by Ann Morgan
‘Hullo,’ says Anton. ‘Been having a bit of a scribble?’
He bends down and picks up your picture, a frown spreading over his face.
‘It’s a council estate,’ you say, feeling foolish. ‘You know, urban deprivation and things.’
Anton taps his fingers on his lips.
‘Yes, I see that,’ he says. ‘And who’s this?’ He points to the woman on the page.
‘Just some girl,’ you say, feeling stupid. ‘It’s up to the viewer to decide. Like it’s up to them to say whether things in the picture are getting better or getting worse: is the sun—’
‘Going up or going down. Yes, I see.’
He turns back to you and his frown cracks into a smile.
‘It’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘Utterly unexpected. Inspired. When can you finish it?’
You look back at the paper, shrug. The original focus has gone, leaving only a residual buzz and the muffled sensation of not having slept. To be honest, you’re not sure what else you’d do to it.
‘Half an hour?’
Anton claps a hand to his forehead. ‘Half an hour!’ he says. ‘Brilliant! I’ll put it to David this afternoon. Excellent, excellent work!’
And so saying, he strides into the studio ahead of you, sending a gust of air rolling across the room, flapping papers.
Twenty minutes later, Edmund arrives to find you standing at the spare easel by Gareth’s desk.
‘Did I miss something?’ he says.
You stop by the Morrisons on the way home to pick up a bottle of wine. You’re feeling exuberant after the success of the day and the admiration that they all – even Edmund – showed for your piece. Besides, it’s a special night – the final of the sewing show – and you and Beryl have agreed to watch it together.
The smell of hotpot hits you as you enter the house: wholesome and warming. Just the thing to combat the first hints of the autumn chill starting to rise in the evening air. Soon you’re both in the sitting room, sipping wine and tucking into steaming plates of dumplings and rich, meaty sauce.
‘Does you good,’ says Beryl with a contented sigh. ‘Cheers.’
The programme comes on. The final challenge is for the last three contestants – the Dudley woman, the Glaswegian and a camp hairdresser from Hull – to create their wedding dresses for the daytime celebrity, whose measurements they have but whose identity will only be revealed at the end when she arrives to pick the winner. It’s a close-run thing. Dudley’s design looks promising but the Glaswegian shoots herself in the foot by venturing away from her tried and tested feathers formula and making a rat’s nest out of strings of fake pearls. You can’t see how she’s going to rescue it. It looks as though the hairdresser might edge it with a chic, boxy design he calls ‘Fifties Futuristic’, but in the final ten minutes Dudley pulls out the stops with a lovely empire-line Pride and Prejudice number and the Glaswegian’s rat’s nest resolves itself into an elegant piece of lattice-work netting dropped over a satin shift.
‘It’s a tough one to call,’ confides the presenter to the camera. ‘They’ve done all they can. Now it comes down to our celebrity’s personal taste. Which design will she pick for her special day?’
You’re leaning over to top up the glasses when the celebrity first appears on the screen.
‘Oh, it’s her,’ says Beryl, clicking her fingers. ‘What’s her name from, you know… thing.’
You look up and suddenly the room around the set goes dark. On the screen, going into raptures over Dudley’s period references, is Hellie. But not Hellie as you remember her, a scrawny teenager covered in glitter dust and cherry lipgloss. This Hellie is sleek and self-assured, filled out and cinched in, in just the right places.
‘What’s her name?’ says Beryl again. ‘She won that competition for a new young presenter for that mid-morning show on ITV. The one that used to have the big floating weather map. I catch it sometimes when I’m doing the ironing.’
‘I don’t know,’ you say dully. Everything seems to have withdrawn from you so that it is as though you are looking at the world down the wrong end of a long, dark telescope. The voices from the television sound very far away.
‘Helen Sallis,’ says Beryl, clapping her hands together and turning in her armchair for your approval. ‘Come to think of it, you look a lot like her. Has anyone ever told you that?’
For a moment, the world seems to teeter on the edge of a cliff. It’s almost as if you can see the room and everything in it – Beryl’s Royal Doulton ladies, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, the rack of Reader’s Digest magazines by the fire – tilting and sliding into the abyss. The street outside the bay window seems to yawn, ready to suck you in.
Then something in you hardens. You grit your teeth. You will not let her take everything from you again. You will not let Hellie rob you this time.
You meet Beryl’s gaze and shrug. ‘Not really,’ you say, keeping your tone as light as the ruffles on Dudley’s sleeves. ‘Just a coincidence. One of those things.’
‘Suppose it must be,’ said Beryl. ‘Funny though, in’t it?’
She turns back to the television. ‘Some people think I look like Victoria Wood,’ she remarks.
You breathe a sigh of relief. The sensations of the evening creep back in. You can taste the wine again. You hear cars passing in the road outside. But through it all a strange sensation swills around the pit of your stomach. It’s part gladness at having kept your nerve, but there’s more to it than that: something tender and vulnerable, a sore spot you didn’t know was there before. It takes you a while to make sense of it. Then, as the credits roll over scenes of Hellie and the Glaswegian toasting each other and accepting congratulations from members of the studio audience, you realise what it means: for the first time almost since you can remember, you’ve got something to lose.
49
On her fifth day in the hospital, Nick arrived. He walked in through the door carrying a stack of books. It wasn’t until he reached the locker and dropped them noisily into a gap among the flowers that he realised there was anyone else in the room. She saw him freeze as soon as he clocked it was her.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’re here.’
‘I’ll go,’ Smudge said, making as if to get up.
‘No, no,’ he said stiffly. He shifted from foot to foot and glanced at the machines. ‘It’s my first trip in for a while actually. Work has been…’ He caught her eye and looked away.
A trolley clattered along the corridor. Nick coughed. ‘Has there been any—?’
She shook her head. ‘Just agitation from the chest infection. She’s been calmer these last few days. The antibiotics seem to be doing the trick.’
For a moment neither of them said anything. Nick drummed his fingers on the back of the cabinet on the far side of the bed. He looked around the room: at the ceiling, out of the window, at the sign on the back of the door prohibiting smoking. His gaze fell on the pile of books.
‘Thought I might read to her,’ he said.
Smudge nodded. The ventilator heaved a series of sighs. A flush spread over Nick’s face.
‘I should go,’ he said. He took a step towards the door and turned back, passing a hand over his forehead. ‘Oh, by the way, I spoke to the benefits people. Explained there’d been some mistake. With your money, you know. They said they’d be in touch. Some sort of date for a meeting, I think. Sounds like it can all be sorted out. Nothing to worry about. So, all’s well that end’s well.’
He wouldn’t meet her eye and resentment gathered in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t about to let him pass off his cowardice, his desire to be rid of the mess of the last few weeks, as a generous thing. She wasn’t going to be grateful to him for trying to erase her from his life.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said in a hard voice. ‘How convenient. Nothing for you to worry about any more.’
Nick frowned, his hand on the doorframe. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
She didn’t reply. He
coughed again and dug in his pockets.
‘In the meantime, this should tide you over,’ he said, holding out some notes.
Fury erupted through her. ‘I don’t want your money!’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, recoiling. He made as if to stuff the money back in his pocket, then seemed to think better of it and went over to put it on the locker. ‘I’ll just leave it here,’ he said.
His voice had an affronted, peevish tone: a school boy aggrieved at getting C+ for his homework when he’d expected an A. She saw there was weakness about his chin she hadn’t noticed before, as though whoever had modelled him had run out of clay. All of a sudden she felt indignant for her sister that this was who everyone lumped her together with, that this was the person with whom Hellie was supposed to share her life.
‘What’s this?’ said Nick, picking up a scrap of paper from the locker.
Peering over, Smudge saw with horror that it was a piece of the letter. She must have left it on the side after the last time she read it to Hellie.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said, holding out her hand for it. ‘Rubbish.’
But Nick wasn’t listening. ‘Is that Helen’s writing?’ He frowned at the jagged scrawl. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s not like hers… except… that is the way she does her “t”s. And the “y”s are the same.’
He shot Smudge a look, suspicion marshalling its forces behind his eyes.
‘Where did you get this?’ he said. ‘Did this come from the house? Did you take this from her room?’
‘For fuck’s sake! No. All right?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘If you must know, she wrote to me. Before she drove to see me that day, she sent me a letter.’
Nick frowned. ‘How come I’m only hearing about this now?’
‘I’ve only recently got round to reading it myself.’ And then, because he didn’t look convinced: ‘I wasn’t very… on top of my mail for quite a while. And when I did find it, I didn’t feel… equal to opening it. If that makes sense.’
She gestured for the page again. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing really,’ she said. ‘Just odds and ends, you know.’
But Nick was still peering at the writing. ‘It’s a bit… manic, isn’t it?’
She looked up sharply, but there was no significance in his eyes. The word didn’t have the same cavernous resonances for him – shouts, guffaws and screams echoing up into the great dome of the sky. It was just another adjective. He might as easily have chosen ‘frenetic’, ‘chaotic’, ‘odd’.
‘I suppose it is,’ she said, being careful to keep her voice light. She looked at the piece of paper he held in his hand, fighting the urge to lunge up and snatch it from him. She didn’t like the thought of his eyes on it, his brain processing Hellie’s private words.
He was staring at it, rubbing a hand back and forth across his mouth. The silence lengthened.
‘Are they all about this?’ he said. ‘About your father’s suicide?’
Smudge narrowed her eyes. ‘How do you mean?’
‘The shoes. The string for laces. Sitting by the feet. It’s your father. It’s the day he died.’
Smudge shook her head. ‘It can’t be,’ she said, studying the sentences. ‘Why would she torture herself by imagining that?’
‘But she didn’t have to imagine it, did she?’ said Nick. ‘She was there. When they found him hanging from the banister, she was sitting by his feet.’
Smudge gaped at him.
‘Sorry,’ he said blankly. ‘I thought you knew.’
‘No. She never told me.’
He nodded. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I only found out last year. It all came out after Emily. Something about the experience, the way she died, brought it all back. Therapy got her to reveal that much, at least.’
‘Where was I? When it happened. How come I wasn’t there?’
Nick pulled a face and stared at the ceiling. ‘I think you’d been out with your mother. Shopping. Something like that. They said he’d been dead for a good hour when you got home. And she’d just sat there, staring up. Watching. She was talking to him apparently. Asking him to get down.’
He shuddered.
‘I can’t imagine what that does to a person,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine how on earth you begin to get past something like that.’
He looked at her for a moment, as though the answer might be written in her face. Then he recollected himself and the coldness dropped back over his features.
‘Anyway,’ he mumbled. He laid the sheet of paper on the end of the bed and walked out of the room.
Smudge stared at her sister’s face, its contours so familiar yet so sleekly different from her own. The same material, the same DNA, the same genetic plans tilted quite another way. The realisation came in a rush: while Helen might have ceased to be herself on the day Akela moved in, Ellie had started to disappear on a dark afternoon a whole two years before.
She turned her head and looked out of the window at the blank clouds, blinking back a surge of tears.
50
One day Anton calls you into the back office. You leave the easel where you’ve been roughing out ideas for a series of modern landscapes for Visit Britain and go in to find him sitting at his desk, a dark silhouette against the yard outside, where, for once, the afternoon sun is shining, glinting off the silver bins.
‘Sit down,’ he says, and coughs.
You sit in one of the armchairs facing the desk. It makes you much lower than Anton, like a child. There’s a pause. You look up at a ship’s barometer hanging on the wall: changeable, it reads.
‘The thing is, er, Trudy, I’ve had a phone call and, to be honest, it puts me in a rather awkward position,’ begins Anton. He stops and runs a hand over his blond hair. It is starting to thin on top, you notice, the pink scalp showing through. It makes you think unpleasantly of streaky bacon.
‘Look, I’ll come out with it,’ he says. ‘No use beating about the bush. The call was from Office Elves apologising that Trudy, the temp worker they were supposed to send us three months ago, didn’t show up and asking if we still needed someone. Apparently there was some glitch in their system which means a load of messages are only coming through now – all of which is rather strange because, well, you’re here.’
He drums his fingers on the desk and looks at you sidelong. ‘Anything you can say to clear this up?’
You flash a smile and summon up the confidence that has seen you through this far.
‘I am Trudy,’ you say brightly. ‘The office must have made a mistake—’
Anton holds up a hand. ‘Sorry to be difficult, but I’m afraid you’re quite clearly not. Not that Trudy, at any rate. That Trudy went into premature labour and had to be hospitalised the night before she was due to start covering reception here. Her partner emailed the agency to explain, but, er, as I said, the message didn’t come through.’
A weight plunges through you, hollowing you out. The room starts to swirl and your thoughts flit like birds, looking for something – anything – you could salvage from the situation. You open your mouth and close it again. You feel tired and sad.
‘The thing is,’ says Anton, watching you warily, ‘I like your work. You fit into the team well and since you’ve started on the art side the clients certainly have no complaints. Truth be told, I’ve never seen so many private commissions come in in all my ten years of doing this. It’s just… well, I have to trust the people I employ and this… rather puts that in the shade.’
He tugs at the collar of his shirt. ‘If you could just explain, perhaps it wouldn’t be an issue,’ he suggests.
The silence seems to go on and on. You look around the room at the shelves of books and trophies next to the barometer, the black-and-white photograph of a bearded man in a naval uniform staring proudly at the camera, and back at Anton. Anger flares and dies. He’s being more than reasonable, you see that. Most people would have chucked you out, no questions asked, in the face of such an abuse of trust, such fraud
. For all he knows, you could be anyone.
A door creaks open in the back of your mind. What if you did come clean? What if you told him about the accident and the institutions and having to start again? You consider it for a moment, but the thought of slipping back into the harness of Ellie, of squashing yourself into those constricting bindings and shouldering the burdens of sadness and shame once again, is more than you can bear. You like Trudy and all she’s come to mean. You like the neatness of her life, her can-do approach and the way she sticks to healthy routines. Ellie would taint that. Simply by speaking about her with Trudy’s mouth, you would bring her chaos tumbling into this room. It would be like opening a cupboard door that could never be shut and there would always be more rubbish spilling from it, faster than you could clear it, so that you would have to spend the whole time shovelling shit out of the way when all you really wanted to do was get on with leading a completely different, unfettered life.
You shake your head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t explain it,’ you say. ‘I’m sorry.’
Anton knits his brows and looks at you solemnly. In this instant you feel you can trace in him the figure of his grandfather, the Admiral; you can see the same expression on the figure in the photograph. If you were Trudy pure and simple at this moment you would be roughing out plans to draw Anton this way in your mind. But you can’t focus because Ellie is out there, prowling round the edges of your consciousness, rattling the cages of your thoughts, and you have to find a way to drive her back into the scrub of No Man’s Land.
Anton drums his fingers on the desk. ‘You’re making this rather difficult for me,’ he says. ‘At least tell me why you can’t explain.’
You open your mouth to try to frame the reasons, but the words won’t come. You find yourself surrounded by blankness, the margin round the edge of the page where the writing gives way to space.