by Ann Morgan
‘Oh come on, Edmund,’ says Gareth. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘It fucking is that bad!’ says Edmund, turning and swiping a can of pens off the reception desk on to the floor. ‘We’re the pawns of some rich twat who gets to order us around and make us jump through hoops just because his grandfather… I don’t know, shot down a hundred Indians or something. It makes me sick.’
Gareth held up his hands. ‘OK, firstly – sorry, Trudy – Anton’s g-grandfather was an Admiral in the navy. He had nothing to do a-with any Indian m-massacre. Secondly: yeah, there’s m-money in his family and his m-methods are a bit eccentric, but you can’t deny he g-gets results.’
‘He’s been lucky,’ says Edmund, folding his arms so that the baby on the front of his T-shirt seems to frown.
‘He g-gets results,’ says Gareth again, firmly.
‘Yeah, by shafting people and firing the receptionist just because she messed up once.’
Gareth put his hands to his head. ‘Gina was taking the piss,’ he says. ‘Everyone said so. Even you said so!’
‘Fuck this, I’m going for a fag,’ says Edmund. He turns and stomps out of the studio to huddle just beyond the entrance. You see the edge of his arm and the puff of smoke when the cigarette’s lit.
‘Trudy, I’m so sorry,’ says Gareth, standing stiffly behind his easel. ‘As you’ve probably g-gathered, things have been a bit up in the air lately. I just want you to know it’s g-got nothing to do with you.’
You shrug, grin and then scale it back, trying not to look too relieved. It is cruel, you think, that Gareth’s name should begin with one of the letters he finds most difficult to pronounce.
‘It’s OK,’ you say. And then, because the occasion seems to demand it: ‘I’m used to it. My old boss was a… bitch.’
Gareth nods, his hair flopping over the pock marks next to his eyes. ‘All the same, you shouldn’t have to put up with that on your first day. It’s just, well, you know… Edmund and Gina… It’s complicated.’
You smile and nod and he turns his attention back to his work. You pick up the pens and stick them back in the pot. A little while later Edmund comes back in. He shoots you a look and in that moment you understand two things: Edmund hates you, and everything’s going to be all right.
47
She was there when visiting hours began and stayed until they ended. She sat and watched uniformed figures bustling past in the corridor, their shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and the buds swaying and shivering on the horse chestnut tree outside. When she got the chance, she helped herself to snacks from the nurses’ station. She discovered a biscuit tin kept stocked with Hobnobs and chocolate digestives and a little fridge next to the fax machine that sometimes contained yoghurts and cheese and the odd piece of fruit. Once, when she was passing on her way to the toilet, she spotted an unattended wedge of chocolate cake next to a steaming cup of tea. She left the plate in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. If anyone noticed, they never said anything. The nurses just smiled at her distractedly when they came to administer their checks and change Hellie’s bags, pads and sheets.
Sometimes she talked to Hellie – long, rambling things about the hospital with its imposing front entrance where carriages would have drawn up in a century gone by or stories about people she saw wandering in the manicured grounds outside the window. Sometimes she just sat and looked.
Once or twice she brought out the letter and read it aloud, rehearsing Hellie’s memories that were almost – but not quite – her own, probing the grief of the passage about little Emily, and communing with the manic enthusiasm that tore through her sister’s mind like wildfire, sending sentences skittering to the fibres at the far edges of each page. Only one bit eluded her: the description of sitting by the feet and the shoes with the string for laces. She stared at it as time ticked past on the clock, but could not unlock its significance.
‘What did you mean here, Hellie?’ she said, as if she might catch her sister unawares, and jerk her into consciousness with her own words, but the figure in the bed lay still.
On a whim one afternoon, she picked up a peach-coloured nail varnish in the chemist’s up the road and spent a careful hour layering the polish on to Hellie’s nails. It was years since she’d used any herself and putting it on someone else’s hand was an added complication. She found she had to keep dabbing with a tissue to stop it pooling round the edges. Hellie’s hand lay on the blanket in front of her: slender, yet dimpled on the knuckles like Smudge’s own. There was a freckle, she noticed, on the right thumb: a mark all Hellie’s own. Had it come in later years or had it always been there? A tell-tale speckle for anyone careful enough to read the signs. If it had always been there, then why had no one seen the truth, the reality of the swap and all that followed? Like dust beaten out of a cushion, a memory rose up around her: afternoons hidden behind curtains. Doorstep honey sandwiches hacked off mouldy loaves by arms stretching up to reach the breadboard. A bedroom door shut and a dressing gown and slippers looking thin and indecent in the middle of the day. Then, suddenly, bright smiles and Sunday best and Akela there, beaming like it had been happy families all along. She and Ellie standing shoulder to shoulder in the hallway with Mother and Akela looming above. Chocolate and the panicky feeling of needing the toilet. Summer blowing in from the garden and change hefting itself up the stairs. She stroked Hellie’s poor, freckled hand. They had been so little. Sadness bloomed and she pushed it hurriedly away and turned to look at the clock. Easy to lose track of the hours in this perpetual, beeping twilight.
But when she looked again, she was not in the room any more. Another tide of memory engulfed her, toppling the hospital’s walls: she was standing on a cliff in the swirling mist, looking up at a bird wheeling in the sky above, and laughing. A hand, Father’s, was in the small of her back and there was a wild, giddy feeling as if at any moment anything could happen, as if magic could rain down from the sky. Dredged up by Hellie’s presence, by her parallel eye and words, the memory began to spill the rest of its circumstances: a holiday cottage in Dorset. Father hiring bi-cycles. Mother muttering about the expense. The juggler forced to flee his pitch in the market square when Ellie kept demanding he showed them another trick. And then another. Laughter – even Mother, in spite of herself, joining in. Possibility. Sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. Father kissing Mother, whirling her round. She telling him not to be so stupid but smiling all the same. Searching for pixies in the trees at the bottom of the cottage garden. Father urging them on to look harder, working everybody up. The funny, fat little man on the Splat the Rat Stall at a local fete who worried about people trying to sneak extra goes. Ellie posed, wielding the mallet with solemn concentration, determined to give the rat what for.
Marvellous and strange to have the past fleshed out like this. Marvellous and strange to feel sensations buried under years of clipboards and fluorescent lights and rooms with carpet on the walls. She had forgotten.
‘We were happy,’ she said wonderingly, looking at her sister. ‘Before everything, we were happy.’
Hellie winced, her face momentarily betraying the wavering, vulnerable look from when they were very young, the feeble expression that had made the original Helen want to pinch and slap and bite her. Smudge stared at her. Where had it come from, she wondered, that timidity of Ellie’s, as though she were afraid of what the world might have to show her? That fear? The story went that her sluggishness and reserve were down to her difficult birth, the cord caught around her neck and choking her. But there had been a time when the discrepancy between the two of them didn’t exist. The Ellie in those early recollections was sturdy and intrepid. What had sent that little girl retreating into herself and caused her, Helen, to try to compensate with cruelty, to winkle her sister back out by any means? What had skewed the balance?
Smudge pulled out the letter and spread its pages, dog-eared and creased, on the blanket in front of her. Perhaps it was in here somewhere, the key to all that had come since
: her own unkindness, Ellie’s intransigence after the swap, the misery and madness that gusted up, whirling them both into other lives.
But the sentences huddled together, opaque and closed.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Smudge out loud. ‘What happened, Hellie? When did it change?’
But Ellie just gaped at the ceiling and didn’t say a word.
48
On your first pay day, you feel great. You leave the office beaming, clutching the wad of cash you persuaded Anton to give you directly on the pretext of getting round the temping agency’s fees – he didn’t like the idea at first, but when you told him everyone did it, he shrugged and finally gave in. You have to frown to hide your relief and delight. For the first time ever, the universe seems to be letting you win; you are slotting yourself into this new wonderful life and everything is conspiring to help.
The money for the month is less than you might have made on a single weekend job at one of London’s swanky hotels, but it feels like so much more. You decide to treat yourself to a new top from the Barnacle shopping centre on the way home and choose a ruched grey T-shirt with spatters of red across its front – nothing too extravagant, there’s no way you’re about to blow Beryl’s rent. Afterwards you stop by the Coach and Horses, a little pub with dried-up window boxes and a flaking sign, for a celebratory drink. It’s quiet so you see him as soon as you step inside, through the glass of the inner door. He’s older and lined about the face, and he has that hollow look that addicts get when the heroin suddenly stops keeping them young, but the wolfishness is still there about the eyes.
It’s such a shock that, for a moment, you doubt yourself. You hover on the threshold, wondering if it’s your brain switching back to the old frequencies again, raking trouble out of thin air. Even with everything you’ve been through, you struggle to believe that life could be such a bastard as to bring him here, now, crashing the party of your happiness. It seems too cruel a joke.
Then, as you watch, a guy in a suede jacket walks over and slides an envelope across the table – some sort of documents, by the look of it. You think you spot a driving licence blushing an unlikely shade of pink. Your mind flashes back to the fake IDs that used to litter the living-room floor and leave rectangular imprints on your arms and legs. You remember the flat vowels and the talk of Manchester – of an uncle living somewhere around here. You think of the conversation you overheard the other week. Certainty clobbers you. It’s him all right, Mary’s brother, sitting in the corner of the pub.
He looks up and you turn quickly so he can’t see you. You hurry out of the door and down the street, heart pounding, a sour taste in your mouth. When you get back to Beryl’s, you lock yourself in the bathroom and dash cold water on your face. You watch your spattered reflection, until the immediate danger of chaos snatching you up is past. When the shuddering subsides, you realise you dropped the bag with the grey and red top in the doorway of the pub. You resolve to let that be the last thing he costs you.
The weeks pass. You keep yourself to yourself in the office and let the others do the talking – Gareth, Edmund, the older designer called Matt whose wife has recently had a baby and the copywriter Gayle, who sits on her high stool in the far corner and complains if the music gets too loud. When you have to answer questions, you’re careful. You don’t fling out details willy-nilly as you’ve done before with all the Roses, Ruths and Veronicas. You take thought over Trudy’s background, her schooling, her parents who sadly died when she was at university. You craft a biography you can live with and work at making it real. Every detail bedded in and every day that passes without incident is a victory, another plank nailed on to the structure of Trudy’s being, sheltering you from the cold blasts of used-to-be. The more solid she becomes, the more the wild ideas and sirens of panic recede. Sometimes you want to burst out laughing with how glad all this makes you – how giddy with luck you feel – but you know enough to sit quietly on your padded desk chair and bite your lip.
Back at the lodging house you do your bit to help out, wiping down the surfaces and taking out the rubbish. Beryl seems to appreciate it. Some evenings she even invites you into her sitting room and the pair of you pass a few hours in front of cookery programmes and home-improvement shows. You get addicted to a series where a group of amateur seamstresses go head to head to win a contract to design a day-time TV presenter’s wedding dress, going through a series of challenges that whittles them down week by week. Your loyalties are split between a small Glaswegian with a flair for working feathers into her designs and a black woman from Dudley who likes gingham and has an infectious laugh. At odd moments throughout the day, you catch yourself thinking about the programme, wondering who will win. It feels luxurious to have the headspace to give to such things, to be able to get excited about something so wonderfully trivial. You hug it to yourself and look for opportunities to gossip about the show as you’ve heard other people do on buses and in the corner shop. When you do, a bit of you stands outside your head watching, marvelling at how normal you sound.
A month goes by and then another. Summer blazes gold and then begins to brown around the edges. Edgewise lands a big project and it’s all hands on deck. Gareth and Edmund pull long days, roughing out a sheaf of ideas. But whatever they suggest, the client’s not happy. The edges of Anton’s smile start to twitch. One afternoon, when Edmund’s out at the dentist’s, you saunter over to Gareth’s desk and ask him to show you the work. It’s wide-ranging, with pictures of vehicles and country houses and statues sprayed with rainbow paint.
‘So what is it?’ you say. ‘What’s the concept?’
Gareth puts a hand to the acne scars on his temple. ‘Anton’s a-word is “estate”,’ he groans. ‘Like the car, but it can also be anything connected – and they a-want something that puts it in a new light. Something edgy and cool. A-We’ve been all over it and turned it inside out. It’s d-driving us insane.’
You wander back to your desk. Something is beckoning to you on the edge of your thoughts, but when you try to look at it directly, it scurries away into the undergrowth. That afternoon, in the lull between calls, you get a sketchpad and try to summon the image forth, covering what you’re doing whenever anyone walks past, but the shapes stay blurred and indistinct, the ideas confused. Once work has finished, you go to the cafe in the Barnacle and sit at your favourite table overlooking the doors and the atrium below. You rough out a few tentative, blocky sketches: people with hard faces, litter blowing in the gutter. But something’s missing. The pictures stay flat on the page.
All the same, when you wake up the next day, the word is still nagging at you. Estate, estate, estate. At your desk, you open the sketchpad to a blank page but the little rectangle of paper feels too cramped to contain your ideas. You need something more. At the end of the day, you linger in the studio. When everyone else has gone, you help yourself to one of the A3 pads of art paper and a handful of pencils and charcoals from Gareth’s desk.
Back at Beryl’s, you shut yourself up in your room. No television tonight: you’ve got work to do. You open the pad on the floor. The walk home has cleared your head and already you can see the idea looming through the grain of the pulp. It’s a tower block and it leads off to a corridor of tower blocks cutting diagonally away to the right side of the paper. But this is no common-or-garden estate, you realise, as you start to rough it out, hunched over the page. It’s grim as they come – blackened edges around smashed windows showing a recent fire, an overturned buggy frame with the seat fabric ripped away, the suggestion of a needle lying in the gutter at the front (you keep it a suggestion because you don’t know how the client will feel about that, so you make it so it could be a bit of an old tin can).
You work on, absorbed in what’s unfolding on the paper in front of you. Apart from getting up to turn the light on when it gets dark, you don’t move. The rest of the world recedes.
Once you’ve got the outlines of the buildings and a bit of the detailing, you
set about pulling together a figure in the foreground. You want her to be both vulnerable and defiant; young and soaked in experience. You want rich, comfortable people to look at her and think ‘there but for the grace of God’. You draw on all your reserves, the patient hours spent sketching and re-sketching in the Barnacle’s cafe, to get the slant of her eyes just right – the squint that could be a flinch or a precursor to a snarl – and create a vision of a moment that could go either way.
Some of the pencils you nicked from Gareth’s desk are coloured and when you look at them you realise they’re those water-soluble ones they used to have in the art room in the unit. ‘Special needs paints’ as you used to call them. You empty the toothbrushes out of the mug in the bathroom, fill it with water and get going with the pencils – streaking the walls of the tower blocks, blackening the window frames. You give the girl green eyes but smear her face with dirt – perhaps she’s escaped from the fire or perhaps she’s been on the streets several nights. That’s not your call. And then, to offset the misery of the foreground, you start to do something about the sky. You put purple clouds overhead but in the far distance, where the line of blocks gives on to the horizon, you work in reds, pinks and a splash of gold, as though beauty could be dawning or receding from the scene: the start of better times or the prelude to something worse.
When you next look up, it’s light. With a jolt, you see from the little clock on the bedside table that it’s 8.40. Shit! If you don’t get the pencils back before Gareth gets in, it’s really not going to look good. You gather everything up and hurry downstairs, mumbling something about an urgent deadline on your way past as Beryl emerges from the kitchen.
When you get to the studio, you see with relief that you’re the first to arrive. You fumble in your bag for the keys, but as you’re reaching for the handle something slips and the pencils, charcoals and pad tumble all over the pavement. You look down to see your tower-block picture staring at the sky. Then a shadow moves over it.