Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

  ‘The Hairpin?’ said Nick. ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him, eyes widening as somewhere inside her brain a connection sparked. She remembered the cruel twisting of the towers, the two structures locked in a monstrous embrace.

  ‘I’ve seen that,’ she said. ‘Pictures, I mean. Computer-generated things. It’s really… something.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nick, pursing his lips against a smile. ‘Who knows? It might not happen if all these Nimby campaigners get their way. Still, we had the same trouble with the Barnacle and that went ahead.’

  Smudge put a hand to her throat. ‘The Barnacle!’ she said. ‘Up in Manchester?’

  Nick looked pleased.

  ‘Yes. Do you know it?’

  She shrugged. ‘I went shopping there once or twice,’ she mumbled. ‘Years ago.’

  Then she fell silent as the memories of the other things that had happened there – that dreadful day – swarmed into her mind.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Nick. He stretched out an arm towards the easel. ‘What do you make of this? Will it do? Do you think you might spend a few hours in here while you get back to full strength?’

  She fought to stay in the room.

  ‘It’s—’ she said. ‘It’s—’

  But the voices and the faces crowding round her were too insistent. She felt the bubbling and the soaking and the beginnings of agony.

  Then the sparks that had been spiralling and fizzing on the extremities began to burn the room away and the floor tipped and gaped, swallowing her into the blackness beneath.

  28

  Time ceases to mean much. When the others are getting up, you’re going to bed. When they’re in, you’re out. You rarely see them.

  Days, hours and minutes, you realise, are arbitrary things, created to make people feel guilty. To stamp a sense of duty on their hearts, so that they are always running late or up against it or behind. You haven’t got the patience for such things. Life is such a random, brittle thing – gone at the touch of a trigger and only discovered some days later by a lighting engineer – and you are not going to let anyone dictate yours to you. Fuck everybody else.

  Sometimes that’s precisely what you do. You go to pubs and stare at groups of men until one of them can’t take it any more and leads you off into the toilets or out back behind the bins. It amuses you that that’s all you need to do – give them the look that Mother would call insolent – to make them abandon the social graces for grunting and puffing with a stranger in an alley instead. It also amuses you how two people can take such different things from the same act: shallow, short-lived pleasure on one side, and a holiday from your head for you as the jerking, clutching and thrusting crowds out all thoughts. You use them and they don’t even know it. And that’s the biggest kick of all.

  You can’t predict how you’re going to react to things. You keep yourself guessing. Personality, you discover, is a lie. There’s always the freedom to laugh in a policeman’s face, splatter a white wall with Coke and lie screaming on the floor. You don’t conform to a set pattern. There’s no recipe for who you are. You’re free. Dizzyingly, exhilaratingly free. You never know how you’re going to happen next.

  Like the day you find yourself standing outside the tattoo parlour. You don’t know until you do it that you’re going to go in. The place is at the far end of the precinct, set back behind a half-barrel containing some bedraggled pansies and an evergreen fir. You’ve passed it for years on your way to Boots without noticing – the colours and swirls of the designs in the windows registering hazily, on the edge of your consciousness. If you’ve thought of it at all, you’ve assumed that it must be some artist’s studio or an unsuccessful colour photocopy shop.

  But one day – because of boredom probably – you stop to look at it. Your eyes travel over the faded photographs in the window: the dragons inked on beefy shoulders, the mystic, Celtic symbols, the Chinese characters that probably say something obscene or nothing at all. And suddenly that flame that spurs you into action – the same one that makes you shout without warning until the top deck of the bus is clear or swipe a child’s ice-cream into the gutter – ignites.

  You push the door and a bell clanks, rusty with disuse. The small salon lies before you, table and implements swathed in gloom. The place smells of dust and for a moment you think it’s empty until something stirs and a figure detaches itself from the shadows of the back room. The man comes forward: large and speckled with pictures, a spike through the middle of his nose.

  ‘Yes?’ he says.

  ‘I want to get a tattoo,’ you say.

  He scratches his nose. ‘How old are you?’ he says.

  ‘Nineteen,’ you say, thrusting your chin forward to ward off any doubt. Nineteen, you’ve learned, is a more effective answer than eighteen: people don’t expect you to lie more than you have to.

  The man regards you a moment longer. His eyes stray to the precinct beyond, calculating probabilities.

  ‘All right,’ he says.

  He heaves out a ringbinder and shoves it at you. ‘Find what you want in there,’ he says.

  Then he turns and shambles off into the shadows. The lights click on and you hear water running and the clink of implements being prepared.

  You turn the pages of the binder. The photos inside have a dated look: Mohicans and aggressive eye shadow hinting at decades past. Where are these people now? you wonder. Are they still rocking out at underground punk-scene revivals or have they turned respectable, hiding their wrinkling body art under long sleeves and office skirts? What if you see them out and about all the time and don’t realise? What if you know some of them? An image of Akela with a Celtic sun around his bulging belly button pops into your head and makes you cringe.

  There is nothing in the book that you like. But on the last page, you see some samples of writing and they make you think. There are names in copperplate and mottoes that walk the line between naff and wise.

  When the man comes back into the room, you snap the binder closed.

  ‘How much to do a word?’ you say.

  The man shrugs. ‘Depends what you want to say,’ he says. ‘I charge by the letter.’

  You look around, your eyes questing for inspiration. Suddenly a memory flashes up in your mind – Mother’s face, taut and shouting – and a word swims up to meet it. You know without a shadow of a doubt that it’s what you’ve been searching for.

  ‘Monster,’ you say.

  The man raises his eyebrows. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Probably be about thirty quid. Where do you want it?’

  You point at the centre of your forehead. ‘Here.’

  He takes a step back and coughs, raising a fist that has H-A-T-E stamped on the knuckles to cover his mouth.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says. ‘I mean, that’s a pretty prominent place.’

  ‘Yes,’ you say. You’re sure. You’ve decided.

  But the man still isn’t convinced. For all his piercings and aggressive tattoos, he looks a bit intimidated.

  ‘How about I do it round the side instead?’ he says. ‘That way you can cover it up with your hair if you want to.’

  Anger flashes through you.

  ‘I don’t want to cover it up with my hair,’ you say. ‘I want the world to see it. Otherwise what’s the point of getting a tattoo?’

  It’s a solid point and he knows it. Still, he hesitates. There’s a silence. You scuff the sole of your Palladium back and forth on the greasy floor.

  ‘I really think—’ he begins after a moment.

  Suddenly, you’re bored of the argument. You want the tattoo to be done and you to be out of there, on to the next thing. This is already taking too long.

  ‘Fine,’ you say. ‘Do it round the side. I don’t care.’

  He nods, relieved, and motions you over to the big dentist-style chair in the middle of the room. It’s too big for you and he has to pump the base with his foot to get it so that you can lean back against the headrest. When you’re in pla
ce, he trundles a trolley over and plugs something in.

  ‘Try to keep still,’ he says.

  Your body tingles with the anticipation of feeling something new. It’s been a while. You think of the compass point you used to rake over the back of your arm in lessons and wonder if it will feel like that. Your left temple thrills with the promise of the pain.

  The machine buzzes into life. The man leans over you. You can smell cheese and onion crisps and fags on his breath. A split second, then the point starts to bite. The nib whirs over the thin skin above the edge of your eyebrow, stamping you with fire. It hurts, but the sensation is good, clarifying, giving a focus for your dispersed, rambling thoughts. You use it as you’ve done before, converting the pain into pictures, so that a big purple flower seems to open above you, drawing you into its centre. You become oblivious to the man’s face hovering above you, his tongue poking between his lips in concentration. There is only you and the flower that seems to be drawing you to another world.

  You don’t know how long you sit there, but sooner than you expect the man sits back and flicks a switch. Quiet floods the room.

  ‘There you go,’ he says. ‘All done.’

  You touch a hand to the side of your face and feel the letters raised, like a scar.

  ‘The swelling will go down after a few days,’ he says, handing you a dusty mirror with a crack running through it.

  You look and see the letters: small, crooked and fringed with redness, stalking like spiders off the edge of your eyebrow and away towards your hairline. The first feeling is disappointment. You’d expected it would be slicker, more impressive than that. You’d pictured the characters as thick and Gothic-looking with pointed ends – the sort of writing you’d see on the titles to the horror films you smuggle out of the precinct under your jacket to watch in the living room at night. Instead, this looks clumsy and homemade, like something you could have done yourself with a needle and a ballpoint pen. After a minute or two, however, the initial feeling subsides and you start to be pleased. You like the rough-and-ready feel of it, the ugliness. You like that it looks as though someone has come at you in the school toilets with a permanent marker. It feels powerful somehow to embrace that side of life, to make it your badge. It feels an honest statement about who you are.

  ‘Yeah,’ you say, nodding as a smile spreads over your face. ‘I like it.’

  You hand over the money you took from Mother’s handbag yesterday and leave the shop. The daylight rushes at you. You blink and shake your head. People push past on their way to Boots. No one gives your tattoo a second glance.

  A feeling bursts open inside you. You were planning to stay out tonight, head up to the pubs by the mill pond – it is Saturday, after all, and there’s bound to be someone you can tap for a drink or three – but now you’ve got a different idea. You glance up at the clock set in the wall above the fountain that stopped running three years ago for want of public funds (a notice explains it all to anyone who cares). It is six o’clock. They’ll just be sitting down to dinner. Perfect.

  You stride out of the precinct. The bus comes quickly and you board it, holding the rail and swaying amid the gaggles of teenyboppers and school kids off to the cinema for a Saturday treat. You bite your lip and have to work on keeping your fingers still as excitement bubbles up through you. The thought of Mother’s face when she sees it, as the force of the message hits home. You can’t imagine what she’ll do – you’ve no idea what you want – but you know it will be big and you know it will change things. This is not something she can ignore. Wild, vicious hope bobs in your heart like a kite on a string, jerking in a gale-force wind.

  You get off the bus by the postbox and stand for a few minutes with your hands on its cool, curved surface, taking deep breaths. You must not fuck this up by being overexcited, by saying something outrageous that sends things off on another track. You have to be cool and collected, let the tattoo do its work. Oh God! It all makes sense now. It’s all been building to this day! Everything you’ve been through – it all adds up, it was all so you could be ready for this. When you look around, everything agrees: the bus shelter gleams encouragingly, the trees nod their approval, the postbox gives you a grin. Even the registration numbers of the cars driving past seem spread in happy smiles. HI 2, reads a personalised plate on a black Jaguar gliding by. See? The world knows! The universe has got your back.

  You take another shuddering breath and set off up the road, digging your fingernails into your palms as you go. There is so much inside you that you are amazed your body holds together, containing all that feeling in one space. The house stands among its sisters, waiting for you. Akela’s car is parked outside. Everything is prepared.

  You let yourself in at the front door and the buzz of conversation in the dining room stills. The smell of fish pie hangs in the air. You shut the door and walk past the living room to the threshold. There they all are, sitting round the table: Akela, Hellie, Mother and Richard, swinging his legs on a grown-up chair.

  ‘Hello,’ says Akela in the tone of a scoutmaster trying to jolly his troop through a wet weekend in the woods. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

  You don’t say anything. You don’t trust your voice. Instead, slowly, trying to keep your hand from shaking, you reach up and brush your hair back from your temple. You turn your head so they can get a good look. You stand still, letting the force of the message hit home in all its raw, shaming power. You imagine the feelings rising in Mother as she sees her word turned back against her, engraved on your head. Confiscated.

  When you look back, it is as though someone has cast a spell over the room. You feel like the White Witch in that BBC adaptation of Narnia you and Hellie used to watch years ago. Akela, Richard and Hellie are all frozen, mouths agape. Only Mother, in the midst of them, continues to eat her food.

  Her eyes drift up to meet yours and she sniffs and turns her head away. Her silence pricks the balloon inside you, dispersing your hope and excitement and anger to the air, until you are nothing but a shrivelled, empty rag. She eats on regardless. And she doesn’t say a word.

  29

  Muttering, voices, hands on her face and neck, a light shone in her eyes. At one point someone lifted her up, popped a pill into her mouth and made her drink. She swallowed obediently, wondering where in time she was. She heard the chatter of Heloise’s voice but then other voices muscled in too so that she couldn’t be sure what was real and what was part of the chorus in her head. Day, then night, then day again.

  Then a hissing voice: ‘Listen, please, just go and snap her out of it. I can’t take much more of this.’

  Her eyes flipped open and Nick was sitting there.

  ‘Quite a scare you gave us, not taking those pills,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Temperature up to a hundred and two – a severe fever from the infection. No wonder you weren’t all there.’

  (‘You were a complete fruitcake,’ whispered a voice. ‘You were off in La La Land. We all saw you. We’ve been monitoring you for quite some time now.’ So they were back then, she thought dully.)

  She stared at him. He had a scar, she noticed, on the underside of his chin.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘But surely you knew you had to take them. I don’t get why you didn’t.’

  She opened her mouth, but the words to explain the great vast sea of not-caring, that ocean of indifference on which she spent her days drifting, buffeted now and then by squalls of rage and pain, simply weren’t there. She shut her eyes against him.

  When she opened them again, Heloise was sitting there in an apron and a white pudding bowl that had a red cross Sellotaped on it for a hat.

  ‘I’m going to be your nurse,’ she announced. ‘And you will get better.’

  She held up a book she had taken off the shelf across the room: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

  (‘Get the onions, put the kettle on and make us all a nice brew,’ instructed a voice.)

  ‘Toda
y, it’s reading medicine,’ said Heloise. ‘Except not the hard words because they might frighten your mind back inside your brain like a snail into a shell, and then where would we be?’

  She opened the book and began to read. As it turned out, there were a lot of hard words. But Heloise did not let these faze her, simply missing them out altogether or swapping in alternatives she thought would do instead:

  ‘Number one… Letter one… To Mrs So-vile, England. You… will… read… to… hear… that… no… daughter… has… the… comma… of… end-surprise… which… you… have… mmmn… with… such… eel… four-bodies.’

  The voice piped on and Smudge lay back and let the tide of words wash over her. Heloise was right: it was therapeutic. She particularly liked the way the near-senseless string filled the echo-chamber of her head, crowding out the whispers from within.

  When she looked again, Heloise was gone but the book was still there. She picked it up, feeling the vertical ridges in the spine and the thick edges of the brown-spotted pages against her thumb. But when she opened it, the spine cracked, sending pages cascading over the bed. As she gathered them up, she saw that some of them were annotated with underlinings and little notes in the margins, written in a cramped, jagged hand. ‘Feeling isolated – on the outside of society,’ said one. ‘Cruelty of people to those who don’t fit in,’ observed another.

  ‘Ha!’ said Smudge.

  (‘Ha!’ seconded a voice.)

  ‘What would Hellie know about that?’

  (‘What would Smellie nose in the vat?’)

  She looked around the room, and the bookshelf, chest of drawers and bedside table looked back, waiting. So she picked up the book, put the pages in order, and began to read.

  30

  A cloudy day. The sky sulking. You’re sitting in Akela’s car, the old Vauxhall Cavalier, looking up at it through the shaded glass at the top of the windscreen. You’ve got the cassette in your hand: a mixer tape you’ve recorded off the radio. Stiltskin’s ‘Inside’, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ (the annoying version where ‘fucking’ is changed to ‘very’), a bit of Metallica – all the best stuff. It took you ages to get it together, finding versions where the DJ didn’t come crashing in over too much of the outros, and now you’re going to play it through for the very first time.