by Ann Morgan
‘I’m sorry,’ you say again. ‘I’m just not able to be myself. I haven’t been for a long time.’ The shadows in the corners flex and pulse, ready to rush in and steal all this away. You can’t bear it. ‘But you should know, I’ve never been so happy,’ you say in a rush. ‘I love this life. I love what I’m doing here. I might not be Trudy, but I am really, truly me.’
You sit back and stare at the floor. Your voice echoes in your ears: pleading, needy. You know you’ve blown it now. First rule you learnt in the unit: never show your weakness to anyone, never reveal what you really care about. People will only ever use it to fuck you up. You sit and wait for it all to come tumbling down like a pack of cards.
The silence lengthens. You look up. A light glimmers in Anton’s eyes. ‘Hmmn. By rights I should sack you on the spot,’ he says. He glances up at the ship’s barometer. He takes a deep breath. ‘But perhaps we all have our reasons for not doing what’s expected of us from time to time.’
He coughs again. ‘Just tell me one thing,’ he says. ‘You’re not in trouble with the law, are you?’
You look at him steadily. ‘Not any more,’ you say.
He nods. ‘I see.’ He lifts one hand and taps his fingers on his top lip. ‘And I’m not going to have the police pitching up? Or anything nicked?’
‘Nothing like that,’ you say.
‘You’re not a murderer, are you?’
The abruptness of it – the look of unease on his usually complacent face – almost makes you want to laugh. You rein it in. Now would not be the time.
‘No,’ you say.
Anton looks at you, some sort of calculation going on behind his eyes. Behind him, in the square of sky above the yard, a plane glides into view and seems to disappear into his left ear. You picture it soaring down the canal, getting lodged in the passages of his brain.
‘OK,’ says Anton with a sigh. ‘I hope I’m not going to regret this… You can stay.’
You blink. You look around. The walls are still standing. Outside, your desk is still waiting for you, the easel poised for your next idea. The world has not collapsed.
A flood of feeling engulfs you – all your emotions switched on and blaring. You stand up in your excitement.
‘Thank you,’ you say. You want to run and embrace him, but something holds you back. You’ve never done that before. Perhaps he wouldn’t welcome it.
Anton recognises your impulse and looks pleased and embarrassed.
‘That’s all right,’ he says, holding up his hands. ‘But we keep all this between us. As far as the rest of the team are concerned, you’re still Trudy who came to temp. The first hint of any kind of… dodgy shenanigans and you’re out. Understand?’
You nod energetically and make for the door.
‘Hold on,’ says Anton. ‘There’s something else.’ He gestures to the armchair again.
You sit back down, pulse racing, gladness and anxiety fizzing in your blood. He fiddles with a stack of papers on his desk.
‘An opportunity’s come up: three months’ work for a client in Amsterdam. They want two artists. Big, ambitious project – creating twists on Old Masters to launch a new tablet. I was thinking of sending Edmund and, er, you. If you’d like to go…’
You shrug. ‘Love to,’ you say.
‘Well, that’s a relief anyhow. At least you’re not a convicted drug mule,’ he guffaws, and looks at you. ‘Sorry. Bad taste. They’ll want you to send some preliminary ideas over and then be out there solidly from about four weeks’ time, but you’ll have to do quite a lot of preparation in between and some wrapping up afterwards. We’re probably looking at roughly six months’ work all told. Perhaps under the circumstances a bit of time away wouldn’t be a bad thing. Sound like something you’d be interested in?’
You nod again. ‘Absolutely,’ you say.
When you get out of the office, everyone’s looking at you.
‘You were in there a long time,’ says Edmund. He’s wearing a Pearl Jam T-shirt today and his jawline is dark with stubble.
You shrug and try to appear nonchalant through the maelstrom of excitement swirling round your head, the euphoria at finding everything still here unchanged. Trudy’s life – your life – exactly as you left it. You think it must be like coming back to your house after you’ve been told it’s been burgled and finding that the thieves have left everything just as it was. Untouched.
‘So what did he want then, old Tim-Nice-But-Dim?’ continues Edmund.
The others are trying to pretend they’re not listening, fiddling with things on their desks. Gayle the copywriter is tapping away at her keyboard, but you know she’s probably just typing random letters the way she does when she wants to eavesdrop on Matt’s fights with his wife.
You shrug again. ‘Oh, you know. This and that. Just seeing how I was doing.’
Edmund sneers. ‘Half an hour’s a long time to be seeing how you’re doing,’ he says. ‘What else did he say?’
Something in you warns against it, but you’re happy and so relieved that you just blurt it out. ‘Amsterdam,’ you say. ‘He told me about you and me going to Amsterdam for this big client job.’
The others abandon the pretence of busyness and straighten up like meerkats. Edmund frowns.
‘Amsterdam,’ he says. ‘What the fuck…?’
‘Yeah,’ you say. ‘He’s sending you and me for this big tablet campaign. New twists on Old Masters or something.’
Edmund nods. ‘And of course he decides to tell the fucking newbie, the fucking receptionist-who-draws-a-bit, before he runs it past the senior fucking designer who’s only been in the job five fucking years!’
‘Ed—’ cautions Gareth, peering round the side of his easel.
‘No, I’m sorry, this is fucking bullshit. First he promotes her without asking me, and now this. I’m not having it!’ storms Edmund, and he strides across the studio and bursts into Anton’s office, slamming the door behind him. Muffled voices come through the wall.
You go to your easel as the others shift uneasily on their stools. You pick up a pencil and think about roughing out your image of plane brain, but something in the room feels blocked as though all the doors and windows have been stopped up with cotton wool and no one can really breathe.
Five minutes later, Edmund is back.
‘Right. I’m out of here,’ he says. He goes to his desk and starts shunting paper aggressively into stacks which he crams into his bag.
‘You m-mean, you’re off for the rest of the day?’ ventures Gareth.
‘No, fuckface,’ says Edmund. ‘I’m done. I’m gone. Yesterday’s paper telling yesterday’s news. Or some shit.’
‘Now hang on,’ says Gareth, holding up his hands. ‘Surely there’s some a-way to sort this out.’
‘No,’ says Edmund, ripping a half-finished sketch showing a monkey eating a Mars Bar off his easel, screwing it up and hurling it at the bin. ‘I’ve had it with this place. The whole thing’s a joke. I didn’t spend three years working in McDonald’s to pay my way through art school so that I could sit around taking orders from some clueless public-school boy with a chip on his shoulder about not getting into the navy. I’m telling you, I’m done.’
‘What about Amsterdam?’ you say.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Edmund, rounding on you with a bitter smile. ‘Your jolly’s still on. I told the boss to send Mahatma Gandhi here with you instead. Better get on with packing your knickers and passport. Just don’t count on this place still being here when you get back.’
The conversation continues, jerking back and forth between Edmund and Gareth with Matt and Gayle interjecting now and then, but you don’t hear it. With Edmund’s words, that airy, buoyant feeling you’ve carried since your meeting with Anton disperses like so much hot air. Another obstacle looms on the horizon, blotting out the light: a passport.
All afternoon, the issue preys on your mind. Long after Edmund has packed up and stormed out and Anton has shuffled through, m
uttering something about all pulling together and a lunch meeting in town, it lingers. When the others crowd round Matt’s laptop to watch a YouTube video of a surprise proposal at a mud-wrestling tournament, you sneak away to one of the Macs in the far corner and spend an anxious few minutes tapping questions about passports into Google. It frustrates you how slow you are with things like this: the years in the unit just as everyone else was discovering the internet have made you clueless and clumsy. Your fingers fumble over the keyboard. Nevertheless, what you do find isn’t good news. A passport will require a birth certificate and fuck knows where you’re going to get one of those.
Come hometime, you slip out without saying goodbye to anyone. The heat of the day radiates off the pavement, making your face hot. You walk through street after street: past the old police station, the park, the parcel depot, and up under the railway line. Before you know it, you’re walking blindly, choosing turnings at random. Stretch upon stretch of terraced red-brick housing with front doors opening straight on to the street. Smells of dinner drifting out of windows, the stern tones of the six o’clock news. You don’t know where you are, but then a familiar landmark looms on a corner: a pub with dried-up window boxes and a flaking sign. The Coach and Horses. It seems unavoidable, just as if it has been drawing you here all along. Before you know it, you’re at the door and going in.
You look over at the corner, but there’s really no need: he’s there, just as you’ve known he would be. He’s almost the only person in the place. The bartender is slumped at the bar, gawping up at a home-improvement show playing silently on the screen above the fruit machine. There’s a glossy couple sitting by the window with a guidebook open on the table between them: tourists lost while searching for the real Manchester. Other than them, there’s no one else.
You walk over to him. You cough. He looks up.
‘I need a passport,’ you mutter. ‘How much?’
He takes out a cigarette and taps it on the table. Recognition drops into place on his features like a line of cherries on the fruit machine.
‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘Been a while.’
‘How much?’ you say again.
He sits back in his chair, head framed by the wall and a Save the Children collection box on the shelf beside him.
‘I often think about you, you know,’ he says with a smirk. ‘Even now. I think about you long and hard. Sometimes very hard.’
You set your jaw. ‘Fuck you,’ you say quietly.
‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding and weaving the cigarette through his fingers. ‘That’s one of the things I think about. That attitude of yours – that little bit of spark that no one could ever get to. You were a special girl, Ellie. My special girl.’
A wave of feeling surges through you, threatening to fill your eyes with tears. You bite it back and think of hard, cold things: doors clanging shut, clipboards, plastic chairs in bare rooms. After what you’ve survived today, you are not going to let him get in your way.
‘Look, are you going to help me or not?’ you say.
He sniffs. ‘Oh yeah, I’ll help you,’ he says. ‘For a price.’
You shift impatiently. ‘That’s what I said,’ you say. ‘How much?’
He looks you up and down, taking in your coat from Marks and Spencer, the bag you picked up in an Oxfam shop.
‘A grand,’ he says. Then his gaze shifts to your crotch. ‘Unless you can suggest another way to pay.’
You think of the money mounting up steadily in the account Beryl helped you set up. You’d hoped for something better for it than this.
‘Fine,’ you say. ‘A grand.’
Surprise flashes in his eyes. He scrambles to cover it. ‘Two.’
You shake your head. ‘You said a grand.’
He shrugs. ‘Inflation. Guess you’d better get creative.’
You narrow your eyes at him. Over by the window, the tourists stand up to leave.
‘By the way,’ you say, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask: how’s Mary?’
The shutters come down over his eyes. ‘Dead.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ you say. ‘Overdose, was it? Slash her wrists? Or did your bastard father fuck her to death the same way he tried to do to you?’
He fidgets and drops the cigarette. ‘All right, fuck it,’ he says. ‘I’ll do it for a grand.’
He pulls a curled bit of paper out of a pocket inside his leather jacket. ‘Write down what you want on there,’ he says. ‘Name, date of birth, all that shit.’
You write Trudy’s name and that she was born in Camden. Then you put that she was born in 1984 and for her birthday you give today’s date.
51
She spent every hour she could with Hellie. Sometimes she read to her from the letter or the pile of books that Nick had brought (although she avoided Frankenstein with its tortured margin notes). She agonised for a while over the eighty pounds he’d left, itching to stuff it into the Syria relief fund collection box at the nurses’ station and have done. Then she decided to keep it – she had no idea how long she might be here and it was probably a good idea to have something to keep her going other than filching from the nurses, especially as one of them had started narrowing her eyes when she passed her in the corridor. As Nick could barely be bothered to visit and Mother and Akela hadn’t appeared once in the time she’d been there, Smudge would treat the money as a contribution to Hellie’s welfare, enabling her to stay and watch over her. She tucked the notes under the big tub of hyacinths sent by the Room for Improvement producers. When she wasn’t reading the scraps of the letter, she kept them there too. It seemed safer than carting it all around in her coat pocket, with its corner that was starting to tear.
She did what she could to keep Hellie comfortable and thought about ways to draw her out. One day, in a charity shop along the South Circular, she happened upon an old cassette player and a selection of tapes with music from the nineties – Blur, the Spice Girls, No Doubt. Exactly the sort of saccharine stuff Hellie used to love. She snapped them up and took them to the ward. A nurse gave her an approving glance as she fumbled to plug it in.
‘Music and the radio is good,’ she said in a Trinidadian lilt. ‘We’ve seen so many people improve because of it.’
‘Really?’ said Smudge, straightening up, her face flushed. ‘I thought we were past any chance of that now.’
The nurse leaned in conspiratorially. ‘The doctors won’t tell you this, but don’t give up,’ she said. ‘While there’s life, there’s hope.’
Smudge put on the Spice Girls. Synthesised gusts of sound enveloped the room, filling it with faintly robotic voices. She closed her eyes, shocked at the vividness of the images that crowded her head: Hellie dabbing on lip gloss on a Saturday evening, while she, Smudge, sat hunched on the bed against the wall. The giggles of the popular girls from school as they sat around Hellie on the bus, sharing headphones, chewing gum and poring over More and Just 17. The strains of ‘Two Become One’ drifting down the staircase as she let herself out of the front door and made for the park and the dark oblivion of the trees.
When she wasn’t reading or playing music to Hellie, she’d talk. As the days went by, she found herself dredging up more memories and bringing events out into the light that she hadn’t thought about in years. Her mind was full of the past. The more she said, the more there was to say. Pictures and incidents thronged her brain, clamouring to be taken up, considered, expressed. She remembered the time they first met Mary loitering by the swings and the games in the park and a birthday party – had it really happened? – where Father donned a red nose and pretended to be a clown. It was as though they were rebuilding the past between them, piecing it together, her speaking and Hellie listening, and thereby making it real. Sometimes she almost felt that Hellie was speaking too, so sudden and unexpected were the images that crowded into her head, as though they had been suggested not by her own mind but by someone else who had also been there.
Some days she lost track of t
ime. Morning bled into afternoon, which merged with evening, as though someone were blurring the day with water and a thick brush. Visiting hours ceased to mean much. She popped out when it occurred to her to do so; otherwise she sat in the chair by the window and talked to Hellie. When June, the Trinidadian nurse, was on duty, she turned a blind eye and let Smudge stay on long after the sun had sunk below the skyline, plunging the city into an orange gloom. Sometimes she even brought her sandwiches, slipping them on to the locker with a wink.
Slumped in the humming dusk as the monitors winked and the machines sighed, Smudge found time surged and receded. Now the beeping was coming from the machines around Hellie’s bed, now it was the lorry reversing outside their house that summer afternoon, bringing Akela’s clutter to their lives, and sometimes it was from contraptions in an amusement arcade. Next it was the beeping from the supermarket checkout as Mother stuffed items absently into bags, staring over their heads out into the car park. Smudge was five, fifteen, her own age; she was Helen, Ellie, Trudy then Smudge again. Pictures flowered. Real images sprinkled with the taunts of Neverland. Never was.
She sat in the pink leatherette chair by the window and watched Hellie’s chest rise and fall, the shifting of her eyelids. She matched her breathing to her twin’s, pulling the air in and out in unison with her until she had the impression that if she stopped, they might both of them founder and die, floating to the surface of the room like fish in a freak-show aquarium on some ghastly pier. Those were the times when she felt – so keenly it was painful – how much she wanted her sister to live. Those were the moments when her desire to hear Hellie speak was so strong that it cancelled all other thoughts and sensations, shunting the paraphernalia of her disordered brain to the far reaches of her consciousness and crowding out the whispers and mutterings of her mind, so that all the while she was in the hospital the voices that usually picked over her thoughts like vultures did not say a word.
52
You and Gareth spend the afternoons in the lead up to the trip playing with classic paintings like children experimenting with Lego, taking the constituent parts and arranging them into outlandish shapes. You introduce Picasso’s angular women to Gainsborough’s aristocratic beauties. You set Hockney-style sailboats afloat on Constable seas.
