In the room I bitterly refer to as my studio the window blind failed long ago. It slumps onto the sill, bulging along the bottom like a roll of flab. Evening light leaching through the fly-spotted fabric has a jaundiced tinge. The house frumps and crumbles around me. When I enter it I often give a cheery greeting: a ‘hi there!’ or ‘hey Kerry!’ or even ‘I’m hooome!’ I tell myself I do it as a gag, a self-deprecation, but the words leave a taste in my mouth that won’t go away, like the nicotine gum I’m constantly champing. I patrol the empty rooms, sometimes summoning a follow-up cry: ‘Have a good day, Kerry? How was work, babe?’ Doors drag on warped floorboards; the cornices sag. I’ve come to regard the place as a mirror of myself, a kind of schema of my innards, to the point where if I’m feeling something visceral I scour for the detail that represents it. These days I find it in the bedroom where a noticeably lighter patch on the wall indicates where Kerry’s poster of Amy Winehouse once hung. She stuck it there to cover up a mysterious blossoming blotch. Since then, the fumes of our cigarettes had deepened the dun hues of the wallpaper surrounding it. I feel that oblong of absence inside me, complete with the stain at its centre like an ominous shadow on an X-ray.

The brush kisses the canvas, adding nuances of texture to the figure in the cardigan. I know I’m fussing. The piece is essentially complete and I’m prevaricating, because this is the last picture I will ever do. My dream of being an artist ends tonight and I’m putting off the moment when I break my brushes. For now, I convince myself this fiddly intricacy is vital. While I’m adding imperceptible traces I’m still a painter.