by Ann Morgan
Shortly after they went in, the bell stopped tolling. Smudge pushed back her stool and stood up. Her shoes were new and she wasn’t sure about them. They were very high – unlike anything she’d worn for years – but when she’d seen them in a charity shop window earlier in the week she’d felt that they would be the right choice for Hellie’s funeral. Their brashness would help her to blend in.
The church door creaked as she let herself in. Heads turned but no one seemed to register who she was. A man in a dark suit handed her an order of service bearing a picture of Hellie’s face – the same shot that had graced the front pages in the days after the crash. Helen Sallis, it said on the cover. 15.04.80 – 03.09.13.
Smudge slid into a pew near the back. The church yawned in front of her, its arched ceiling ridged like a throat. There was a man standing at the lectern, which was hard to make out from where she sat. He was reading a poem but she couldn’t concentrate on it. She kept scouring the rows in front of her for Mother’s waved helmet of hair, all the while tugging her own blonde strands forward over her own face, lest anyone should catch a glimpse of her profile and start to wonder.
They stood up to sing and sat down to listen to the words of a bearded priest, but none of it reached her. It all seemed to be coming down a long, echoing tunnel from very far away. There was nothing here of the Hellie from later and that last night. Smudge shouldn’t have listened to Anton. It was a mistake to have come.
Afterwards, following the instructions of the priest, the guests began to make their way to a hotel a couple of streets away for a reception while a private cremation took place in Ealing. The family, apparently, had particularly requested that everyone come and there would be a collection for a road-safety awareness charity. Smudge edged her way towards the church’s side door, avoiding the throng of people heading out of the main entrance to the street. She was just about to slip away when—
‘There you are,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You big naughty. Where have you been?’
Smudge looked round to find Heloise standing behind her, arms folded, a scowl stamped on her face.
‘You went away and you didn’t say goodbye to me,’ said Heloise. ‘That was rude.’
‘I… I’m sorry,’ said Smudge, glancing around warily. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I just had to go.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Heloise, picking a service sheet off the pile on the stand next to the door. ‘You just did what you wanted to. Like all the grown ups. You are big, selfish poos. And by the way your hair looks silly.’
(‘She’s right, you know,’ said someone. ‘Look at you, you big idiot. Mutton dressed as lamb. No one wants you here.’)
Smudge looked around, but there was no one behind her, only the heavy wooden door standing ajar. With a sinking feeling she realised they were back: the voices circling her thoughts like sharks once again. She felt the old panic start to bubble through her veins.
‘Why did you do that?’ said Heloise.
‘What?’
‘Look around like there was someone there.’
(‘Charlatan. You big, fat fake.’)
Smudge ran a hand through her hair, blinking. ‘I – I thought someone said something, that’s all. It must have been my imagination.’
Heloise nodded solemnly. ‘I get that sometimes,’ she said. ‘I get a boy shouting “knickers” and a man called Mr Tomlinson who tries to do “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” with different words. Sometimes he makes me giggle.’
Smudge stared at her. Then there was the sound of clattering heels.
‘Heloise?’ called Mother’s voice. ‘Heloise? Oh, there you are. You mustn’t walk off like that!’
She glanced at Smudge and gave a start of recognition
‘Hello, Mother,’ said Smudge.
(‘Hello, Marmaduke.’)
Mother blinked, then drew herself up. ‘Eleanor,’ she said, her voice cold as the marble memorial plaque on the wall above her head. ‘Come to show me that miraculous letter, have you?’
Smudge opened her mouth but no words came out.
‘I thought not,’ said Mother, pursing her lips. ‘Two hours we sat in that canteen. I knew it was pointless but Horace would wait.’
There was a muffled thud as someone dropped a hymn book on the far side of the church. Mother looked round then back at Smudge, taking in her dyed hair and stilettos.
‘I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve to come here at all,’ she said.
Indignation sparked in Smudge’s stomach. ‘Why?’ It came out louder than she’d expected and a huddle of people over by the main door turned to stare.
(‘There you go again, letting the side down.’)
Mother folded her arms. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s not as though there’s anything for you here. It’s not as though you had any connection with Helen any more. You haven’t for years, for all you might have hung about the hospital at the bitter end.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re not going to get anything, you know. You’re not mentioned in the will.’
Smudge held up her service sheet, bearing the picture of Hellie’s face.
‘I came because of this!’ she said, pointing to the photograph and the name. ‘Because she was my twin sister. And because once upon a time… I was her and she was me.’
(‘Ooh, hark at you.’)
Mother rolled her eyes and shifted so that the light from the stained-glass window above Smudge’s head fell on her, daubing her face with pinks and blues. ‘Still on this, are we? Still on this… this obsession. I told Horace it was foolish to believe you. I knew – I knew – all that nonsense about a letter couldn’t possibly be true. As if Helen would ever be so stupid as to write something like that. He’s too trusting for his own good sometimes.’
‘Maybe Horace wants to get to the bottom of things,’ said Smudge, haltingly. ‘Maybe he’s tired of sweeping things under the carpet.’
‘Sweeping what under the carpet?’ retorted Mother, slipping her service sheet into her handbag and snapping it shut. ‘There are no secrets between Horace and me.’
‘I think we both know that’s not true,’ said Smudge.
‘Bollocks,’ said Mother.
The word exploded in the quiet of the church. In the nave on the far side a verger tidying up halted what he was doing.
‘Everything all right?’ he called across.
‘Yes, quite all right, thank you,’ answered Mother, slipping on her polite-company voice. She glanced down and caught sight of Heloise, staring up at her saucer-eyed.
‘Heloise dear, go and find Daddy and Peeps,’ she said, tapping her granddaughter on the arm. ‘Quickly!
‘Now you listen to me,’ she said, her voice becoming a vicious hiss as Heloise scuttled off. ‘I won’t have any more of your lies. I won’t have any more of your poison. This stops now.’
Looking closely, Smudge noticed that her mother was trembling beneath the flawless helmet of her hair. Every sinew in her neck was taut. She saw what she had never seen before: Mother was terrified. The woman who had once shrieked with laughter as they all whirled round on the beach, and stood expressionless on the doorstep as the police drove her daughter away, was desperately afraid. ‘Oh, Mother,’ she said quietly. ‘What are you so frightened of?’
Mother blinked at her, uncertainty in her eyes. Deep within her gaze, something of the old Ellie look was lodged: vulnerable, lost. A wave of pity engulfed Smudge.
‘What happened to you, Mother?’ she said, reaching out and taking her hand. It felt smaller than she’d expected, the fingers thin and fragile inside their black leather glove. ‘Was it Father? Or something further back than that?’
Something flashed inside her thoughts, a bulb flaring in the far reaches of her brain. Hadn’t there been something? If only she could think clearly. If only she could recall. But all her mind would offer was the image of a little pink glass holding a row of false teeth.
‘You don’t have to keep it all buttoned up,’ said Smudge. ‘If so
mething happened you can talk about these things. Perhaps it might help.’
(‘Who are you kidding?’ carped a voice. ‘Call the fire brigade, I say. Douse her in foam!’)
Mother stared at her, moisture gathering in her eyes. The ribbed throat of the church’s roof seemed to expand, as though the building were taking a deep breath. Then she pursed her lips and gave a harsh laugh.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘You’re talking to me about getting help? That’s a joke. Well, I have news for you. Some of us don’t need help. We don’t expect it. We’re not weak in that way. We don’t go in for that self-regarding support-group therapy rubbish. Because at the end of it, what do you come back to? That you’re on your own and you’ve got to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Well, some of us have known that all along.’
A man in a fawn-coloured coat stopped next to them and Mother assumed a wan smile to accept his murmured condolences. When he moved on, she looked at Smudge and her face settled back into its old, hard lines.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Some of us have been managing just fine, thank you very much, with self-discipline. With routine. Structure, that’s the thing. People like you might do well to remember that.’
(‘And people like you might do well to stick it up your arse and dance the fandango.’)
Smudge screwed up her eyes against the voices, fighting the urge to turn and hurry away out of the great, gloomy space. She tried to think. Beneath all Mother’s fire and indignation, something wasn’t making sense. She goaded her brain to trace the threads of the conversation, to find the hole in its weave.
Mother smiled triumphantly and shifted her handbag on to her shoulder. She looked round to see Nick, Heloise, Horace and Richard approaching along the aisle. In the dappled light from the windows, Richard was revealed to be tall with a round head like his father and a weak chin.
‘Now, if you’ll excuse me—’ Mother began in a voice she might have used to round off a complaining phone call to her bank.
‘No. Wait,’ said Smudge. With a massive effort, she brought it forth: ‘It hasn’t always worked for you, has it?’
Mother frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Before,’ said Smudge. ‘After Father’s death. There was no routine then. No structure. You were a wreck. You stayed in bed with the curtains closed. We had to fend for ourselves.’ A vision floated before her eyes of an empty bread bin, little hands sawing precariously at the heel of a mouldy loaf. ‘You were struggling then, Mother. You needed help.’
She folded her arms. ‘So that’s the tale you’ve been spinning, is it? A pitiful childhood of neglect. The Little Match Girl. Well, I’m sure it’s very effective in many quarters but I don’t have time for it. Today I am burying my daughter. That is the end of the story.’
‘Burying two daughters,’ said Smudge, pointing out through the church doors to the waiting hearse. ‘There are two people in that coffin.’
Mother shot her a look. ‘Oh, I buried you a long time ago.’
Smudge swallowed. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You did. You buried me the day you failed to notice we’d swapped places – that she’d become me and I’d become her. And you buried her too. You gave us both up for dead when we were six years old.’
Mother glanced quickly over her shoulder, but the others were muttering between themselves, peering at something on Nick’s iPhone while Heloise wandered a little apart, gawping up at the ornate memorial plaques on the wall.
Mother took a deep breath. ‘All right, you want the truth?’
(‘It’s a trap! Don’t listen to her! She’ll kill us all!’)
‘Yes,’ said Smudge. ‘Yes, I do.’
Mother hesitated. She looked round once more.
‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’
64
Blur and crash. Emotions wash in and out. You are hot, then you are cold, then you are burning up again.
At first you cling to the buoyant fiction of Trudy, to the simplicity of her life. Without that, you are afraid you will sink into the mire and drown. So you try to pass the story off as a coincidence, a bit of celebrity nonsense. Someone who happens to look like you. Someone else. It’s not impossible, you argue, in a world of nearly seven billion people, that there should be someone who looks so similar to you. In fact you saw something about it – didn’t you? – on one of the Dutch cable channels, a chat show with people and their doppelgängers brought face to face.
You take a tea towel from the rail on the oven door and start to dry one of the plates. If you can just keep performing the Saturday morning you planned, you think, perhaps the rest of the world will follow your lead. Maybe you can wrench reality back on to the right track simply by refusing to live it any other way.
But Gareth is not playing along. He stands there, stony-faced, a muscle pulsing in his jaw. After a moment, he reaches out and taps the newspaper print. You lean in to read the line next to his finger. The bitch has only gone and mentioned your MONSTER tattoo.
You open your mouth to try to brazen that one away too, but the words stick in your throat. You can hear how it will sound in advance: flimsy, thin, false. He doesn’t deserve that.
You set the plate and tea towel down on the side. You turn to look at him. There is a thrumming in your head and your vision keeps blurring and sharpening as though someone is twiddling the focus knob in your brain, but you do your best to hold his gaze.
‘All right,’ you say. ‘She is talking about me. Sorry I lied, I just—’
But he doesn’t wait to hear any more. He turns and strides out of the kitchen. You hurry after him.
‘Gareth, please,’ you say. You put a hand on his shoulder but he shrugs it off. You follow him into the living room.
‘Please,’ you say again. ‘I can explain all this. Just give me a chance. Please.’
He turns to you, the light from the window behind him throwing his face into shadow. He once told you that he never says much when he’s angry, that his stammer gets worse when his feelings run high so he prefers to keep quiet. At the time, you joked that this would make arguments easy, but now you find his silence stifling. Fear pinches your heart.
You open your mouth and bring it out quickly, hurrying over the details. Yes, it’s true, you tell him. That was you. You did that – what she said. Or at least, that was how other people saw it. But it was years ago. You were a very different person. You’d been through hell. You spent a long time lost and – as you told him – ill, but you’re past that now. It’s ancient history. You’ve started a new life. He’s got to believe you.
He stares at you as the canal oozes its way along behind him in the rain. Heat prickles at your temples. The little knot of being lodged deep within you seems to throb.
He blinks. ‘You told m-me you were ill,’ he says slowly. ‘You told m-me your family didn’t understand you. You said they threw you out. And all the time…’ He narrows his eyes. ‘I bet your name’s not even really Trudy, is it?’
‘It is now,’ you say urgently. ‘That’s my name now. Trudy. That’s who I am.’
But he shakes his head and will not look at you.
‘How can I believe you?’ he says. ‘How can I trust anything you say?’
You swallow and close your eyes, delving within yourself for something hard and solid enough to shatter his incredulity.
‘Things weren’t easy, growing up,’ you say at length. ‘It was a screwed-up family. My dad killed himself when we were four. My mum had… well, her own demons.’
‘So what?’ says Gareth. ‘M-My dad had cancer. You don’t see m-me running around trying to kill people.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ you say. ‘I wasn’t running around trying to kill people. What happened was an accident. And because I was ill, because they didn’t know how to deal with me, they chose to see the worst. There was something that happened, you see, back when we were very young. If you’d just let me explain—’
But Gareth
swipes your words away and hurries from the room. For a panicked second you think he’s making for the front door, but instead he turns towards the bedroom. You trot after him, stars exploding wherever you look.
‘Please, Gareth,’ you say. ‘You’ve got to believe me.’
Your voice sounds so weak and pathetic, it makes your stomach churn. Passing the bathroom, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror above the sink: your face blotched and stricken.
In the bedroom, in front of the rumpled bed in which only an hour ago he moved above you, sighing, he turns to face you. There’s a coldness about him you’ve not seen before, a wall rising up between you. It scares you. Panic bubbles up, sending the truth spilling everywhere. You put a hand to your belly.
‘There’s another thing I’ve got to tell you,’ you say urgently as he opens his mouth to say something that might cement the wall in place for good. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He stares at you with the eyes of a stranger you have bumped into in the street.
‘What do you m-mean you’re pregnant?’ he says. ‘A-Weren’t you taking the pill?’
‘It was an accident,’ you say. ‘I didn’t think it could happen to me. I’ve never had anything like this happen before.’
His face is blank.
‘You have to believe me,’ you say again, like a child saying a made-up incantation, hoping that wishing can make it true.
But the spell is broken. Gareth shakes his head. He holds up his hands. And this time he does stride down the hallway to the front door.
‘Gareth, wait!’ you shout. No matter: your words are empty and powerless now. The door closes behind him, answering you with a tut.
You stay in the flat, wandering from room to room. You stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror. You slump on the sofa. You stretch out on the bed. You go over what happened. You go over it. Again. Again. What you said. What you could have said differently. What you should have said.
You talk to the empty air. At first your tone is pleading, then it’s hurt, then it’s angry – indignant that after everything he can’t grant you more credence, that he isn’t here, expressing sorrow for all you’ve gone through. He owes you that. Someone owes you that. Why the fuck isn’t someone giving you that? You rage for some time in a voice fit to shake the windows. Cruel bastard world, you admonish the sofa, the turntable, why the fuck should you be saddled with this? Why the fuck can’t he just put it all aside and love you? Why does no one ever give you a fucking, cunting break? The furniture surveys your unloveliness unmoved. You subside into mumbles and whimpers: pitiful, animal noise.