by Ann Morgan
You like listening to things in the car instead of on your Walkman because that way you can be inside the noise. You can feel it on your skin. Even though Akela’s speakers are rubbish and there’s no megabass on the car stereo, they can pack a punch if you turn them up loud enough, until the beat thuds in your heart.
You should be excited about this one, about hearing your creation for the first time – it’s all you’ve been thinking about for weeks – but instead you’re feeling a bit disconnected. You put the key in the ignition and just sit there, staring out to where the first few leaves of autumn scutter around the pavement in an endless game of ‘It’.
Everything feels like an effort this afternoon. Even breathing feels hard – so much so that you decide to stop for a while and sit in the stillness, feeling the pulse in your neck throb until your lungs heave open and the tide of air rushes in once more. Strange to think that one day there won’t be any more breath, that this body – so solid, so together – will break up and dissolve. You stare at your hands – the scabbed fingers and bitten nails, the inked-on doodles – and try to imagine them rotting in the earth or crackling in a furnace, but it doesn’t seem feasible. You’re locked into this life; your body is like a straitjacket, binding you to the world.
Suddenly, there’s a knock at the window. You look up. Hellie is standing there in one of her teenybopper outfits: pink miniskirt and a fluffy jumper stretched over the bra she’s padded with wads of loo roll. The sixth Spice Girl.
She frowns and makes a spiralling gesture with her arm. Cautiously, you wind the window down an inch. The early-evening air rushes in: casseroles cooking and the six o’clock news.
‘You’re going to have to get out of there,’ says Hellie.
You stare up at her. She’s taken extra care over her hair today, you can see – torturing it with straightening irons until the wispy bits lie flat – and there’s sparkly make-up smeared around her eyes.
‘Why?’ you say.
She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Dad is giving me a lift in, like, five minutes.’
‘Where are you going?’ you say.
‘What’s it to you? You’re not invited.’
A party then. One of those Saturday evening things in people’s houses she’s started going to recently. You know because you’ve heard her gossiping about them on the phone, sitting on Mother and Akela’s bed talking into the extension where she thinks no one can hear. Plus you’ve been reading her diary.
The diary is a pink, obvious thing which appeared in Hellie’s underwear drawer a few months ago. You couldn’t believe it the first time you saw it – rummaging through in case a few of your Alice Cooper T-shirts had got mixed in with her stuff by mistake – it was so blatant. But then, that’s always been Hellie all over – that wide-eyedness, that inability to see how transparent she is to the rest of the world. Even with all the youness she’s barricaded around herself she can’t shake that. Every so often she’ll do something that proves her Ellieness through and through. Like the time she fell for that prank call from her best friend Alia, pretending that Simon Pritchard in the year above wanted to ask her out. She got all extra dressed up for school that day – lipgloss, purple body peeking from under her unbuttoned school blouse – and then she had to spend the day pretending it was just a new look she was trying out.
At first, it doesn’t occur to you to read Hellie’s diary. You know you’d be bored by its plastic secrets. But one day when the batteries have run down on your Walkman and there’s nothing else to do, you dig it out and have a look. Turns out, you’re sort of right. The diary is mostly boring. It’s all about Alia and Charlene and which of the Heathfield boys they fancy. Worse than anything, apart from the round handwriting with the circular dots over the ‘i’s, it’s not even written the way Hellie writes. It reads like something off one of those American teen sitcoms she watches obsessively in the school holidays – like Hellie is trying to be in Blossom or Clarissa Explains It All. And when it gets to the bit about the parties, it gets even worse. Because it turns out that Hellie’s idea of a party is going round to someone’s house on a Saturday night when their parents are out, drinking two Hooches and waiting to see if Peter Damrosch from Science will look at her. She’s never even spoken to him. That’s how sad she is. Even her taste in music is pathetic. Like, she thinks when one of the boys puts on Oasis it’s heavy metal. She actually wrote that.
You stare up at her standing by the car, all pretty and sure of herself in her teenybopper gear, all locked into a version of the world that you can never have, and the burning feeling flames up once more. It’s not that you even want to get angry or hurt her or anything like that – to be honest, right now, you couldn’t give a shit about any of it, about any of them – but it sort of happens through you. It’s like you’re a channel through which all this energy has to pass. You couldn’t stop it if you tried.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ you say. ‘Don’t wet yourself. It’s not like anyone’s going to care whether you’re there or not. Peter Damrosch is never going to finger you anyway.’
You watch as realisation dawns. Her eyes go wide. Then the fury erupts.
‘You fucking bitch!’ she yells. ‘You’ve been reading my diary. You fucking bitch!’
She grabs the door handle and begins to yank it, but you’re too quick and you push the knob down so it locks.
You stare up at her flushed face, her mouth gaping as she tries to dredge up more things to call you – words she’s never needed before in her perfect life. Is this what you look like when those men do it to you? you wonder. Your face all red and your eyes watering? It’s amazing really that they want to see it through – you’re so ugly.
‘Calm down, Hellie. Nobody cares,’ you say when the yanking subsides.
Then she really gets angry.
‘Don’t call me that, you fucking weirdo,’ she screams. ‘Don’t put all your weird fantasies on me. You should know by now that nobody believes you. It’s just some rubbish you made up because you’re broken. Do you understand? You’re sick. That’s what everyone says about you: you’re sick. Even Mum and Dad. They think you should be locked up. They’re frightened about what you’ll do to Richard.’
A pause. The breeze blows in through the crack in the window. The Indian family across the street is cooking curry tonight. You can smell the spices on the air.
‘He’s not our dad,’ you say slowly.
She frowns. ‘What?’ she says. You stare up at her for a moment. Then, like a truck, it hits you: she doesn’t know. She’s separated it off in her mind and blocked it out. Her reality is even more twisted than yours.
‘Akela,’ you say. ‘Horace. Mr Green. He’s not our dad.’
She rolls her eyes and opens her mouth to unleash another tide of invective. But something in you knows the cold steel of what you’re saying can cut through her bluster.
‘Our father’s dead,’ you say. ‘He died when we were four. That man in there is not our father.’
Hellie blinks. Her gaze flits here and there, weighing things up. Then it hardens.
‘You fucking liar,’ she whispers. ‘You fucking, shitting liar.’
‘It’s true,’ you say. ‘It’s in the newspapers in the local archive. You can deny it all you want, Hellie. You can keep on living your perfect life, but that doesn’t stop it being real.’
But Hellie won’t hear it. ‘You filth!’ she continues, her voice rising. ‘You disgusting, disgusting girl! You should be a-fucking-shamed of yourself for coming up with such shit. Mother’s right. You’re poison. Do you know that? That’s what she says about you. You’re toxic fucking waste!’
You stare up at her mouth as it goes on flaring and contorting, a wisp of mouse-coloured hair stuck in one corner. It seems bizarre, almost hilarious – a grotesque exhibit in the zoo. And yet Hellie is the one they all think is normal. Oh fuck it. You’re sick of them all and their edited lives, their rosy world where anything unpleasant simply doesn’t exist. Th
ey’re fucking insane. You don’t want to listen to it any more. You’ve had enough. You need your music to drown them out.
You turn the key in the ignition to start the mixer tape as Hellie comes round the front of the car, arms flailing. But something’s wrong, the gearstick’s not in the usual position, and instead of starting smoothly like it always does, the car lurches forward, butting Hellie off her feet.
It all happens in an instant: one minute she’s standing there, face red and streaked with No. 7 mascara, and the next she’s disappeared. You wait for her to stagger to her feet, angrier than ever, but the moments stretch and nothing happens so you open the door and peer round the side. Hellie is lying on her back on the tarmac, her head against the tyre of the car in front. She is still. Nothing is moving. Nothing except a thin line of blood trickling from her mouth, down her cheek and past her ear, to pool on the road.
31
She’d expected a horror story. From the little she knew of it, gleaned mostly from adverts and an abortive attempt to show the Kenneth Branagh film version in the unit, she’d assumed it would be all flashes of thunder and vast laboratories packed with a range of weird and unnatural devices. She’d expected cackles of laughter and a wild-eyed mad scientist in the midst of it all, unleashing his creation to wreak havoc on the world.
But it didn’t come, the horror. Instead what she got was sadness – lots of it – and the blundering of the poor misshapen monster as he ripped the world around him apart in his eagerness to enter it and be recognised for what he was. It gripped her, drawing her on through the glaciers and the streets of Geneva and Ingolstadt, in the wake of the unlucky student and his bastard creation. And when it came to the account of the nameless creature (who was not called Frankenstein, it turned out, despite what they’d muttered about her scar in school) living in an outhouse, peering through a crack at the family life he would never be part of, she could not help but cry. As the fever ebbed in her brain, the story flooded in to replace it, filling the empty hours with urgency and sensation, stifling the voices in her head and threading itself into her existence. There were times when the sounds of Heloise scampering to meet Nick at the end of a long day morphed into the voices of the family in the story and reality seemed to shift aside like pieces of a stage set as the world of the book gusted in. Now and then, she would roam from room to room, unaware of her surroundings, wafted by the story’s currents.
One afternoon when the house was quiet, Smudge found herself standing in a cream-carpeted room, facing a blond-wood dressing table with a wall of mirrored wardrobes off to her left. A large double bed occupied the centre of the room and there was a fluffy white rug lying in front of it. Behind her, a spiral staircase led down from the corner back to wherever she’d come from. Alarm ballooned through her as she realised she must have wandered into Nick and Hellie’s room and she froze and listened for any sound of Nick, Heloise or Eva, the new Lithuanian nanny, who always gave her disapproving looks when she crept down to the kitchen for a glass of water. But there was nothing.
Her head was quiet too. She probed cautiously at the recesses of her mind but no voices cawed or cackled. All was calm and still.
Light came in through the large sash windows, bringing sharpness and clarity. She ought to go back down the staircase and out, away to her part of the house. Why, then, did she stay here and walk slowly towards the wardrobes? Why did she draw aside one of the doors and stare in at Hellie’s dresses?
She stretched out a trembling hand and fingered the fabrics – satins as smooth as oil, soft cashmere, petal-like silk. Hellie’s clothes. Velvet, cotton, linen. As she moved along the row, a dress slipped loose of a hanger and slumped on to Smudge’s arm. It was pink and made of fine chiffon with cloth roses attached in a swirl on the front – the sort of thing, Smudge supposed, you might wear to a summer garden party or for opening a summer fayre. It was a flamboyant dress, a look-at-me.
Before she knew it, she had shrugged off the pyjamas they’d put her in and slipped the dress over her head. It dropped down easily over her bony frame, hanging slightly loosely over her ribcage and angular hips. She looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad, as a whole. Halfway Hellie. Only her hollowed face with its tell-tale tattoo to give her away, but perhaps there was a remedy for that.
She went to the dressing table and began to root through the make-up bags there. The pots and tubes flashed unintelligible names at her, but soon with her eye for colour and a little trial and error she found the raw materials to give her face Hellie’s glossy glow. She spread a creamy, peach-coloured liquid over her skin and watched the MONSTER fade like a painted-out shop sign. Next she daubed her eyelids with pink powder, layering darker shades in the creases, as she’d seen on the models on posters in the bus shelters. She stood back to admire the effect: not bad, a little heavy-handed in the daylight, perhaps, but certainly far from shocking. A dusting of powder on the cheekbones and a sweep of mascara to make her lashes long and thick like spider’s legs, and she was done: a Hellie-phant, a mademois-Hell. She whirled around to see the dress whisking and fluttering in the wardrobe mirrors and her foot struck a turquoise bag protruding from under the dressing table. She picked it up. Inside was a purse containing a fifty-pound note, and a set of house keys. She beamed at herself in the mirror as the next stage of the plan arrived, fully formed. It was brilliant, inspired. Incredible that she hadn’t thought of it before. She skipped, laughing, down the spiral staircase. She would take back her life by force.
The world blared at her, the colours dancing, as she let herself out of the front door. She went down the drive and walked up the street, feeling the paving stones rough and hard under her soles. She looked left and right, searching for signs that people were noticing her being Helen Sallis, walking confidently along. But she had forgotten how loud it all was. On the high street she stopped, bewildered by the noise, the traffic, the people and the shops offering heaps and rows of stuff. A woman with a buggy barged into her and rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t stand in the way,’ she huffed, bustling past.
Smudge staggered, shocked by the pain where the buggy had caught her ankle. Her eyes filled with tears. She felt the fragile vase of the moment shift and teeter on the high shelf of her mind. She screwed up her fists and swallowed, thinking of calmness, water, open fields where she could breathe.
An idea surfaced. She should get something. That would be the Hellie thing to do – some sort of treat that they could all enjoy this evening, a thank you for Nick. Yes, a treat. She clutched the bag and looked around hopefully for a shop that might sell such a thing. There was the butcher’s (unlikely), the post office (hardly) and a Tesco Express (which somehow felt mean). Behind her was the greengrocer’s, from which the woman with the buggy had emerged. But there – over by the postbox – she caught sight of something wrapped in cellophane and girded with a ribbon. It was part of a display in the window of a chocolate shop: a large white chocolate rabbit, surrounded by lots of small animals arranged in a woodland scene. She smiled, delight fluttering in her throat like a caged budgie. She’d cracked it. It was perfect. And it was exactly the sort of thing Hellie would choose.
She pushed through the glass door into the rich-smelling interior. The chocolate animals stared down at her from ranks of shelves that stretched up to the ceiling. There were birds and cats and sheep and horses. There were dragons and unicorns and strange mythical hybrids that she couldn’t pinpoint. And in the midst of it all, behind the counter at the far end, sat the shopkeeper, watching her like a toad.
Anxiety crackled along her nerves and she felt the urge for a cigarette. Perhaps this was a bad idea. She brushed the thought aside and turned to the shelves. The ribbons flashed at her, as though transmitting messages in secret code. She took a deep breath. She could do this. She could do this. She just had to Hellie it up for all she was worth.
Behind her, the shopkeeper coughed. ‘Yes!’ she wanted to say. ‘In a minute!’ But she was aware that that was not how normal people
talked. Normal people smiled and joked easily, small talk always to hand. She couldn’t think of the words they’d say, but she knew the feel of them: smooth, effortless, refined. She clenched her fingers around the bag, biting her lip. The shelf loomed, the chocolate animals snickered. It was getting worse. In one of its leaps ahead, her mind showed her herself sitting hunched on the wooden floor of the shop, weeping amid fragments of chocolate and slivers of cellophane. She had to get out.
In a panic, she snatched up the nearest thing: a dark, bug-eyed sort of dog. She went to the counter and thrust it at the man, not daring to look at his face as she paid. He took the fifty-pound note in his with fat, hairy fingers. She imagined them trailing through vats of chocolate and the thought made her feel ill. She didn’t want the dog any more, but she made herself go through the motions of the purchase, gritting her teeth against a scream. Like a pack of wolves gathering ready to savage her, the voices began to whisper their way back into her mind.
The man glanced at her face and his stern expression broke like clouds before the sun. A smile shone through.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you out and about, Ms Sallis.’
Triumph scudded through her, whisking paranoia’s screens and curtains aside. She pushed her shoulders back and looked him in the eye with a grin. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘You gave us all a scare there for a while.’
‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’
‘But it looks as though you’re well on the road to recovery now.’
‘Yes, I am,’ she said fervently, as confident as any Hellie could be. ‘I really am.’