by Ann Morgan
Still he doesn’t come. You put the television on and turn it off, unable to stand its gabbling. You stare for what feels like hours at Hellie’s face in the newspaper. Tracing her difference from you – the sleek roundedness of her cheeks, the subtle slant in the angling of her eyes.
Time gallops and stands still. You seem to spend years stuck at 15:23 on the oven clock then suddenly it’s an hour later and the sickly winter light is starting to fade. It is as though the flat itself has been cut from its moorings and sent drifting off down the canal, bobbing and swaying on the currents of Gareth’s absence. Your head throbs. When you touch a hand to your forehead, it’s clammy and cold. The walls seem to rush towards you and retreat, doing the hokey-cokey on the fringes of your field of view.
Oh, where is he?
When it gets dark, you sit at the table in the living room and stare out at the evening coming on. Your thoughts are sluggish and murky now, the bulb illuminating them fused. All you know is you can’t leave; you can’t let yourself out of this reality. The being knitting itself together inside you won’t let you. And something else – a raw, liquid feeling in your chest – demands that you stay here too. This life has got its claws into you and unlike all the other times since you left the unit, you can’t shrug it off.
You must fall asleep at the table because the next thing you know is the sound of a key in the lock and the light flicking on.
‘Hello,’ says Gareth, coming into the room. ‘I didn’t know if you’d still be here.’
You open your mouth and find no words waiting. So you close it again and stare up at him. He seems to loom towards you and then swoop away.
He indicates the plastic bag he’s carrying.
‘I’ve got some food if you’re hungry,’ he says. ‘Stuff to m-make an omelette. Enough for two.’
You shrug. He goes to the kitchen and prepares the meal. You’re still sitting at the table when he carries the plates through.
You eat in silence, glancing at him between mouthfuls, wary. Finally, you both speak at the same time.
‘About earlier,’ he says when you nod that he should talk. ‘I’m sorry if… It was a lot to take in. I’m not used to dealing a-with other people’s stuff, you see. It’s always just been m-me.’
‘That stuff in the papers,’ you say. ‘It’s not the whole story. There is another side. Things got twisted and—’
‘Yes,’ says Gareth. ‘That’s something that occurred to me when I was walking around. That’s something I’ll have to hear properly from you.’
You nod. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Around,’ he says. Then he scratches his head. ‘A-Weirdly, I spent quite a bit of time in Pizza Hut. I don’t know why. M-Maybe it was the free refills of Coke.’
The bathos of it makes you both smile.
‘I had to think, you see,’ he continues. ‘I had to make sense of things for m-myself.’
‘So what does that mean?’ you say. You wince and add: ‘For us?’
Gareth sighs. He looks round the room then back at you. ‘It m-means I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It m-means let’s see. But we’ll have to take things slowly. I think living together is probably not a g-good idea for now. I need time to get used to things, to adjust.’
Relief pours into you. You nod. Of course. You completely understand. Whatever he needs. You’ll start looking for a place tomorrow. You’ll leave tonight if he wants.
He waves the suggestion away. There’s no need for you to do that. Of course you can stay until you have somewhere to go. He cares about you. He wants to look after you – and the baby if that is what you want too. He just needs a bit of space for now. It’ll take him a little while to trust everything again, to feel ready to mix your lives up together full-time.
Oh, and there’s one more thing.
‘No m-more secrets,’ he says. ‘No m-more revelations. I couldn’t take it again.’
You nod and smile. You take his hand.
‘Absolutely,’ you say, staring deep into his eyes. ‘I promise. No more secrets.’
He returns the nod and stands up to collect the plates.
‘I love you,’ you say, and in this moment you know you’ll do anything to hold on to this, to take this chance of happiness and make it count.
‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘That I do believe.’
65
Smudge climbed into the funeral car and settled herself against the leather upholstery. There was a click and the roar of the high street rushed in as Mother got in the other side.
‘The others will follow in the third car,’ she said.
Smudge nodded and stared straight ahead at the back of Hellie’s coffin in the hearse parked in front. She swallowed and clutched at her bag. The fire and bluster that had gripped her only moments before in the church had blazed themselves out in the walk down the path, leaving her cold and empty. Even though the sun had warmed the car, her fingers felt like ice. At the back of her mind, the voices whispered and bickered, getting ready to strike.
‘All ready?’ said the driver, climbing in and flicking his coat tails back with a practised gesture.
Mother nodded and the car pulled away behind the hearse, into the lunchtime traffic.
Smudge sat and waited for her to speak, but for several moments nothing came. They drove silently through the streets of west London. Outside the car, shoppers barged past one another, stretched their arms up to snap selfies, thrust sandwich packets into overflowing bins. Ahead, the exotic blooms on Hellie’s coffin shuddered and nodded as the hearse took one turning, then the next, making for the A4.
(‘My old man said “follow the van and don’t dilly dally on the way”,’ warbled a voice.)
Smudge bit her lip against a hideous urge to laugh and forced her mind back to the matter in hand. A sideways glance at Mother showed that she seemed to be deliberating over something, her lips forming silent words. She was fidgeting too. She took her gloves off and put them in her bag. Then she opened her bag again, got out a powder compact and spent several minutes peering at her face from different angles, patting at the skin under her eyes. Finally, as the cortege eased its way on to the dual carriageway, Mother took a deep breath.
‘What I’m about to say…’ she began, and stopped. She leant forward to the driver.
‘Would you mind putting the radio on?’
‘Certainly, Madam,’ he said. ‘Talk radio or music?’
‘Whichever you prefer,’ said Mother.
The driver pressed a button and the strains of LBC Radio filled the car. A man was complaining at length about parking restrictions in Lambeth.
‘What I am about to tell you will not be repeated,’ said Mother in a tight voice, speaking below the outraged tones coming from the speaker. ‘If you try to tell anyone else – Richard, Nick, Heloise, anyone at all – I will deny it utterly. If you go to the media, I will pursue you through the courts. You understand?’
(‘I’ll canoo you through the quartz, you dirty hand.’) Smudge shook her head, battling to stay listening to Mother’s voice.
‘Do you understand?’ she pressed, as the Bentley came to a halt behind the hearse at the Hogarth roundabout.
Smudge nodded distractedly to show she had heard. Against the barrage from the radio, on which a woman was now reporting on a spike in class sizes, and the whispers and snickering inside her own head (‘Elasticated knickers… Loose in the crotch… Come here and give these melons a squeeze…’), she was struggling to hold on to the thread of what she was supposed to understand.
‘The truth is, I did know,’ continued Mother, looking in the compact mirror once more so that she seemed to be talking to her reflection, performing herself to herself. ‘I did know about the swap. There. I knew you had become Ellie and she had changed to Helen. Maybe not instantly, but soon. I started to suspect not long after Horace moved in and pretty soon it was obvious. Your little mannerisms. The shape of your faces. You forget how well I know you. You forget I was the on
e who washed and fed and kept you from the very first. Of course I know who you are.’
Smudge stared at the back of the driver’s head with its neat line of greying hair. The voices in her mind fell silent. Even the radio seemed to inch its volume down a notch. But still the words wouldn’t compute. She turned and looked at Mother, open-mouthed. A moment passed. Then the lights changed on the roundabout and they pulled forward into the traffic, the flowers in the hearse ahead shivering.
‘You’re saying you knew about the swap?’ she said slowly.
‘I knew,’ said Mother, closing the compact with a smug click.
(‘You are the Queen of Sheba and I claim my five pounds.’)
Smudge screwed up her face and looked again, but the world was still there just as she had last seen it. Outrage began to beat a distant drum.
‘If you knew about it, then why didn’t you say anything?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you make it stop?’
Mother blinked. ‘Because I… by the time I was certain, it was too late. There was no way to correct it without ruining everything. Ellie would have acted up – she was always far more of a prima donna than you were about things like that – and Horace would have found out and I… couldn’t have that.’
Mother looked across and out of Smudge’s window as they turned off the main road into a tree-lined residential street. Close up, her eyes seemed cold and unreadable as a lizard’s.
‘So you sacrificed me for the sake of keeping up appearances?’ said Smudge, her voice rising. ‘Because you didn’t want to admit you were wrong?’
‘Shhh,’ said Mother, with a glance at the driver. ‘Keep your voice down. It wasn’t like that.’ She swallowed and looked up at the beige-upholstered ceiling of the car. ‘Look, you don’t know what it was like. Things had been awful for so long. Since your father’s death – even before. He wasn’t an easy man, you know. Highs and lows, madcap schemes, always running after the next thing, then long black spells. You don’t know what it’s like dealing with someone who has that kind of… condition.’
‘Don’t I?’ said Smudge quietly. (‘How d’you like them onions?’)
But Mother wasn’t listening. ‘What you said earlier, in the church… about me struggling,’ she told the ceiling. ‘Well, it was true. I’m not proud of it. But, yes, I was… unhappy for a while and I suppose I let things slip.’ She fumbled suddenly at the clasp of her bag and snatched out a handkerchief with which she dabbed at the corners of her eyes with an odd, furtive little gesture. Her hands – strangely naked without the gloves – still sported the hallmark red nails Smudge remembered from the early Akela days. Only now their skin was almost translucent, revealing the veins and tendons underneath, exposing her workings to the world. The thought struck her: Mother was getting old.
‘Then Horace came along and he was so kind and uncomplicated, so steady,’ Mother was saying. ‘And I started to see another way. I saw someone who’d look after things for a change and I wanted that. I wanted to give it a chance. Is that so very wrong?’
She gave a sniff and looked at Smudge as the radio blurted out a jingle for cheaper car insurance and the Bentley followed the hearse in between a pair of redbrick pillars. Smudge sat still.
‘So, you see, how could I possibly take the risk of Horace finding out that I’d confused my own children?’ she continued. ‘What sort of a mother would that make me? How could he be expected to stay around after that?’ She folded the handkerchief and tucked it back into her bag. ‘So, yes. Perhaps it was selfish, perhaps it was wrong, but at the time I couldn’t bring myself to do otherwise. I would have done anything to snatch at that chance of happiness. I just wanted things to be simple for a while, after everything. And the truth is, I would do the same again. Yes, I would.’
Mother folded her arms and regarded Smudge, thrusting her chin forward as though defying her to disapprove. The pose had the opposite effect, however. In the dappled light from the trees shading the cremat-orium drive, Mother looked oddly frail and vulnerable, a player pitted against loaded dice. The helplessness Smudge had glimpsed in her in the church was back. It was sobering to think that underneath all the severity – the rigidly pressed jacket, the lipstick applied just so – there might be another little girl trapped by other people’s choices.
(‘Oh, spare me the violins,’ scoffed a voice.)
Moved by a wave of pity, Smudge reached out to put her hand on Mother’s shoulder. Mother bowed her head and tolerated the touch for a moment. Then she looked up, flinching Smudge’s hand away.
‘Anyway, I never understood what all the fuss was about,’ she said briskly as the car pulled to a halt outside the chapel.
Smudge frowned. ‘How do you mean?’
‘You carrying on the way you did for so long,’ said Mother, getting her gloves out of her bag and sliding them back on. ‘It was hardly a drastic change, after all. You were still living the same life. You were still in the same family. I expected you’d forget it happened soon enough.’
The radio fell silent as the driver switched the engine off and opened his door. The sounds of birdsong and the distant hum of the main road filtered into the car.
‘Did you really believe that?’ said Smudge.
‘Of course,’ said Mother, snapping her bag shut. ‘After all, it wasn’t as though changing your name was really going to alter who you were underneath. You would still have been you, and Helen – Ellie – would still have been Ellie, no matter what we called you. No amount of swapping back and forth was going to change that. Really, I couldn’t see it would make all that much difference in the long run, which of you was which.’
Smudge gaped at the woman she had put out a hand to comfort only a moment before. Only now did she see that she could not reach her. ‘Oh Mother,’ she said quietly. ‘You never knew us at all.’
Mother looked back. Her gaze wavered for a second. Then one of the undertakers came forward to open her door and Mother stepped out of the car, leaving Smudge staring at empty space.
When she got out a moment later, she saw Horace, Richard and Nick emerging from the car behind. Mother was standing talking to the priest, inclining her head and wearing a pinched smile. She looked like a stranger standing there – they all did – and Smudge knew then, coldly, that that was what they would become. Already a door was swinging closed in her mind, shutting all this, finally, in the past.
She glanced one last time at Hellie’s coffin. The flowers were still now, serene. ‘Goodbye, Hellie,’ she whispered.
Turning, she set off walking away, up the drive, between the trees.
Behind her came the clatter of footsteps.
‘Are you going then?’ said Heloise, hurtling round to block her path.
‘Yes,’ said Smudge. ‘I think it’s time.’
Heloise nodded solemnly. ‘The wind’s changed, hasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like in Mary Poppins.’
‘Something like that,’ said Smudge.
She regarded the little girl and something occurred to her. ‘Listen, Heloise. There’s a secret your mummy told me. Up in your attic there’s supposed to be a painting by Mummy’s daddy.’
‘Peeps?’
‘No, not Peeps. Another daddy before Peeps. It’s a picture of fireworks. You can’t tell anyone about it just yet, but maybe one day, when things are happier, you could see if you can find it and get your daddy to take it out and put it somewhere you can see it. Do you think you’ll remember that?’
Heloise nodded again. ‘Yes, I will.’
A cassocked figure approached.
‘Are you staying for the committal?’ asked the chaplain, offering a smile.
‘No,’ said Smudge. ‘I think I’d better not.’
He gave his head a prayerful tilt. ‘I quite understand,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Mrs Sallis appreciated you accompanying her in the car. A terrible thing to lose a child.’
(‘Pompous arse.’)
‘Yes,’ said Smudge. She looked back at the chapel. Horace was stand
ing next to Margaret now, his pudgy fingers on her shoulder. Nick and Richard were hovering by the hearse. Later, they would attend the reception at the chic hotel in town, accepting people’s condolences with rueful smiles, behaving appropriately. She was glad she would not be there to see it.
‘Goodbye, Heloise,’ she said to the little girl who was standing a little way off now, sucking her fingers thoughtfully. ‘Don’t forget.’
‘I won’t,’ mumbled Heloise, waggling her free hand. ‘’Bye.’
Smudge turned and went on up the drive. The voices rushed in to set up a triumphal roar inside her head. (‘Good riddance!’ ‘Simon and Garfunkel!’ ‘See you next Tuesday!’ ‘Darling, you were marvellous!’ ‘As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again!’) This time she did not try to block them out.
She walked to the corner. The R68 bus was just passing and it was starting to rain. She put a hand in her pocket to feel for an umbrella and pulled out a slip of paper: Anton’s cheque. Creased and wrinkled now, but still good, the name space blank. A song started to play softly through the speakers of her brain. She set off up the road.
66
It’s mid-morning by the time you leave for the office the following Monday. After the freedom of Amsterdam, it comes as a shock to have to fit back into the old routine. Besides, neither of you is eager to get there. You’re both nervy and fragile after the weekend – a Sunday spent tiptoeing round each other, hours of talking about Hellie, two nights lying sleepless side by side in Gareth’s bed. When you couldn’t take it any more, you got up and went to the living room, flicking the TV on with the sound turned low. You switched it off soon after the screen showed a picture of Hellie’s face and the presenter began to recount how the new host of Coffee Break had had an emotional outburst during a phone-in about domestic violence and revealed that her identical twin sister had tried to kill her when they were teenagers. The general consensus seemed to be that the twin sister must have been a monster. In the darkened room after the screen went black, the old voice started to whisper once more that you’re broken beyond repair, that you will never be any good.