Face

by Brighton, Bridget

  Home study at Virtual School suits me better. Obvious reasons. A casual remark, meant to reveal what? How bad things are, underneath that shroud of grey? I shape his black fedora, and angle the rim upwards, to reveal the whole of his Natural face to me. Considering my options for below the eyes, my pencil hovers: what did I actually see? Raw bitten-down fingernails, serious running shoes. Gangly legs in a loping strut. The real clues were in the posture; he sloped off like one of the cool kids, but how can that be? Bolstered by the delusion of C.O.F, the Campaign for his Original face run by his parents- maybe he’s some kind of a mummy’s boy? A face far from normal, but here Cliff comes now from my pencil, holding his face as if it were. I’m not a Natural, I’m an Original. I choose to be this way. (Does every girl get that line? It’s like he was waiting to say it.)

  Whatever is under there, it’s been sixteen years of the same! His expressions must come easy, over familiar to the muscles beneath. Never tight, or new. A face that is not a product: a combination of features I won’t have seen before. Absolutely nothing like it; nothing like him.

  Last time I lent him Dollar’s curls and gave him shifty eyes and silly eyebrows, when he was just a cartoon. Today he gets to be real. He gets the self-controlled smile I heard in his voice. I like the way he’s looking up at my pencil for all the answers. Something about this portrait works. I’ve captured that intense vibe that comes off him, like I’m the one with all the secrets.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My baby is due in late September. We know that she/he has a genetic susceptibility to developing Electro-Magnetic Sensitivity in early childhood. My husband has left, and I cannot seem to find the right time, or the words, to tell my 16 year old daughter, True. I chose to implant this embryo. Did I do the right thing? Survival tips welcome. Adelaide O’Reilly, England.

  Hi Adelaide, my tip would be, move house before the birth! My 5yr old daughter has EMS and every time she gets a bug we have a five hour round trip to the hospital that will treat her with isolation ward, etc. Check if your local one has EMS facilities. We move house Friday, GOOD LUCK!! She never kept the scarf on age 2 or 3, but is OK with it now. Loads of child-friendly designs out there, I let her pick.

  The best thing you can do for your unborn child is to join our campaign, Equal Rights for EMS. Be aware that the Security Council elected to make a legal loophole for medical procedures, ensuring your child’s physical well-being, but totally denying their psychological needs. This is unacceptable. EMS sufferers are denied a human right, by being forced to live as Naturals. Your child’s quality of life is in your hands. Act now. Tell everybody.

  The Security Council are the good guys. (We must never forget Shanghai.) Nobody comes into this world with a guarantee of a good life. Give him the best start you can. Build self-esteem, explain prejudice early. People can surprise you. Be EMS Invincible.

  Nobody else can tell you if you did the right thing. My EMS daughter has a long history of mental illness. Campaign for Original Face have been a life-line. Did being EMS Natural cause my daughter’s illness? We’ll never know for sure. Do I regret having her? Absolutely not, she brings me joy every day. My first husband left. I am happily re-married, third time lucky.

  I am EMS Natural and hate it. You should have asked people like me first. I am disgusting to people, would you choose that for yourself? Of course NO but you chose it for your kid that’s SELFISH and STUPID, you wrote this because you know too late that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG.

  Having a Natural in the family does change things, so you need to be prepared. You and your daughter should contact Campaign for Original Face together, the helpline is brilliant. (Sounds like it would benefit your husband too?) Most important is that you don’t offload your worries onto the child as he/she grows. Dig deep and banish your own prejudice first. Allow them to grow strong. Get support from family and friends. Rise to the challenge, courage Adelaide!

  I write as a former Science Correspondent, now retired. All the advice here is well-meaning I’m sure, but entirely misses the point. It must never be forgotten that the technology involved in the creation of self-replicating nanobots (by which I refer to nanobots independent of an external computer control), enabled the massacre of nearly a quarter of a million people in Shanghai, China at the turn of the century. The first International Weapons Control Treaty came too late for those individuals and their families. Do I sympathize with the plight of EMS Naturals? Yes. Do I think the human rights of the minority can be placed above the human rights, the safety, of the rest us? No I do not. Let the Security Council get on with their job. Your EMS child will be born into a society that makes more than enough allowances for their needs. Tell your daughter.

  You are evil God has cursed you with Natural children who will walk the earth as a reminder of your...

  The remainder of this posting disappears just as I am about to be enlightened as to Mum’s evil-doing. Immediately I think of Cliff, wonder if his ‘helping out’ includes deleting the offensive stuff. Perhaps an over-protective mum leaps in first to edit the messages her son receives about his place in the world. C.O.F had a good write-up; do the parents slip them in, innocently spaced?

  The doorbell goes and I know who it is. Mum beats me to the front door, which doesn’t happen often these days.

  “Hello Seven.” Mum says

  Seven is practically a part of our (reduced) family.

  “Hi Adelaide!”

  Seven flings an arm around Mum’s shoulder and squeezes her, side-on.

  “How come you haven’t had the baby yet? Surely you can’t get any bigger?”

  They both stare at the bump, like it might answer the question for them.

  “I guess whoever is in there isn’t quite ready for...” Mum begins.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Um-

  “My mum reckons it’s a girl because the bump is all out in front.” Seven says

  “Yeah, I heard with boys you carry like a camel, a hump on the back.” I say.

  It works, Seven turns her face towards me. I’m not ready to talk to Mum yet, or to look her fully in the eyes, knowing what she’s kept from me about that bump. Mum looks frazzled as always, dark strands of hair wisp out from the back of her head. She steps back and gestures for Seven to pass. Seven makes a mock squeezing sound but Mum has already tuned out.

  “I love your SexyFace by the way, so powerful. What a transformation.”

  Same woman with bigger lips, thicker eyelashes, I want to point out. Physically the lead part, mentally a walk-on player.

  “Oh,” Mum places a palm on her cheek. “It was just a bit of fun.”

  “Good for you.” Seven confirms, and turns her knowing smile to me.

  “Upstairs, Miss Maverick?”

  I am aware of my face dent for the first time today.

  “So, how are things between you and your stalker?” Seven says.

  She has taken the high-backed throne at my desk and swivels towards me; she’s reclining on leopard-skin velvet stretched across a gold frame, with mock crystal edging, a homework encouragement from Dad on my 15th birthday. (The last one he chose to attend.) Seven’s opener totally throws me as I’d just this second made up my mind not to mention him. Could she have seen me with him? Stupid. It was an empty park. Now I’ve paused too long.

  “I met up with him.”

  “Tell me you didn’t.”

  It feels good to get it out there; guilty-but-good, because the confession is to True. Her face says: betrayal, something of that magnitude.

  “I feel weird about it.”

  “So? How bad did he look?”

  “Six foot Bugs Bunny suit, pure Natural underneath.”

  “Shut up. He wasn’t was he? In a costume?”

  It takes me a while to stop laughing. Seven watches my dimple with arms crossed.

  “He had a scarf on,” I gulp some air. “I didn’t see his face at all.”

  “You must have seen his eyes.”
>
  “I didn’t get that close. I was trying not to stare- he probably gets that all the time. Plus, I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, so I barely looked at him. He was um, tall.”

  “He didn’t try to show you his face?”

  I grab a silver t-shirt from the recycling mountain, drape it over my lower face.

  “What, you mean like ta-dah!”

  I’ve got the giggles again. Seven locks her arms over her face and shrieks.

  “Hands off me you beast!”

  “He didn’t touch me.”

  “Not even an accidental brush?” Seven paws at my knee, one palm covering her lower face. She fixates on my cleavage, then the reedy voice: “True...I’m just like Dollar underneath...”

  “It was nothing like that.”

  “I believe you. Cleavage out today?”

  “I was zipped up to the ears. I had no tits.”

  “You had to be careful.”

  “He’s the new boy, he has no friends. We chatted that’s all.”

  “Could you see anything through the scarf? I mean, I bet your mind was going crazy the whole time, imagining.”

  “Nothing. I guess I saw his eyebrows. He had a hat on, a fedora. I can’t describe his eyebrows so they can’t have been that offensive.”

  “I hope you met in a public place.”

  “Oh, just some alley after dark.”

  I consider dropping in the part about his eyes on me the whole time but I won’t get it right. The sliding closer and the scary itch and the people need to see my eyes and the stupid show-off exit and the people like you, and his whole delusional C.O.F family and what he found out about Mum and our family being about to change forever. But Seven doesn’t need these kind of details to make up her mind about him.

  “True, be serious: how can you trust somebody who is hiding their face? Who knows what’s going on in his head.”

  “They let him into school.”

  “He’s hiding himself. There’s a reason for that.”

  “Avoiding the stares?”

  “You’re too kind- it’s getting to be a problem. Get a look in his eyes: damaged goods, time to walk away. Actually don’t- you’re right- he’ll think you’re interested.”

  “He told me he’s Natural by choice- an Original.”

  Seven snorts through her Merlot nose.

  “And you believed him?”

  Seven has this knack of pulling all these different expressions at once, wringing value for money from every Update. We had the same mouth in name alone.

  “Who in their right mind actually does that anymore?” she says, “I bet he can’t change, I bet he’s EMS Natural.”

  “No. He said not.”

  “Then it’s like... it’s arrogant.”

  “He’s not arrogant, he’s...I don’t know. I guess he gets a better reaction masked.”

  “Did you smile for him?”

  “What, did us freaks connect, you mean?”

  “No! Just...did he say anything about it? You being a Maverick now?”

  “There were no smiles.”

  “Sounds like a right laugh. So when are you seeing him next?”

  “I’m not. He left suddenly. I think he got fed up with my avoiding looking at him.”

  For future reference: it is okay to look at me. It’s not against the rules.

  “Good, he got the message. He’s not an honest person, True. He’s not like you.”

  The doorbell goes again, three times. The gang are late, we’ve only got thirty- five minutes gossip time remaining before school log-in.

  “Please don’t say anything to the others,” I plead.

  Seven fixes me with an ambiguous look. We leave my room in single file, her shoulder grazing the wall of the newly-narrowed hall.

  “It’s only confidential because it means nothing.” I hiss.

  “ True ‘n’ Cliff?”

  “There is no True ‘n’ Cliff.”

  Story hovers in the doorway to my bedroom; Day comes up behind her, overtakes and flops to the floor like a dog. He hasn’t stopped fiddling with his phone. Story joins me to sit on the bed, our backs to the wall. Seven saunters in last to take the desk chair, my throne, and complete the circle.

  “Did your room shrink again?” Story says, glancing around.

  “No Chance! Mum and I had strong words about that. She changed it back weeks ago- when she could still get up ladders.”

  “I still can’t believe she did that to you.” Story says.

  “Yeah, a rubbish plan on her part. She must have figured I’d start feeling more and more claustrophobic- without noticing why- and eventually skip downstairs to embrace the family arena. Spend some quality time with her.”

  I don’t know why I’m blaming Mum because it was almost certainly Dad’s idea, remote-control parenting. The truth is less amusing. Story shakes her head like she’s struggling to grasp the size of it, the depth of deception, which makes me feel all warm inside.

  “So sly!” she says, a rightful recognition of my suffering.

  Day zones in to our conversation grinning straight whites, cheekbones that could cast a shadow. Day looks like a lot of other boys from school right now, flawless and on trend. Eyes a solid crayon blue that are meant to mean dependable- but not today. He is the only one who hasn’t commented on my Maverick smile. Not to my face, anyway. He goes back to his phone. There’s a girl- you can tell by the level of concentration. He’s self-editing to impress. He won’t tell us who she is yet, so we act like he’s fully present, and ignore him. Eventually he sticks the phone in Seven’s face, and she shrieks and huddles over the screen. Day is pleased.

  “You’re going to want to see this True.” he says.

  I guess it isn’t his girlfriend texting after all. Day is much harder to read than Seven, his eyes are often down-turned, unavailable. There’s a series of something to view; Seven’s peels of jagged laughter come in bursts, but she isn’t sharing yet. This is too important. At the edge of my field of vision Story extends her index finger, I turn towards her and get poked.

  “Sorry! I wanted to see what it felt like. It feels normal- like normal skin.”

  “My hole in the face.”

  “Don’t you like it anymore?”

  “I never liked it. It interests me.”

  “But you’re keeping it?”

  “Yeah, for now.”

  Seven tosses Day his phone back, a loopy throw as if it’s contaminated.

  “Take it! Take it! Urghh.”

  Day reacts too slow, grasping the air as his phone hits the floor and snaps shut.

  “Careful! Monkey-Face is after me, he won’t believe me if this thing gets damaged again. He says it like that: ‘Breakage again, Day? How convenient, start of every lesson...’”

  “MonkeyFace, the new wild animal range for men. Get back to your evolutionary roots.” Seven flows in a Merlot-purr.

  She does Merlot to perfection. We all laugh our appreciation as Seven finishes up in an old Merlot-smile, two smiles back, before Merlot went all vulnerable.

  “Does he seriously look like a monkey?” Story says.

  “Put it this way, other monkeys would be attracted.” Day says.

  I get second look at Day’s phone, bypassing Story, which confirms what I’ve already guessed. It’s something about Dollar’s shock announcement: Dollar is to go Natural for his next film role, and here lie the rumours of his new face. I sneer at the first image, it’s too easy: they’ve picked his broad roman nose, and twisted it comically off centre.

  “Dollar would never agree to that.” I say

  He’s doing one of his more soulful gazes, but we don’t connect. I don’t get the same tug when he’s trapped in a photo. Story is leaning over, watching me watching Dollar.

  “So, what’s the verdict?” Story says.

  I’ve found a more likely candidate: in this second image, the trademark intimacy is gone from his smile, although his lips retain their fullness. It’s still r
ecognisably Dollar, but colder, and closed down. His cheeks are hollowed out, his nose sharper, a loss of perfection. It’s a cruel face. Plus it’s all going on behind the eyes: they are shrunken and positively glint with menace. His head is shaved. It’s the kind of Natural we have all come across before; the type of face you see on TV and you know, before they’ve even spoken, that you’ve met the baddie.

  “This one is the internationally recognised actor-plays-psycho face.” I say. “Bet they’ll use that. It gives me a familiar feeling, do you know what I mean? He’s still sexy.”

  “You need help.” Story says, and pats my back. “Seriously. That’s a crazed psychopath.”

  “Yeah, but Dollar’s still there, isn’t he?”

  I tilt the screen at her, but Story’s SwimmingPool eyes remain unconvinced.

  “I reckon the film company should look into his real ancestors, and turn him into the genuine article- the Natural in his genes. I’d like to see that.” Day says.

  “People have got to want to pay to see him on the big screen,” Seven mutters. “And now ...it’s time to ask the lady of influence in his life...”

  I assume she is referring to me and go to respond, but Seven has changed her phone display to Share, and Merlot’s latest advert fills the centre of our circle. Seven swivels her phone on the floor and Merlot’s image bobs and rotates, stopping in the air to face me.

  “Check her out.” Seven says

  “Poor thing.” Story says, heaving a sigh.

  The new down-turned mouth. I let the gut tug wash over me this time; Merlot always does what she claims on the box. The mood in my bedroom turns suddenly sombre.

  “Cheer up!” Seven addresses me through Merlot. “You know Dollar will be back to his normal, gorgeous self by the premiere, he’s got to shoot the next Rex Rayne.”

  It occurs to me far too late that Mum and bump are resting down the hall and Seven does not do subdued. I get up to shut my bedroom door and when I turn back, Merlot has made her graceful exit and Day has taken over, with a dramatically protruding bottom lip and pleading eyes. Story and I crease up laughing. Day’s protruding bottom lip quivers, he releases a strangled sob.