‘So, what appears to be the problem, Margaret?’
‘I can hear the birds,’ I said. His hand was on the small of my back as he guided me into his living room. ‘Do you think that if you shone a light on my face you’d be able to see my skull?’
‘You mean like a halo?’ he laughed, and poured me a drink.
There is a man in the gallery who has sidled up beside me. I don’t like how close he is.
‘Beautiful painting, isn’t it?’ he says.
I try not answering, to see if he will leave.
‘Sad, though, don’t you think?’
I can’t help it: ‘What’s sad?’
‘Well,’ he smiles at me, the tips of his fingers resting on his chin. ‘The piece itself, really: the history.’ He keeps glancing at me while he talks. ‘You know that the artist asked his sister to pose as Mary for him, she—’
‘Christina Rossetti, yes.’ I want him to realise that I know this painting.
‘Yes,’ he nods. ‘She was a problem child.’
We look at the painting, at Mary shying away from someone she should trust. I look down and notice that the man is wearing orange trainers.
‘Mary’s halo and Gabriel’s halo are different colours,’ I say. ‘Because Gabriel’s halo was added three years after the painting was first exhibited. Critics thought he didn’t look angelic enough.’
The man looks impressed.
‘I often look for God in this picture,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘That’s not the point, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not.’ I wish he’d disappear. I close my eyes and count to ten.
Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830. Her father was an exiled Italian revolutionary and her brothers were famous artists. She had a collection of poems published by her grandfather at the age of twelve and, two years after that, was said to have had a nervous breakdown due to religious mania. In her late teens, she posed for her brother, Dante, several times, dressed as Mary. As an adult, she spent ten years volunteering at a Mary Magdalene Asylum for Fallen Women. She died in 1894.
Each time I come to the gallery I manage to see a different painting. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Mary, sometimes it’s Christina. Once Gabriel was a dustbin man coming for a weekly collection. Like an out-of-sync period. ‘I have come for blood. I will give you blood: family. I will give you the blood of Christ. Body and Soul.’
I continue to stare straight on until all of the colours blur. I imagine Christina reciting her poetry: We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?
‘So, I see the Reverend every Tuesday now,’ I told Flora.
‘What’s he going to do?’ she asked.
‘He says he’s going to unpeel me like a fruit to get to the core of all my problems,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think that’s funny?’
‘I guess.’
‘I mean, it’s like he’s reaching into my soul … or something.’
‘Right.’ She continued to braid my hair in silence.
Flora and I had a mutual understanding.
We didn’t speak of the unspeakable things.
It turned out I didn’t quite snap in two.
I bent.
I changed.
I didn’t have a Gabriel.
I was told by a pregnancy test. By that little line turning pink.
I handed it wordlessly to Flora.
‘Blimey,’ she said.
And we stared at the floor.
I had a dream that my stomach was the world. That Reverend David lifted it up, clean off my body, and held it aloft for the congregation to see. They all started to sing ‘He’s got the whole world … in his hands … he’s got the whole wide world …’ and then I looked down at myself and realised that I was bleeding to death.
After five months, when I couldn’t hide it any longer, I told my mother.
I said it was Liam McGee but I don’t know if she believed me. She asked if his family had Greek ancestry. Then she lit a cigarette and tapped her foot. She even poured herself a beer.
‘You know what, Angela?’ my dad said, frowning at my stomach. ‘You should have bought that girl a bloody bra!’
I was told I was to give the baby up. My mother said it was the right thing to do. I was too scared to disagree with her. The doctor told me I had to stay in bed for weeks. I wasn’t well. He said that I shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant in the first place, really; he said I was too thin. He said I was malnourished. He said I had to eat. My mother liked the fact I had to stay in bed; it meant the neighbours didn’t get a chance to see much of me.
When I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt like a cage. I felt like the stork.
‘You’re going to do this wonderful, selfless thing,’ my mother said, sewing an elastic band into my trousers. ‘You’re going to give a baby to a couple who’ve always wanted a child but could never have one. Don’t you think that’s a wonderful thing to do, Margaret?’
‘Very saintly,’ I remember saying and I thought she was going to slap me.
‘You know we can’t afford another mouth to feed, Margaret.’
Outside we could hear horses, their hooves clattering on the tarmac.
‘Did I ever tell you about the four horsemen of the apocalypse?’ she said, and started sewing again, as though the piece of material was a person she was stabbing repeatedly in the heart.
The baby kicked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thousands of times.’
‘Oh,’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘In that case, let me tell you this one …’
What does the bee do?
Bring home honey.
And what does Father do?
Bring home money.
And what does Mother do?
Lay out the money.
And what does baby do?
Eat up the honey.
One night I had a dream that my mother made a scarecrow. I went downstairs to get a glass of milk and she was shoving straw inside one of the suits she’d collected for Christian Aid. She said that she was trying to make the demons go away. She stuffed it so full that it split at the seams, and then gave it a carrot for a nose. She snapped it so that the end broke. It dangled pathetically.
‘Right, let’s get this outside,’ and she dragged it right into the middle of her vegetable patch, next to the aubergines that had won her first prize at the church fair, even though Mrs Timmins’s were better.
She pulled a box of matches from her pocket and lit one. She set fire to the legs of the scarecrow, letting the smoke billow out around her. She looked like a figure from a murder mystery film as I stood watching her from the doorway.
‘That’s right!’ she shrieked at the scarecrow. ‘You stay where you are until you’re all gone!’ And suddenly she wasn’t my mother anymore. She was Mary Tudor. ‘Heresy!’ she cried, as the flames burned white.
The scarecrow screamed. My non-mother danced.
I woke up, sweating, with cramp in my legs.
By January, my stomach was so huge I used to pretend it was a map. The veins under my skin were rivers. I’d trace them in bed and read them poems. These were my baby’s wires, winding their way around the equator, deep beneath the sea.
Flora came to visit me sometimes, when my mother was out, and my dad let her in. We played snap.