The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  Dad works as a financial adviser. He does go away for work from time to time, so I could half believe it, but he never actually has to drop everything and flee the country.

  I flush the loo and wash my hands, staring at myself in the mirror as I do so. An Asian woman is washing her hands next to me. She looks at me in the mirror and grins, nodding at my hair. I smile back.

  I still look like me. My hair still looks great. It looks very un-Ella. It is more Bella than Ella.

  I am, however, wearing school uniform. I will be flying to Brazil in a black school skirt and white blouse and green V-necked jumper. I hope Mum has done some halfway reasonable packing. I hope she has brought me some books, my pencils, my little sketchbook. I quash the thrilling idea that, having produced a massive painting of Rio as part of my GCSE art, I now have the opportunity to draw it from life. I have headphones, but until they give me my phone back I can’t use them. I need all that. I need it. If I don’t have my world around me – my books, my music, my art – there will be too much blank space, and I know who will leap in to fill it. I must have my stuff to keep my head full of normal things, to ward off the badness.

  I can’t tell them that.

  Dad escorts me back to our table in the café, where we discover that no one has stolen or blown up our bags, or taken away the dregs of our coffee. I stare at him over the top of my cup while he looks anywhere but at me. I wish I’d got Jack to stay right up to the last minute. I wish he was here now.

  When Mum comes back she looks different again. She is grinning, though she has also been crying, and she is brandishing boarding passes. She’s been gone for ages.

  ‘Right. I’ve checked us all in. I’ve dropped off the bag. We can go through security now.’ She smiles with her mouth but not with her eyes. Her eyes look at me with huge, unnameable emotion. ‘Let’s get you to Rio, darling.’

  It’s quite nice to be locked in a metal structure that has been flung, by the power of the burning fossil, into the air. We are trapped, but no one cares. Everyone has chosen imprisonment. We are in a massive bomb, and it’s slowly exploding in a controlled way that means it lands in one piece when we get to Rio. And it’s messing up the environment as it does so.

  I’m not completely sure about it being a bomb (I might be thinking of a space rocket), but I like the idea.

  I am on my way to Rio. Although it’s freaky and weird, this is also interesting. It is the very thing I wished for when I sat bored and ignored at school.

  However, I have a bad, bad feeling.

  I alternate between staring out of the window at the clouds and staring at a film about a woman who has a surrogate baby and then doesn’t want to give it up. I’m not interested – I am barely even following – but it gives me moving shapes to look at. I have a book on my lap, and it’s one I really want to read, which I bought at the airport, but I can’t focus on that either. The people in front of me are talking loudly about their trip to Latin America.

  ‘She’ll meet us in Lima,’ says a woman, ‘if we get there before the twenty-fifth. If not, she says we can try to hook up in Cusco.’ It goes on and on, the discussion of complicated arrangements. The people behind are also talking non-stop, but I can’t understand them at all. I put my headphones back on.

  I won’t understand anything anyone says in Brazil – I don’t speak even a little bit of Spanish, and I gave up French last year, although I was actually good at it. French won’t get me far in Rio anyway.

  Flying to Brazil, for the three of us, can’t be cheap. Is it from my parents’ savings? Is it embezzled? Stolen? Laundered? I can’t imagine any of those things. It can only be money they had in the bank.

  My parents are too normal for this. That is a fact. Yet here we are. It smells slightly of sweat in here. It smells of recirculated air. I have drunk a little bottle of white wine, and now Mum says I have to have soft drinks. Even though I am seventeen they are acting as if I was five. I could have sat here and got drunk on my own, and it wouldn’t exactly have been fun but it would have distracted me. I’ll be eighteen next month.

  Both my parents are constantly looking at me, quickly and sneakily. Every time I look round one of them is doing a surreptitious check. It’s extremely unnerving; this could still be about Bella. If they found out about my mental state they might take me off on a huge strange holiday as a way of avoiding a difficult conversation.

  I can’t think why else they would take me on a bucket-list sort of holiday. I’m obviously not ill.

  Obviously.

  There is nothing ill about me.

  Nothing

  ill

  about

  me

  at

  all.

  If I concentrate I can almost make a fantasy life in Brazil come into focus. I pretend to myself that I could finish my education at a school beside the beach, with those mountains I painted as a perfect backdrop. I could make new friends, and they would be cool and international and they would like me and not despise me. In a few weeks from now I might be wearing a bikini top and little shorts to school, and I could have friends from Latin America and all over the world. My new friends will be glamorous and beautiful, with glossy black hair, and they will make everyone at home look dull and drab. I will fit in just fine with my purple sideways hair: I will be the cool quirky English girl.

  If Dad had been embezzling, then he would be caught and arrested and taken home. There would be camera flashes, and everyone in the whole world would know that he stole money and we ran away to Rio. Everyone would be terrified of us as we were taken off the plane in handcuffs.

  Dad couldn’t have done a thing like that. He just couldn’t.

  I take off my headphones.

  ‘What is it really?’ I say to Mum, who is pretending to read an in-flight magazine.

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘The thing we’re running away from.’

  I look into her eyes for a while, and I can’t read what’s in them, but the look still feels like the most honest conversation we’ve had since she turned up at school, which was only this morning. Mum’s eyes are a greyish blue. Mine are light brown like Dad’s. Hers would go better with my hair: they’re almost purple.

  ‘Just enjoy the holiday,’ she says after a while. ‘I promise no one’s in trouble. It’s not like that.’

  ‘What is it like?’

  We stare at each other some more. She wants to tell me. I hold my breath and will her to do it. There is a tidal wave of emotion in her eyes, but she doesn’t say another word. Still, she’s worried about me; I can see it.

  This is about me.

  This is not about Dad’s work or Mum having a breakdown.

  It

  is

  about

  me.

  They would only whisk me away to the place at the top of my list if they thought this was my only chance to go there.

  If they knew something terrible was about to happen.

  If they wanted me to have fun while I still could.

  I need to stop thinking.

  I put on the headphones and turn back to the film. After a while a woman appears beside Mum with a trolley of food, but although I ask for the chicken I don’t want it. I stare at it and smell its horrible smell and wonder why this chicken and I are meeting right here, right now, in a sealed tin thirty thousand feet up in the sky.

  Someone farmed and killed this chicken. It probably grew up on a battery farm, too fat to be able to stand up on its legs. It never flew. It never even stretched out its wings. It was a crop, farmed like a cabbage, kept alive only because its life force was the thing that kept the meat fresh.

  Then it was executed, sent off to a different sort of factory and made into an airline dinner, nestled in with potatoes and slimy broccoli, covered in a gloopy grey sauce, sent up into the sky, warmed through and presented to me.

  I eat it quickly. It is, oddly, delicious and I smile at the way the world is set up for humans to do what the hell we like.r />
  Later I wake with my face creased from the little pillow. I make the parents move so I can queue for the loo. I have no concept of what time it might be, but I suppose it’s night back at home.

  I wonder who is thinking about me. Jack, and Lily. Girls at school will talk about me for a bit and then move on to something else. Only Lily will actually miss me. Only Jack actually knows where I am.

  I yawn and remember the first time I met Lily. She was the only mixed-race girl in the class and I was in love with her bouncy hair from afar. When we were put together for the nature walk I remember that my head was ringing and I knew I had to do something naughty to make it stop, and I was glad I was going to do it with Lily.

  ‘I think there’s a whole pile of fir cones just over there,’ I said, and took her hand.

  ‘Maybe some blackberries,’ she suggested, and we headed away from the path together. We climbed over branches and pushed our way through brambles and past nettles, and ended up in a clearing deep among the trees, where we sat down and talked. We hadn’t really talked before. Lily told me that her dad had just left and her mum was taking her back to Ghana for the summer. I told her that I was getting a kitten next week and I was going to call him Humphrey.

  We stayed away for ages. I loved being away from the rest of the class, who ignored me or laughed at me even then because sometimes I was quiet and shy and at other times I lost control and had huge tantrums and they all thought I was mad. I didn’t really know Lily at all, but suddenly she felt like my only friend.

  It took ages before they started shouting for us. We passed the time by talking about any old thing. I told her some stories I’d half stolen from books. I adapted tales about orphans and castles and forest adventures, realizing that I could be myself with Lily. She has a beautiful voice, and she sang some songs to me very quietly. She taught me some words of Ghanaian.

  We heard the others shouting, but I wasn’t scared about being in trouble because there were two of us, and the ringing had stopped and I was back in my own skin. We stayed tight, giggling. Our dresses had been ripped by brambles and our hair was all over the place.

  They shouted our names, and after a while we went back.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Lily whispered, squeezing my hand. She and I were friends now.

  The teachers were frantic. All the other girls were standing in pairs at the base at the edge of the forest, holding hands and looking scared. We ran towards them, and then I let go of Lily’s hand and flung myself at Mrs Barrett, throwing my arms around her waist and sobbing.

  ‘We got lost,’ I said. ‘We went off the path because we saw a rabbit and then we couldn’t find it again. We were so scared.’

  I could hear her heart pounding. She put a hand on my head.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now. No going off the path again, girls.’

  I looked round Mrs Barrett and saw Lily standing a little way off, crying and being fussed over by other girls who all wanted to look after her. Our eyes met and we both smiled tiny little smiles.

  ‘Here you go.’ My mother hands me my passport and a white form. ‘Your immigration form. I filled it in for you.’

  ‘That’s lucky, since I can’t read or write.’

  She sighs. ‘Ella. You were asleep.’

  I look away. We are in a queue of tetchy travellers. They all want to get out into Rio, and I want it more than any of them. Lots of them are talking fast in languages I don’t understand; or at least in a language I don’t understand. I let it drift past me. None of these travellers look as if they’re being kidnapped by the people who are supposed to look after them.

  None of them looks as if there might be something wrong inside their bodies.

  Actually some of them do.

  ‘Hello,’ says the immigration man, and he gives me a quick, bored smile. I pass over my passport and white form, and he stamps the passport and hands it back, part of the form still in it. I say, ‘Thanks,’ and join Mum and Dad, who are, of course, both right there, waiting for me. Mum extends a hand and I give her back my passport and its form. She puts it in her handbag. I am five years old.

  We have one single suitcase between us, and not much hand luggage either. ‘We’ll buy the right sort of clothes when we get there,’ Mum said (God knows what she’s packed). I’m trying to make my school uniform look the least uniformish I can, but if you’re wearing a short black skirt, black tights and a white shirt, and you’re not at school, you look like a waitress. I twiddle the long side of my hair around my finger, self-conscious about my stupid clothes rather than my purple hair. I don’t want to be wearing tights in Latin America. The air, even indoors, is humid and heavy. Everything feels strange.

  Then we are getting into a taxi. A man is throwing our suitcase into the boot. I ignore both parents’ attempts at conversation and climb into the front. I slam the door before either of them can tell me to sit in the back with Mum.

  It’s dark, but I can still see trees with huge green leaves in strange shapes. There are lights twinkling all around. People live in this city: it is their world and I know nothing at all about it. This is wild and exciting.

  The driver goes fast, using his horn often. It’s totally brilliant. He swerves round corners and through tunnels. I’m happy to be his passenger. I can sense both parents tensing behind me, nervous, scared of crashing, but I don’t care.

  There are buses everywhere: they hurtle along, taking their unimaginable passengers to unimaginable destinations. They are awesome buses, the opposite of the stupid ones that hardly manage to speed up at all between stops at home. One veers towards us from the next lane, but our driver stops it with liberal use of his horn. Dad clears his throat, and I know that he wants to ask him to slow down and drive like he does, all sensible, checking his mirror and indicating and following the highway code. I also know that he won’t say anything because he hasn’t got the words, and even if he did he would feel that it was too rude.

  I am giddy with excitement. I knew this would be my place and it is. Everything is different. Everything is wonderful and exciting and dreamlike, and none of it feels real. My head is not ringing. My vision has never been clearer. I am entirely myself.

  There are mountains silhouetted against the dark sky. I have been longing for the mountains. A light is shining on top of one of them, and the driver points to it and says something to me. I say: ‘Que?’ and hope he understands.

  ‘Cristo Redentor,’ he says, turning towards me and taking his eyes off the road in a way that makes both parents gasp behind us.

  ‘Cristo Redentor,’ I repeat, and he nods, pleased.

  Then there are buildings all around, and I stare at them. When people say city centres are all the same, they are not talking about this city. There are no chain stores here; no Boots, no Smith’s, no Sainsbury’s. Shops flash by, all closed, and sometimes there are restaurants and bars with people sitting outside, and I can’t look properly at anything because we’re driving too fast for anything to come into focus.

  I am a bit scared but I stamp that out. This is amazing. It’s the place in my head, but it’s real and better. I am absolutely longing to draw it all.

  Soon we are outside a hotel with a shiny front, and a man in uniform opens my door. I am the first out of the car, the first to set foot on the Rio pavement, which is made not of normal paving stones, but of black and white mosaic tiles in swirling patterns. The air is hot. It smells exciting – like the sea, and tropical plants, and adventure.

  I smile at the doorman. I watch my parents fumbling, thanking the driver, thanking the hotel doorman, wondering whether they ought to be tipping either one of them, and if so how much, and what Brazilian currency is all about anyway. I see them looking agonized, and I know that they are trying to remember what they paid for the cab when they bought the voucher at the airport, and working out the right percentage for a tip. While they’re doing that the cabbie drives off without a tip, and the doorman carries our suitcase into the hotel
. I follow him in, from the warm damp outdoors to a sharply air-conditioned lobby that is all shiny with marble.

  I stand in the cool. Mum and Dad scurry after me and walk up to the desk, where a friendly man welcomes us all in English, and they start to fill in forms and hand over bank cards.

  The three of us are sharing a room. I know it would be twice as expensive if we had two rooms, but I’m sure the reason they’re making me sleep in the same room is so they can watch me all the time, awake and asleep. I had my own room when we went to Cornwall a couple of months ago, but now I am demoted to theirs. I might as well still be a baby. I feel like an object they have to remember not to lose.

  It’s a big and beautiful room though, and I would be monstrous to complain about it. My single bed is quite far away from their double, but they will still be able to sit up in bed and check on me whenever they want.

  I sit on my bed, then lie on my back. The room has a high ceiling, a marble-tiled floor and a minibar and a safe, and it’s clean and shiny.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Mum is fiddling with the suitcase. She has opened the wardrobe. The way she’s fussing around while trying to look casual catches my attention, and I start to watch her closely, pretending to be undoing my shoe. I see her take a bundle of papers out of her handbag and put them into the little safe: from the haunted expression on her face I can tell they are important. I lean over and try to see them, but I can make out only a handful of official-looking envelopes.

  She looks round to see whether I’m watching, and then presses buttons carefully until they beep and the safe is locked. Then she looks at me again. I pretend I didn’t notice a thing.

  ‘Nearly midnight, local time,’ says Dad. He is pacing about, trying to force himself to relax. ‘But that’s nearly two back home.’

  ‘Is this the southern hemisphere?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘We crossed the equator.’

  ‘We did,’ he says. ‘I believe it goes through the north of Brazil. It’s nice to see you excited, Ellie, if I’m allowed to say that.’

  I smile at him. I am seized with an urge to jump up and down and sing. If you had told me this morning that my day would end in Rio, I would of course have thought it was unimaginably amazing, as well as impossible. And it is. And I am here. I am in this magical place; the place of my dreams.