A girl trapped in a painting, stuck to the wall.
I visit every Friday. The red room she is kept in has air vents lining the floor, and there are twenty-nine people in there with her. Nearby, Ophelia is floating down a river, dead. At the edge of a door, a poet who didn’t make it past the age of seventeen. Her world is a collection of scenes that puzzle me. The public walk through it like it’s some form of freak show. The people they watch sit behind glass, with name tags by their side and golden frames. They cannot talk, they can only stare.
The painted girl I come to visit is called Mary. She sits in a portrait by Dante Rossetti called Ecce Ancilla Domini. It shows her being told she is to give birth to the son of God.
Each time I come to stand in front of this painting, I disappear.
I think of Girl Guides and Church Sundays, carrying flags up to the altar and playing games in the pews. The year we turned eleven, Flora Talbert taught us poker, laying the cards down flat on Mrs Timmins’s hand-crocheted prayer mats. We asked God to forgive us for our trespasses as we bluffed our way to victory. Then again, as we forgave those who trespassed against us.
Flora always won.
My mother used to make me go; she said her parents never took her to church when she was young, and sometimes she worried about her own soul. And anyway, she said: it was nice. Sometimes I thought she did it for the recipes she could get from the well-dressed mothers at Sunday school, and because she blushed whenever Reverend David walked by. My mother said he used to give her an extra sip of wine at Holy Communion.
‘Such a charming young man,’ she said, and hiccoughed.
I remember her sitting in her lilac Sunday best, me in a pair of jeans she’d fashioned into a skirt, when Reverend David told us the story of Mary and Gabriel. I was twelve at the time, and we’d started Greek mythology at school. Liam McGee found a painting in a book of a swan having sex with a lady. The caption said that Greek gods would come down to earth as animals and have sex with women.
‘The Greeks were perverts, Margaret,’ my mother said. ‘Remember that.’
So there we were: gods and women.
Reverend David cleared his throat and beamed. He said that Gabriel had visited Mary and she had been afraid but honoured. He called it a very blessed event. He said the word blessed like it was two syllables. Blessed. Like he was hopping over the word, burning his tongue. We all nodded and clung to our prayer sheets.
Amen.
That winter, my father was made redundant by the Forestry Sector. He sat in the kitchen skewering ham onto cocktail sticks and drank too much beer. Occasionally he’d swear at the telly.
He said it was stress.
‘You liquidise what little cash we have!’ I heard my mother hiss. ‘You’re pissing our money down the drain.’
I’d never heard my mother use the word piss before.
‘Oh, that’s rich.’
‘Is it?’ She slammed a mug down hard. ‘Well, I’m glad something is.’
‘Oh, you think I’m hiding from all this at the bottom of a pint glass?’
‘Too right you are.’
‘And what about your chalice, eh?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Supping from the hand of God, eh, Angela?’ he laughed nastily. ‘Don’t think I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Well, maybe I’ll come along to one of these Bible classes of yours, too, eh? Wednesday nights, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ And here I could picture my mother straightening her apron. ‘But that’s the evening you play darts, dear.’
We had very little money but my mother refused to let anyone know. She said it would make us all the poorer if they did. We had beans and potatoes for three weeks straight and my stomach bloated. My mother spent weekends foraging in the woods that had rejected my father, picking edible berries and piles of nuts.
‘I need you to do me a favour, Margaret,’ my mother said. ‘I need you to stop growing.’
But I was about to turn fourteen. I was growing in all kinds of places. My mother pretended not to notice. I needed a bra. She said we couldn’t afford it.
‘It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that,’ Flora giggled, nudging me in the ribs.
‘Maybe if you lost some weight you wouldn’t grow so fast,’ my mother said as she spooned our tiny dinners onto hand-painted plates. ‘Now, don’t forget to eat your greens.’
‘But you said—’
‘Now, Margaret, think of all those poor, starving children in Africa,’ she said, and she glared at the straining buttons on my blouse, as though I were hoarding all the fat in the world.
I first saw the painting Ecce Ancilla Domini tucked inside a poetry book by Christina Rossetti. The painting was printed on a postcard, and on the back someone had written ‘Why are Gabriel’s feet on fire?’ At the bottom of the postcard it was typed that Christina Rossetti had posed as Mary for her brother to paint her.
The postcard looked as though it had been used as a bookmark, but this was a library book with stamps in the front. The last date said it should have been returned fourteen years before. I wondered what the Reverend would think about my mother stealing poetry books from the local library.
The page it marked said:
Her hair is like the golden corn
A low wind breathes upon
Or like the golden harvest moon
When all the mists are gone.
How skinny and small she looked, I thought.
How captivating.
In the painting, Mary sits behind two plates of glass, in a white room.
Gabriel stands next to her, at the foot of the bed. His feet are on fire and he is holding out a white lily. A dove floats by his shoulder.
Mary herself is leaning away, against the wall, her legs bunched up under her, looking scared. Behind her is a blue curtain like that around a hospital bed. She is dressed in white.
Gabriel is also dressed in the baggy white of a hospital gown. When I look at them, there is a pain so obvious I can smell it; that very same sensation when you jump into a swimming pool and the water shoots up your nose and tries to reach your brain. The front and back of Gabriel’s robes aren’t joined at the sides, like a sandwich board, so you can see the naked flesh of his torso.
Beside the bed is a red object, with painted lilies. It looks like a set of scales.
I can see all the bones in Mary’s hands. Her sunken cheeks. Her lollipop head. I imagine Mary as a woman with an eating disorder told she is pregnant in a recovery clinic. She has never undressed in front of a man. She has never slept with a man. The people in this clinic have been starving themselves for God, like nuns in the Middle Ages who would not eat and called it prodigious fasting, saying that they were doing it because they believed it meant they would be able to communicate with God.