She unlocks the door and pulls it open, standing aside so that I can see. The stench of paint fumes from the room is almost unbearable. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at. An enormous pile of something: rubbish. As if a skip full of some kind of debris has been emptied onto the floor. The mess looks fluffy in parts, like feathers from many different birds, none of them matching, but I can also see wood, cloth, every colour I can imagine, and pieces of . . . is it canvas?

Abberton. Inside the outline of a person, this is what Mary stuck on to the picture: rags and rubble from this pile.

I see, all at once, dozens of tiny fragments: a painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky, a patch of something flesh-coloured. A small chair, no more than a few centimetres high and wide, torn in half. ‘Pictures,’ I breathe. ‘These were paintings, canvases. And frames, sawn into pieces. How many . . .?’

The mound is nearly as high as I am. Over it, someone has splashed several tins of paint, maybe even dozens, so that it looks as if it’s been wrapped in multi-coloured string. Hard, dried pools of paint cover the floor. As if someone stood next to the pile with a tin of paint and poured it in, so that it dripped all the way through and seeped out at the bottom. The same colours have been splashed randomly over the cream and gold wallpaper, over the three large framed botanical prints on the walls: yellow, blue, red, white, green, black. At the back of the room there’s a dining table, which has been pushed up against the large sash window, with more tins of paint on it, as well as a portable telephone lying beside its base, an ashtray, three unopened tins of Heinz ravioli and a rusty tin-opener.

‘Pictures,’ Mary confirms. ‘Frames. And stretchers—the wooden structures you stretch canvas around. I like the way that word sounds medical, makes you think of emergencies. It seems appropriate. If it hadn’t been for an emergency, I’d never have picked up a paintbrush.’

I am transfixed by the size of the mountain of broken wood and shredded canvas, the glimpses I keep getting of landscapes and interiors, people’s faces and clothes: an earlobe, a necklace, a jacket pocket. It’s almost as if some pieces have been cut deliberately larger than the rest, to allow part of something to survive. I narrow my eyes, blur my focus, and it looks like a heap of multi-coloured precious stones. The pile stretches almost all the way across the room, leaving only a small gap on either side.

‘Whose paintings are . . . were they?’ I ask.

‘Mine,’ says Mary. ‘All mine, now. I got them back.’ She turns to me and smiles. ‘Welcome to my exhibition.’

20 - 5/3/08

20

5/3/08