The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night Read online

  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. Bless-ed. 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.

  Apparitions and fantasies and paper-thin skin.

  I remember when I was fourteen and I’d tried so hard to disappear. I had many pockets in my trousers for shoving pieces of food into. I’d stretch up in front of the mirror in the evenings, reach for the ceiling and watch the holes appear in the middle of my ribs. I was a box with a bird inside that got quieter and quieter. I’d crack my knuckles and my knees and give my packed lunch to the homeless man who always sat outside of Tesco.

  It was like walking on stilts.

  In the summer, with the heat, sometimes I could hear voices. The medieval starving nuns said they were hungry for God. Hungry, starving. They had to stop because the Queen called it heretic. She burned them at the stake, flames licking at their skin. Bless-ed. I wonder if people starved themselves in the name of religion before the Middle Ages. I wonder if this is it.

  Mary’s eyes are staring out of the painting onto the floor.

  Why are Gabriel’s feet on fire?

  The bed is hard, in fact it is a rock. Mary saw them cover it with a sheet before she came in. The women in here are not the same as she is. They are starving so that God will visit them in their sleep. Hannah sleeps next door. She told Mary this morning, over a breakfast they didn’t eat, that last night Satan had sat on top of her wardrobe. She said he told her to eat a biscuit.

  ‘And guess what,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t eat a biscuit.’

  On the wall in her room, Mary has cut a series of boxes into the rubble with a stone. There is a cross in each box marking every day before Joseph returns. He made her a boat out of wood, which sits on her bedside table. She is here because he says she has issues. She doesn’t eat. He asks her if it is because of God. She has said no – because it’s not – she does not know why.

  She sits and examines the contours of her wrists. The sun is at its hottest, beating in through t
he window behind her, and all the nurses are taking their mid-afternoon nap.

  Outside, the birds are talking to her.

  There is a flash of light.

  She jumps.

  She is no longer alone.

  ‘Mary,’ the angel smiles. ‘My name is Gabriel. I am a guardian angel; I bring you news of great joy.’

  Mary can’t help but notice that the angel’s feet are on fire. No wonder it’s hot in here. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You shall have a child, Mary! A boy. You are to give him the name Jesus. He will be the son of God.’

  ‘… I don’t understand.’

  The angel smiles, a dove perched on his shoulder. ‘You are to have a child; God has chosen you.’

  Mary decides that her brain doesn’t seem to be working properly. ‘This all seems very impossible,’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m flattered, but I didn’t ask to get pregnant.’

  ‘God knows this.’

  ‘And what’s my boyfriend going to say?’

  ‘This is the work of God, Mary,’ the angel smiles. ‘And you must nourish this baby that belongs to him. You must eat, and get well.’

  ‘But I don’t—’ She begins to think of Hannah, next door, who has talked non-stop about wanting a baby. How none of them can have a baby. All Mary can think of is her stomach swelling. She feels sick. ‘But, this is … How will I look after the son of God?’

  ‘As you would your own child.’

  Mary thinks this should be simple but it isn’t. She wonders how many people will believe her: that this angel came into her room and said she was pregnant with the son of God. A baby: a baby growing inside her that belongs to God.

  For one ridiculous moment she imagines a baby with a beard.

  ‘This is a very important task, Mary. Very important. You should be thrilled that God has chosen you.’

  Mary nods but she feels suddenly empty.

  ‘This is a bless-ed event,’ Gabriel smiles.

  The dove lands on Mary’s shoulder, and suddenly she feels as though she is Noah’s ark.

  It turned out that my mother was right; you could decide not to grow.

  When I first stopped eating, she thought it was pious; that I’d started listening to her talk of aid and starving children in Africa; she said that everything I didn’t eat she’d bundle up and send to someone who needed it more.

  ‘Spread the fat around,’ she said, patting my back. ‘That’s my girl.’

  I pinned my hair up in front of the mirror and sucked in my cheeks. Balloon head. My choices were eating me. I was sure if you shone a light on my head you’d be able to see the bones in my skull.

  Sometimes, if I skipped several meals, my head swam so much I could hear the birds talking. A dove sat on the windowsill. I smiled at the dinner table and tried to pretend my stomach wasn’t trying to gnaw its way through my skin to get to the food on my plate.

  ‘Amazing,’ my mother said, and packaged the food away.

  Flora introduced me to whisky on a Wednesday night when we were supposed to be at Girl Guides. Her parents were away for the week. We drank a whole bottle. We were so wasted that we ripped up her bed sheets and wound them around ourselves like dead Egyptians.

  ‘You’re so skinny, Margaret.’ She picked up one of my arms but I couldn’t feel her fingers. I enjoyed these out-of-body experiences. I enjoyed trying on other people. We danced to terrible music, wrapped up in white.

  Eventually, we collapsed on the living-room carpet, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Have you ever, you know?’ she asked.

  There were rumours she’d done it with Liam McGee.

  ‘No,’ I said, like I didn’t have the time.

  She picked my arm up again. ‘Probably for the best; you’d snap in two.’

  We giggled into our glasses. Me: the shrinking tree.

  I got home just after midnight. My mother was up and waiting, sitting on the doorstep, smoking a cigarette and trying to look calm.

  ‘What the hell do you think you look like?’

  I looked down at myself and shrugged, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Behold,’ I said. ‘I am the Holy Spirit. On spirits.’

  I spun in circles, allowing the white sheets to billow out around me. My mother simply sat, watching me, blowing smoke into the night air.

  I stopped and vomited violently into the gutter.

  ‘Right.’ She stubbed out her cigarette on the white-washed walls. ‘That’s quite enough of that.’

  I was dragged to the Reverend’s house first thing next morning, dazed and hungover, where she told him she was scared I was turning into a demon. She said I wouldn’t eat, that she’d thought it was for the common good, but that now she wasn’t so sure. She used phrases she’d heard on TV that she’d never said out loud in her life, like ‘going over the edge’ and ‘problem child’ and ‘completely self-absorbed’.

  Her mouth seemed to move at a different speed to the rest of her body.

  I was only half listening. I was imagining the white cliffs of Dover. The white doves. Falling over the side.

  ‘I think you’d best come in, Margaret,’ the Reverend winked at me. ‘Don’t worry, Angela. I’ll sort all this out.’

  He shut the door in my mother’s face.

  ‘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 thi
rsty 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?’