Chapter 4: Under the stadium lights, Roz captures the primal energy of the game until Grezza's provocative gesture shatters her focus, leaving Ally to growl 'That's my fucking artist' in his teammate's ear - a possessive declaration that echoes in the sudden silence of her sketchbook's empty next page.
The private box at Murrayfield was a bubble of hushed, carpeted silence suspended over a roaring, heaving sea of noise. Roz stood at the glass, her sketchpad propped against the cool surface, trying to translate chaos into line. Below, the pitch was a vivid, violent ballet. Bodies collided with a sound that sometimes, when the crowd dropped for a second, punched through the glass like a dull thud.
Her hand flew across the page. She wasn’t drawing individuals, not yet. She was capturing vectors—the arc of a pass, the converging lines of a tackle, the explosive scatter of a broken defensive line. Her charcoal stub was a blur.
Ally had arranged this. A text two days prior: Match day Saturday. Box 12 has your name. See it live. Feel the geometry. It was professional, but the word “feel” had lingered.
Now, she watched him. Number 8. A constant, calculating pivot point in the frenzy. She saw the intelligence in his movement, the way he seemed to parse the chaos a half-second faster than anyone else. He absorbed a tackle from two enormous men, went down, and popped back up, slapping the ball back cleanly before joining the next ruck. It was relentless.
In the plush seats behind her, corporate guests sipped champagne and chatted about quarterly reports, their eyes occasionally flicking to the spectacle below with mild interest. Roz felt like a spy.
The game was a brutal, seesawing affair. Scotland were defending a one-point lead with minutes left, England hammering at their line. The air in the box grew taut, the corporate veneer cracking as men leaned forward, ties loosened.
Roz’s phone vibrated on the leather ledge. Lena.
> Buyer confirmed for tomorrow. He’s bringing his curator. Be impressive.
She ignored it, her focus narrowing to the pitch. The English fly-half made a slicing break. He was fast, ghosts of defenders grasping at his shoulders. He was clear. A try was inevitable.
Then, from the edge of Roz’s vision, a dark blue blur entered the frame. Ally. He came from an impossible angle, not with a desperate dive, but with a terrifying, controlled acceleration. His tackle wasn’t a hit; it was a surgical excision. He wrapped the ball carrier up, lifted him just enough to deny the offload, and drove him into the turf a meter short. The impact was audible. The crowd’s roar was a physical wave against the glass.
The ball spilled loose. A scramble. A thick-set Scottish player with a shaved head and a perpetual grimace—Grezza, she recognized—fell on it. The referee’s whistle blew. Penalty to Scotland. Game over.
The stadium erupted. In the box, people jumped up, spilling drinks, shouting with raw, unfiltered joy. Roz didn’t move. She was frantically sketching the aftermath of the tackle: the beautiful, terrible geometry of intervention, the lines of force radiating from the point of impact.
On the pitch, the players were a mud-streaked heap of celebration. Grezza was at the center, pounding fists on his chest, roaring at the crowd. He shoved teammates, laughing, a force of pure id. Then his eyes, scanning the stands, found the corporate boxes. He pointed. He was pointing at Box 12.
Roz took a step back.
Grezza, still riding the animal high of the win, grabbed the hem of his filthy, sweat-soaked jersey. With a theatrical grunt, he peeled it up and over his head, his barrel chest heaving. He spun the sodden garment into a rope, whirled it around his head once, and with a final, beaming wink aimed directly at her, launched it.
It slapped against the exterior glass with a damp, ugly sound, right at Roz’s eye level, and slid down, leaving a faint, greasy streak. The white number 3 was smeared with mud and grass. The men in the box behind her howled with laughter. “Ah, Grezza’s claimed the artist!” one guffawed.
Roz felt her face burn. It wasn’t desire she felt; it was a sharp, cheapening reduction. She was no longer the observer. She was a target in the celebration zoo.
Before the heat in her cheeks could even peak, another figure moved on the pitch. Ally. He cut through the celebrating players, his expression dark. He reached Grezza, said something sharp and low into his ear, and clamped a hand on the back of his neck. It wasn’t a friendly pat. It was a steer. Ally, his own face set in a mask of post-match intensity, bodily turned the larger man away from the stands, shoving him towards the tunnel entrance. Grezza’s smile faltered, replaced by a look of confused protest, lost in the crowd’s din.
The jersey remained on the other side of the glass, a limp, haunting trophy.
Roz looked down at her sketchpad. Her hand was clenched so tightly around the charcoal that it had snapped, leaving a jagged black gash across the drawing of the match-saving tackle. The violent mark ruined the composition, slicing through the careful lines of motion.
It was perfect.
It was the exact, brutal feeling. The interruption. The violation of the pure form by something crude and real.
She carefully closed the pad. The laughter in the box had subsided, conversation turning back to where to go for dinner. She gathered her things, her movements precise. She didn’t look at the jersey again.
Her phone buzzed in her bag. Not Lena this time.
> I saw that. I’m sorry. He’s an idiot who forgets he’s not in the student union bar. Can I make it up to you? There’s a team function at the Ghillie’s Dhu tonight. Might be useful for the portrait. More faces in their natural habitat. No pressure.
She read it twice. The heat of embarrassment cooled, replaced by a curious thrum of anticipation. The “natural habitat.” Not the controlled workshop, not the staged box, but the messy, loud, unfiltered aftermath.
She thought of the broken charcoal, the gash on the paper. The painting of the storm in her sketchbook. The expensive coat waiting for her tomorrow.
She typed a reply, her fingers steady.
> No apology needed. The jersey just added a new layer of texture. What time at the Ghillie’s Dhu?
She sent it, shouldered her bag, and gave the pitch one last look. It was empty now, just a scarred rectangle of grass under the floodlights. But the ghosts of the collisions, the trajectories, the final, damp slap of fabric on glass, hung in the air. They felt, suddenly, like the only real things in the world.
The Ghillie’s Dhu was a cacophony of victorious bodies and spilled lager. Roz hovered in the doorway, the damp night air at her back a stark contrast to the wall of heat and noise that pulsed from the pub. She scanned the crowd, a sea of broad shoulders and flushed faces, and felt acutely like a specimen dropped into the wrong habitat.
Then she saw him. Ally was leaning against the far wall, near a fireplace choked with cold ashes. He was clean, dressed in dark jeans and a simple grey jumper, a pint of water in his hand. He wasn’t shouting. He was watching, a slight, detached amusement on his face as Grezza, shirtless now in fresh clothes, arm-wrestled a teammate amid a circle of roars.
Ally’s eyes found hers across the room. He gave a small, acknowledging lift of his chin, then pushed off the wall, navigating the chaos towards her.
“You came,” he said, his voice cutting through the din as he reached her. He smelled of soap and cold air, not sweat and beer.
“You promised natural habitat,” Roz replied, hefting her satchel. “I’m here to observe the wildlife.”
His smile was quick, a flash of genuine warmth. “Right. Well, the big males are posturing, the young ones are trying to prove themselves, and the hierarchy’s being re-established through fermented grain. Standard stuff.”
A booming voice cut through. “The artist! You survived the jersey bombardment!” Grezza loomed, his grin wide and unchastened. He thrust a pint of amber liquid towards her. “Peace offering. And I’m told I owe you an apology. Sorry if I scared you.”
Roz took the pint, her fingers cool against the glass. “You didn’t scare me.” She took a small, deliberate sip. The beer was bitter. “It was just data. An interesting insight into celebratory rituals.”
Grezza’s smile faltered, unsure if he’d been complimented or dissected. Ally saved him. “She’s working, you idiot. She sees your antics as… behavioural study.”
“Right, right,” Grezza said, clapping Ally hard on the back. “Well, behave naturally, lads! The documentarian is here!” He winked at Roz again, but it was softer now, less of an assault. “He ripped me a new one, you know. After. Said I made it look like a bloody meat market.”
Roz glanced at Ally, who was studying his water. “It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s not,” Ally said, looking up. His blue eyes were serious. “But we can move on. Come on, I’ll introduce you to some slightly more articulate specimens.”
For an hour, Roz moved through the pack. She met the fly-half, who talked about the geometry of the game with a scholar’s passion. She met a lock forward who wrote poetry and blushed when she asked about the feeling of a scrum collapsing. She saw the layers, the contradictions—the brutal physicality housing fragile, thinking minds. Her fingers itched for her sketchbook, but she kept it stowed. This was about listening.
She found a quieter corner near the dead fire, Ally following. “They’re not what I expected,” she admitted, half to herself.
“None of us are,” Ally said, leaning beside her. “That’s the problem with the portrait, isn’t it? You can’t just paint the armour. You have to paint the why. The quiet inside the storm.” He echoed his own words from the workshop, and they landed differently here, in the noisy dark.
Roz felt a jolt, a connection snapping into place. “Yes. Exactly that.”
He nodded towards her satchel. “Did you draw today? During the match?”
She pulled out the pad, opened it to the page with the shattered charcoal line. She turned it for him to see. The violent black gash cut through the intricate web of her drawn players.
He studied it for a long moment, his brow furrowed. He didn’t see a mistake. “That’s the tackle. And that,” he said, pointing to the jagged mark, “is Grezza’s jersey.”
Her breath caught. He saw it. He actually saw it. “Yes.”
“It’s better with the break,” he said, his voice low. “It’s true.”
The noise of the pub faded to a distant rumble. In this pocket of stillness, the recognition felt more intimate than any touch. Roz’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Once. Twice. A relentless reminder of another world.
She ignored it. “Your friend,” she said, nodding towards Grezza, who was now leading a bawdy song. “He doesn’t seem too sorry.”
Ally’s gaze turned wry. “Gregor’s sorry he got told off. He’s not sorry for the impulse. He saw a beautiful woman in the stands and his lizard brain short-circuited. It’s not malice. It’s just a spectacular lack of imagination.”
“And you?” The question was out before she could stop it. “What’s your impulse?”
He held her look, the intensity from the pitch returning. “To understand the composition,” he said finally, his words deliberate. “Not to disrupt it.”
Her phone buzzed again, a long, angry vibration. Lena. The buyer. Tomorrow. The “psychic geography” awaiting its map.
Roz closed the sketchpad, the moment broken. “I have to go,” she said, the real world crashing back in. “Early meeting.”
“The famous buyer,” Ally stated. It wasn’t a question.
“How did you—”
“You get a look. A compartmentalizing look. Your eyes go distant and hard, like you’re fortifying a position.” He pushed off the wall. “I’ll walk you out.”
They didn’t speak through the crowded pub. He simply cleaved a path for her. At the door, the chill night air was a shock. The street was quiet, empty.
“Good luck tomorrow,” he said, his hands buried in his pockets.
“Thanks.” She shifted her satchel, the pad inside feeling suddenly heavy with its true, broken drawing. “And thanks for tonight. For the access.”
“Any time.” He hesitated, a conflict playing over his features. “Roz? When he looks at your work, that buyer… don’t let him talk you out of the gash. The break is where the light gets in, or whatever the quote is.”
He was quoting Leonard Cohen to her on a damp Edinburgh street. A laugh, sudden and surprised, escaped her. “I’ll try to remember that.”
She turned to leave.
“One more thing,” he called after her. She glanced back. His expression was open, curious. “After you understand the ‘why’ of us… will you let me see it?”
It was the most personal commission he’d given her yet. She nodded, a silent promise in the dark, then walked towards her car, the ghost of charcoal dust on her fingers and the living weight of his question settling deep in her chest. The two futures were no longer just pulling; they were starting to speak to each other, and the conversation was nothing like she’d expected.
The two futures were no longer just pulling; they were starting to speak to each other, and the conversation was nothing like she’d expected. It hissed in her head all the way back to her cramped studio above a Leith bookshop. The radiator clanked a monotonous counterpoint to the echo of the pub’s roar and the chilling precision of the buyer’s impending visit.
She unzipped her satchel, carefully extracting the sketchpad. The page with the gash seemed to vibrate. A beautiful woman? Is that what Ally thought she was. The phrase, Grezza’s crude reasoning refracted through Ally’s apology, felt alien. She examined the drawing again, the brutal elegance of the tackle, the violent interruption. Her focus had been on the force, the structure, the intent. Not the observer in the glass box.
He was certainly a beautiful man. The admission, stark and unadorned, clicked into place like a final puzzle piece she’d been avoiding. It wasn’t just the physical fact of him, which was undeniable—the solidity, the arresting blue of his eyes, the way he occupied space with a quiet certainty. It was the contrast. The thoughtful gravity against Grezza’s bluster. The way he’d seen the truth in her ruined drawing. Unlike any other she had ever seen in the flesh. She shook her head, a physical rejection.
The feeling she had had since she first met him, a low hum of recognition in the workshop, she let it bloom properly for one dangerous second. It was a warmth, a pull towards a different kind of authenticity. Then she shut it down. No, no she mustn’t. This was a professional commission. He was a subject. A complex, fascinating subject, but a subject. The other future, the one with the expensive coat and the validated career, demanded cold focus.
She turned the page, deliberately. To the storm she’d drawn after the class. The brooding, smudged sky. It needed the bothy. The anchor. She worked quickly with charcoal and a dirty kneaded eraser, carving the small, dark shape of the shelter into the base of the cliff, a defiant little square against the immense grey. She worked until her hands were black and her eyes blurred.
The buzzer for the street-level door jerked her out at 10:58 the next morning. She’d changed three times, finally rejecting Lena’s “serious poet” black dress for her own uniform: dark jeans, a simple grey linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, smudges of primer under her nails. A quiet statement of identity.
Lena arrived first, a whirlwind of taupe cashmere and sharp perfume. “He’s just parking. Remember, his name is Mr. Kincaid. He’s a significant collector. This is a big step up, Roz.”
“I know what a step up is, Lena.”
“Just be… agreeable. He likes to feel he’s discovering something.”
Mr. Kincaid was in his fifties, wearing the promised expensive coat—a breathtakingly soft-looking charcoal melton wool—over a tailored suit. He had a collector’s gaze: assessing, acquisitive, missing nothing. His curator, a silent woman with severe glasses, trailed him with a tablet.
“The studio,” Kincaid said, not as a greeting but as a verdict, his eyes sweeping the paint-spattered floors, the canvases stacked against brick walls. “Authentic. Good.”
He moved past the commissioned rugby studies pinned to a wall, his interest fleeting. He stopped before the large seascape, the furious Fraserburgh piece. He stood silently for a full minute. Lena fidgeted. Roz held her breath, her mind treacherously replaying Ally’s words: don’t let him talk you out of the gash.
“The texture in the wave-break here is exceptional,” Kincaid finally said, his voice soft. “A real controlled fury. You’ve captured the… punitive nature of that coast.”
“Thank you.”
“The title is just ‘North Sea, January’?”
“Yes.”
“Bland. We can work on that. The psychic geography is what interests me.” He turned from the painting to look directly at her. “It’s a landscape of interior punishment. A self-portrait of sorts, yes? The artist battling her own limitations, her irrelevance against the sublime.”
Roz felt a cold creep up her spine. His analysis was technically apt, but it felt like a violation. A dissection performed without consent. “It’s a painting of the sea,” she said, her voice tighter than she intended.
Kincaid smiled, a thin, knowing stretch of lips. “Of course it is.” He wandered, pausing at her desk, where her open sketchbook lay. The storm and the bothy. His hand hovered. “May I?”
A sense of profound intrusion swamped her, but Lena gave a tiny, urgent nod. “Yes.”
He flipped back a page. Past the storm. And there it was. The gash. The ruined tackle drawing from Murrayfield. He studied it, his head cocked. “This is a fascinating failure. The disruption is quite… juvenile. An emotional spasm ruining a competent study.”
The air left the room. Lena shot her a warning look. Roz’s hands curled into fists at her sides. She saw the jersey slap the glass. She saw Ally’s hand on Grezza’s neck, steering him away. She heard the charcoal snap.
“That is the study,” Roz heard herself say, her voice surprisingly steady. “The disruption is the point. It’s the context. Without it, it’s just… diagrams.”
Kincaid looked up, his eyes glittering with a new interest. “You’re attaching a narrative. Sentimentality. Dangerous for the work’s objectivity, its market purity. The seascape succeeds because it is pure, untethered emotion. This?” He tapped the sketchpad. “This is gossip.”
The word was a slap. Gossip. The raw, human mess of it all reduced to trivia. The quiet inside the storm dismissed as noise.
“I disagree,” Roz said.
Lena made a small, strangled sound. Kincaid’s smile returned, wider now. He liked this. A debate. A resistance to conquer. “The seascape, then. My offer stands. We’ll work on a title. Something that hints at the interior conflict without being obvious.”
He turned back to the large canvas, already claiming it. The curator took notes. Lena began talking numbers, relief in her voice.
Roz didn’t hear them. She looked at the sketchbook, at the jagged black line that spoke of celebration and violation and a quiet, fierce defense. She looked at the storm and the tiny, dark bothy she’d anchored in the cliff face. A fortress against the sublime.
Gossip.
Ally’s question from the dark street echoed, clear as a bell. Will you let me see it?
Mr. Kincaid was finalizing details with Lena, his back to her. Roz reached out, quietly closed the sketchbook on his assessing gaze, and slid it into her bag. The decision was simple, a final, quiet click. She would not let him have the storm, either. Not on his terms. She would paint it her way, with the shelter in it, and she would show the man who understood the value of the break exactly where the light was getting in.