by Ann Morgan
Coming down the stairs, she met Heloise.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said the little girl. ‘Where have you been?’
Smudge put a hand up to her hair, which was brushed and felt strangely conspicuous as a result.
‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ she said. ‘I’ve not been very well.’
‘Liar!’ exploded Heloise. ‘I heard you moving about up there. You don’t move about if you’re not very well: you lie in bed and go “Oh, I’m not very well” and people bring you things.’
‘This was a different sort of ill,’ said Smudge.
Heloise narrowed her eyes and folded her arms, looking, for a moment, disconcertingly like Mother. ‘A likely story,’ she said.
From two floors below, Nick called up the stairs, ‘I’ll be up in a little while to kiss you goodnight!’
Smudge blinked, confused, before she realised who his words were intended for.
‘’K!’ yelled Heloise. She turned back to Smudge. ‘You look very nice.’
Smudge glanced down at the jeans and grey top she had fished out of the pile of clothes Nick had left for her. She had hoped for neutral, understated, nothing that could in any way be construed as trying to put her sister on.
‘That top is one of Mummy’s favourites for at-home days. But it looks almost just as nice on you,’ said Heloise, glaring with the effort to be generous.
‘Oh, is it?’ said Smudge. She pulled the hem forwards and considered the top. It was ruched down one side and the fabric had a soft, cashmere feel. Of course, it must be very expensive, she realised all of a sudden. She should have gone for one of the long-sleeved T-shirts from M&S.
‘Thank you,’ began Smudge. ‘I didn’t choose it on purpose. I—’
But Heloise was suddenly bored.
‘Well, goodnight then,’ she said, flapping a hand. She scampered up the stairs.
Nick was standing at the range when Smudge rounded the banister. He gave a start when he saw her. Then he collected himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, walking towards her across the room. ‘It’s just that, for a minute, in the light…’ He shook his head. ‘You look very nice,’ he said.
She blushed. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise the top was – is – one of Hellie’s favourites. I can go and change. It won’t take a minute.’
He held up a hand. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You look very nice. You look very… well, if you don’t mind my saying, much better than you did the other night.’
She looked down at her shoes – nearly new grey Converses, apparently of no special significance.
‘About that,’ she began, and stopped. How to find the words to explain the squalls of illogic that blew in across the landscape of her mind?
‘First things first,’ said Nick. He turned and picked up an open bottle. ‘Wine?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t,’ she said.
‘Nobody should on the face of it,’ he said. ‘That’s part of the point. Wine?’
She shrugged. ‘Why not?’ she said, and then laughed, surprised by the feeble pun.
He’d cooked a feast of asparagus wrapped in Parma ham with homemade Hollandaise sauce, accompanied by several generous glasses of crisp white wine, and coq au vin to follow.
‘Wow,’ she said when the casserole came brimming to the table. ‘You’ve really gone to town. Anyone would think you were up to something.’
He caught her eye and looked away, embarrassed. Shadows from the garden crept over his face, hollowing out his cheekbones and putting circles round his eyes.
‘It’s been a tough time for you, hasn’t it?’ she said, and then flinched at the triteness of the words. She always hated it when people tried to wrap her experiences in everyday expressions and yet here she was doing exactly the same thing.
He kept his eyes on her glass as he poured from a fresh bottle of red wine. ‘Tougher than you know.’
She served spoonfuls of the rich stew on to their plates. As she did so, she caught sight of a framed photograph hanging by the door to the utility room: Ellie and Nick raising glasses of champagne to the camera from a pod on the London Eye. Her sister’s hair glimmered in the sunlight, arranged sleekly round her face. She was every inch the TV star.
Smudge swallowed and made a concerted effort. ‘It must be so hard watching someone you love go through all this, not knowing how it’s going to end,’ she said. ‘I guess you feel trapped. Like your life can’t move forward until she’s well.’
Nick accepted the plate with a sigh. ‘I do feel trapped,’ he said. ‘But it’s not entirely how you think.’
He looked over at her, as though sizing her up like one of his structural walls, deciding how much weight she could bear. Then he threw back his head and drained his glass.
‘Oh sod it,’ he said. ‘The truth is, we didn’t love each other. Not any more. Things hadn’t been right for a long time. Two days before the accident we’d decided to get a divorce.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘There. Now you know.’
Smudge said nothing. She forked a piece of chicken into her mouth and sat chewing the tender flesh.
Nick picked up his cutlery. ‘I suppose you hate me now.’
Smudge frowned. ‘Hate you? Why would I hate you?’
‘Well, it doesn’t exactly look great, does it? Here I am supposed to be the devoted husband, waiting at the bedside, and all the while I’m itching to run for the hills. The media would have a field day if they knew.’
He poured himself some more wine and gulped it greedily.
‘They can’t blame you for how you feel,’ said Smudge.
‘Oh, can’t they?’ said Nick, talking to his glass. ‘It’s just the sort of thing they’d love, what with all the hoo-hah over the Hairpin. They’d have me down as a cold-hearted bastard as soon as look at me. And they’d be right.’
Smudge frowned, trying to keep focus as the wine lapped at the fringes of her field of vision, blurring boundaries. It was a while since she’d had this much to drink and already she could feel the fuzzy pull of oblivion.
‘I think you’re being too hard on yourself,’ she said slowly. ‘You’ve been very nice to me. Putting me up and… the studio and everything.’
Nick snorted. ‘Oh yes, very nice of me, very altruistic,’ he sneered. ‘The truth is, I only did it because I hoped you’d go and see her and wake her up so I could finally get myself out of this mess, once and for all. Pathetic really, given the odds, but I’d got to the point where almost any way out seemed worth a shot.’
Smudge held her breath. The table slanted, then righted itself again.
Nick wasn’t finished. He waved his hand over the plates, his sleeve grazing the rim of her glass and setting the liquid inside trembling. ‘Even all this, tonight, was just going to be another attempt to butter you up. I had a little speech planned and everything. I was going to tell you how much I love her and how much she means to me and plead with you to go and talk to her. And all the while I’d just be thinking of myself, of getting my life back.’
Smudge coughed. ‘I…’ she began, her voice sounding faint and far away. ‘I can understand how you could get to that point.’
But Nick wasn’t listening. ‘A cold-hearted bastard,’ he said again. ‘In fact, the only person I know I come second to in that respect is my “darling” wife Helen, the biggest fake of them all.’
He stopped and looked at her, his eyes taking a moment to focus, a dribble of red wine on his chin.
‘What did you say?’ said Smudge.
Off in the utility room, the dishwasher whooshed and sighed.
‘Sorry,’ said Nick. ‘I shouldn’t be saying all this. She’s your sister after all, even with whatever happened in the past—’
‘No,’ said Smudge, urgently. ‘It’s fine. What did you mean when you said about Helen being a fake?’
He stared out into the garden. ‘This’ll sound weird – and maybe I’m making too much of it, maybe it’s the wine – but I never felt like I
really knew her. Even when things were good between us, it felt like she was holding something back.’
Smudge lowered her fork. The room seemed to shimmer. ‘Go on,’ she said.
Nick took a deep breath. ‘Well, you know how she is on TV – all polished and word perfect? That’s not an act: she’s like that all the time. It’s like, there’s a person in there somewhere – a real person – but you never get to her because of all the layers in between.’
He shook his head. ‘Even on our wedding day, standing at the altar in that little church near Margaret and Horace’s place, watching her walk up the aisle, I remember thinking: Maybe now I can really get to know you. But it didn’t happen. She was never truly there. Even in our best moments, I felt like we were just going through the motions until someone yelled “Cut” from across the room.’
He made an expansive gesture with his glass. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. When it was good, it was lovely. But there was always a distance there, you know? And then when Emily died, things went to shit. We tried couples counselling, but it was a disaster. She wouldn’t open up – she just sat there looking perfect, as though any minute we’d be live on TV.’
He put his glass down and looked at Smudge, flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It feels good, I suppose, to have it out in the open. That’s the thing about living with a celebrity – you feel you have to be so fucking careful all the time.’
‘And meanwhile you’ve got her crackpot twin sister bombing around the clubs and bars dressed up as her,’ said Smudge. ‘Just what you didn’t need.’
Nick looked at her oddly. ‘Is that what you were doing?’ he said. ‘I just thought you were on some regaining-your-youth bender. Helen never dressed like that in all the time I knew her.’
‘Oh,’ said Smudge quietly.
She swirled her wine glass gently, watching how the light from the jagged lamp hanging above the table played across the liquid inside. The drunkenness that had been flooding into her brain had receded, leaving her thoughts clean and exposed. She looked at Nick, weighing things up.
‘Do you know why Helen was always so reserved?’ she said slowly. ‘Why she never seemed to be quite herself?’
Nick shrugged, drained his glass and began pouring himself another. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I always assumed it was to do with being on TV. But, looking back, I think she was always like that – long before she got famous. Of course I knew the official story of what had happened with you from the interviews she did before we met. But I’ve never set much store by media stuff. I’ve seen enough in my career to know things can get twisted. And with her there was always something locked inside you couldn’t get to. At least, I couldn’t. Maybe someone else would have had more luck. Maybe someone else will.’
The bottle tilted in his hand, sloshing wine on to the table, staining its blond wood. Smudge reached for it.
‘Here, give me that,’ she said, and helped herself to a generous top-up. She sipped it and looked at him.
‘The reason she never seemed to be herself was because she wasn’t.’
Nick frowned and looked at her. He rolled his eyes as though struggling to focus.
‘She wasn’t herself, because she was me,’ said Smudge, her voice raised with the effort to get it said. ‘She was pretending to be me her whole life. You were married to Ellie, not Helen.’
A wary look passed over Nick’s features. He glanced around the room, as though half expecting to find a camera crew and a gurning presenter lurking somewhere, poised to catch him out.
His hand went to his throat. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t—’ he said.
But Smudge silenced him with a shake of her head. It was done now. It had to be finished. Taking a deep breath, she launched into the story of the game and the swap and everything that had come since.
At some point during the telling, Nick stumbled up and fetched another bottle of wine to the table. This he splashed into their glasses without saying a word.
When she was finished and it was all said – at least as much of it as she could manage in one sitting – she risked a glance at him. They were sitting closer together now, their chairs pushed back from the table. Nick was slumped slightly towards her. His eyes were closed and for a moment she worried he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at her.
‘Ssshhittt,’ he said, his consonants sodden with the wine. ‘You’ve been through a fuck of a time, haven’t you?’
She nodded, her bottom lip trembling.
He scraped his chair closer to her and patted her arm. ‘A fuck of a time,’ he said again.
His hand dropped down onto her leg and rested there a moment. Their eyes met and then he was out of his chair and upon her, his mouth on hers, his hand kneading her breasts. And she was kissing him back, urgently, hungrily, her fingers sliding up and down his spine.
She was drunk, a voice in her head kept saying. They were both drunk. This was what happened when people got drunk. There was nothing anyone could do to help it.
It was convincing but not quite enough to drown out the other, sour knowledge, whispering away in the background, that this wasn’t about the man above her, thrusting his knee, now, between her legs, but about an unconscious woman several miles away. That at last now she was getting what should have been hers.
After a few moments they broke apart, gasping. A resolute look came over Nick’s face.
‘Come on,’ he said. And he took her by the wrist and began to lead her up the stairs.
38
They call you in for a meeting in the director’s office. They’ve been doing this for a while now, getting you in rooms and talking at you. Mostly it goes over your head, but this time it’s different, more formal-feeling. There’s Ange, one of the doctors, the director and another woman you haven’t seen before.
‘Ellie, good to see you,’ says the director, standing up and holding out his hand like the man in that terrible educational video they made you watch about job interviews. ‘Have a seat.’
You sit down and they all smile at you. Uneasily, you reach up and tug at the neck of your T-shirt. Behind them, there’s a picture of a night sky filled with swirls and balls of blazing light.
‘Well,’ says the director. ‘As you know, Ellie, we’ve been talking for a while now about the next steps as you’re going to be eighteen next month, officially an adult.’
Adult. It’s an odd word. It disintegrates when you think about it. A dult. It sounds as though it should mean some sort of weird creature – a pond dweller with bulbous, short-sighted eyes. You think you’ll have a go at sketching one next time you’re in the art room.
You’re so busy thinking about what the dult will look like that you don’t hear the rest of what the director says. It’s only when he stops talking and there’s a sort of eager hush in the room that you realise there’s something you’ve missed.
‘I’m sorry,’ you say cautiously. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well,’ says the director, steepling his hands and shifting in his chair so that the blazes of light in the picture wink at you above his head. The painting is beautiful and strange and you wish they hadn’t put it there. It deserves to be celebrated and admired, not stuck behind a pot plant looking down on piles of forms. You wonder who the artist is.
‘As we’ve been discussing with you over the last few weeks,’ continues the director, ‘we’ve all been very impressed with the progress you’ve made – with the way you’ve thrown yourself into your art and what have you – and so we see no reason why you shouldn’t – with the right guidance and support – er, make the transition into society.’
You blink and try to make the words add up in your head, but it’s like trying to input wine gums into a calculator: it doesn’t compute.
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘It’s what we’ve been talking about, Ellie,’ says Ange excitedly. ‘In a month, you’re going to be back in the world. You’ll be free.’
But you don’t care what she would or wouldn’t encourage: you’re too busy trying to absorb the ten-tonne weight of knowledge that has landed on your head. When did they tell you this? Where was your head while all of this was going on?
‘Out?’ you say. ‘But where will I go?’ Then something hardens inside you, like resin setting in a mould. ‘I’m not going back there. I’m not going to Mother’s house.’
They exchange looks.
‘We were hoping you might say that,’ says the director. He takes off his glasses and rubs a hand across his eyes. The starry-night whorls above his head seem to swirl towards you. ‘As you might remember, your parents have also expressed a wish, er, not to have you back in their home.’
You grit your teeth. Akela is not your parent. Why can no one ever get it right about who people are?
‘So what we’re proposing is that you go from here to a halfway house while you wait for permanent accommodation,’ continues the director. ‘Angela is going to spend some time with you researching the options and taking you through the specifics of some of the things you’ll need to know. She’s also offered to get the ball rolling with applications for the various benefits you might be entitled to, although, of course, eventually we hope you’ll want to get a job and pay your own way and contribute as a normal member of society.’
His language, you think, is like the sort of stonework you see on old churches and town halls: fussy, impenetrable and hard.
‘Do you have any questions?’ says the other woman.
You look at her. She’s about five years younger than Mother, you reckon, with that sort of scraggy turkey neck that very thin women get above a certain age. There’s a glint in her eye that speaks of barging past homeless people in the street and pushing in in the supermarket.