Tuesday Night Life Drawing in Royal Park pub

Up the carpeted stairs, a hand slides along the greasy banister.

Below, sticky floors with spilt Jager bombs swirl in a sickly pit.

One floor up, only a locked door away from chaos, something else exists.

The pub holds a naked lady within its peeling walls.

Her and the white mattress lay in the middle of the floor.

Empty pint glasses lay scattered around the room,

Whilst a cobwebbed chandelier dangles above.

Its gloomy light casts shadows of her body on the thinly papered walls.

In silence apart from the music and intoxicated rowdiness below,

The noise gnaws its way through the wooden floorboards.

Does the model feel at ease? Do her eyes flit over to the locked door?

Are the hairs on her body standing ever-slightly on edge?

She lets us see her body and everyone sinks into silence.

Encased within the wooden rib cage of the pub,

People draw and breathe together like one pair of lungs.

They sit cross legged on the floor, in tangled rows.

Wrinkled and saggy, her flesh becomes sketched into the page.

Her skin lays folded, like the chairs in the back of the room.

No modesty, just a wizened body existing,

Whilst we decipher its fleshy material.

Her flesh renders words meaningless,

And her body grows louder than the noise below the floorboards.

Her pink flesh ripples gloriously in the still room,

Which is preserved from the chaos downstairs.

Words + Images: Daisy Hayward, she/her