In the tin confines of locker 228 Turton Pym, artist, not well known, bound and gagged with duct tape, hearing people calling to have the locker opened, urges them on with grunts. ‘Hurry, Jesus bloody Christ, hurry. I’m still here, but I’m dying. Dying. Unable to breathe.’ Sitting upright with his hands bound behind his back and his legs folded sharply, he pushes with his toes against the locker door. He tries to draw his feet back to kick the door, but he is folded too tight. Bent like this, his knees pressed against his cheeks, with tape covering his mouth, he has to struggle for every breath.

Hope surges through him into a sob and his stomach vaults as he hears the familiar sound of a key scrabbling at the entrance to a lock. As the key is inserted and turned he half closes his eyes, expecting a blast of light. His pulse lifts. There will be concerned faces, policemen, ambulance people, distraught friends, another twenty years of life. A masterpiece. An Archibald win. He shivers at the thought of the adhesive tape being torn off his head by some eager young policeman; it will surely peel the skin from his lips and tear a swathe from each of his sideboards. It must be eased off slowly, using a solvent. He hears the creak of an opening door; prepares to accept the world.

But he remains in near darkness, mocked by a meek dribble of illumination through the ventilation slits of the locker door. A different door has opened – another door to another locker. He closes his eyes and listens, unable to move, as the Weeping Woman is pulled from locker 227. Of course, they have come for her. His legs are beginning to knot with cramp. He hears the crowd murmur with delight as she is birthed into the world. The murmur becomes a polite fizz of applause. She is powerful, famous. The applause becomes as loud as she is priceless.

People are cheering and Turton Pym is happy she has been saved. He is happy, as well, to know his friends have paid this price, this priceless price, for his freedom. He silently thanks them for that. He wishes he could join the celebrations. Someone out there shouts, ‘Three cheers.’ The crowd obeys and the ventilation slits begins to sparkle with camera flash. Turton keeps pulling hard through his nose for every breath and the air whistles in his nostrils so loud he wonders the crowd can’t hear. A champagne cork pops, ricochets off the tin door, making him flinch.

His mind turns, as it always does in times of crisis and pain, to finding ways of making this into art. How best to paint the scene? How to capture the irony of a crowd cheering a work of art while an artist dies, unmourned, in their midst? The locker he is in would be transparent, a ghostly white frame surrounding him as he hovers unseen among them. The crowd would be staring rapt at the unrolled masterpiece in postures of triumph and worship. Some with arms in the air, one holding a spouting bottle of Krug, some kneeling. Turton would be smiling at their childish idolatry. He’d get rid of the duct tape – he must have a smile like Jesus smiled at the last. And an amused twinkle of forgiveness. And Whiteley. Whiteley will be at the centre. Didn’t Edward Trelawney reach into Shelley’s funeral pyre and save the poet’s heart? Yes. There will be a golden heart in Turton’s chest, the source of all light in the painting. Whiteley will be reaching for it, through the ghostly geometry of the locker, through Turton’s ribs. For Whiteley alone has seen the real treasure here. Whiteley will consult that heart unto his dying day; will plunder its immeasurable depths for inspiration. But … should it be his heart Whiteley is reaching for? What about his eye? Or his brain? Figuratively speaking, what best represents an artist’s genius?

Sitting in locker 228 with his knees up against his chin and his eyes twinkling in the camera flash from the ventilation slits, Turton Pym knows his painting would be a masterpiece. The tiny bursts of light he is seeing are the bright flickering of his heart and eye pressed against Whiteley’s bosom, and his brain, fierce as a star, held in Whiteley’s hand.

Caught in the thrill of creation Turton ignores the dreadful ache of suffocation as it seeps from his lungs into his chest and out into his limbs and lips. It is an aggravation to be ignored, like thirst, hunger, a salesman knocking at the door. He will deal with it later. He is painting now.