by Ann Morgan
I sniff, nodding up at the blurry Mother in front of me. ‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Right,’ says Mother. ‘Come along then, like a good girl.’
I follow her into the toilet, the sick squelching round my feet. At the door, I turn and look back. Ellie is standing by the hedge. Her face is still pale from feeling ill, but on her mouth there is a small twist of a smile.
5
She spread the photograph of Hellie, smiling at the camera with a glint in her grey-blue eyes, on the living-room table and pegged it down with drawing pins. She stood back and stared at it. The face looked up at her, nervousness in the eyes now – some of the old Ellieness still peeking through. After three hours of sitting reading the words about the crash over and over again, smoking her way through the tobacco, she finally knew what she had to do. Her nerves zinged with it. Her head voices were in agreement. (‘Yes!’ they all shouted. ‘Yes!’) She was glad of their support.
‘Don’t worry, Hellie,’ Smudge whispered softly. ‘It’s not what you think.’
And it wasn’t. It wasn’t nasty. It wasn’t vengeful or mean. It was brilliant. Something new and entirely different. It would make sense of everything at last. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before.
She arranged her materials: the dregs of the paint, water, toothpaste in place of white, the brushes, the mirror. She also laid out some old make-up – foundation and eyeshadows in garish colours. She didn’t know how they’d mix up, but she liked the idea of using them. No doubt critics would have something to say about her choice of materials – a comment on the superficiality of the modern age.
(‘Estimable,’ said an authoritative, woman’s voice somewhere inside her ear.)
She let fly a laugh. Critics! Ha! She could see it now: the crowds, the awards, the interviews with the national press. There’d be exhibitions and books published on the subject. They’d probably even name a new school of art after her – Hellenism, perhaps? Or hadn’t there been that before? Oh well, she’d leave it to others to hash it out. She had enough to be getting on with. She was too busy being a genius. Because who else in the history of everything had ever come up with such an idea? A self-portrait painted over someone else’s face. It was fucking inspired.
Thinking about it, it could be the start of a whole series. Marilyn and Me, The Queen and I – there was no end to the possibilities. She was on a roll. This could be, like, a whole new art form.
She bit her fist and jiggled with the excitement of it all. The doors of her mind blew open and she saw suddenly how it all aligned, how everything had been leading to this point. Everything made sense. The world linked up; shining threads running through the passages of her brain, turning the dusty, dark places into chambers of light. There had been a purpose to it all; through all the suffering, all the shit, she had been bringing herself steadily to this moment, shaping and refining her being until she was pure and lithe and alert to the rhythms of the higher plane with nothing but creativity, energy and will. And now it was here: her opportunity, her moment, her time to shine. And the best thing about it was that this was not her having one of her up times. This was not her being delusional. This was actually, properly real.
(‘Real as strawberry jam,’ agreed the woman’s voice.)
Hellie watched her, warily.
‘There, Hellie, there,’ said Smudge, stroking her sister’s dewy-looking cheek.
Poor Hellie. She felt sorry for her now, fixed in all her daytime perkiness. She thought she might cry for a moment, but then the impulse passed.
She rubbed a hand over her face. What now? Oh, yes, music. She needed music. She flew over to the CD-cassette combi-player in the corner and rummaged through the cases lying around it. Joni Mitchell? Nah, too ephemeral. Radiohead? Too downbeat. Nirvana? Fuck off. The Beatles, Oasis, Carole King… She swept them all aside: she needed something uplifting and substantial, something to urge her on to brilliance. Mozart’s The Magic Flute? That would have been good but it wasn’t in its case. Beethoven’s Ninth? Nah – too militant. Besides, it wasn’t even the proper version. It was one for a xylophone orchestra that she’d picked up in some car boot sale and only realised when she got it home. Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2? Now we were talking. She slipped the CD into the machine and turned it up as loud as it would go. The music shivered the speakers in gusts – sinister, moody, clouds gathering before the weather broke to let the late-summer evening at the piece’s heart shine through.
She walked back to the table in time to it, nodding to herself. This would carry her. Borne on Rachmaninov’s great surges of sound she’d crest over the mountains of self-doubt and on into the stratosphere. She could feel the universe shifting and reordering itself, the stars thrumming. She was ready, she was open, she would channel it all.
As the music swelled and then scattered into rivulets of running notes, she twisted the top off the concealer and blobbed it on to the page. The beige liquid collected in drops, streaks of clear liquid running through them where the mixture had separated in the weeks lying out in the hallway. She reached out and smoothed it across the paper, feeling it spread like silk beneath her fingers, until the full wonky oval of Hellie’s face was covered in a uniform, neutral shade. That done, she used the eye pencil to shade in some of the shape of her face. She traced back the features that loomed through the mist of the make-up, lending a leaner slant to her cheekbones and the hollows beneath and narrowing the eyes that Hellie’s make-up team had widened so artfully for the camera.
The music shimmered, sending bright streams trickling through the whorls and crevasses of her brain as she set to work on the tattoo. This was the most technically complicated part and she spent some moments studying the letters on her temple in the last shard of the bathroom mirror. The trick was to get the angle correct. It was tempting to bend the rules and print the word on so it could be read backwards by anyone looking at the picture. But that would be a lie. From front on, only the ‘M’ and the ‘O’ were visible. That was what she had to capture if she wanted to present the picture as it really was. And this was what it was all about: truth.
She selected the indigo tube of paint and squeezed a worm’s head of it out into the ice-cube tray. The music seethed around her, throwing up shapes only to topple them like so many houses of cards as she painted on: harnessed, focused, absorbed.
At first she thought the banging was the timps thundering in the furious climax of the third movement, but when the noise of the orchestra ebbed away, leaving the piano alone on the shore of melody, the thuds continued, insistent and brutally out of time. She frowned. What now? The family with the Rottweiler next door? Someone new moving in upstairs? The orchestra flooded in again carrying the piano with it to the penultimate crest of the piece and seeming to sweep the banging away. She shrugged and turned her attention back to the picture: ‘A Selfish Portrait’, she was beginning to think she would call it. It was a good sign, the title beginning to crystallise like that – it meant the work was sound.
‘Ellie?’ called a man’s voice from the hallway.
She stiffened. Fear gripped her, sending thoughts ricocheting through her brain: social services? Dom come to huff and puff and scratch his arse about her rent? The police? The kids from the estate setting off bangers outside? Bailiffs? No, they wouldn’t call her Ellie like that. Then who?
The banging resumed, accompanied by the rattle of the letterbox. As the music surged to its finale, she edged to the threshold of the living room and peered out into the gloom of the hall. A dark shape stood behind the frosted glass of the front door, its outline shifting and changing like patterns in a kaleidoscope.
Then it disappeared. The letterbox flipped up.
‘Ellie?’ said the mouth it revealed: a man’s mouth set in a smooth, clean-shaven face.
The mouth slid away and a pair of big brown eyes swooped in to take its place. She jumped back into the living room as the music tumbled to its final chords.
‘Ellie?�
�� said the mouth again. ‘Look, I know you’re in there. I can hear the music. I can see your shadow. Can you just open the door?’
Smudge looked down and saw her black outline spilling away from the bare bulb above the table and out into the hall. She shifted too late and sank down against the wall to minimise it, wincing as the paper rasped at her descent. She crouched, hugging her knees, feeling naked as the applause after the music ebbed away, leaving her exposed. Even her breathing seemed crude and loud in the silence.
(‘Irrefutable,’ pronounced the woman.)
‘Shhh,’ said Smudge.
She heard a sigh come through the letterbox. ‘Look, Ellie, you don’t know me, but it’s Helen’s husband, Nick,’ continued the mouth. ‘I know this is difficult, but there are some things I need to talk to you about. It could be important. Would you please just open the door?’
He talked on, but she couldn’t hear him. For, from the ceiling to the lino on the floor with its burnt patches gaping over scarred boards, everything was starting to reverberate with the notes of the Rachmaninov, giving back the waves of music absorbed over the preceding half hour in a swelling gush until the air itself quavered and pulsed with noise and the screech of a million violin strings seemed to come from the taut wires of her nerves. She stood up suddenly, sticking her head into exploding stars as the sound closed in, crushing her and forcing out one high, ringing scream that seemed to rebound off the walls and the window panes and come back stronger to torture her again.
She rushed to the table. There was the picture. Clumsy, demonic, skewed, it seemed now; laughing at her. She had thought she was in control when she made it – she had thought this time she was the one. But it was just like before. The Hellie bitch was still after her. Even now, at death’s door, she wouldn’t leave her in peace. She had tracked her down somehow. She had sent them after her. She would never be free.
Smudge picked up the black pencil and scored and scored and scored across the face. She scratched on to the point where the eyes of the face became blind and the mouth had no more smile in it and the paper ripped and gaped like a wound. She scratched on until her hand ached and her palm bled from where her nails had dug into it, and there was no longer anything to see.
6
As September comes closer, I start to get excited. My excited is a sharp, jagged thing that I hold inside me, ready to rip and tear at everything and change it all round. It is an excited that comes from still being stuck being Ellie. Plus ages sitting outside Chloe’s mum’s house in the lane in case she comes by and I can tell her the matter and she can make the truth come real. Plus trying to find Mary in the park and still there is no sign and I am worried that the house with the dragon’s eye has eaten her up. Plus the silly looks that are still going on between Mother and Akela like there is no tomorrow and Mother floating about the house like she is a lady in a film and not in real life at all. Plus the times in the night when the tears come and shadows crawl on to the ceiling to laugh at me.
On the third of September I am the most excited I can be. It is a day I would not normally be excited because it is the end of the holidays, which means the first day of school, but this time it’s different because the mistake is going to be discovered. The mistake is going to be discovered for three reasons. Firstly it’s going to be discovered because Jessica and Charlotte and that lot will see me and know who I am. Next, it’s going to be discovered because I am much cleverer than Ellie and anyone seeing her doing work that tries to pretend it’s by me will say, ‘Ellie, you stupid silly. What are you doing? Get back in the colouring in corner where you belong.’ And last of all it’s going to be discovered because we get to see Chloe again and that will really cook Ellie’s goose.
When I think about the mistake being discovered, I am so pleased, I can hardly breathe. The way it will happen is one of the teachers will come and clap a big hand down on Ellie’s shoulder while she is spelling things wrong in my storybook – like writing ‘people’ when everyone knows it has no ‘o’ anywhere at all. Then we will all have to go off to Miss Marshall’s office, where it smells of cigarettes, and we will sit by the fern in a pot and the shelf with a trophy from the county under-tens long jump championship 1986 on it and we will have to tell the whole story like it really is. And Ellie will have to submit how she has been lying her head off and then everyone will go ‘Ummm’ at her. Next they will make Mother come in and Miss Marshall will put on her glasses and say ‘I’m afraid there has been a serious incident’, like she did when Thomas Jones was knocked down by a car and we all had to spend time driving go-karts around a little racing track to learn about road safety. After that they might put Ellie in prison, or if not they will make her clean out the games cupboard, and meanwhile everyone will feel sorry for me and give me sympathy and it will be like I’ve broken my arm, except without the plaster cast or having to fall over.
When we come in the school gates, I can see Jessica and Charlotte and that lot standing over by the broomstick trees and my heart gives a little skip like it can’t wait for my body to get over there and be amongst its friends. But before I can get to them, Ellie speeds up beside me and powers across the grass doing my strong, striding run and swinging arms, and because of the blouse and the skirt Mother dressed her in and how confident Ellie is being, they all gather round to hug her. From a distance, she looks taller somehow, like a famous person.
They look over their shoulders at me as I come up in Ellie’s tunic. ‘Oh, hello, Ellie,’ says Jessica.
Jessica’s face looks longer and she is all golden from spending the summer at her uncle’s house in Sicily, where there is a swimming pool and a tennis court and a little donkey you can ride.
I shake my head.
‘It’s me: Helen,’ I said. ‘Ellie’s trying to play a trick.’
Jessica looks between Ellie and me. The moment wobbles. I see them all narrowing their eyes and staring and it makes me wish I had some of the Cola bottles Akela gave us left, to bring out and offer round. That would prove that I am Helen because Ellie is always greedy and finishes her sweets without offering any to anyone else. It’s one of the worst things about her and everybody knows it and always says about it in secret chats. I think maybe I will buy some and bring them in tomorrow. That will show what a genuine Helen I am.
Then Ellie puts her hand on her hip, standing proudly, and says: ‘God-uh, Ellie. I’ve had it up to here with you. Haven’t you had enough of Let’s Pretend? We’re in Class 3 now, you know.’
Charlotte and that lot all burst out laughing, bending over like it hurts with how funny it is. I wait for them to finish, watching Jessica’s smile curl into a sneer, like a piece of paper burning on a bonfire, but just as I open my mouth to say how it really is, the whistle blows and they all run away, screaming and giggling, to go and line up.
Ellie might have got everybody on her side at the start, but I am determined to have the last laugh, so when we go in I run quickly to get a place at the popular table, right next to Jessica. As we take our chairs down Nadia rolls her eyes and Seema waves her hand in front of her nose and says ‘Does it smell in here?’, which is what they always used to say about Ellie, but I smile because I know the truth. When Ellie finally comes in with her arm around Katy, there isn’t any room left at the table so she has to go and sit with Ruth and Hannah C, who bites her fingers and smells of Quavers. I am pleased that things are getting back to the way they should be.
The new teacher is called Miss Inchbald. She is young and shiny, with corners on the collar of her jacket that look like they have been put through a pencil sharpener to make them point. When she comes in, the first thing she says after ‘Good morning’ and writing her name on the board is: ‘Now, Class Three, see how smooth my forehead is? There are no lines on it. I don’t want there to be any lines by the end of the year, so you’d better make sure you behave.’
Next, there is the register. The names go in the normal order except for the new boy, Pascal, who comes from France.
He looks worried when he hears his name and looks round to see what he should do. Then he realises everyone had been saying ‘Yes’ and he says it too in a funny French way and makes us all laugh. He puts his hands in the air like a footballer scoring a goal and suddenly, just like that, he is not new any more. He is one of us.
Then it gets to Ellie’s name.
‘Eleanor Sallis,’ says Miss Inchbald. Nobody says anything. Everybody looks around.
Miss Inchbald taps her pen on the page with all the blank squares on it, two for each person for every day in the term. She looks up.
‘Eleanor Sallis?’ she says again.
I see the movement beside me before I hear the words.
‘She’s here, Miss,’ says Jessica, pointing, and the others join in: ‘She’s here! She’s here!’
Miss Inchbald looks at me through the forest of their hands. ‘Hmmn,’ she says, and she marks Ellie’s cross with thoughtful eyes.
Then it’s Helen on the list and I lurch to put my hand up, only Jessica grabs it and holds it firm under the table so I have to watch while Ellie nods and takes my name with a pinched little smile.
After the register, we get ready to write all about what we did in the holidays. A new year means new exercise books and I am looking forward to getting mine and writing my name on it once and for all. And I am especially looking forward to telling the story of Ellie’s naughtiness and how she is lying at everybody left, right and centre. But instead, Miss Inchbald comes over and takes my hand and leads me to the special corner where there is Ellie’s old workbook that she didn’t finish last year. The workbook has pictures that you have to match up with words and then copy out the spelling so your hand learns how to do it properly and I have to sit between James, who always wets himself, and Parvez, whose family moved here from Bangladesh last year and who still thinks ‘hellohowareyou’ is one big long word. When I look up from the book, I see Ellie swaggering to the space next to Jessica, hugging her new exercise book and my pencil case like they are teddy bears, and a black feeling comes over me that makes me pick up my pencil and scrawl all over the pictures of the dog and the cat and the family car that I am supposed to be matching up. I am so busy scribbling, wanting to make every last bit of the page grey, that I don’t notice anyone is there until a hand comes to rest on the edge of the table. It is a hand I know: a soft hand, with purple, sparkly nails and rings on all the middle fingers.