by Olivia Levez
Music sounds, low and shuddering. I look up, wonder where it’s coming from. A group of musicians stands deep in the shadows, their chins hugging violins, closing their eyes as if all the sadness in the world is in their hearts. A large woman in a gypsy dress comes forward, lifts up her face and starts singing. She stands, and gives herself up to her song, strange and pain-filled and yearning, arms clasped across her chest. Her voice kills me. When she’s done, she drops her head, as if exhausted, showing the white parting in her black hair, curved like a crescent moon.
‘Romany singers,’ says a woman, brightly. She’s wearing a coloured headscarf like a Russian peasant, but her accent is Home Counties. ‘They’re wonderful, aren’t they? They add a real feel of authenticity, don’t you think?’ She claps enthusiastically when they’re done, when the last haunting note has melted away. ‘Are you here for the auditions?’
I nod, but she’s already moved off to chat to a pair of clowns, who are dressed identically, except one is in head-to-toe black, the other in white. There is a makeshift stage rigged up, with real sawdust, and a few wooden seats. A girl in a sports bra and leg warmers is dancing with her dog as she plays the flute.
‘Not very good, is she?’ At first I think it is the child in dungarees talking to me, but then I realise that he’s not a child at all, but a young man, his trouser legs rolled up at the ankles. I flush. He cannot be much over four feet tall. ‘What is your act?’ He has an accent that is somehow familiar. Then I realise that he sounds just like one of my old au pairs.
‘Are you Bulgarian?’ I ask, then kick myself. Rule #6: Never display interest in other people. Do not draw attention to yourself.
But he looks pleased. ‘Yes, yes, I am. From Sofia, although my family all come from Plovdiv.’
Plovdiv. Sounds like a strange, alien place. I realise suddenly that in all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never once asked Martyna where her family’s from.
He’s leaning forward, this man, eyes twinkling in his uglyhandsome face. ‘Your act?’ he repeats. ‘Clowning? Mime? Acrobatics?’
I consider. ‘Gymnastics, and a bit of modern dance thrown in,’ I say. ‘I do a bit of everything, really.’
He nods, and his mouth twitches. ‘And where did you train?’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Oh, here and there, you know – the usual places.’
Because I’m not exactly going to say ‘at school’, am I?
He gets up, and once again I am struck by how short he is. I meet his eyes, and feel that, somehow, he’s laughing at me.
‘I’m Kristiyan, Kit for short,’ he says. ‘No pun intended. Good luck with the show.’
I realise that he’s waiting for me to introduce myself, and for an awful moment, I nearly say ‘Willow’.
‘I’m Frog,’ I say. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ And I watch him saunter onto the stage, raise his hand to someone at the side, and catch juggling pins, one after the other. Once again, the music swells, at first low and heartbreaking, then zithering into a frenzy as Kit throws the pins faster and faster, higher and higher.
I stare at the number being chalked up on the board above the bar: 17. I am number 20. I begin to feel the signs again, the tingling palms, the racing heart. Close my eyes and take deep breaths.
‘You all right, love? You look a bit peaky.’ It’s the barman, friendly-looking, bearded, carrying a clutch of glasses. ‘Can I get you anything?’
I breathe out. ‘Just water, please,’ I manage to say. I watch Kit finish his act by juggling chairs.
When the water comes, I pinch out two of my tablets and swallow them quickly, watching the number being scrubbed out and changed to 18.
It’s the pink-haired girl’s turn. She has what looks like a wolf’s tooth through her ear lobe, and a tattoo of Pierrot across her entire neck. She is very good. She performs a mime act, both clever and bittersweet.
‘Trained in Paris,’ Kit tells me. ‘School of mime.’ He’s back from his performance, sweating and slightly red-faced.
I nod, quickly. My throat feels tight. Inside my coat pocket, I hold Mother’s photograph, turning it over and over in my hand. I close my eyes and picture my her face, those laughing dark eyes, her warm, strong hands throwing me into the sun, the clouds, freedom.
‘I said, it’s your turn. Number twenty, yes?’
A woman is hovering over me. She wears a silver tracksuit and a scowl. Her long dark hair is scraped back into a high ponytail, and she could be either thirty or fifty. Behind her, two floppy-fringed boys are stumbling out of the ring, each holding a unicycle, laughing.
Numbly, I hand over my ticket. She nods at the musicians, who take their places around the ring. One of them spits on his hands.
The music is yearning and haunting, but I am not.
I try to remember my gymnastics routine from last year. Begin to mix in a few dance steps, then change my mind. I am terrible, and that knowledge makes me more so. I see Kit look away, and think, he is doing this to spare my feelings, and I am mortified. I slow cartwheel around the edge of the circle. I try to remember my moves from when I was in the gymnastic shows at county level. I stand on my hands and wobble.
In desperation, I go down into sideways splits. At least I can show them I am flexible, I think.
But even this fails dully. I seem to have seized up since I was last performing in class, and my thick, ugly legs in their black tights stick stubbornly halfway.
The dark-haired woman raises her arm. Enough! But I keep going, I won’t stop. She’s turning away, uninterested. I start to feel frantic. I need them to see what I can do.
‘I haven’t finished,’ I call. I slide my feet further and further away from each other until the tendons in my inner thighs are protesting.
Burn. Snap. Stretch.
I force my legs to keep sliding. The silky, scratchy sawdust pushes between my fingers as I place them on the ground to steady myself. It smells like sun and rain and eucalyptus oil.
Squeeze. Push. Force. Tears squeeze out of my eyes as fire burns through my tendons. Lower and lower. Both Kit and the clown girl are looking now.
‘Enough,’ the girl says. ‘You are not ready.’
But I don’t stop, not even for the tiniest of breaks in the pain. If my legs do not snap, they will splinter. Still I press down. I groan, breath coming in shallow rasps. The ground is only centimetres away.
‘I said, stop!’ the girl yells. ‘Next.’
The music withers and dies.
Lions’ Den
A boy in a feather boa opens Tone’s door. He has a thin, pointy face and bruised-looking eyes.
‘Welcome to the party,’ he says, and his voice is slurred. I push past him and into Tone’s living room. This time it is full of people and a thick fog of smoke. Some are in a circle, sitting on the rug and bending their heads over a cigarette that they’re passing around. There is a sweet, acrid smell in the room. By the curtain, a girl is dancing in slow motion, dressed in the Jungle Jane outfit. She has dirty hair and dirtier feet.
‘Where’s Tone?’ I say. ‘Where’s Patrick?’
‘Heeeeey, Beanie. Make way for Beanie.’ It’s Patrick’s voice. He’s sitting hunched over a bong. He waves at me, then looks at his hand, as if fascinated.
I push out of the room and cross the hall through to the back room. This may have been a kitchen, but now it is empty of units. There are two or three tanks like the one that contained Lizzie, and a battered old sofa. A couple are moaning and sighing on top of it.
One of them is Tone. I go up to him and tap him on the shoulder.
‘I’ve come for the photos,’ I say. ‘You said you’d have them ready.’
He pulls his face away from the girl’s hair, and bares his grey teeth at me. ‘What photos, love? Can’t you come back later?’
‘No. I need them now. You promised.’ And I listen to my voice, with its boarding-school vowels and petulance.
Tone points to a grubby poly-pocket on top of one of the snake tank
s. There’s a couple of pictures of me with a smear of red lipstick, tilting my head coquettishly, and a few leaflets spill out. They look just like the ones at the pier information centre.
‘What’s this?’ I say.
Words mumbled into the girl’s hair: ‘…introductory package…’
‘Where are the rest of them?’ I remember the time spent standing on my hands, and suddenly I don’t want to know. I push the plastic wallet back at him, slam the glass on the floor.
‘And my fifty pounds?’ I shout. ‘Where’s my fifty pounds?’
But my words are lost in the fuggy air, swirled into the wreathing smoke along with my money.
Scramble and Twist
When I return to Number Six, Portland Square, Mrs Fox is waiting for me.
She’s wearing a pink, quilted dressing gown and a frown. A newspaper lies open on the counter; beside it, a cup and saucer. It is clear Mrs Fox is an early riser.
‘We are not accustomed to our residents dropping in at all hours,’ she says. Her nose twitches. I wonder if she can smell me out like a sniffer dog: the layers of Jägermeister and cannabis and grime from Tone’s place. The photographs he took nestle in my bag like dirty secrets.
‘It won’t happen again,’ I say, pushing past her to get to my room.
But she’s following me up the stairs, dressing gown rustling.
‘Miss Stephens, in order for you to continue staying here, I really need to see a copy of your passport.’
‘That’s fine,’ I call. ‘I’ll let you have it as soon as it comes. I’ve sent for it…’
I push open my door and slide past her. Smile at her brightly and close the door firmly. It’s only when I am inside that I realised what she called me.
Miss Stephens.
She called me Miss Stephens.
It was the newspaper, I think. Daddy and Scally must have told the press. Or maybe Scally was able to trace my call somehow. They are after me.
The name that I gave her was Sarah Bean. Beanie. I pick up the button, the head girl badge and the photograph with shaking hands. I need to go. I have to leave now.
I imagine Mrs Fox at her counter, letting her cat lick at the spilt tea in her saucer. Beside her, the open paper, the large picture of me in my St Jerome’s uniform. I should have disguised myself more. It’s not enough. Cutting off my hair is not enough.
‘My dear, can I speak to you?’
Mrs Fox’s voice. A rap at my door. I don’t stop what I’m doing; I swipe all of my lined-up keepsakes back into the yellow bag, search around for the rest of my things.
Rule #7: Always be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. Well, this is that time.
‘I’m afraid you give me no choice but to…’
I think of her leaning over her Daily Mail, fuchsia-painted fingernails following the print along with her magnifying glass. Looking up at me slowly, as I came in, gasping. Something in her eyes.
She knows, I think. She knows who I am.
Quick. Quick. I can’t walk past her, not with her suspicious eyes following me. Daddy must have informed the police by now. It has been six weeks since I went missing. The longest yet. Her dolls watch me over their lacy doilies. I hurry to the window. It’s one of those sash ones, clagged with decades of old paint, but I am strong. I clench my teeth, heave. With a groan and a shriek, it lifts. A rush of sea air. I lean over. It looks over a small yard, with neatly positioned bins of different coloured plastic.
The fumble of a key in the lock.
I throw my bag out, and it lands on top of the brown bin. Next, my yellow coat. A cat shoots out from behind the bin, yowling.
A creak. Footsteps in the room.
I lower myself out of the window, hands gripping onto the sill. There’s a glass sunroom below, glinting in the dawn light. If I jump, will I break through?
I drop, land and roll. Manage to scramble and twist. Above me, Mrs Fox’s mouth is an O of surprise.
I jump down and crouch. Scramble for my bag. I can’t stay here, not in that doll-filled room, not any more. I can’t let them catch me. I can’t go back.
I’ll die if I have to go back.
Money in Money out
£693.75 (gap year savings) 1 Challenger Trail sleeping bag Total spent:
£39.99
£39.99
New total: £653.76
Smoke and Mirrors
At first I think that it’s the same girl, the one I gave Daddy’s gold card to at Paddington Station. But it’s not; of course it isn’t. This girl has more life. She is hurling burning pins into the air, juggling with fire.
Around her is a mad scribbled world of pavement art. Coloured chalks lie scattered next to an upturned top hat. I am flicking through a newspaper someone’s left on a bench, hoping to find jobs at the back. Migrant Crisis! shout the headlines, next to Fisherman’s Big Catch, with a photograph of a man with his arm around his new bride.
It’s busy in the little square by the fairground: holidaymakers wander in and out of the arcades, families sit on plastic chairs outside the fish and chip café. There’s a little shelter with a couple of benches, and public toilets, and a children’s teacup ride. I perch on the edge of a teacup and turn the pages of my newspaper. The print darkens with a few early splats of rain.
The fire-juggler is bringing in a small crowd. She’s not bothered by the rain, which has picked up, splattering the paving slabs with freckles. Her dreadlocks swing as she throws her fire sticks, face upturned to the sky. Beneath her, her chalk art swims and disappears.
A father watches and smiles with his children. They are holding matching animal umbrellas, his little boy’s, a frog, his daughter’s, a ladybird.
I am hungry; the sharp vinegar tang from the café is making me crave fish and chips. Coins lie heavy in my pocket, tempting me. In the paper I find jobs for drivers, carers, machinery operators. Jobs in telesales. Jobs in sales management. All of them require an address. All of them need internet access to respond.
The rain is threatening to dissolve my paper now, so I run to the little shelter outside the arcade to take cover. I have to squeeze in, as everyone else has the same idea.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, when my rucksack bangs against someone’s knees. ‘I’m terribly sorry –’
I push up against a girl at the end, and we stand for a while, watching the rain.
I wonder how I will dry my clothes without anywhere to live. Wonder whether I could try to find a youth hostel, now that I have a sleeping bag. I wonder what I’ll do when my money runs out.
‘That’s some accent you’ve got there.’ The girl is speaking to me. She has short yellow teeth and one of them is missing. ‘I love the English accent, especially a classy one like yours.’
It’s the fire-juggler. I recognise her now as the pavement artist, the girl who sold me the friendship bracelet. It’s still there, on my wrist, tatty and grubby now.
She is tiny close up, much shorter than she seemed when juggling. She has streaks of pink and yellow chalk dust on her cheeks and is wearing grubby Aladdin-style pants. She smells of something strong and unpleasant.
‘You staying somewhere close?’
Her accent is vaguely Australian, a mixture of coarse and soft bits, like it’s being pushed through a sieve.
She’s jabbing a thumb at my rucksack, with its carefully tied roll of sleeping bag.
‘Youth hostelling?’ she asks. ‘Like a Duke of Edinburgh thing? We get a lot of those round here.’
She talks like she’s the ambassador for Hastings. I hesitate.
Rule # 6: Never display interest in other people. Do not draw attention to yourself.
But she’s nodding. ‘Thought so. Like, I could tell that right away about you. That you’re not just any old holidaymaker. I love your style, by the way. I love your coat.’
I study her. It doesn’t look like she’s being sarcastic. She has an honest face: all smiles and chalk smuts and wide, guileless eyes.
She goes to sh
ake hands, and it would be rude not to.
‘I’m Suz,’ she says, showing again those very yellow teeth.
I look around for inspiration. The boy is spinning with his frog umbrella, even though it’s stopped raining now and the sun is sucking up puddles like a Hoover. Beneath him, Suz’s chalk drawings swirl in dirt.
‘Frog,’ I say. ‘I’m Frog.’
‘Cool name,’ says Suz, and the space between us shrinks.
Up close, she’s filthy. There’s grime around her hairline, and in the lines around her eyes. It’s hard to know her age; she could be twelve or thirty. There’s something about her that suggests she’s been in corners of human existence that I’ve only ever peeked at. Like she knows everything worth knowing.
The only beautiful thing about her is her eyes, which are the colour of sea glass.
‘Smoke?’ she says. She’s offering me a battered tin of tobacco, and she’s making herself a roll-up with rainbowchalky fingers that have nails rimmed with dirt. I think of the Handbag’s zebra polish, and wonder what fingernails say about a person. My own are bitten.
Suz is still pushing her tin at me.
I shake my head. I’ve only ever smoked Marlboro Lights, and those were with Beanie, back at school. We’d leave each other fags inside the mouth of one of the gargoyles on the roof of Founder’s Building. That was our secret meeting place, where we taught each other to smoke, lying on our backs after Prep, sighing out smoke and whispering dreams and listening to the thwack of the balls on the tennis courts below.
Suz is staring at my bag, and I place a hand over it protectively.
‘So, what’s your story?’ she says.
I stiffen.
‘You have one, right?’ she says without looking at me. ‘Apart from the youth-hostelling thing, I mean.’
‘I really don’t think that’s any of your business.’ And I hate the way my voice sounds, posh and petulant.
She hold her hands up as if to say, I get it. Spits a glob of black tobacco onto the pavement.
‘Well, I guess I’ll be getting back to work,’ she says. ‘Stopped raining now. Nice meeting you, Frog.’