A quarter of an hour went by. I slid the ring off my finger and rolled it back and forth to help me think. Because of its silvery twists and knots, it made a juddering sound on the wooden floor. I drew a smooth breath and let the ring go, watching as it rolled away and dropped through a gap in the skirting board. I waited for a rattle or a ping, but it disappeared without any sound at all. In my mind’s eye it fell and never stopped falling, as if there were an eternity of cobwebbed darkness beneath me, instead of just a house.

I uncapped the pen.

Freya, I wrote at the top of a fresh page. An exhibition of portraits by Cory Byrne. I rubbed my eyes and settled down, finally, to write.

Cory Byrne once gave me some advice. “Write what you know,” he said. “Write what you see; what’s there, in front of you.”

It would have been good advice if it hadn’t been offered so glibly; as if seeing—or knowing, or painting, or writing—is ever a simple thing . . .

It took me a while to shape my first ideas into sentences, but once they were on the page they gave rise to more. I forgot I was imprisoned in an attic, that I was freezing, and that Cory was going to kill me. There were a lot of crossings-out, but they weren’t passionate scrawls or furious scribbles—they were just lines I drew through the words that didn’t work.

I don’t think any amount of nakedness or intimacy or contortion can make a painting obscene. It’s only when humanity gets left out that things turn ugly. I don’t mean that the subject’s soul ought to be hoisted up a flagpole and waved about for all the world to see, but I do think it has to be referenced, subtly. Take Freya Sleeping, which manages to be obscene without any nudity at all . . .