The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  Sometimes you don’t need to say anything.

  ‘So,’ I say. I pick up my beer bottle and he takes his, and we clink them and take a sip. I wish I didn’t have to tell him what I did.

  ‘So,’ he says as we put them down.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘Thank you for coming here. I’d better tell you some stuff.’

  He nods, and I take a deep breath and start talking.

  I thought it wouldn’t take long: after all I have only two actual facts to relate. However, for some reason I talk for hours and hours. I tell him everything. I have never done that before. I’ve never told the truth about myself. I tell him all of it because there is nothing to lose, and because I want him to know the truth about me.

  We order fish and potatoes, and it arrives and we both eat it and I barely notice because I am so busy talking. I find myself telling Christian about Bella, and am horrified to hear the words coming out of my mouth. He reaches across the table and grips my hand as I talk, because the words make me shaky. I have never spoken about her to any human being, not even Lily; not even when Lily came into the room and saw Bella killing a bird.

  ‘She’s made me do awful things.’ I stop, wipe my eyes on the napkin he passes me and take a deep breath. ‘I’ve thought for a while that it was building up to something terrible. And then it happened. Yesterday.’

  I talk him through yesterday, and I don’t leave anything out. I tell him about the letter and about my phone call to Michelle, and about the café and the thing inside me that smashed the bottle and would have slashed my mother’s throat with it. I tell him about my dad catching my hand, and the man being right there, and the line of blood across his face.

  ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,’ I say, and I’m not hungry any more. I want to be sick. I expect Christian to get up and walk away from me. He looks at me and I see uncertainty on his face. Then he nods.

  ‘And you can make sure it’s the worst thing you’ll ever do,’ he says. ‘Look – I don’t know what’s going on back there but your parents didn’t tell me any of that. They just said you’d had a fight and run away. There were police around but they probably weren’t …’ I see that he doesn’t know what to say. He wants to reassure me that I’m not in trouble but he can’t. ‘I don’t know,’ he says in the end. ‘I don’t know what would happen if you went back right now. Maybe you should stay here a while. I can go back and find out for you.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Can I tell your parents – your adoptive parents – that you’re safe?’

  He is so kind. He is gentle and lovely. I had no idea.

  ‘Yes, but – please don’t tell them I’m here. Find out if I’m going to prison and then I’ll work out a plan. In fact I’ll write them a note and you can just give them that when you get back, so they’ll know you really have seen me.’

  Christian nods. He looks more worried than ever now. ‘Look. I have to be in Rio this evening because it’s Felix’s birthday and he’s booked a show and shit like that. I’ll talk to your parents. I’ll give them a note. I promise I won’t tell them you’re here, and I’ll find out everything you need to know. Right?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Anyway. You know everything about me now and I don’t know anything about you. But you seem to be so together. Your life isn’t falling apart like this.’

  He laughs, though he doesn’t sound as though he thinks it’s funny. ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah. There’s a bunch of stuff you don’t know. Let’s pay the check. Let’s not talk about Bella or anything that happened yesterday. Let’s take your mind off it a bit. So, this island has no cars? Are there bikes?’

  ‘Yes. I hired one yesterday. I’ll take you to the rental place. The owner’s nice. He speaks perfect English, luckily for me.’

  Christian pays the bill even though I try to make him split it with me. We walk down the road hand in hand, and when we reach the bike rental place I rent mine again and introduce Christian to Alex.

  Alex says: ‘Oh, the friend in Rio! I knew it would be a boyfriend.’

  I feel too shy to look at Christian’s face. I want him to be my boyfriend. I wish he could be. I could do anything as long as he was standing where he is now, holding my hand. He knows everything, and yet he’s still holding my hand.

  Christian doesn’t correct him. In fact he squeezes my hand and gives me a secret glance, as if we are in this together, which we are, and my heart fills up and overflows with sparkles and joy and love.

  ‘It’s ten an hour,’ says Alex.

  Christian takes out his wallet. He says, ‘Three hours?’

  He takes out thirty reals, and I watch him do it, and I see, because it’s in front of my face, that in his wallet there is a picture of a girl.

  She is a beautiful girl.

  She has long black hair.

  She is smiling.

  You only have a picture of a girl in your wallet if she’s your girlfriend. So Christian does have a girlfriend.

  It’s not me.

  I’ve just told him everything. I told him all my secrets and he never told me that he had a girlfriend. He never said he didn’t have one, and I never asked.

  He pays and puts his wallet away and gets on his bike, and I get on mine too, and we pedal down to the end of the road. Except that now I don’t know what to say because, having seen that picture, I can’t really carry on as normal.

  Christian doesn’t say anything either. There are other bikes and the funny trike things and then a horse and cart, so we don’t really have the chance to chat anyway. Then we turn off down a stony path, past those peaceful houses, and the world is silent except for the buzz of insects, and no one is here but us.

  ‘Ella,’ he says, slowing down so we are riding side by side. ‘I know you saw the photograph back there.’

  I look at him and then look back at the road. ‘Oh?’ I try to pretend to be surprised, but there’s actually no point. ‘So I guess you have a girlfriend back home?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I don’t. I really don’t. I was happy when that guy called me your boyfriend.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘I was. Look. Ella. That was Vittoria. My sister.’

  Immediately I’m relieved, but then I sense something. It’s in the tone of his voice, and the fact that no one carries a photo of their sister in their wallet.

  ‘Shall we go and sit on the beach?’ I say, and we keep going until we reach a stretch of sand. Then we push our bikes across it and lean them against a palm tree, and we kick off our shoes and sit down at the edge of the water, looking out.

  Christian reaches for my hand. ‘So let me tell you why, in spite of what you might think, I am not at all together.’

  We sit there, and he tells me all about his life, beginning from his earliest childhood memory of himself and his twin sister, Vittoria, sharing a cot. He tells me how they did everything together; how everyone called them ‘the twins’ instead of using their names. They grew up in a nice part of Miami and went to good schools and had their own groups of friends, but they were so close that they felt like ‘two halves of the same person’, he says. He talks about the big house, the emotionally distant parents, the sense he always had that it was the two of them against the world.

  ‘And then she got sick,’ he says. ‘I knew it at the same time she did. She got sick, and we knew it was serious, and it was. It was a very rare cancer. Anaplastic thyroid cancer. If you get it, the chances are you’ll be dead soon. You can fight it, but it’s not one you beat. Our friends and family tried to be positive, and I did too – she was my fucking twin sister, and if positive thinking might help, then I was going to do some positive thinking. But it didn’t help. I knew it wasn’t going to and Vicky knew it too. So.’

  ‘Oh God. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too. It sucks.’

  I can’t think of the right thing to say, so I just hold on to his hand.

  ‘You would have
liked her. She’d have told me you were too young for me. I can hear her saying it. But she would have loved your hair.’

  ‘How long ago …?’

  ‘A year. One whole year. It’s a lifetime, and no time at all. Felix and Susanna came over here with me for the anniversary. Or, rather, to get away from the anniversary. My parents would have preferred to have me home with them, and I feel bad about that. But I couldn’t do it. Vicky would want me to be here with you, sitting on this beach, right now. She would.’

  Christian is holding my hand, playing with my fingers.

  ‘It’s not today?’

  ‘No. You know what? It was two days ago. The night we met up in Lapa. You said it was the best night of your life, and that meant the world to me. It really did. When you said that I felt like, actually, Life can go on. I can be happy. People can be happy. I felt good.’

  I stare out at the water. ‘I’ve just spent, like, four hours telling you all my problems, and they’re just nothing next to yours. I’m sorry. I feel like a dick.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Your problems are very much not nothing, Ella. My problem is boring. It’s about getting through the rest of my life when there’s only half of me here. It’s about living Vicky’s life for her too. It’s something I have to work out just through living. Yours, Ella … yours is immediate, because you’re here and your parents – the people who have always acted as your parents, whatever – are a few miles away over there, and I seem to be the only one who can move between you and them and try to help you work it out.’

  I try to digest everything Christian just said. There is a lot to process.

  ‘What did Vicky like to do?’ I feel self-conscious saying Vicky instead of Vittoria, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  He looks at me. ‘She was much smarter than me. She wanted to be a doctor. And she loved to dance. She would have been doing the samba in the street with you.’

  I nod. I want to have a sense of her in my head.

  ‘She sounds brilliant.’

  ‘She was. Always. But I didn’t plan to come here and talk about her. I really didn’t. Like I said, I’ve got to go back to Rio tonight. And I’ll do everything we said. Can I come back tomorrow? I’ll come in the morning. Could I … Could I stay the night with you? Tomorrow? Depending on everything else.’

  I turn and look into his eyes. We stare at each other for a long time. Then I answer his question by kissing him.

  I see his ferry off, and he stands at the back and leans on the rail and waves to me until he blurs into nothing and the boat carries him over the horizon. The boat, huge and white and made of metal, carries my Christian away from me, but only until tomorrow.

  He is coming back. I thought I loved him before, but I had no idea because I didn’t know that it was possible for another person to make you want to open up. I have never been open with anyone. I always hold things back because I’m scared of them, but I told it all to Christian. I told him my horrors and he told me his, and we sat on the beach in the sun and kissed and kissed and kissed.

  He’s coming back tomorrow and he’s going to spend the night with me, and then I hope the next two nights after that too. I’ll ask Ana-Paula whether she has a double room, and if she doesn’t we can go somewhere else.

  I left school a few days ago thinking I was Ella Black, but now I know I’m someone different.

  Maybe that is a huge opportunity.

  I am invigorated, and the only thing I want to do right now, since Christian is gone, is find my real mother. Life is short. Weird things can happen. I don’t know who I am and that feels fundamental. Christian and his twin sister were united against the world, but I have no one to unite with. I know no one with whom I share genes, and I need to find them. Even if I just look into her eyes and see parts of myself there and walk away – that would be enough. I don’t want to be anyone’s baby girl any more. My birth mum doesn’t have to look after me.

  I need to find a place to use the internet and a computer – I have a phone but no charger, and although I’ve been keeping it switched off most of the time it won’t survive a long search for a birth mother. I guess I might be able to buy a charger here. I’ll try to find a shop in the morning.

  Until then I’ll see if Alex can help me.

  ‘Could I borrow your laptop?’ I say.

  He barely looks up from his magazine. ‘You can try. It’s older than you are. You might as well communicate with the world by carrier pigeon.’

  ‘Oh. Well, do you know anywhere I could use one? I’ve got my phone but I have to do some stuff on the internet for a family thing and it’d be much easier on a computer. I’ll, like, pay or whatever.’

  Alex puts down his magazine and looks at me over the top of his little glasses.

  ‘Most people just use Wi-Fi on their phone,’ he says. ‘On the island, I mean. If they need to. I’ll give you the Wi-Fi code for this place if you want to use it. Or you’re welcome to have a go on this old thing. I just about manage to keep the bike-hire website updated but it’s not easy. I could bring my MacBook along tomorrow if you like.’

  ‘Thank you. That would be amazing.’

  ‘Your boyfriend’s a nice guy.’

  ‘He’s wonderful.’ I know that I am glowing. I can’t believe Alex brought up the subject of Christian. Now I get to talk about him and I didn’t even make it happen. ‘He’s coming back tomorrow, to stay.’

  ‘Hey. That’s great. Did you two have a fight? Is that why you showed up all jittery yesterday? You do … Well, you seem much happier now.’

  ‘It wasn’t a fight.’ I can tell he’s not that interested, but I decide to keep it as close to the truth as I can. The new me is going to try to be upfront with people. ‘It was family stuff,’ I say. ‘The same stuff I need to use a laptop for now.’

  ‘Take it, and good luck.’ Alex grins and pushes it towards me along his little desk, then picks up his magazine again.

  I sit at the back of the bike rental place, on a step beside a load of bikes, and open the laptop. It is dark here: the front of the shop is open to the street and there are no lights on. It smells of bikes and wooden floors and walls.

  It takes a long time to connect but I don’t mind waiting. When it’s working, and connected to the Wi-Fi, I start googling.

  I begin with my old name, Ella Black.

  My fingers are trembling.

  I need to know who I am.

  I

  don’t

  know

  who

  I

  am.

  My adoptive parents haven’t told the papers that I’m missing, and the police aren’t searching for me. I guess they’re probably working on bigger crimes than mine. I shelve that for now.

  I look up how to go about finding your birth parents, and fill in a form to join the Adoption Contact Register. I know, from the adoption certificate that Michelle read out, that I have the right birthday, and I’m glad about that because it would be very strange to have been celebrating on the wrong day all these years. I navigate slowly through the internet and do everything I can to help my birth mother to find me in two weeks’ time, on my eighteenth birthday.

  Then I take Mr Vokes’s letter out of my bag and uncrumple it. I realize I know the name on it, I just haven’t let myself think about it for a while. I read that part again.

  It says: Ms Hinchcliffe. That is her surname. That is my real last name. Ella Hinchcliffe. She must have had a name for me that wasn’t Ella. I wonder what my first name was.

  I want to find Ms Hinchcliffe. Mum. I want to tell her that I’m all right, that the baby she had to give away because she was too young or too poor or too ill has grown up. I want to tell her that they lied to me all my life, but that I know now and I forgive her. I want to tell her that I have been Ella and Bella, that I always knew something was wrong. In my head Ms Hinchcliffe was not to blame for what happened. She was young and she couldn’t handle a baby. Maybe her family wouldn’t let her keep me. If I was p
regnant (which is not actually a possibility, but it could be after tomorrow – that thought makes me shiver with excitement) I might not be able to handle it. I might have to give the baby to someone else so that it could have some proper parenting. I imagine her looking like me, being young and scared, struggling with the idea of motherhood, knowing she had to give her baby to some grown-ups. I want to tell her that, although I’ve had all the material things in life, I’ve missed her every single day without knowing what it was that I didn’t have.

  I take a deep breath and type the words Hinchcliffe baby 1999 UK. It seems unlikely, but you never know.

  The computer works slowly. I squint through the darkness at the sunlight outside. Alex is talking to some tourists who want to hire bikes. I can’t understand a word any of them are saying, but I can vaguely follow what’s going on through their gestures and the tones of their voices. One of them is very tall and is looking for a particularly big bike, but Alex isn’t sure where he put it.

  I look back at the laptop. It’s still thinking. The Google search comes up but the rest of the page is blank. I am only half hoping for a birth announcement or something, and you probably don’t really put them in the paper or online if you’re about to give your baby up for adoption. Nineteen ninety-nine is a long time ago and the internet was different then. I am sure there won’t be anything, but I have to try because that name is the only fact I have.

  The results start to appear, but they are irrelevant, as I thought they would be. All the Google hits are about a recent court thing which has nothing to do with me. That’s annoying. I add the word adoption to the search, and they keep coming, the same results, about some boring other thing.

  The first image to come up is an ancient photo of a woman being arrested. She’s called someone Hinchcliffe. I look at the picture just in case, but she looks nothing like me: she has a tiny, skinny face and thick black hair and she’s not my mum. I scroll down the page to the bottom, but all the results are about her.