Copycat

by Gillian White

  ‘Wait, Martha…’

  I could hardly bear to speak to her. ‘I said, get out of here… oh Christ, I’ve been so wrong, you evil, warped bitch from hell. Everybody was right about you but me – I’m so stupid I just couldn’t see…’

  She was deathly white, half stunned, bent in half as if from a blow. She backed towards my door like a dark and ugly spider. ‘Martha, Martha, please…’ she cried.

  If she didn’t go now I would kill her, I would bludgeon her face until she stopped speaking. I would pull out her hair, gouge out her eyes, shut that sobbing, slobbering mouth. I clawed at the air in front of my face. ‘YOU WILL NOT PULL ME DOWN. DO YOU HEAR WHAT I’M SAYING? YOU FUCKING CRETINOUS LIAR.’ And I kept on shrieking as she backed to the door, ‘You’ll stop at nothing, you’d see your kids dead just to vindicate your own sick desires…’

  ‘Christ! Martha!’ Sam hurried in, saw the mess on the floor and Jennie cowering at the door. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on here?’ He was naked save for a towel round his waist.

  ‘Jennie’s just leaving,’ I managed to hiss. ‘Aren’t you, sweetheart? And you’re never, ever coming back. I never want to see your face again.’ Just the feel of her poisonous name in my mouth made me want to vomit.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Shut up, Sam!’ I shook with rage. ‘Let me handle this on my own. This vicious little bastard won’t be—’

  ‘She’s gone, Martha. Calm down, calm down. She’s gone. Look, Jennie’s gone.’

  Shaking like a jelly, I let myself fold into his arms. I allowed myself to be comforted. I stuttered out exactly what had happened. ‘She said… she said… she tried to make me believe that you and Tina… you and Tina…’

  ‘Bitch,’ snarled Sam. ‘Bitch.’

  ‘You were right,’ I told him as he dried my eyes. ‘You were dead right. I did, I felt guilty, I felt sorry for her and responsible in some weird way…’

  ‘You were never to blame for Jennie’s sickness,’ Sam said, as I shuddered in his arms. ‘It took time to realize what a freak she was and you were too involved to see. As for that evil story about her and Graham…’

  I sniffed and blew my nose on a tissue Sam found on the table. ‘Poor Graham,’ I started to say, ‘and those poor, poor kids…’

  ‘Those kids you feel so sorry for are giving our kids hell. They’ve been sucking them dry for years and you’ve been blind to all of it.’

  ‘I know, I know that now.’ My voice had turned childlike. ‘And I didn’t tell you before, but Jennie has been complaining to Mrs Forest and saying that Scarlett has been unkind. And Mrs Forest has been on the phone to me about it.’

  ‘Shush, Martha, shush, it’s over now.’

  With a rush of relief I hurried to tell him. ‘I had to go and bring Scarlett home and talk to her about it. But it wasn’t Scarlett and Harriet at all – it was Poppy, trying to get them into trouble. No wonder they were so worried and so wary of her friendship.’

  Sam looked furious. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t know.’

  ‘Scarlett kept trying to tell me, but I was always too busy and then Jennie went behind my back…’

  ‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? True to form as ever. But now you know the truth, you can take a very different attitude.’ He was stroking my face, calming me down.

  ‘But how could she, Sam? How could she lie about you and Tina?’

  ‘There are no limits to Jennie’s schemings where you are concerned, I’m afraid,’ said Sam. ‘Poor cow.’ He kissed me softly, lit a cigarette and said, ‘It’s over now, Martha. Come on, come on, it’s all over and I love you.’

  And I knew without doubt that he meant it.

  I only wanted to sleep in his arms.

  I knew I couldn’t take any more. I was an emotional wreck.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Jennie

  I KNEW I COULDN’T take any more. I was an emotional wreck.

  My work was my salvation.

  I needed no calm interior for that – the more tumultuous the turmoil, the better the results; the more anguish, the quicker I worked; ideas flashing like forked lightning as I formed and hewed and nurtured some sort of order out of chaos into my moonscapes of a tortured soul.

  The classes were behind me since Josie said she had no more to teach me, and yes, that did thrill me then. ‘You’re on your own, Jennie. You’ll make it,’ and she held out a hand encased in red clay. ‘I envy your talent, I really do.’

  But nothing could lift my spirits now.

  I watched dully when Graham cleared the garage in preparation for my new firing oven, a birthday present from him. He set it up, built shelves and racks and then tiled the floor.

  ‘Don’t you need planning permission for that?’ shouted Sadie as she stalked past.

  Graham took no notice.

  There was so much ill feeling now, and all directed at me.

  And then, of course, the planners came round, alerted by a petition signed by every resident which said my studio would cause local nuisance – just one of the petty attacks we endured. The chief planner, Mr Jackson, saw no problem as we weren’t changing the external aspects or putting in a window. ‘But change of use?’ he wondered aloud. ‘That could be a tricky one.’

  No window. No looking out.

  I worked all the hours God gave under that stark fluorescent light. I moulded, I twisted my shapes of wire, I sliced, I fashioned; I fired with the inside of my head all broken and my brain whirring round with the wheel. Of course, I had to explain to Graham about this frantic behaviour, so I told him truthfully about Tina and Sam, and Martha’s angry denial.

  ‘So Martha believed them, not me. She honestly imagined I made it up.’

  ‘But why tell her, Jennie? Christ, you kept it from me, why not her?’

  Why? How could I tell him? How could I explain? ‘Because she was being made such a fool of.’

  ‘Better that than torture,’ said Graham, with a knowing that surprised me. He drummed the table with his long fingers, concerned that I was being turned into this persona non grata. ‘But this animosity can’t last, it’s far too time-consuming. Persecution uses up energy. The only answer is to ignore them and get on with our lives as normal.’

  There was no ‘as normal’ about it.

  It was never going to be that easy.

  ‘Don’t let them see you’re upset,’ I told Poppy and Josh with a breaking heart. ‘Just don’t give them the satisfaction.’ It was anguish to watch them being ostracized through no fault of their own, cold-shouldered by kids on skateboards and bicycles; Poppy not collected for school and coming home alone. And when, of an evening, the green turned into a playground, if Poppy or Josh crept out to join in there’d be sniggers and nudges and rushes inside the nearest unfriendly house.

  Look what I’d done to my children.

  Dear God, how could I answer their innocent questions? How could their mates turn on them like this? Someone had eavesdropped, as children do, as the angry gossip flew round the Close, and they must have caught on to the undertones. We were vilified as a family of troublemakers and common decency no longer applied. Intelligent and manipulative, Scarlett was a natural leader.

  It was quite a shock to realize just how much I was disliked in the Close. It hadn’t occurred to me before how much Martha’s protection had meant; these women held on to their various grudges, bitter old vultures pecking at morsels, poised to pounce and drain and tear, and I was astonished to see normal adults conspiring in this vicious way.

  I tried to approach them as individuals, but as public enemy number one I didn’t achieve very much. Hilary Wainwright turned, and stalked off as if I didn’t exist, Angie Ford acted the same, and I didn’t have the guts to tackle Sadie because she was the least well inclined of them all.

  I went across to Martha’s house with a speech carefully rehearsed. The door stayed closed in my face.

  I tried to ring her.

  She put down the phone.

 
; I sent her reasonable notes, pleading for sense for the sake of my children who Martha had always been fond of. I couldn’t get my head round the fact she was happy to see them so cruelly treated.

  The men remained polite but distant. Although they took no part in the feuding they weren’t blind; they must have accepted it. When Graham tried to sort things out, man to man, across the road with Anthony Wainwright, he was told he didn’t know the half of it, that I was being taught a much-needed lesson and that I was a vindictive woman.

  He was told his kids would get over it. ‘It might be easier for everyone,’ advised Anthony, ‘if you moved your family somewhere else.’

  Finally, after six weeks of this, we both decided we had no choice. We couldn’t go on living like this: the children would have to be moved before any lasting damage was done.

  Swimming pool, brand-new studio, a safe and stylish place to live – all down the drain through one foolish mistake. We’d had such high hopes when we came here and now we were both broken-hearted. The FOR SALE sign went up and we started looking for houses nearby within commuting distance of town. New schools for the children seemed like the sensible option – this September Poppy would have gone to the comp; she’d been assessed and placed in the C stream, two below Scarlett, with rough types not interested in learning. A private school was the obvious answer, and I felt the same about poor little Josh who already missed Lawrence so much that he cried for him every night and refused to give his Buzz Lightyear back.

  The kids in the Close, hyped up by the feud, got wise to the kind of trouble they could cause. Led by Scarlett and Lawrence, the little gang consisted of Harriet and other school friends, the Wainwrights’ two boys and Angie Ford’s nephews. They were pissed off because they’d been banned from the pool – not by us, but by their parents. So when we had our first couple of viewers, these little tormentors played football on the green, making sure to kick the ball in our garden, targeting the car and the front windows, finally wedging it in our gutter.

  ‘This open-plan arrangement,’ mused a Mr Gregson, eyeing his wife, ‘I’m not entirely sure I’m in favour.’

  His neat little wife was more direct. ‘How do you tolerate this behaviour? They’re so uncontrolled, so cheeky! They must come from that awful estate. The agent said it was improving, but obviously he was wrong.’

  So we cut the viewing to daytime only, avoiding the summer evenings when the kids tended to hang about. But then some yob came up with a new ploy – and scarlet paint was tipped into the swimming pool.

  ‘Right,’ said Graham, ‘time for the law.’

  They were useless. What could they do? they said. ‘You’re lucky if this is your first time,’ said one. ‘At least you’re insured. Some poor bastards put up with worse than this every day.’

  Graham insisted, ‘But this is a personal vendetta and we’re suffering daily from petty vandalism.’ He sounded so tired, so pissed off with it all.

  They had summed us up as paranoid, probably deserving all we got, because why else would the neighbours turn against us? ‘Before we can act we have to have proof and that’s not easy to obtain. Our hands are tied. Without the proof, we can’t get these buggers to court.’ I didn’t offer the two coppers tea.

  They were undermanned, under pressure, the force was certainly not what it was; these two would get out when they got the chance.

  Where could we turn?

  We felt so alone.

  We were prisoners in our own home. When they came home, Poppy and Josh crept up to their rooms and shut themselves in.

  ‘It’ll soon be the end of term,’ I said, ‘and then maybe we could go away.’

  ‘School’s not so bad as it is here,’ Josh said. ‘At school they leave me alone.’ And I imagined him in the playground, abandoned.

  ‘Poppy? How about you?’

  My daughter was crying silent tears. Resentful and angry, she sobbed, ‘Don’t ask me, it’s hell, don’t make me go…’

  ‘It’s only for another two weeks…’

  ‘One day is too long,’ she cried, and oh how I felt for her distress. ‘Mrs Forest lets me stay in the office. Sometimes I help Mrs Gould, typing envelopes and that, and sticking stamps on.’ Unable to go on, she buried her head. God, I was angry. What sort of education was that? What was the point in putting her through it, but to take her away would be total surrender. I just hoped she wouldn’t start skiving and end up vulnerable in the mall again.

  ‘This is all my fault,’ I told Graham. ‘You just don’t know…’

  ‘I don’t need to know, Jennie. Nothing you did could justify this.’ Again he was my strong protector, defending me and soothing me, the way we were before I loved Martha. ‘This is an evil vindictiveness, the kind you expect from some mindless underclass. These arseholes ought to know better.’ He was pale and utterly furious. I rested a hand on his knee and we dropped back into uneasy silence.

  But what if he did know? What if they told him? They had so much ammunition to use if they chose to annihilate me completely – all those betrayals, our private sex life, that story about our shameful first meeting, my fumbles in bed with Martha. For God’s sake, my worship of Martha, my suicide bid.

  And then the secrets nobody knew: I’d deliberately hurt my child to get Martha’s sympathy, I’d faked a miscarriage and frightened the children in my care with my bouts of frenzied screaming; I had even welcomed my own mother’s death.

  At weekends, in an effort to protect the children, we took them for days out – anywhere. Anything was better than sitting around at home and feeling all that hostility closing in on us; anything rather than gaze out the windows to where our enemies gathered. We attempted a kind of enforced joviality, but, of course, that never worked – even at the best of times we weren’t really like that.

  We tried to anticipate future attacks and guess what form they might take. Who was at the heart of this devilish revenge? We failed to find any answers. We only knew that when we went out, we had to keep our heads held high.

  The silent phone calls came from the children. I could hear them laughing behind their hands. We never knew how much vandalism was caused by our neighbours, and how much by the estate kids whose troublemaking on the way home from the pub had escalated since last year, to every homeowner’s horror.

  My washing line was laden with clothes when somebody sliced it in half.

  Our flowerbeds were trampled into mud. The heads were cut off our roses.

  They slashed the tyres of Graham’s car. Some of my pottery tools were stolen.

  A dirty old mac was left on the doormat. Graham was nonplussed but I knew what it meant and I detected Sam’s hand somewhere in this. This was the ultimate stab in the back. Martha must have told Sam my story of how we two had first met, and Sam would not hesitate to turn this into public knowledge. But this didn’t cause any more dismay; I already lived in a fog of horror.

  My pleasure came in the few split seconds I was relieved from pain… those moments before waking up every morning.

  I deserved this vilification. Over the years I’d brought it on with my appalling behaviour, but my family were innocent. Maybe I should go away for a while, perhaps until the house was sold. My brain played around with this new idea. The thought of flight was appealing – any action seemed attractive, any action promised some hope of relief.

  Graffiti was scrawled on our garage door; Graham painted it over. It came straight back.

  And all the time I marvelled – how could Martha have a hand in this?

  Did she honestly know what was happening?

  But she wouldn’t see me: she refused, even when I called on her at work.

  ‘Martha is busy,’ was the message that finally reached the front desk. What was she – cool, amused, hostile, controlled?

  I even turned to God, to the stern God of my mother. ‘Forgive me for all that selfishness, oh God, please tell me what to do.’

  There was no point in crying out loud.

 
Nobody wanted to hear me.

  On weekdays I was alone in the house with nothing to do but think, or work. I rocked, I moaned, overwhelmed by the thought of my children being turned into victims, like me. I thrust my fingers into my mouth and bit them to cause some alternative torment.

  Then I would force myself into action. I worked from the moment the family departed until the time they came home. And often, at night, after they were asleep, I wrapped up warmly, turned on the studio lights, lit the heater, and worked myself senseless till dawn, experimenting with new forms, new glazes, while I moved around the howling corridors of nightmare.

  The house alarm didn’t cover the garage and I was in mortal fear of some child creeping in and destroying my work. Slowly, it became very precious to me. I went overboard with padlocks and bolts.

  ‘I don’t care what they smash up just so long as we stay safe,’ said Graham.

  ‘But they wouldn’t seriously hurt us, would they?’ I was astonished that he might think otherwise. It was me they were after, it was me they detested. What might they do – shave off my hair, tar and feather me, break my kneecaps? This was absurd.

  ‘I just don’t know anything any more,’ Graham confessed without expression. ‘How can I know, how could anyone know? This is all beyond understanding.’ He kept a poker beside the bed.

  ‘I’ve had it before,’ I reminded him, ‘most of it. And it felt just as bad when I was bullied at school and nobody bothered. At least this time there’s two of us. Imagine if we were alone and didn’t have each other.’

  We were so used to abusive calls that Graham always answered the phone in the evenings. That screaming sound was so threatening then, and that jerk of anticipation the phone seems to give before it actually starts to ring. Everyone jumped when the phone rang; we all stopped what we were doing and stared around with frightened eyes.

  Total relief. We breathed again. This was a dealer called Hamish Lisle, a bit of a joke between us, and Graham gave me a wink.

  ‘Thing is, old dear, I’ve got someone here who would just adore to meet you. Wondered when would be a good time?’