
At street level, a man was lingering around the skip, where she’d earlier discarded a small side table. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his head inspecting the skip like a pigeon pecking at crumbs. He was in his mid-thirties, with a bad, choppy haircut and wore shorts inappropriate for the December climate. He turned as she approached, smiling confidently. He was waiting for her deposit, like a shopper in the sales hoping to get a bargain.
She flipped the plastic bags into the skip. She would have thrown the art in too, but it seemed uncharitable, so she smiled at the man, shrugged, and placed them at the foot of the skip. As she walked back to the flats, she paused by the gate. The man was holding up the old geometric painting, first landscape then portrait, evaluating it. He laughed to himself, taking the Banksy canvas too, and waddled out into the street with his quarry.
