by Ann Morgan
The witch stepped out of the shadows, her face every bit as sharp and angular as her picture on the page.
‘What on earth is going on?’ said Mother.
She stalked forward until the light from the glass roof fell on her face. ‘Where’s Nick?’
‘Daddy went out and left me and Smudge to play by ourselves,’ announced Heloise. ‘And look what we made!’
She proudly tilted the drawing in Mother’s direction.
Mother’s face turned pale and she put her hand to her throat.
‘How dare you!’ she exploded. ‘How dare you come here and try to poison this house too? How dare you try to turn my family against me?’ She held out a trembling hand to Heloise. ‘Come away, darling,’ she called in a brittle voice. ‘Come away this instant. Let’s go upstairs and watch Dora the Adventurer. This Splodge or whatever nonsense she’s calling herself is not a nice person. Mummy wouldn’t like it if she knew you were talking to her.’
Heloise regarded Mother with a thoughtful frown.
‘Fuck off,’ she said at length.
‘Right, that’s it!’ said Mother, clattering across the room, snatching Heloise’s hand and yanking her off her chair. ‘Upstairs this instant or you’re in for a smack.’
Heloise stumbled across the room and up the stairs.
‘Anyway it’s Dora the Explorer,’ she shouted when she was safely out of reach. ‘Not Dora the Adventurer, you big poo!’
Mother turned to Smudge, a wild look in her eyes.
‘Right, that’s it,’ she said again, through clenched teeth. ‘This nonsense ends here. I don’t know what kind of spell you’ve cast over Nick but I won’t have it. For the good of everyone, I’m telling you to leave. Right now.’
Smudge stared at the grain of the wood on the table, a hum building in her ears.
‘This isn’t your house,’ she said quietly.
‘What’s that?’ said Mother.
‘This isn’t your house,’ said Smudge, erupting from the table to stand and face her. ‘This is Nick’s house and he’s asked me to stay. You don’t have the right to tell me to leave.’
‘Wrong!’ said Mother. ‘This is Helen’s house too and in her absence I speak for her. Nick’s a man. He’s weak. He doesn’t know what he needs. But I see. I see how things are. I see the problems between them – how this is a… delicate time. And the last thing they need is you here spreading your filth around, disrupting things. I will not have it. And I especially will not have you corrupting the innocence of a little girl.’
Smudge barked a laugh. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? Protecting innocence?’
The slap came out of nowhere. Smudge winced as the gash on her forehead ripped into flame once more.
‘How dare you!’ shouted Mother. ‘Dear God, how I wish Richard were here. There’s no way he’d stand by and let you abuse me like this.’
‘So why isn’t he then?’ said Smudge, holding the side of her head. ‘What could be so important that he wouldn’t make time for precious Helen in her hour of need?’
‘If you must know, he’s in Afghanistan,’ said Mother, drawing herself up. ‘He’s on a tour of duty and they couldn’t spare him. Unlike some people I could name, Richard is making something of his life.’
‘Getting as far away as possible, more like,’ muttered Smudge.
Mother glared. She snatched up the witch drawing and strode to the foot of the stairs.
‘I’m not discussing this any further,’ she said. ‘I’m taking this and I’m showing it to Nick and explaining everything. By tomorrow morning, you’ll be out on your ear.’
26
Blackness. Pain. Not caring. It’s all nonsense, and only you know. No consequences, no structure to anything. It’s only lies that keep everyone in place, playing at being who they’re told they are. Fools. You find a mixer tape of music by a band called Nirvana on a Walkman you snatch from another kid, and you listen to that over and over again. You like the crunch of the chords, the way each intro seems to open a tunnel of despair and suck you down to wander labyrinths of dark chambers, insulated from the banal chatter of the everyday world. You think this is what being in a coma must be like. You also think this is what’s underneath everything else if only people would stop to listen, but most people, you realise, are too scared. Most people have to drown it out with irrelevancies – with daytime television and long phone conversations where they say hundreds of words that add up to nothing at all. You’re not scared, though. You’ve looked into the emptiness beneath the cracks in the floorboards of life and you know the truth. And now it turns out that, with the music you hear crackling through the headphones, you’re not alone. Other people have seen it too.
You listen to that music day and night, Kurt Cobain’s voice like a coyote call in a desert of pain. You listen to it on the bus and in bed and in the lessons you go to, with the earphones threaded down your sleeves to your hands so the teachers can’t see the wires. You listen to it in the sessions the school organises for you, with a series of well-meaning, pastel-wearing people who nod earnestly, ask you questions with apologetic expressions, and then disappear after a few weeks. Sometimes you don’t even need the earphones: your head DJ takes care of it, playing the music on and on inside your mind.
There are days when the pain gets too bad, when even Kurt seems far away. On those days you stay in bed. Or you get up and grab Akela’s car keys off the hall table and sit in the driver’s seat, revving the engine until it screams. Or you go and raid the drinks cabinet, pouring sherry, whisky, eggnog, Tia Maria down your throat, until the dizziness and the vomiting overtake what’s going on in your head and banish it for a while. Change, you learn, can be a sort of release, even if it’s for the worse.
Sometimes, Akela comes and talks at you in his blathering, scoutmaster way. If you close your eyes and just listen to the tone of his voice, you can imagine he is giving some lecture to his troop – something about tying knots or lighting fires in the woods. You let him talk until he runs out of words and slips away back to his model planes out in the garden shed, feeling justified.
Mother has nothing to do with you. Hellie keeps out of your way too. When she sees you coming down the corridor at school, she turns her back and faces into her group of friends. But in the night, when you can’t sleep, you sometimes get up and stare down at her, lying in the space where your little bed used to be. The moon shines through the gap in the curtains on to her pillow, picking up the fronds of her once-wispy hair that has now turned thick and luscious, plumped by an array of sprays and mousses on the bathroom windowsill. You look down at her, dreaming peacefully in her perfect life, the life you should have had – full of prizes and performances and invitations to the cinema and sleepovers and parties – and it makes you burn. You reach out and trace the shape of her downy cheek and imagine what it would be like if a razor cut it in a clean line and blood oozed out. Other times your fingers tingle with the urge to clutch her throat and squeeze. You picture it: the second she awakens and the mingling of surprise and knowledge in her eyes before her features freeze like a picture paused for ever on a TV screen. You don’t think beyond the moment of it happening: the pure release. White energy, like magnesium spitting in the Bunsen burner’s flame.
After a while, the thoughts start to come in the daytime too. When you pass her on the stairs, you imagine sticking your foot out to trip her, sending her tumbling in a flurry of light-brown hair, and on the school trip into town to the Natural History Museum it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from lunging at her as the tube train approaches the platform. You find you are watching, waiting, hesitating on thresholds and round corners, in case she is coming and an opportunity presents itself. You are starting to plan.
Then they discover the head in the park. Unusually for you, you are sitting at the breakfast table with the others when there is a knock at the front door. Akela rolls his eyes and goes to answer and from where you’re
sitting you see the black and white of police uniforms and a hand and a notebook scribbling things down. For a moment, you think they’ve come for you. Akela thinks so too, because he glances back and meets your eye, but it’s quickly clear it’s something else. It turns out some local woman, a dogwalker, has discovered a severed head in the undergrowth across the grass from the upside-down tree. The police are going house to house to find out if anyone saw anything.
The neighbourhood goes into crisis mode. All through that day and the week after people stand in huddles whispering what they know. Police tape flutters at the entrance to the park. People swap grisly details like top-trump cards in the playground. The headmaster gives a solemn assembly.
It freaks you out too, if you’re honest. But unlike the others, you’re not worried about a vicious murderer walking the streets or lurking in the precinct to lure his next victim. For you, it’s something different. Because you know how the head got there. Not the details, not the individual story, but how it came together in someone’s mind to end another person’s life. You know the recipe, the ingredients it would take to cook something like that up. And that scares you.
It scares you so much that for a few days, you are the picture of goodness. You help with dinner, you go to lessons, you even hand some homework in. Teachers smile at you, bewildered, pleased. The other students give you wary, curious looks. You ignore them, keep your head down, hope that if you pretend it long enough normalness will seep back inside you and occupy your whole being. At night when you close your eyes you picture the dog sniffing round the sightless eyes, its tongue licking. You play Kurt on the Walkman to blot it out, but it’s always there at the back of your mind, rooting around.
Still, you persevere. And as the days pass and turn into weeks, little by little, it gets easier. People stop acting surprised that you’ve got a brain, that you can work out sums, and start expecting it from you. You begin an art project, drawing a heap of trainers from lost property, and the teacher gives you a B+, then an A. Josie, a fat girl with not many friends, invites you to go to her house to watch a film.
You start to believe that it’s possible for things to work out after all, that perhaps all this has been a bad dream. Even living the wrong existence – if the swap and the game really did happen (and there are times when you doubt this now) – maybe you could have a chance at a normal life. You spend time in Boots, looking at lipglosses and eye shadows in subtle, shimmering colours, like the kind the popular girls at school wear.
Sometimes you catch yourself laughing with the excitement of it all. How right everything is, how much you can do. You shut yourself in the dining room after Sunday lunch and draw and draw, producing picture after picture. These you take in to show the art teacher, Miss Hogan, on Monday mornings, taut with anticipation of her reaction, like an elastic band stretched on the braces of the kids who stare at you in the canteen. Miss Hogan smiles at you vaguely and puts a hand to her head. ‘Did I set all this work?’ she says breezily. ‘I suppose I must have. Well done. Very good.’
Sometimes, when you walk home from the bus stop, you see energy fizzing out of the corners of your eyes. You are in love with life. You’re amazed by the colours in everything – the trees, the houses, the flowers on the roundabout spelling out HONDA. The sky, you discover, is the most extraordinary light show, putting on display after display as people scurry about beneath it, minds elsewhere. It’s awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. You could watch it for hours, lying on your back on the hill in the park, exclaiming as people wander by.
You can’t believe that all this exists freely, unbidden. The generosity of nature astounds you and fills you with gratitude. You want to embrace the world, to thank it and whatever life-force lies behind it, for being so bountiful, so extraordinary, so good. You feel duty bound to share what you’ve discovered, to usher others to this window on to the essence of reality that has been vouchsafed to you. When people get close to you in this mood – in the playground, in the precinct, on the bus – you talk and talk to them about the beauty of the world. They look at you distantly – sometimes they move to get away – but you don’t mind. You are an ocean trying to pour through a tap and all you can do is open your mouth and let the words run. You are on fire with the brilliance of being, burning in a clean, white light. Life astonishes you.
But it can’t last, and you ought to know that by now. One day, walking past the newsagent’s at the entrance to the precinct, you see a pair of black-rimmed eyes staring out from under shaggy, blond locks on the cover of the NME. Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), reads the caption. He killed himself, you discover. A gunshot wound to the head. They didn’t find him for several days, not until an electrician came to fit a security system at his house. It looked like he was asleep at first. There was very little blood.
When you look up from the copy, the world is dulled. The sky is white and blind as a milked-over eye. And a chilly breeze is blowing, probing your neck with cold fingers, fingers that at any minute will clutch you and start to draw you back to chaos and darkness once again.
27
She sat on the bed in the little room, in her coat, waiting for the knock on the door. In the rest of the house she heard footsteps, muttering voices, doors banging and the sounds of things being dragged and moved. A couple of times someone came up the staircase to the attic floor and she braced herself, ready for the polite rat-a-tat and Nick’s grave face, but it didn’t come: instead, whoever it was walked up the corridor and seemed to go into the other room where further thumping and scraping ensued.
She was on the point of shrugging off the coat when the knock came. She swallowed and stood up. The room lurched, but stayed the right way up. She opened the door.
Nick was standing there. He looked tired. There were pouches under his eyes and the lines on his forehead seemed deeper, as though, overnight, someone had chiselled him into a more severe version of himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘What for?’ said Nick.
‘Giving grief,’ she said. She reached for one of Mother’s old phrases: ‘Making a scene.’
He stared at the hinges of the door and frowned.
‘What? Margaret and Horace?’ he said. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s not your fault. It’s been a long time coming. I should have handled it better. I mean, it was good of them to be here to help with Heloise and everything, but it’s been three months now. It’s time we started getting back to normal and working out how to cope on our own.’ He grimaced. ‘Anyway, it’s not as though we had much to do with them before the accident.’
Smudge twirled her finger in a strand of her hair. ‘You didn’t?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Helen has a rather difficult relationship with Margaret. To say the least.’
He shifted and put one hand on the doorframe, leaning there rather awkwardly.
‘So, I saw the drawing you did with Heloise,’ he said. ‘It was really good. More than good.’
She blushed. ‘It’s nothing. I worked as an illustrator, or a sort of graphic designer really, for a few years. That’s all.’
Nick nodded. ‘Heloise said “drawrer”. I thought it must have been something like that. Funny, Helen never told me.’
Smudge shrugged. ‘I don’t think she knew,’ she said. ‘We weren’t in touch at the time. Designer’s probably not even the right term anyway. More like corporate artist.’
‘Interesting,’ said Nick. ‘Who did you work for?’
She fiddled with a frayed bit on her sleeve. The corridor behind Nick was developing an unnerving habit of swinging alternately closer to and farther from her, as though the house were expanding and contracting, like a breathing lung.
‘Just this company called Edgewise,’ she mumbled.
‘Up in Manchester,’ said Nick. ‘I know. Aren’t they the ones that did the Old Masters tablet campaign for that company out in Amsterdam?’
Smudge nodded. ‘Th
at was me. And one other colleague.’
Nick raised his eyebrows and whistled.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s only right that an artist of that calibre should have her own studio.’
Smudge narrowed her eyes and touched a hand to the hot side of her face where the gash burned. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Come on,’ said Nick, and he led her to the threshold of the adjacent room. She followed, sparks dancing on the edge of her vision, dryness in her mouth.
‘Ready?’ he said.
She mustered a smile, fighting the hectic feeling crowding its way up her throat.
He thrust open the door and ushered her into the room. An easel had been set up by a big window looking out towards the park. Beside it stood a table bearing all manner of pencils, paints, pastels, oils and charcoals. Good brands too: Derwent and Faber-Castell. There was even a radio on the windowsill, just like they used to have in the studio all those years ago.
She started forward and picked up some of the pencils. The words loomed at her, seeming to throb.
‘Wow. Nothing but the best,’ she said. She looked up at him and a faint note of alarm sounded way inside the muffled corridors of her mind. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Why are you being so nice to me?’
He dodged her stare and drummed his fingers on the doorframe.
‘Oh, it’s nothing really,’ he said. ‘Just stuff I get through work. Freebies, really. I’m an architect, so—’
She blinked.
‘What kind of architect?’
‘Oh, you know. Buildings,’ he laughed, then saw her expression. ‘Sorry. I’m working on this big project at the moment, actually. This tall pair of towers in central London. It’s causing quite a bit of controversy. That’s why I had to leave you with Heloise yesterday.’
‘Not—’ She snapped her fingers, trying to pick the word out of the air.