Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

  Akela laid down the piece he was considering and turned to her.

  ‘I know you do, Heloise sweetheart,’ he said, ‘but the picture will still be there tomorrow. You can show it to him then.’

  He reached out a hand to pat her arm but she skipped out of his reach and turned to face Smudge.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she said.

  Akela coughed. ‘That’s a friend,’ he said. ‘That’s Ellie. Stay over here, sweetheart,’ he added. But Heloise was already walking over, her fingers trailing along the wooden surface of the coffee table.

  ‘She looks like Mummy,’ she observed. ‘Only her face is narrower and she’s got writing over one eye with plasters on it.’ She turned round and looked at Akela, hand pressed to her head. ‘Did she get born with writing on her forehead?’

  ‘Well, now, gosh,’ said Akela, puffing out his cheeks. ‘I don’t—’

  The little girl continued to advance, until she was near enough to reach out and touch Smudge’s face. She ran her fingers over the tattoo, tracing the shapes intently.

  At close range, you could see the Ellieness in her: a vagueness deep in the grey-blue eyes, although in her it was backed by something steelier. She was darker than Ellie too – than either of them – and determined with it. If there’d been two of them, she’d have been the confident one, Smudge decided, the one for whom the cards always fell the right way. The lucky twin.

  ‘You don’t sleep much, do you?’ observed Heloise, running her fingers over the dark shadows under Smudge’s eyes.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said.

  ‘You can sleep here. We’ve got big comfortable beds. And a trampoline in the garden.’

  She stepped back and put her finger in her mouth.

  ‘Are you in our family?’ she said.

  Akela leapt up, sending the puzzle board jerking to the floor and scattering the pieces.

  ‘That’s enough now, sweetheart,’ he said, holding out a hand to Heloise as though beckoning her back from the edge of a cliff. ‘The lady – Ellie – is tired. We don’t want to give her a headache with all our questions, do we? You come along with me and I’ll tuck you back into bed.’

  Heloise stared at him. For a moment, the look of someone older flashed into her eyes – as though she didn’t buy his fawning for a second and was weighing up the pros and cons of making a scene. Then the little girl was back.

  ‘’K,’ she said, skipping across the room and taking Akela’s hand.

  ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ she said, looking back over her shoulder at Smudge as they disappeared round the door.

  A moment later, Nick appeared carrying a trembling tray of mugs.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he said.

  20

  Today we are in the car going to Grandma’s house in Hastings, me, Mother and Ellie. Richard is staying with Akela at home. We normally don’t go and see Grandma because she and Mother have their differences but we’re making an exception today because Aunt Bessie has decided it’s time to pack Grandma up and send her to a home and she can’t do it all on her own.

  When we get to the house, Auntie Bessie is already there in a horrible floral housecoat with her hair going everywhere.

  ‘Honestly, Margaret,’ she says. ‘You were supposed to have been here two hours ago. The taxi’s coming at four.’

  Auntie Bessie is what Mother would be if someone melted her and spread her with a butter knife. She is wider and bigger in all directions and there is a softness to the edges of her, but her eyes are just as strict. She stands with her hands on her hips like she is waiting for the magic word, but instead Mother purses her lips and strides into the house. If you stand them side by side, even with them being so different, there is no doubt they are twins.

  Inside there are open boxes with stuff spilling out – a frying pan, a china dog with sad eyes, a pack of knitting patterns – all around the hall. Grandma sits hunched in an armchair in the corner of the living room, rocking back and forth like a child. She looks up when we come in.

  ‘Are you the people from the council, dear?’ she says.

  ‘No, Mum,’ says Mother in a pointed voice. ‘We’re here to help you pack.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ says Grandma and turns away. She starts to cough and her face goes wonky. Then she spits and a semi-circle of teeth slides out of her mouth and lands in her lap. Ellie gives a frightened laugh, like a bird chirruping.

  ‘Oh Mum!’ says Mother, snatching up the teeth and looking around fiercely. She catches sight of me.

  ‘Ellie, go into the kitchen and get a glass of water,’ she says.

  I hurry through, almost tripping over a box of records on my way. The kitchen looks like one of those bring-and-buy sales they ask you to do on Blue Peter. Everything is out of the cupboards and half the mugs are wrapped in bits of newspaper ready to get packed. On the side is the kettle that got Grandma into this mess in the first place, all bent and warped with its plastic bottom licked like ice-cream from where she put it on the hob and nearly started a fire. Because ‘kettle’ in her day meant something different.

  I look around for a glass, but all I can see are small ornamental ones in blue, green and pink. I pick up the biggest one I can find and fill it at the tap. When I get back into the living room, Mother rolls her eyes at me. She takes the silly glass and dips the teeth in the water.

  ‘Here, Mum,’ she says. ‘Try to slot them back in.’

  Grandma takes the teeth like a good child and fits them back into her mouth. ‘There,’ she says, giving a crooked smile. ‘Fit to meet the King.’

  ‘Give me strength,’ mutters Mother.

  She looks at us both.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Helen, you come and help Bessie and me. Ellie, you stay here and keep an eye on Grandma. Don’t touch anything.’

  They go out of the room and up the stairs. I stare at Grandma.

  ‘Well,’ she says brightly. ‘My little Helen. I knew you’d come eventually.’

  I shift from one foot to the other, pressing my shoes into the brown swirls of the carpet.

  ‘Don’t you mean Ellie?’ I say.

  Grandma frowns.

  ‘Are you telling me I don’t know my own granddaughters?’ she says in Mother’s that’s-quite-enough-of-your-nonsense voice. ‘I may not have seen you in a little while, but I’ve looked at you every day.’

  And she waves a hand at the mantelpiece, where there is a picture in a frame decorated with shells that says ‘Love and friendship’ in rope letters at the top. Inside is a photograph of me and Ellie before the swap, standing on a cliff top in red and yellow raincoats with the wind blowing our hair. I am wearing a big smile and Ellie is standing a bit behind with that doubtful look she used to get and you can see us as we really are.

  I walk towards Grandma and give her a kiss on her powdery cheek, scrunching my eyes against a rush of tears.

  ‘There,’ says Grandma, pleased.

  Then she looks at me and the weather changes in her eyes.

  ‘But what is it? You’ve got…’ and her fingers open and close as they try to scrabble the word from the air ‘…empty, haven’t you?’

  It’s not the right word, not in an English-teacher-marking-your-work way, but in another sense it is. Amid all the cracked words that no longer do what they say, it clangs like a deep, resonant bell.

  I sit down next to Grandma and take her hand. And while Auntie Bessie, Mother and Ellie rustle packaging upstairs and bang things around, boxing up Grandma’s life, I tell her about the game and being locked out of Helen and everything that’s happened since.

  Grandma sits and listens. Sometimes she puts her other hand to her eyes and says ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ and shakes her head like she can’t believe what’s she’s hearing. And sometimes she rocks back and forth.

  When I get to the bit about the big boys and girls in the park and the stuff in the bag and Mary’s brother, she turns and looks at me.

  ‘Tell me,
dear,’ she says, ‘is Margaret all right? She never mentions anything about Uncle Albert, does she? I always suspected, but in those days, what could you do? You didn’t say anything, you just got on with it. It wasn’t all… fish and chips like it is now. You just had to get on with it. You kept quiet. You did. You did.’

  I pat her hand as she rocks and tell her that Mother’s fine. And then I go on saying about the lonely feeling that comes when I see Ellie with the popular girls at school and how everyone looks at me like I am a monster in a cage that belongs in the zoo. And how if everyone could see inside my head – except for the burning angry times – they’d know I was all right, but they can’t because all the Ellieness is stacked up round me like a high hedge and every year it grows thicker and taller with big spines so that now there is no way out. And how Ellie has taken Helen and stretched her out of shape like she used to do with her T-shirts. How Helen is now a girl who does drama and likes standing up on stage instead of getting prizes for reading, and not even someone I could be any more. She is a Hellie good and proper. And that is the loneliest thing of all.

  After a while, Grandma takes her hand away from her face and looks at me.

  ‘Tell me, dear,’ she says with a smile that is like the sun breaking through watery clouds, ‘are you Cousin Elizabeth’s girl?’

  I stare at Grandma and she blinks. I open my mouth to speak, but at that moment there is a toot from the road outside and footsteps come thumping down the stairs.

  ‘Mum,’ says Aunt Bessie, hurrying into the room, ‘your car is here. It’s time to go.’

  Grandma blinks again.

  ‘Go?’ she says. ‘But we’ve only just arrived. This friend has been keeping me company.’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ says Aunt Bessie, brushing back a wisp of stray hair. ‘But it’s time to say goodbye now. Be a love.’

  Shadows appear on the threshold and Mother and Ellie enter the room.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ says Mother sharply, striding over to take Grandma’s arm and pull her out of the chair. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  Grandma’s face crumples.

  ‘No,’ she wails. ‘I won’t stand for it. You can’t make me go!’

  ‘There isn’t any choice, Mum,’ says Mother, steering Grandma across the room. ‘It’s all been arranged.’

  At the threshold, Grandma stands firm and looks around furiously at us.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed!’ she shouts. ‘Call yourselves gynaecologists! If it were up to me, I’d have you all bang to rights!’

  Then something cracks in her face and she starts to cry. ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Do excuse me. I think I’m not quite myself.’

  Mother leads her down the garden path with Ellie following behind, carrying Grandma’s suitcase. When they get to the taxi, Mother opens the door and presses her hand on Grandma’s head to stop it bumping when she gets in. I hurry after with the photograph from the mantelpiece, the one of Ellie and me.

  ‘Here, Grandma,’ I say, handing it into the car, while Mother gives me an impatient look. ‘You might like this to remind you.’

  ‘Thenk yew,’ says Grandma in a small, pinched, posh voice like the Queen’s.

  Auntie Bessie gives the instructions and then we stand back to watch the taxi drive away. Grandma sits staring forward and doesn’t look back at us once. All you can see when the car rounds the bend is a little white cloud of hair poking out above the top of the back seat. From here it looks like cotton wool.

  21

  She woke up to find the blankness had come back. The fizz and spin of the preceding days was nowhere to be found and instead there was only flatness, as though the whole world had gone stale. She looked around, dully. Grey light slanted in through a Velux window revealing a little attic room furnished with a bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe and a bookcase tucked under the sloping ceiling. The walls were painted primrose yellow and the carpet worn through in patches. She groaned as the weight of the previous day landed on her – the people in the bank, the streams of cars, Hellie’s face blown up and stuck to a road sign, surrounded by withering flowers, Nick, Heloise, Akela.

  The gash on her head throbbed and was hot when she touched it. She ought to get up, she knew. She ought to creep downstairs and get out of there, before Nick had a chance to stop her. She ought to find a way to get across London and back home to the flat, and then she should start making a series of assertive calls to Jobcentre Plus, demanding that her ESA payments be reinstated. She buried her head in her pillow and groaned. The idea was inconceivable. It was like suggesting a person with no legs jump across a ravine.

  The hours drifted past. Now and then sounds floated up from the house below: scampering feet; a door banging; muttered conversations; hissed arguments; once, unmistakably, the sharp edge of Mother’s voice. A couple of times there was a quiet knock – once she heard a giggle – but she always ignored it, turned over and closed her eyes again. Sleep cocooned her. Reality went out like the tide, until it was nothing but a grey sliver at the end of miles of gravelly beach.

  When she went to use the little bathroom at the end of the corridor, she found a tray bearing a plate of fish pie waiting for her. She left it where it lay, congealing and going hard round the edges. She did the same with the pile of clothes left there too: jeans, woolly jumpers, T-shirts, thick socks, some sensible knickers and a handful of bras. Hellie’s things. As if she was going to buy into the cruel joke of putting those on.

  In the late afternoon she found she was sick of lying in the bed, so she got up and paced around the room. The furniture was battered and mismatched – a world away from the subtle pieces composed just so in the living room downstairs. Glancing at the bookshelf next to the heavy chest of drawers, she saw with a jolt that it was the one that had been in her and Hellie’s room back in Mother’s house. There was the chip on the shelf from when she’d hurled the glass of water and there the deep scratch from her boot as she’d clung on when they’d tried to drag her away that final night. She lay down on the floor next to it and ran her finger along the mark. More than fifteen years later, the cheap wood still showed up pale and vulnerable against the dark veneer.

  She found a lighter and a pack of elderly Marlboro Lights on top of a pile of clutter in the bedside table and smoked one out of the skylight, peering over the ledge into the garden: a rectangle bounded by a brick wall and trees backing on to a park. She could see the glass roof of the kitchen extension jutting out below her. The room inside was airy and light, and dominated by a large, spiky vase of irises plonked in the centre of the table. The flowers seemed to watch her resentfully, like a crowd of little Mothers, as she took each drag.

  At the other end of the lawn sat a building with a roof jutting up at a sharp angle at one end. There was a porthole next to the door and a glazed section at the lower end and the whole thing had the feel of a boat crashed into a conservatory. It took her aback – so edgy did it seem, so un-Hellie – and stare at it as she might, she couldn’t work out its purpose.

  She was just sliding another cigarette from the packet when the door of the room juddered and a piece of paper slipped underneath it. She picked it up to find a message printed in an uneven hand:

  Dear Mummies Friend

  How are you? I am fine.

  We went to the park but then we came home. The end.

  Love Heloise.

  She turned the paper over but there was nothing more to it, apart from a shopping list scribbled and ticked off in Mother’s spiky handwriting.

  A few minutes later there was a scratching sound at the door and another bit of paper slipped underneath:

  Dear Mummies Friend

  You can right back if you like. The end again.

  Love Heloise.

  She laid the paper to one side, intending to ignore it, but five minutes later another slid through:

  I am waiting for your ansa.

  Frustration flared. Smudge went to the door and opened it.

  ‘Look,’ she said t
o the little figure standing there. ‘I’m not going to write back, OK? Just… go and play somewhere else.’

  A pair of grey-blue eyes stared up at her above a trembling bottom lip. Smudge sighed and ran a hand over her face.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be angry. I just… don’t like writing letters.’

  Heloise stared at her.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  She blinked. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not very good at it.’

  ‘Why?’

  (A voice cleared its throat in her head. Shit, that was all she needed.)

  ‘Jesus,’ she muttered, rolling her eyes. ‘Look, I’m just not, OK? For fuck’s sake!’

  The eyes creased and the mouth blossomed, shaping a wail.

  Fearful of who might come if Heloise started to cry, Smudge took her arm and pulled her into the room.

  ‘Shhh!’ she hissed. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be nasty. I’m just not very good at controlling myself sometimes.’

  Heloise regarded her solemnly. ‘Like your insides are too close to the surface?’ she said.

  Smudge looked at her, surprised. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose. Something like that.’

  Heloise looked at the bed and the coat on the floor beside it.

  ‘You don’t have a lot of things, do you?’ she said.

  Smudge twitched and reached up to drum her fingers on the frame of the skylight. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said.

  ‘Is that ’cos you’re poor?’

  ‘I—’ In Smudge’s mind, black fireworks started to explode, coating her thoughts with dark glitter.

  Heloise went to the window and bounced up, gripping the sill to look at the view until her arms gave out. ‘What’s it like being poor?’ she grunted. ‘Is it like the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins dancing on the rooftops?’

  Smudge ran a hand over her eyes. A guitar struck up inside her mind, thrumming out the introduction to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with ominous intensity. ‘Not exactly,’ she said.

  Heloise bounced again. ‘Or like My Fair Lady with the people selling flowers and hats that you strap on your head?’