Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

  a – I don’t get confused. I know exactly who you are. I know who I am. It’s just sometimes, looking back, the past gets blurred. Back when we were really young. Before everything.

  b – Mother always called him Father but what did we call him we don’t have a name for him just an empty space.

  c – That time (this I remember, this I’ve got all straight) I told you Horace was our father was a lie. I knew what was real. I was just locked in the story. I couldn’t let things be another way. You were never locked in the story. Not really. That was the thing about you.

  d – This is where it gets weird again. I see it from my head and I see it from your head. Seeing it from both heads can’t be right, but my brain uses them both as though both of them are part of me, as though both stories are mine. It makes me scared sometimes. It makes me sad. And sometimes I like it.

  (x) I sat by his feet. His shoes were scuffed. One of the laces had broken and he had replaced it with string and that was nearly broken too. I sat there for hours.

  (1) Hello. So I found you. You were in the newspaper – one of those local ones we use to research stories for the show sometimes. Human interest extreme makeovers near-death experiences. That sort of thing. There was some picture of a community garden and runner beans and there you were and it said a different name underneath, but I could see it was you. The M from your tattoo was poking out from under your hair. It was lucky lucky in a way (that’s not the right word) because I’d been wanting to speak to you ever since… well, you know (well you don’t that’s kind of the point). We haven’t heard from you since… well, you know (and this one you do know and that’s also kind of the point). After I saw you in the picture, it was easy. I just got one of the researchers on to it. Kids just out of university – paid to turn people up for us all the time. I don’t know how they do it. Facebook or something, except I’m pretty sure you’re not on that. Think she thought I was mad wanting some care-in-the-community case tracked down. Ha. Many a true word. Did it, though – phone number, address, the works. Turns out no one’s hidden now not truly not any more. How am I? I am living a colossal bluff. There. They think I’m all surface. Like all of them. Sometimes I hate them for how stupid they are and sometimes it makes me glad. Sometimes I’m frightened that if I let them in on what’s going on inside the galaxy in my head they will want to contain it and shrink it down make it manageable like they tried to do to you. You weren’t afraid though were you you just went right ahead and hang the consequences (no pun intended) you were always braver I miss you every day and every day I’m glad you’re not here. It’s almost as much as I miss the baby Emily her. Except with her I never wish she wasn’t here she was not old enough to develop a personality and get complicated. With her it’s like a limb’s gone like they’ve ripped something out and carried it away. With you it’s like half the story’s missing the colour the intrigue. It’s safer that way I have control no one’s there to answer back or contradict there is one version but the version is flat and sometimes I wish it would throb and twist and surprise sometimes I’m frightened my telling has sucked all the life out of it. Losing her has given me another half story and words not to tell. I am living a television existence all neat and edited fobbing people off with elevenses and clever storage solutions and the lunchtime news. I think how it would look through your mind, your eyes, if you were here. Do I seem arrogant to you? Sometimes I think I must be the most arrogant shit on the planet and then other times I think the world really is as small and boring as it seems. Other people just don’t seem to have as many layers. Nick is so simple and I hate simple. They seem happier with less all except you and we know what happened there or at least we know my version. There’s an empty space where yours should be. Write back. Will you. Do I want you to.

  (4) Remember that trip to Thorpe Park. Horace bought us both elephants and you had a tantrum. I think it was before everything. But Horace was there so it couldn’t have been. Still, I think it was before I became me and you became you. One of us was sick. Do you remember? Which one?

  P.S. None of this might be true tomorrow.

  (5) We packed up the car. For once Mother was laughing. She was wearing a dress with big white flowers that fluttered when she whirled. There was a lot of whirling. She never wore it after that. Not that I remember – do you? a Driving, talking, laughing. Tea at Auntie Bessie’s. Something stupid with T-shirts in a shop. Colours I never wanted. Here’s what I remember: you and me and Father-Dad skipping along a street. Laughing and laughing, going faster and faster. And then it was too fast and there was too much laughing and suddenly we were whirling around on a roundabout, around and about, feeling sick, and he would not stop laughing. And we looked at each other, you and I, as he whooped and caterwauled and we knew something was broken. And that was when you started to cry. This time it was definitely you. I remember, because I let go of the roundabout with one hand and reached out to comfort you. I remember the feel of your cold arm and Father’s laughter singing like the wind in our ears as he kept on yanking us round, faster, faster, more, more. Too much fun I shouted this is too much there should be less fun than this! But he wouldn’t stop and all we could do was grip each other and the metal bars and stare at the middle of the roundabout, the still point around which everything else whirled. Again. Again. Again! It’s all right, I whispered. It’s all right. I knew we just had to get through the fun. I don’t know if you heard you were shaking so hard. But here’s the funny thing: when I remember that day now there’s a time my brain goes back to before the roundabout, a moment where the road was clear and the laughing was wild and free but still with normal in sight. The three of us skipping and the sky huge above us. I think there was a bird flying and there was a feeling of space. It comes to me sometimes in dreams. It catches me when the wind blows in the horse chestnut trees and a balloon floats over from the park, like it’s doing now above the skylight, the red ribbon dragging across the glass so that maybe I could open it and catch it if I move fast. And I know I’m not imagining it. I know that was real. We did not make that up. And I think sometimes if I could freeze my life and pick out a moment in the procession of days to go back to and inhabit for all time, I might stop it there.

  a – I saw a dress like it in a charity shop up on the high street and I nearly bought it. But then I thought, what was I going to do? Wear it and be Mother? That would be insane.

  (3) What if it never really happened? Have you ever asked yourself that? Have you ever sat down, looked at yourself in the mirror and told yourself that maybe that really is who you are? Maybe we never swapped and this is all in my head I try that game all the time when they’re fussing over me in the green room, the power brush going, the conversation droning on – where are you going on your holidays? What are you up to on the weekend? a – For fuck’s sake. Sometimes I fantasise about breaking things smearing lipstick over the mirror, exploding powder pots up the wall. I’d like to see their faces. But they don’t have rock stars in daytime TV so instead I sit and smile and have another cup of tea. Sometimes I think everybody is sleepwalking, just sleepwalking. I want to stand up and scream. Am I making sense?

  a – What you’re dealing with here is a person caught up in a world where extreme artifice insinuates itself almost everywhere. Nothing is as it appears. I am not saying this to be arrogant or difficult. b – I am simply stating facts.

  b – If you ask people about me they will tell you that I am one of the loveliest presenters to work with. I have made a point of being that. Always. I have studied what people like and made myself fit it. It is one of my special gifts. Again, I am not saying this to be arrogant or difficult. I just need you to know the reality of who you’re dealing with – a person who is extremely conscious of everything.

  (6) The puppet theatre. He bought it and put it in the garden. There were going to be shows and shows and shows. All summer it sat there, going mouldy under Mother’s dirty looks. By the end, there was green stuff on the curtains and
black spots up the walls. Eventually the rag and bone man came and threw it on the back of his truck with a thud and a crack.

  (xx) What I can’t write about is her hands. How delicate they were, how soft, with the little fingers you were afraid of cutting every time you clipped the nails. Her mouth too – always pouting. She had a birthmark on her left foot. They talked about removing it, but I said no. I wanted her to stay. I wanted to keep her just as she was. That was all I wanted.

  44

  On, on. An hour spent staring at a caterpillar in a park. Another hour watching your feet. Look up and it’s dark. Whee! Look up and it’s light again. So much to do, so powerful. You sit making plans, hunched over tables in cafes, slurping down coffees, teas, hot chocolates, whatever they’ll bring – again, again. People try to talk to you at times. You smile indulgently at them, wondering how they can be happy with so inefficient a method as words for expressing the universe within, all those rampant colours. There must be so little of them. They need to see how far you can see in comparison. You must find a way of lending them your eyes. This is for the good of humanity.

  You find a stall on Portobello Market selling postcards of the work of Van Gogh. Of course. Suddenly the message left for you in the starry picture in the director’s office makes sense – even fuddled on drugs as you were at the time, before you kicked them in the run up to your release, you knew it couldn’t be hanging there by chance. You peel off notes from the wodge of cash in the anorak and buy the lot. These you distribute willy-nilly to everyone passing in the street. Some of the people assume they’re flyers and cast them aside. Sunflowers in the gutter. Chair with Pipe beneath a bicycle’s wheels. No matter. There will be such casualties along the way. The truth is, no one is capable of apprehending the genius of Van Gogh’s use of colour and lines the way you do. If they did they’d all kill themselves instantly because they’d know their lives could never be anywhere near as valuable. That’s why they need you: the intermediary, the prophet. Someone who can stand as a filter between them and ultimate art, who can open their minds to the power of such skill and yet protect them from the despair of it all along. They’re fragile, poor things: they can’t see how little stands between them and self-destruction. Between Cash in the Attic and suicide there is only the thinnest wisp of self-delusion. Thank God you’re here.

  What next? What next? Ah yes, a busker. Expressive dance. You throw yourself into it. Your body becomes lithe, snake-like. A crowd gathers. At the end, they applaud, as well they might. What they don’t realise, of course, is that they should be throwing themselves at your feet in adulation. Not because of you, you understand – you’re clear-eyed about your marginal role in all this – but because of the power of the universe that has been channelling itself through you, transforming you into a cipher for the original life force. That’s what they should be recognising. That’s what they should break down, weeping, in awe of. But of course they don’t see it, poor, dear, dull, blunt-minded things. And on balance perhaps it’s better that they don’t. Else how would the post get delivered? The dirty clothes washed?

  Speaking of which, might a laundrette be… No! The Natural History Museum! Of course! It’s all coming together now. Funny you didn’t work it out sooner. But that’s the nature of your brilliance, you see, it’s always there, turning over beneath the bonnet, steering you in directions calculated to leave you breathless with delight. Excellent mind! And here of course there’s so much richness, so many connections to forge. Great discoveries shimmering round every pillar – only the dexterity of a mind like yours needed to make the links that have eluded scientists for centuries. In, then.

  Oh yes, this is the place. Lots of ideas ripe for linking up here. Wander among the bones. The giant Diplodocus skeleton, make for that. Ribs like roof rafters. The inspiration, probably, for building as we know it. We all think we’re so original, but the truth of it is most of our inventions are right there in nature all along if we’d only deign to look. On then. Glass cabinets. Teeth. Stuffed birds. A school party behind one of them. Exercise books, worksheets. That smell they have: sandwiches, crisps and cheese. One of them staring up at you from the other side of the cabinet, open-mouthed.

  An idea takes you. This’ll learn him. Quick as a flash you’re round the corner and staring down at the child face to face. Ha-ha!

  But this is no anonymous boy. He’s older, taller, darker-haired than when you saw him last, but unmistakable nonetheless.

  ‘Richard,’ you say.

  The boy stares up at you.

  ‘Come away, Pavel,’ calls a teacher, looking at you over her glasses. ‘Leave the lady in peace.’

  But you’re not fooled. ‘Richard,’ you say again.

  Richard frowns up at you and shuffles from foot to foot. His eyes are closer together than they used to be and he has grown weaselly and sallow. There is a new birthmark on his chin, but that doesn’t throw you off. You’d know him anywhere. He coughs as if in confirmation. The teacher bustles over, takes his hand and pulls him away, and as she does so, panic – oily, inky and suffocating – begins to ooze in at the doors of the gallery, flooding up to your nose until you can’t breathe. You see the dastardly, treacherous plot, all its sordid machinery laid bare. Mother, Akela, the unit working everything from behind the scenes. They are all in on it, you realise, all trying to lure you into a trap, with Richard as bait. They have sent him here to spy on you and report back.

  Fear jabs you in the heart. You have to get out of here. You turn and run, swiping someone in the stomach as you pass. A yell. No time. The exit. Somewhere on the other side of this rabbit warren of rooms. Signs, always fucking signs. Why should you give a crap about early man? The polar regions? You just want to get the hell out. Ah, there it is, the door. Light outside. Thank fuck. You lunge through the barriers, setting off an alarm. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ a voice calls, but you are long gone. They can tidy up the fag ends of today, you’re already on to tomorrow.

  You don’t stop until you’re on the pavement. Then you put a hand to your head. Think, think: a plan is what you need. You look around. The coaches line up at the end of the road, sucking in tourists. Of course. Away again. You hurry down to the one at the end of the row. Manchester, it promises in red, lighted letters across the top of its windscreen. Manchester, then. Yes, why not? It’s half full but you push your way in among a crowd of Americans keeping the driver so busy with their stories of Lysester Square that he doesn’t see you squeezing past. You plump for an empty double seat near the back and mutter to yourself in an ominous way like a mad person whenever anyone comes near. It works: everyone leaves you alone. In a little while, the bus revs up and sighs its way out into the evening traffic. You watch as London slides past in the twilight, buildings dwindling as the suburbs roll past. Then it’s the grey verges and litter of the motorway and headlights flashing from oncoming cars on the other carriageway.

  45

  What Smudge hadn’t been prepared for were the movements. Coma, she’d thought, meant out of action: suspended animation like in one of those sci-fi films where bodies hang lifeless in capsules waiting for someone to flick the switch to bring them back to life. But Hellie was far from motionless. Every so often, her hands twitched the line plugged into her veins, her eyelids flickered, her lips churned above the plastic tube connected to her throat, carrying air from the machine hissing and sighing by her bed. Now and then she even wrinkled her nose, as if objecting to the strong scent drifting from the pots and vases of flowers on the locker on the far side of the room.

  Smudge found the jerks and twitches unnerving. They made it seem that Hellie might emerge from unconsciousness at any minute, so that if you didn’t keep watching her you’d find her eyes suddenly fixed on you. Expressions scudded across her face: irritated, baffled, frustrated, as though she were locked in a long argument with an official who may or may not deign to let her back into the world. Most of the expressions were adult – a medley from the tougher human-interest int
erviews and phone-ins Helen Sallis conducted sometimes on her morning show – but every so often something younger and more unguarded would creep in. The little-girl-lost look of the old Ellie hesitating on the edge of a dubious game surfaced from time to time. Now and then the trembling pout that promised tears wobbled to the fore, sending time ricocheting back and forth between the decades, shuffling emotions like a deck of cards.

  ‘Hellie,’ said Smudge.

  The face winced.

  ‘Hellie,’ she said again, louder this time.

  The face stayed still. Something between a grunt and burp escaped from the mouth.

  Smudge put out a finger and traced the line of her sister’s cheek: smooth and peachy even after four months in a hospital bed. She looked for the suffering of the letters: lines and shadows to reflect the anguish and grief, but all was smooth. Untrammelled. Beautiful. My face, she couldn’t help thinking, if things had gone differently and life had flowed another way. A spark of the old longing flared, the nights staring down at Hellie in the bedroom at Mother’s house. She thought for a second about jabbing her nail in and yanking it, feeling the skin tear. She thought about grasping a hand and pulling the fingers back until she heard a crack. She leant down, wanting to be cruel.

  ‘I had sex with him, you know,’ she hissed suddenly. ‘I had sex with Nick. We both enjoyed it. What you took away from me, I’m taking from you. It’s my time now.’