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The studio at St Ephraim’s smelt faintly of turpentine and damp wool, the windows sweating slightly against the late afternoon chill, and Avril had leant into the canvas for so long that her lower back had begun to throb in a low, companionable way. She did not notice the discomfort immediately. When she worked, the rest of her body receded. The world narrowed to pigment, surface, pressure. The painting before her was half-figure, half-erasure: a body emerging through layered greys and bruised umbers, the face suggested but not resolved, the flesh thickened and dragged back with a palette knife. There was something of Lucian Freud in the insistence of it, in the refusal to flatter, but she had smeared a vertical haze across the torso that dissolved the form in a way that owed more to Gerhard Richter. She had stood back earlier and felt faintly dissatisfied, as if she had been too careful, and so she had attacked it again, loading the brush and pressing harder than necessary until the paint responded like something alive.

Her hair, usually left loose in light brown curls, had been dragged into a makeshift ponytail that was already coming undone. Three brushes were stuck through the elastic at the nape of her neck, bristles stiff with drying oil. She did it without thinking, a small domestic solution to the inconvenience of not having enough hands, though it meant she would later find streaks of Naples yellow and iron oxide along her hairline. It did not bother her. She rarely bothered with appearances in the studio. Wide-leg black trousers were spattered at the hem, an oversized charcoal jumper slipping from one shoulder, and her fingers were crowded with heavy silver rings that knocked softly against the palette as she mixed. The rings were the only thing about her that could be called ornamental, thick and unapologetic, catching the light with a dull gleam. She liked the weight of them. They made her feel anchored.

She paused, stepping back, wiping the side of her thumb against her hip, leaving a faint smear. Her favourite painter, Anselm Kiefer, had once said that art was about confronting history and ruin, and she sometimes thought about that when she worked, about scale and damage and what it meant to leave something deliberately unresolved. There was a gravity to his canvases that she both envied and feared. She was not sure yet what she was confronting, only that she wanted the paint to feel as though it had memory in it.

The studio door opened without ceremony and Mandy drifted in first, her short dark bob tucked neatly behind her ears, followed by Leila, who brought with her the faint scent of coffee beans and cold air. They stopped a few feet behind Avril, as people always did, careful not to cast a shadow across the work.

“It’s getting darker,” Mandy said lightly, though her tone held approval. “You’ve gone full existential again.”

Avril huffed a small laugh and leant back on her heels, studying the canvas as if seeing it anew through their presence. “I didn’t mean to. It just… went.”

Leila moved closer, arms folded. “We’re going to the King’s Arms later. Pete’s finished his shift at seven and Tim’s meeting us after. You’re coming, obviously.”

Avril reached up to adjust one of the brushes in her ponytail and succeeded only in lodging more paint into her hair. She had always preferred the idea of going out to the reality of it. She did not drink often; she disliked the sluggishness the next morning, the slight loss of control. When she did, she chose carefully, as if taste were another form of self-definition. A Brandy Alexander if she wanted something almost indulgent, the chocolate and cream masking the strength beneath. More usually a Rémy Martin neat, the glass small and uncompromising in her hand. She disliked heels, refused them even on nights out, and would turn up in mom jeans and a clean white T-shirt with her rings stacked high, hair brushed but not styled, perfume applied with restraint. L’Interdit by Givenchy, always, a scent that hovered rather than announced itself.

“I’ll see how I feel,” she said at last, which was her usual answer. She never committed too early. “I’ve got a bit more to do here.”

Mandy rolled her eyes with affection. “You always have a bit more to do.”

It was not untrue. Avril found it easier to remain with the canvas than with people. Conversation required a quickness she did not naturally possess. In groups she often felt half a beat behind, as if everyone else had been given the script in advance. Her friends were kind; they included her without question. But she had never had a best friend, never had that singular person who seemed to exist in step with her. The closeness she had now at university was the closest she had ever known, and even that felt provisional, as though it could shift if she moved too abruptly.

“We’ll text you,” Leila said, already edging towards the door. “Don’t disappear.”

Avril nodded, though she had no intention of disappearing. She watched them go, listened to the murmur of voices in the corridor, the scrape of chairs, the distant thud of someone dropping a portfolio. When the door closed, the studio settled again into its low hum. She stepped forward and pressed her thumb into the still-wet paint at the shoulder of the figure, dragging it downwards in a single decisive stroke that blurred the anatomy into something less certain. The mark felt right. It felt honest.

On the table beside her phone lay face down, smudged with a faint crescent of ultramarine. She had been thinking earlier about stopping for sushi on the way home, sashimi if they had decent tuna in, the clean simplicity of it a relief after the thickness of oil and solvent. She thought too, fleetingly, of the battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo on her bedside table, the long patience of revenge and transformation, of a man who had been remade by confinement. The idea of hidden identities had always unsettled and fascinated her in equal measure.

She did not notice the first vibration of her phone at all. It was swallowed by the scrape of her palette knife and the steady rhythm of her own breathing as she leant in again, unaware that something small and unseen had just begun to thread itself quietly into the edges of her afternoon.

Avril only became aware of her phone when it shifted fractionally against the wooden table, the vibration dull and insistent rather than loud. She did not turn immediately. She finished the line she was dragging through the paint, stepped back, assessed it with narrowed eyes, and only then wiped her hands on a rag and crossed the room. The studio light had thinned towards evening, the colour of everything cooling by degrees, and the screen glowed with institutional cheerfulness.

St Ephraim’s Fine Art Department: Reminder: Coursework submission deadline for Contemporary Practice is Friday 16th at 16:00. Late submissions will incur penalty in line with University policy.

She exhaled softly through her nose. Of course it was. She had known, vaguely, in the way one knows a storm is coming without looking at the forecast. The message irritated her less for its content than for its tone. Deadlines were always framed as neutral inevitabilities, as though the work did not require something of the body in exchange. She locked the screen and set the phone back down, meaning to return to the canvas, already rearranging her evening in her head. If she did go out later, she would need to leave by half ten. She disliked working the night before submission; she preferred the illusion of control, of having already leant into the problem and wrestled it flat.

The phone vibrated again.

This time she frowned. Administrative systems did not send follow-ups within seconds. She reached for it with paint-stiff fingers and turned it over.

There was no departmental header. No logo. Just an unfamiliar mobile number and a message beneath it.

You always work harder when the light starts to go. It’s when you’re most honest.

For a moment she assumed she had misread it. Her eyes tracked the sentence again, slower now, as if a second reading might transform it into something mundane. It did not. The words were plain, almost gentle, but there was a precision to them that unsettled her more than anything overtly obscene would have done. She had, only minutes earlier, thought about the way the studio darkened her colours. She had stepped closer to the canvas because the shadows helped her commit.

Her first instinct was annoyance. Pete, she thought immediately. Or Tim, attempting something theatrical. It would not have been beyond them to glance in as they passed the studio earlier and decide to wind her up. The familiarity of that explanation steadied her. She typed quickly, without overthinking.

Very funny. Who is this?

She hit send before she could interrogate the flicker of something colder beneath her irritation. The message left her phone and dissolved into the unseen, a small blue arrow launched into dark water. She felt faintly foolish standing there, as though the studio itself might be watching her now, and she glanced instinctively towards the open door. The corridor beyond was empty, its strip lighting humming in a flat, indifferent way.

The reply came faster than she expected.

You don’t need to know who I am. I prefer watching you like this. Before you know you’re being seen.

The air in the room altered, not physically but in her perception of it. The smell of oil seemed heavier. She became abruptly aware of the paint drying in her hair, of the weight of her rings, of the fact that she was small in a large, mostly deserted building. She told herself not to be dramatic. Anyone in the department could have observed her working late before. It was not a secret habit. There were windows along the corridor; people passed; people looked in.

Her irritation sharpened.

Seriously. Stop. It’s not funny.

She pressed send again, more forcefully this time, as if the physical act could reinforce the command. Beneath the annoyance, something else began to coil, something she refused to name yet. The sentence lingered in her mind. Before you know you’re being seen. It implied duration. It implied history.

Her gaze shifted, involuntarily now, to the far end of the studio where the internal window looked out over the courtyard. The glass reflected only her own shape and the half-formed figure on the canvas behind her, blurred and doubled in the fading light. The building at this hour always felt suspended between presence and absence, rooms occupied but not watched, doors ajar without purpose. She had never minded that before. She had liked the privacy of it, the sense that she could unfold without commentary. Now the quiet felt altered, as if it belonged to someone else first and to her second.

She told herself not to overreact. Anyone could have walked past earlier. Anyone could have noticed the way she worked when the daylight thinned. It did not require devotion to observe a pattern. It required proximity.

That word lodged unpleasantly in her thoughts.

Proximity meant someone near enough to see her through the glass. Near enough to know she stayed late. Near enough to distinguish effort from honesty. The message had not been crude. It had not demanded anything. That almost unsettled her more. It presumed intimacy without asking for it.

Her phone remained in her hand. She did not put it down this time.

The studio hummed on around her, but she no longer felt alone in it.

The reply did not come immediately, and that unsettled her more than if it had. She stood there with the phone in her palm, pulse faintly audible in her ears, aware of how exposed the gesture felt. She had meant to sound dismissive. Instead she felt as though she had entered something without understanding its rules. After a full minute, she locked the screen and set the phone face down beside the palette, annoyed with herself for waiting.

She forced herself back towards the canvas. The figure on it now seemed too self-conscious, as if it had been caught mid-transformation. She mixed a colder grey and leant in, dragging it across the blurred torso with more force than necessary. The bristles bent and split slightly under pressure. The physicality steadied her. Paint obeyed.

The vibration came just as she was wiping her hands again.

She did not hesitate this time. She turned the phone over at once.

You don’t have to pretend you’re annoyed. I can tell when you’re engaged.

Her stomach tightened in a way she did not appreciate. The wording was calm, almost indulgent, as though he were correcting her gently rather than provoking her. Engaged. As if she had participated in something reciprocal. She read it again, searching for humour, for the clumsy cadence of one of the lads attempting to be clever. It was not there. The tone was measured, deliberate. It felt older than them.

Her irritation flared properly now, not as a flicker but as heat.

I’m not engaged. I don’t know you. Leave me alone.

She typed it with clipped precision and sent it before she could second-guess herself. The act felt defiant, satisfying for a fraction of a second. She imagined the message landing on the other end, imagined the mild embarrassment of whoever was playing this game. That image steadied her.

The response arrived almost instantly.

You’re thinking about me now. That’s enough.

The certainty of it made her skin prickle. There was no escalation in language, no threat, no obscenity. Only a quiet assertion that he had achieved something. That her attention, even sharpened by irritation, was a form of reward.

She became suddenly aware that she was holding the phone too tightly. She loosened her grip and placed it back on the table, though this time she did not turn it face down. The screen dimmed slowly, reflecting the studio lights and her own small, tense expression.

The building felt different now. Not louder. Not darker. Just altered in ownership. She had always believed the studio to be a space she inhabited by right, a room granted to her by enrolment and effort. The message suggested something else. That her movements within it were observable. That someone had been watching not only what she painted, but how she inhabited the act of painting.

She told herself again that it was ridiculous. That attention did not equate to danger. That boys mistook reaction for invitation all the time. Still, the word he had chosen lingered.

Engaged.

As if she had stepped into a conversation that had begun long before she realised she was part of it.