by LK Fox
The other driver remained behind his wheel with the window insolently closed. His face was lost in shadow. He wore a red Nike Dri-Fit baseball cap with a peak that had probably spent the night in a coffee mug to keep its curve and was now pulled down low to hide his eyes. I could make out a stub nose, a ridiculous-looking black moustache – they’d come back into fashion after the hipster beards thing ‒ and a pointed jaw. He was wearing an old-fashioned pinstripe suit, white collar, blue tie, which struck me as odd because this really wasn’t a smart school, and looked as if he’d come to the wrong place. His suit sleeves were pushed up and there was something on his right arm . . .
‘Hey, open your window!’
He cracked it a couple of inches but didn’t move.
‘You want to step out and see this?’ I walked around to the contact point of the two cars. The Peugeot had lost its nearside headlight and the wing was crumpled. The BMW sported a furrow that had torn up the paintwork.
Rain pattered on fragments of orange plastic in the kerb. A couple of the mothers stopped to watch. My head was getting wet and starting to throb very badly. I had the strangest feeling, as if I had somehow become unmoored from reality. The hangover was back with a vengeance.
I looked back at the road, feeling nauseous. Some workmen had fenced off a hole at the kerb with a yellow metal sign explaining that a water main was being replaced. The red-and-white plastic tape surrounding it flapped in the billowing rain. I looked around slowly and took everything in. An Indian girl in a pink coat stood talking on her mobile. The mother in tight jeans and the hooded puffa jacket slowly turned to watch the argument. The scene felt dreamlike and artificial.
Turning back to the BMW, I saw the driver reversing, preparing to move around my stalled Peugeot. ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ I called, walking fast towards the vehicle. ‘I need your insurance details.’
He continued turning the steering wheel. I tentatively placed my hand on the wing but was ignored. Great, I thought, I give Gabriel a hard time about asserting himself and I’m just as hopeless as he is.
My alcohol-damaged brain splintered any clear thought. The wet roadway pixelated into migraine-cells. I stood squarely in front of the BMW, knowing that I couldn’t afford to have the Peugeot repaired without making an insurance claim. The driver twisted the wheel and the car swung around – that’s the BMW wheelbase, I caught myself thinking with admiration – and then, Shit, he’s running out on me!
At the last moment, I dragged my phone from my jeans pocket, nearly dropping it, and flicked open the camera. I grabbed a shot of the rear plate as the car receded. There was a furry yellow tiger attached to the retreating rear window. It swung backwards and forwards, its tongue out, taunting me.
I arrived back at the flat with a strange sensation in my gut. Gabriel’s toys were scattered across the floor of his bedroom. His abandoned art-swirl kit had left dried spatters of paint on the walls, and Star Wars characters n -one could recall from the boring middle films were stuck in unlikely locations; I could usually locate missing Lego pieces by standing on them in my bare feet.
I missed having a partner who was fastidiously neat, but it was too early to think about dating again. I dreaded the idea of someone smiling awkwardly while they patted Gabriel on the head before deciding they weren’t ready to become a second parent.
In the hall was Gabriel’s birthday gift: an old-fashioned compendium of board games, with dice cups and counters, notepads and markers. He preferred them to online games because they were tactile, and he responded better to things he could touch.
I brewed coffee and tried to put my thoughts in order. I had the day off, and planned to put out the last of Ben’s stuff. For the past three months, I had been stumbling over the boxes in the dark. Despite his tidy fetish, Ben had been addicted to back issues of GQ, bicycle parts and useless kitchen gadgets. When he moved out, he took only the stuff he needed for work. We were very polite about the whole thing.
Dumping my coffee mug in the sink, I listened to out-of-date voicemails: Mrs Arnold requesting the pleasure of my company at the school for a very serious word. Gabriel on a classmate’s phone, complaining that he couldn’t get into the flat because I had forgotten to leave the keys out . . . Parenting. I got the broad strokes right, but in Gabriel’s case it meant putting in a lot of extra work, making him feel special but not different. It was a balancing act, but I could handle it.
Even so, it was time to pull things together. An out-of-shape 34-year-old workaholic with thinning hair and an exhausting child to look after wasn’t much of a catch. I should rejoin the gym, shed a few pounds, get a haircut, meet someone nice and not spend the evening discussing my ex-husband.
After showering and putting on clean jeans, I found a relatively uncreased navy-blue shirt. Then I recalled the damage to the car. I sat down in front of my MacBook and logged on to my insurance company’s website, filling in the online claim form. I checked the licence-plate shot I’d taken on my phone. A seven-year-old BMW sedan, red leather seats, gun-metal finish, still a smooth ride in spite of its condition.
Zeroing in on the rear plate, I just about managed to make out the letters and numbers. After typing the registration into the online form, I was going to delete the shot when something drew me back to the picture.
I panned across the frozen frame, examining the car in sections, then realised what I was seeing.
Something impossible.
Pushed against the rain-spattered window, below the furry yellow tiger, a blue Chicago Bears sweatshirt and a hand pressed against the glass.
I panned up and enlarged the shot as far as the granulation would allow. A head came into view. There was a child looking back out of the rear of the car.
I felt my stomach dropping as I realised I was looking at Gabriel being driven away by a stranger.
Ella
‘There’s no one there.’
My mother talking, shaking out the folds of the blue dressing gown hanging from the hook on the back of my bedroom door. ‘See? All gone now.’
I had screamed and brought her running. ‘I thought there was somebody else in the room!’ Not a hunchbacked witch or a clawing monster, just a man.
After she had smoothed the dressing gown flat, I could no longer see the figure on the wall. ‘It’s thrown by the street light,’ she explained. ‘Not a man, just a shadow. I can get you heavier curtains if you like.’
That was typical of Jean. Where my father would have said, Don’t be silly, Ella, how would a man get in your room at night? Show some sense, my mother came up with a practical solution. She didn’t believe in spoiling her children, but liked to solve our problems. When my sister Lesley was teased at school, Jean taught her how to befriend her tormentors. When I saw a man made of shadows, she showed me there was nothing inside the darkness.
But Jean wasn’t there for ever. Soon after that, she died and, since my sister had already left home, I found myself fighting my terrors alone. The shadow man haunted my childhood. My father once told me he was real and had taken my mother away. I wasn’t stupid; I knew how sick Jean had been, but knowing didn’t make me any less scared. And that was how it stayed for years, the two of us forced to share the same melancholy house: resentful father and fearful daughter.
There are girls who are remembered by everyone they meet. They’re beautiful, funny, carefree, charming. Cameras pick them out in crowds. Boys swarm around them, unable to look anywhere else. They cast a golden glow, and when they speak everyone listens. Sometimes there’s another girl standing nearby who’s lost in the shadow they cast. That was me.
I was too shy to make friends, too smart to be popular. By the time I was fourteen, there had been three memorable days in my life. The first was when Jean sat me down in the kitchen to explain why she had to go into hospital. The second was when my dance teacher told me to go home and give away my ballet shoes because I would never be a ballerina. And the third was when I checked out Fanz4Ever.com and found the boy I kn
ew I was destined to be with for the rest of my life.
Which is why I cut school one day and ran all the way home. I flew like a demon. There was only one thought on my mind: If I miss him, I’m going to burn the house down, then kill myself. Or worse, cut off all my hair. I could never get rid of my energy fast enough, which was why I ran that day.
My father Harry owned one of the biggest houses on The Avenue. Wide double-front, huge garden, everything trimmed and painted. Just me, him and Karen (Wife Two) rattling around in there. Harry was so old-fashioned it was sometimes hard to remember that he was still alive. When I was young, he wore suits to the beach.
My older sister Lesley had got out as soon as she could, fleeing to the suburbs to have a couple of fat little babies. She sent Christmas and birthday cards with photos and money she couldn’t afford tucked inside, and even though she told me to call on her, I knew I never would, unless I was desperate. She had her hands full.
As I slowed down outside the house, breathless, I saw it was less than five minutes to the start of the live vlog. I fired a curse, wishing for an electronic glitch to delay the start of Chartbustaz. I’ve always fired curses at people. Girls are good at curses.
I kicked open the door and hammered up the stairs to my very pink, teddy-filled room. Karen shouted up from downstairs, but I ignored her. I dumped my bag and threw myself down in front of my laptop.
I’d missed the beginning. The Inspectors were already performing. They were standing on a tinselly platform that looked as if it had been used for a thousand tacky cable shoots in the producer’s bedroom.
I’d sent the show an email asking about attending the band’s live appearances, but they’d replied with a stupid warning about me being too young because they performed in pubs. The lead singer – my wonderful boy – was called Ryder, and his songs had a parental guidance check on them. I’m small – well, small-boned – and have the kind of face that can’t look older without a ton of make-up, which is not a good idea at fifteen. When we first met, Karen suggested she give me a makeover. After studying me with brush in hand and pity in her eyes, she remarked, ‘Well, I suppose we have a little raw material to work with,’ as if I was an old building that needed decorating. She soon gave up when she saw how I looked in blusher.
From my computer screen, Ryder thrashed out a remix of his earliest song, and I just stared in awe with my mouth open, in a state of loved-up hypnosis. His lead guitarist, Baby, was clumping around the stage in rubber bondage gear. I knew what ‘bondage’ meant, it was tying people up with straps, although nobody at school had ever been able to explain the point of it.
I hated everything about Baby, starting with her stupid sexist name; her copper skin, swept-back dreads, tiny waist and fake breasts as round and hard as grapefruits. She looked like a cross between a Barbie doll and a balloon animal, but she was twenty-one so I figured her life was pretty much over anyway. At fifteen, I still had the body of a skinny boy. I watched the other girls in my class changing by the day, and dreaded that I might be stuck as a boy-thing for ever.
My friend Deborah said I was probably going to turn out to be a lesbarillion, which is like a million times more powerful than a lesbian. She said there were Victoria’s Secret models my age so I shouldn’t get my hopes up that I’d ever change. But Mum had told me being young was a time of innocence and it was to be treasured, because soon it would disappear and you could never get it back. She didn’t know that once her time was over she would be replaced within a year by Wife Two.
Karen couldn’t believe her luck when she landed a balding widower with a house in The Avenue, when she should really have been working in the kind of hairdresser’s you find at the pound-shop end of the high street. Karen had these white-trash nails that gave the game away. Karen said she’d read a book once but didn’t like it, so she never bothered again. The book was Finn Family Moomintroll. I’ve never heard of anybody not liking that book.
I didn’t think my father had met Karen while Mum was in and out of the hospital, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. After Jean died, he could barely bring himself to look me in the face. He refused to speak to my sister because Lesley had left home at eighteen to be with a man he hated. When she ended up raising her children alone, Harry was able to gloat and tell her You Made Your Bed, Now You Must Lie In It.
I lay in front of my laptop, watching the back-up dancers listlessly waving their pink and yellow glow-sticks, wishing I was old enough and pretty enough to be one of them. In the glittery black-light they looked like drifting sea anemones. But all I could see was him. Ryder, the singer. As thin as a pencil, as tense as a cat.
I checked the time on the pink Disney Princess watch that Harry, in a spectacular misjudgement of my character, had given me for my birthday. I’d spray-painted the strap black but the dye came off on my wrist. I wanted to be a Goth, but Harry would kill me if I dyed my hair.
There was just enough time to get to the recording studio; it was only a short dash from our house. It would be my chance to get Ryder’s autograph and ask him why he hadn’t answered any of my emails. Every time I wrote, I received a note covered in fake printed signatures from all the band members. I didn’t care about any of the others.
Ryder was supposed to be dating Baby, but they were always fighting; she complained he was stoned all the time. But I knew all that was just stuff made up by the band’s publicist to sell stories. How could someone like Ryder have any interest in someone like her? Anyone could see that she was completely stupid. She obviously embarrassed him. If Ryder got to know me properly, he would see I was the kind of person he needed to be with.
Nobody else saw what I saw in him. When my classmates found Ryder’s picture Pritt-sticked into my notebook, they made fun of me. It was a good job the teachers didn’t let us have a school prom, otherwise I might have got pig’s blood tipped over me.
What my friends missed in him, I saw. There was an aura around Ryder; he sparkled and glowed and crackled with wild electricity. What was it like to walk through life knowing that one day everyone would be watching you, wanting to be you? I could see the future in him.
On his Facebook page, Ryder said he loved emailing his fans. I sent DMs all the time and never got a reply. He built this wall of myths and half-truths around himself, telling journalists about his shocking background, but he changed the story every time. He was raised in the Outer Hebrides by Quakers, in Jamaica by Rastafarians, in New York by Jewish intellectuals. He’d been molested, sent to jail, given the Young Humanitarian Award. He had three sisters, was an identical twin, an only child. He’d worked as a security guard in Liverpool, a chef in Melbourne, a doorman in Hollywood. I figured he was sending a message to journalists, telling them to think for themselves and not rely on what people told them. Or maybe he had a really burned-out memory.
*
Finally, I decided that a face-to-face meeting was the only option left open to me, even if I got into trouble and was grounded for the rest of the week. Besides, given Ryder’s disastrous performance on the show, it might be the only chance I’d ever get.
I knew there would be hell to pay if Harry got home and found me missing again. I had a habit of disappearing. He’d be even more horrified at the thought of me hanging out at the studio, waiting to see bands arrive. There was no use trying to explain anything to Karen. I’d heard her retro playlist coming through the bedroom wall enough times, and it was totally beyond suck: Celine Dion, Michael Bublé, Coldplay, Adele.
I hated Karen almost as much as I hated Baby. She was twelve years younger than Harry, a bottle blonde with coral lipstick and nail-bar claws that looked like they could tear open a sofa. She acted like a sulky, spoiled child around him and had three modes of behaviour: pissed-off, whiny and hysterical. Harry didn’t help matters by regularly pointing out to her that no one could ever replace his first wife, to which Karen always replied, ‘If she was such a saint, why did you never have sex?’ She bitched about her second-wife status, but i
nstead of trying to fit in she just sat around the house all day, tapping away at her phone, complaining that she had nothing to do and giving Gloria, our Filipina cleaner, a hard time.
Harry was a hedge-fund manager and came home from work so late that he was hardly ever sober. Our family was broken, but nobody bothered to fix it so long as everything looked shiny on the outside.
I needed to get out before Harry came home or I knew he’d never let me go. He once complained to me, ‘I don’t understand why you get so hooked on these so-called celebrities. When we were young, our heroes were scientists and sportsmen, not kids with bad haircuts who can’t even sing.’ Harry had never been young in any way that I could understand, and I didn’t want to face that lecture again.
I put on my jacket and slipped down the stairs, keeping to the sides of the floorboards so they wouldn’t creak. As I passed the front room, I caught a glimpse of Karen sucking the sugar from a Krispy Kreme doughnut off her fingers while she lay on the sofa watching back-to-back soap shows on her phone. I closed the front door as quietly as I could and made a dash for it.
There were just a few kids hanging around outside the studio, the usual faces I saw every time I went to the shops, the sad Twitter and Facebook trolls who waited there or camped outside radio stations with their phones and autograph books, posters and customised teddy bears. Blank faces, as vacant as cows in a field. Often, they didn’t even know who they were there to see. They came because they couldn’t stand being at home a second longer, because they had nothing to do except stand somewhere else and stare across the divide, and it didn’t matter that they’d come to look at complete strangers. The strangers had a microscopic sliver of fame, and they didn’t.
The well-known bands had already left the building. The Inspectors had released two singles, but the first one had bombed and the second had only managed to break the bottom of the top 100 on a bad week, so this was their most important gig to date. I’d been following them right from the start, when they played in local bars where I could only peer in from outside. I knew their time was coming. How could it not be, when Ryder was the most beautiful, sensitive singer in the world?