by Louisa Reid
‘Hephzi, what do you think?’ I muttered quietly. Mrs Larkin had the window open and a gust of wind fluttered the pages just as I spoke. I wondered if that could be a sign.
She didn’t answer but I filled in my details: name, address, school. It was easy enough. Mrs Larkin caught me at it and nodded approvingly. I didn’t bother telling her I was just filling it in for fun, as part of a game I was playing in my head. She would have thought I was mad. I put the form back in my locker, ready for another day. A fragment of the future.
February came. My sister had been gone for over a month. No one else seemed to remember her. Even when I dared to make the detour round to Craig’s, hiding in the shadows of the street, looking for signs of her and seeing if I could summon her up, I found no evidence that anyone else cared about her going. But of course Craig wasn’t sad. He’d never loved her. He’d used her and thrown her away. That’s what men do to women, even fathers to their daughters. Hephzi should have seen it all coming. If she’d ever opened her eyes, she’d have known how it goes.
At school there were going to be what they called mock examinations. A mockery indeed. When they put the papers down on the desks and I saw the other kids bend their heads and start to scribble, I understood at last what was expected and tried to read the questions. But it was pointless; I was destined to fail all their tests, destined to prove The Father right. The questions were gobbledygook; all that homework I’d done, all those notes I’d taken, it had all been a waste of time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying my best, it’s just that the words started to dance in front of my eyes, numbers winked and jiggled and ran in arpeggios across the page. I couldn’t do it. Someone noticed and came over and asked if I was OK. I nodded, hiding behind the hair that hung down on both sides of my face and wiped my cheeks on my sleeve. Afterwards the teacher asked me if everything was all right and said the school understood that it was hard for me and that it’d take things into consideration. I nodded again and wandered off. Because there were exams it meant there were no lessons. I could sit in the library all day if I wanted to and no one would ever know.
Instead of worrying about what The Father was going to say when he found out I’d answered not one question on not one paper I immersed myself in Great Expectations. I’d graduated to the Ds now and Dickens was wonderful. I wondered if I could smuggle it home; perhaps I could hide it somewhere really safe. Maybe in Hephzi’s bed, surely they wouldn’t go looking there? Then I could stay up all night and read this amazing book. I was up to the bit where Pip tells Estella how much he loves her and that she would always be a part of him: part of the good and part of the bad. A part of his very existence, no matter what. The words made me cry and my tears splashed on to the page. The girl opposite me reading Twilight looked up and stared. Hephzi would have loved it though and I read it over again, learning the page off by heart so I could recite it for her when she came back. The image of the summer school flashed into my head and I thought that if I got to go then I’d maybe have a room in one of those buildings that had been pictured on the leaflet, a room all to myself with no one in the walls, and I’d be able to read whatever I wanted to and find out all the things I longed to know. I walked over to Mrs Larkin.
‘The summer school. How will I pay?’
She looked up from her computer in surprise. ‘Well. You’ll have to talk to your parents, dear. See if they can find a way. Surely they know how you love reading …?’ She tailed off, seeing my face.
Then I blurted, ‘I couldn’t do my exams.’
‘No?’ Her voice was gentle, her eyes concerned behind the glasses.
‘So I don’t think I can go, then. Can I?’
‘Talk to your teachers, Rebecca. I’m sure something could be sorted out.’ She looked a little bit desperate. I suppose she doesn’t usually have this kind of thing land on her plate, usually she’s just got the overdue books and kids snogging in the Reference section to bug her.
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right. Please, do feel you can talk to me any time, Rebecca.’
Someone like Mrs Larkin wasn’t going to be able to fix anything, I realized, and one of the cards I’d been using to build my fragile little castle toppled breezily to the floor. I would have to forget about it now. I put the copy of Great Expectations down on her desk and felt her eyes follow me, the ghost of her concern trailing behind me, as useless as Miss Havisham’s wedding veil.
That weekend it was business as usual. I spent Saturday helping The Mother to clean the church. It was a large old building. Unusual in its design, admiring visitors always said. To me it was a pain in the neck. And arms and shoulders and thighs. I’d scrubbed the cold stone floors and polished the benches so often and so hard that I knew every ridge in the flags, every crack in the pews and every knot in the wood. We worked silently and I sweated, pausing to rest when she wasn’t looking. So I was slower than usual and The Mother had to help me get my bits finished on time. She did so unsmilingly, just so I’d know she wasn’t doing it for me but to save a row from erupting. Things had to be ready for Evensong or there’d be trouble later.
As I sat through the service I watched The Father, dignified in his cassock, surplice and scarf. Most people thought he was handsome. Even though really they weren’t alike people would say that they could see where Hephzi got her looks. The Mother and I usually took that as a signal to shrink further back and leave them to their limelight. That’s how it was. Hephzi and him. The bold and the beautiful. But every rose needs its thorn. When we’d been younger, if he’d been in a good mood, he would make jokes and we’d have to laugh.
‘We should pin a sign around your neck, Rebecca. A pound a stare. I’d be a millionaire by the end of the day.’
Or he’d jeer, ‘What do you want for Christmas, Rebecca? A new face?’
At least it had made me almost immune to the insults of others. I was offensive to him and he’d always made sure I’d known it. And The Mother, the woman who’d given birth to me, never said a word. She and Hephzi were obliged to smirk and titter while I stepped back a few more paces, letting my hair fall around my face, melting into walls, a ghost of a daughter.
On the way out of church a sign caught my eye. I hadn’t been the one to put up this new poster so it must have been one of the wardens who’d tacked it there, maybe Mrs Sparks. The poster advertised a church summer camp for teens, with those same smiling faces on the leaflet I still had hidden at school in my locker but this time jumping to punch the air, their T-shirts spelling out some evangelical bon mot. The dates coincided. I thought about it, saw a seed of a plan and let the idea take root. This could be the perfect alibi and it might just work, if only I had the guts to pull the whole thing off. If I could tell them I was going to one place and then end up somewhere else entirely I’d have exactly what I wanted for a change. And for my sister too. All Hephzi had ever wanted was to escape; if I could get us both out of the vicarage and off to the summer school, she’d be free. I could let her go then, cut my heart strings and whistle her down the wind, up and into the clouds where she would soar at last.
You see, I was right. Hephzi hasn’t gone, not yet, not entirely. I kept on calling for her, I didn’t give up, and in the end she started to answer me back. She’s whispering in my ear right now and saying that I shouldn’t tell anyone about it. She says that everyone’ll think I’m mad. But if I need her she comes, even if I can’t stop her from being mean sometimes.
I waited until Sunday evening, again the dried-out serving of meat with some flaccid vegetables collected like sedimentary rock in my stomach. He had been drinking steadily: his duties for the weekend over, he would enjoy himself now. The Mother was cleaning the dishes and I was helping. As I wiped the table, the mouldering cloth leaving a stale smell on my hands, I made my opening gambit.
‘Mother. Did you see the advertisement in the church? The summer camp? For young people?’
‘No.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Well, it’s at the end of July. I won’t be at college then. Could I possibly go, do you think?’
She didn’t answer, just scrubbed the meat pan a little more frantically. I’d never asked for anything, not for years, and now she didn’t know how to react. Hephzi had been fairly good at wheedling things out of The Mother; as usual she’d succeeded where I’d failed, like when she’d persuaded The Mother to let her go to the fair with Auntie Melissa, or the time when she’d begged for us to go out for our twelfth birthday.
Eventually she spoke. ‘You’ll have to ask your father.’
‘Oh.’ I let my disappointment hang in the air, stale and heavy. She twitched away from the sink, gathering up a bag of rubbish to heave into the cold night. I followed her out to the bin. It was so dark she couldn’t see me and I forced myself to reach out and touch her sleeve. Instantly she froze.
‘Please, Mother. I really want to go. With Hephzi gone, well, I’m lonely …’
Not knowing how she would handle this admission, I was glad I couldn’t see her face. I wasn’t allowed to have feelings, especially about Hephzi, and the darkness between us shrouded our mutual fear. If she admitted I was human, she’d have to help me. The Mother knew she should help me. She’d been the one to find me in the bathroom when I was thirteen, she’d stood over me while I wiped up the blood and the mess and made me swear not to tell. She said that if I told, then people would know how bad I really was. So I buried the truth in my bedroom, I stashed it safe behind the wall, but it cries to me in the night, it cries and wails and asks to be loved. They all do.
‘Let me think about it. I’ll see.’
That was good enough for me. I scampered upstairs and pulled on my nightclothes, dragging Hephzi’s bed into place and barricading myself in for the night. I lay for a long time, not at all tired, trying to work out how I could pull off my plan. The sticking point was the money. Two hundred and fifty pounds. I didn’t have that kind of money and nor did anyone else I knew. Unless I could find a fairy godmother, Cinderella would not be going to the ball.
My teachers were fine about the exams. They let me resit and I did a bit better and they cobbled together a half decent report for me. But The Father still spun into a rage, fizzing with gleeful indignation. His anger blew like a bomb, for I’d proved he’d been right all along, he said. As far as he was concerned educating a girl like me was a wasted effort and he had only been going along with it for appearance’s sake. Now it had been proved that I was a retard, he could pull me out of that school and get me doing something useful. There was plenty of work to do around the vicarage.
‘Please. Give me one more chance.’
He stared at me, surprised I’d spoken up in self-defence and that I’d dared to express a desire. Then his lip twisted and his sneer made me drop my eyes again.
‘For what? To prove what we all know? You’ll never be anything more than a freak, an aberration. But I’ll give you five more months and let you show the rest of the world how pathetic you really are. When you fail these exams in the summer then I’ll be proved right. And no one will be able to say I didn’t give you every chance.’
I held my breath until I’d escaped upstairs then let out a huge sigh of relief. If he’d stopped me going to college, then that would have been the end; I needed to escape, I needed the exams. I guessed The Mother hadn’t yet mentioned the summer camp; if she had he’d have been sure to have brought it up then and there and that would have given him another good excuse to ridicule and belittle me. Hephzi’s absence hit me again like a fist in the gut. If she’d still been alive I’d have done better in my exams, I would have had her to talk to and to give me hope.
Don’t be pathetic! she says. But I told her that it was true.
She’d been moving further and further away from me, I knew that, but I could have pulled her back and made her remember how much she needed me, how much we needed each other. And she did need me. She needed me to help her with her homework, to cover for her, to lie for her, to back her up. And I needed her for all sorts of reasons. It had been the business with Craig that had really come between us and I was glad I never had to speak to him again, even though I still wandered round to stare at his house sometimes. In a way everything was his fault.
They’d met on the first day. I’d been in the form room during lunchtime, not wanting to brave the canteen and all the new staring faces, the suppressed smirks, the looks of outright horror. Hephzi had gone off without me, she’d said she’d bring me something and I waited all lunchtime for her to return, flicking through my Maths textbook, staring out of the window. I hadn’t discovered the library yet and I was thinking that two years of this was going to be almost as bad as two more years in the vicarage trying to make myself invisible. I was tired, worn out by nightmares, and I rested my head on the desk. When Hephzi burst back in with a whole crowd I’d been almost asleep and I looked up, expectant, but she met my eyes and then blanked me, turning back to the group, one of whom was Craig.
She didn’t hang around with me after that. She always had someone else to sit next to in all of our lessons and she spent every break and lunch hour in Craig’s company, disappearing with him, barely showing up at all in the end. I started to hate him. He didn’t even know I was alive.
After the debacle with my exams and school report I got my head down and worked hard. I couldn’t afford to slip up again and The Father had said he’d be going to the school parents’ evening to find out exactly what I was up to. It wasn’t until April so I still had time to try to earn some credit. And I still needed to start making money. On the way home from college I scoured the notice board in the local corner shop. It smelled funny in there, stale bread and mice, and the owner sat reading the red tops, his belly resting on the counter. It was where we did most of the household shopping, Hephzi and I, and once or twice he’d given us a lollipop, which we’d jammed in our mouths and crunched to pieces of sticky, sugary rock before we could be spotted. I’d asked Mrs Larkin about working in the library but she’d regretfully shaken her head and told me to check the board in the shop and so that’s what I did. There wasn’t much to go on though. Someone wanted a cleaner, but for hours when I’d be at college, and someone else was after a builder which cancelled me out again. The guy behind the counter saw me looking.
‘You all right, love?’
I nodded. I didn’t want to explain myself to him.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’
‘No. It’s all right, thanks.’
‘If you need a job I’ve one going here.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You’re the vicar’s girl, aren’t you? You’re the one with the twin … what happened there, then?’
I shrugged and looked at the floor. Nosy parker, Hephzi whispers, tell him to mind his own bloody business. But I knew he was just saying what everyone else was thinking. Hephzi’s death was common knowledge. How it had happened was my family’s dirty secret.
‘She had an accident.’
‘Terrible that.’ He paused and I made for the door, not wanting this chat to go any further.
‘Well, if you want a job delivering papers after school, then let me know, I’ve got a space,’ he called as I hurried off.
‘Thanks.’ I didn’t dare ask the pay but guessed it couldn’t be much. Leaving the shop I felt a little more cheerful though. I was returning to the vicarage with more than I’d set out with that morning: a job offer and Middlemarch in my bag. I’d decided to take the risk and smuggle the contraband home. If Hephzi could get away with sneaking out night after night for clandestine meetings with her lover then I could at least risk reading under the covers. And, even if The Father did find the book, I doubted he could find anything in it to complain about. Why he thought books would corrupt us, I don’t know. In some of his sermons he preached the evils of reading, especially anything really good. I watched the congregation shift awkwardly in th
eir pews. Some of them didn’t agree with what he was saying, but the crazy ones nodded and zealously acted on his words. They were the type who banned Mickey Mouse, the type who threw party invites in the bin, the type who saw something satanic in the carving of a pumpkin. Parents like Hephzi and I had. Crazies who dressed in normal clothes, who smiled and raised money for charity, crazies who got down on their knees to pray, then, once they were safely behind closed doors, peeled off their masks and let the poison erupt.
Granny had got hold of the first few Harry Potter books at the charity shop near where she lived and I’d devoured them, reading all night long under the covers, knowing I couldn’t take the book home and unable to countenance leaving without reaching the end. But I’d never betray Granny and I’d never let on what she’d allowed us to do – if The Father knew even half of it he’d dig her up and kill her all over again. I know it was him who did it, even if no one else thinks so – he hated her and she had to pay.
But I learned a lot from Granny and if I ever have children I know how I’ll raise them, safe and happy and free. I’ll invite their friends over for teas of pizza, chips and homemade cupcakes. We’ll have snowball fights in winter and splash in a paddling pool in the back garden in the summer when it’s hot. I’ll buy them presents and tell them how wonderful they are. We’ll have a puppy and go to Disneyland on the holiday of a lifetime. I’ll tell them I love them and that they’re perfect in my eyes, beautiful and unique. That’s what I’ll do, if I ever get the chance. My children will never cry themselves to sleep at night or lie quaking in bed afraid of what the darkness holds.
So I took the job. I didn’t confess to The Parents but instead told them I was staying late at school for extra Maths coaching. Maths was my weakest point, or maybe it was Physics. Whatever. They didn’t like it but so long as I did my chores when I returned and kept out of the way, they let me live the lie. I wore a hat pulled low over my forehead and tramped the streets with my heavy sack of free papers twice every week. The bag weighed a ton and often I felt faint with tiredness and hunger but I persevered. It paid ten pounds a week. I knew I’d only just have enough to pay for the place at the summer school but I’d posted the application form off regardless and was trusting that somehow, some way, something would go right and The Mother would eventually persuade The Father to allow me to go to church camp. I guess I was stupid to believe they’d never catch me at it, stupid to think no one would see me and report back. After all, I’m kind of unforgettable in the looks department.