by Emily Barr
The world is dark around the edges like a spooky photo. Everything else has faded away. Bird, book, cat, hammer.
Bella.
I feel sick, but not in a normal way. Nothing about this is normal for anyone but me.
I can see the bird trying to fly away, and I know it will never fly again. I am Bella, and I can do anything. I have the power of life and death.
I pick up the hammer, wait for a moment with it raised just high enough, savouring every second, and smash it down on top of the creature.
I
feel
it
crunch.
I
watch
it
shatter.
I stare at the remains. I love doing this.
‘Thanks,’ I breathe to the cat, and he inclines his head towards me in a you’re-welcome sort of way. A we’re-in-this-together way.
This is what it’s all about. I love it when I get to take over. I want to be her forever; I want her to stop being Ella Black and let me stay here, in her body. I could do anything.
The white noise starts to fade. I try to hang on to it.
I hate doing this, says Ella’s pathetic voice.
GO AWAY.
I am scared.
NO YOU’RE NOT.
‘Ella?’
The voice slices through everything and I am shrinking away to nothingness.
The ringing is back, but it’s quieter. I am Ella, cross-legged beside my bed, on the other side of the room from the door. It takes me seconds to come back to myself, to know that I am Ella again and not Bella, and when I do I push the hammer under the bed and jump to my feet. My legs wobble. My heart pounds so hard they must be able to hear it downstairs.
Lily is standing in the doorway.
I look around, gasping for breath, drawing in great lungfuls of air and trying to use them to force the last bits of Bella away. I am in my bedroom. The walls are pink and blue, with anime posters and my sketches of Rio de Janeiro. My clothes are on the floor. There is a photo collage of me and Lily and Jack, laughing, doing ironic duck-faced pouts, posing with our arms round one another. Everything looks normal.
Everything
looks
normal.
But I know nothing is normal.
I don’t know what she’s seen. I don’t know if she saw Bella lift the hammer and kill the bird. Bella is not here. She is not. Lily cannot see her. She cannot see this. She cannot. I push the darkness away, away, away.
In my head I say the words that bring me back to myself. They only work after Bella has done her thing and nearly gone.
The universe the universe the universe, I say.
The universe.
The universe.
The
whole
universe.
The only thing that chases Bella away is that cosmic perspective. If I think of the entire universe and how tiny I am, everything feels manageable because nothing matters. Nothing at all matters. Ella doesn’t matter and neither does Bella. Unfortunately, this really does only work when she’s on her way out. It doesn’t stop her arriving.
I discovered the universe thing by mistake. I was in the downstairs loo, aged about eleven, battling a demon I understood even less than I do now. I had my back against the locked door and I was pulling the wallpaper off the wall because I couldn’t control myself and I had to destroy something. As I did it, Bella started to fade, and I read a line in a poem that is still hanging up on our downstairs loo wall.
Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
The universe is unfolding.
It made Bella leave me alone. Now I’ve refined it to just the words the universe. I say them over and over again.
Bella has gone.
My lips move but I don’t think any sound comes out.
I must be nice.
Be nice.
Be normal.
I
have
to
be
normal.
Smile.
You
must
smile.
‘Oh, hey, Lily,’ I say. My voice trembles but the words are kind of right. ‘Um. Don’t come in!’
I snap the last bit as she steps into the room. She stops. I take a wobbly step towards her then sit on the bed because my legs give out.
‘Oh, Ella.’ Lily is lovely. She is confused by my snapping at her because I never do that. ‘Are you OK? Your mum said I could come up. I just came by because you haven’t got your phone and I wanted to –’ I see her look at my bed. I see her notice my phone. ‘Oh, you got it back?’
‘Yes. Back. Um.’
Be normal.
‘Sorry,’ I say. I form the word carefully, trying to say the thing that Ella would say. ‘The cat brought in a bird. It’s really grim. It’s made me sick. Sorry. Really don’t come in. I had to put it out of its misery. I … had … to …’
It’s too difficult to come back to myself. It’s harder every time. One day I won’t make it. One day I will be stuck as Bella. I know she wants that. I would hate it. It can never happen.
The ringing is fainter still, and then it just about stops. The edges of the world are sharp again.
‘Oh, shitting hell,’ says Lily. Lily could never understand, and I would never tell her because if I did she might not be my friend any more and I need her. I need her. She pulls me back, often, and always without knowing. ‘Oh, Ella. You poor thing. I’ve got a tissue. Hang on.’
She is walking towards me. Humphrey crouches, then runs, streaking past her legs and out of the room and down the stairs.
I pull her down to sit next to me on the bed and take her face in my hands. I cannot let her look at what I did. Her springy hair on my fingers grounds me. I am with Lily now.
‘Seriously,’ I say, my face right in front of hers. ‘Don’t look. I’ll clean it up. Could you maybe run down and get a plastic bag from my mum?’
I am hiccupping. It is all too much. I’ve always managed Bella better than this. I’ve always kept Lily away from her. Lately it has been getting worse.
‘Sure. Shit, Ella. You poor, poor thing.’ She puts an arm round me, and just for a moment I lean in and bury my face in her shoulder. Her hair is loose. It tickles my face. I cling on, and then I force myself to let go.
When she has left I put my head in my hands. This is awful; I can’t keep it up. Jack must have wondered why I needed him to leave. Lily actually walked into my room and found Bella in it. Next time it will be worse and then everyone will know. I can’t get my thoughts straight or stop shaking, but I have to clean this up. I can’t let Lily know, and I can’t let Jack know either.
They cannot know.
They
cannot
know.
I leave the poor smashed bird where it is, and fold the history essay around it. I am shaking, and a feather falls out of the package. I kick the textbook out of the way and try to pick up the stray feathers, though I really need to vacuum to get the carpet clean.
Mum will be pleased to see me spontaneously using the vacuum cleaner. So that will make everyone happy for a bit.
When Lily comes back with the bag I drop in the bird in its essay coffin, and drop most of the feathers in too.
‘I’ll just wash my hands.’
Lily ties the handles of the bag and takes it downstairs while I lock myself in the bathroom and try to breathe without it catching, without gasping or taking such shallow breaths that I feel dizzy. I wash my hands with lots of soap. I splash my face with cold water and soap, and I put on some moisturizer to make it soft and smooth. I take off my old eye make-up. I breathe in and out. In. Out. In, deeply. Out, deeply. I close my eyes. I remember smashing the bird. It made Bella happy, and Bella is part of me.
I do not want that to make me happy.
I do not want to be part Bella.
I do not want it to build up inside me like this.
I do not want to be someone who smashes birds with a hammer.
I do not want to be this girl.
2
37 Days
‘Ella!’ she shouts up the stairs. I notice that Lily is keeping away from my room after what happened on Wednesday. I grab my bag and run down the stairs, smiling, ready to be relentlessly nice all day long.
‘Hello!’ I say, super-enthusiastically.
She grins. ‘You look gorgeous.’
I don’t, but it’s lovely of her to say so.
‘You do,’ I tell her. She’s wearing skinny jeans and a big white shirt. ‘You really do. Classic and beautiful.’ I immediately feel messy beside her, in my leggings and long-sleeved T-shirt. I feel like a child, but that doesn’t matter.
Lily and I have been best friends for nearly ten years: that’s more than half our lives. We became proper friends at the age of eight, when we were put together for a school nature walk and let loose in the forest with a sheet of paper and a list of random things to collect. We went further and further from the base. I wanted to get lost to see what would happen (Bella was young then too, and she took a more random approach), and Lily was happy with that plan because she likes an adventure.
It didn’t go brilliantly, but we ended up friends.
As we walk into the kitchen to say goodbye to Mum and Dad, they stop talking and plaster on fake smiles. I wish they’d just argue properly – they are always breaking off a whispered fight as I come into a room. Dad is off work today because of his recent trip, and that means they get an extra day to hiss at each other, which is nice.
‘Hello, girls!’ says Mum.
Dad looks up from his paper as if he were absorbed in it. He might as well be holding it upside down because he definitely wasn’t reading.
‘All right?’ he says.
Mum is clattering about, cooking. I wish that sometimes she would read the paper while he cooked, but no. They just don’t do it like that. I’d like her to have a break sometimes. Dad does occasionally offer, but she insists on doing it all herself; she’ll only let us lay the table or take the compost out to the wormery.
Yes. My mother seriously has a wormery. It’s like three hundred pets that eat all our kitchen waste and poo out compost. I love them. Sometimes I take off the lid and stare at them. Once Bella tried to make me pour boiling water on to them and I had to run all the way to my room and slash one of my own paintings to pieces with a craft knife just to save them.
So Mum is cooking. She’s tall and blonde, just like I used to be (I am still tall unfortunately, but no longer blonde), and she beams as we walk through the kitchen, and says: ‘Would you like some soup, girls?’
Lily says: ‘That’s really kind of you, but we’re just off to Mollie’s.’
‘It smells great though,’ I say, even though it really doesn’t. Mum’s lentil soup is so thick you can literally use it as wallpaper paste. Once I stuck a sketch I’d done to the wall with it, just to see if it worked, and it’s still there today. It’s a picture of Humphrey stalking a mouse, and it’s on the wall to the left of the window.
Mum was out and I was messing around with Jack. I bet him that it would stay up, and it has, for months now. We laughed so much we cried. I do love Jack.
Dad and Mum both pretend we haven’t walked in on another silent argument, so it feels insanely awkward. Dad smiles at me and Lily and turns a page of his paper. Generally he is much easier to live with than Mum, because he does his thing and gives me all the space I need, which is a lot. I can talk to Dad about things and he’ll engage with me. The other day he said abstract art was rubbish, and I told him why he was wrong and he totally got it and changed his mind.
‘Watching movies?’ he says now.
‘Yep,’ I say.
‘It’s Psycho today,’ says Lily.
‘The Bates Motel,’ says Dad.
I don’t answer. Lily humours him for us both by singing a version of the shower music and Dad makes a stabbing motion, which I notice he aims at Mum.
We get on our bikes and cycle off. I love cycling. Even when you’re wearing a helmet the wind is in your hair. I like the way your legs hurt and you feel as if you’ve done something good. Sometimes I have even managed to cycle Bella away from me.
As I follow Lily, her hair springing out from under her helmet, I think about the fact that Mum and Dad are unusually happy to see me leave the house today, and I know it’s so they can carry on their secret arguing. I was always glad that my parents weren’t divorced like most people’s because I’d rather live with Dad (judging by what happens to other people I’d probably have to live with Mum), but now I wish they’d just do it already. I’m seventeen so I could live where I liked. I have no idea what is going on and why, and I certainly don’t want to think about one of them having an affair, so I guess I’ll just leave them to it.
Lily hasn’t seen her dad since she was eight, though she still gets money from him. That must be horrible, but she says it’s all she knows and so it’s perfectly fine, and she is indeed one of life’s happy people.
A couple of hours later we are in Mollie’s massive living room, almost at the exciting part of Psycho. I can’t relax here because I don’t belong: I know I’m only here because I’m with Lily. Mollie and the twins and Lily are all A-list and I’m a hanger-on, so I sit quietly on the squashy sofa with Lily, our legs pressed together, and that grounds me though I couldn’t say so. Mollie’s dad put a bowl of Maltesers in front of us a minute ago and they’re already half gone and I’ve taken most of them out of nerves. Everyone’s staring at the screen so they don’t even notice. I will do extra exercise later to make up for it. Mollie will be angry if she sees that I’ve taken all the Maltesers.
I know they don’t like me because I’m boring and scared and awkward. I look like one of them (or I did), but I’m not one of them. I say the wrong thing, or I say nothing at all, and generally they just act as if I wasn’t there. They don’t hate me though, so that’s something.
Mollie is applying for film studies at college and she’s trying to watch every important film ever made so she’ll be able to talk about them at interviews and get offers from everywhere. We are all watching them with her (or rather, she invited Lily and the twins to watch them with her, and Lily brought me along) because we will be off to uni next year too, and they all like the idea of being seen as cool and stylish film buffs. I do too, obviously, but mainly I just enjoy switching off and watching the movies. When I’m absorbed in someone else’s traumas, my own can fade into the background. It’s the same with books. It’s why I love reading and why I love painting too.
The idea of going away from here is weird. Unlike Mollie, I don’t know what I want to do or who I want to be. I only want to apply to art school, but you can’t exactly have a career as an artist (not according to the careers advisers at school anyway). Whatever it turns out to be, I can’t wait to leave this town because I only have Lily and Jack here and no one else cares about me, and if I was far away from Kent I might be OK. I might become a full-time Bella or, just maybe, I might finally manage to fight her and kill her off. I could be Ella all the time. I could be someone good.
I take a deep breath. Perhaps I should apply for film studies too. I’m enjoying this film. I wish the rest of them would stop talking so I could concentrate, though of course I can’t ask them to.
Unfortunately Lily is telling them about the bird. She didn’t tell them after it happened, but she’s telling them now.
‘God, Ella,’ says Mollie, looking as if she’s actually a bit scared of me, and perhaps she should be. ‘That is so fucked. I mean – here’s a bird in distress.’ She laughs. ‘Let’s get, like, Ella Black to put it out of its misery.’
She and the twins all burst out laughing. I look at Lily. She mouths, ‘Sorry.’
‘But,’ says Nisha, ‘that is seriously so gross. I literally couldn’t have done it.’ She lo
oks at me as if I might be a monster, as if this is a story that might travel like a bush fire around the common room, as if it is something that could make my life just that little bit worse, and I know it is.
I try to give her a bright smile, though I bet it comes out all wrong. ‘I just did what I had to do,’ I say. ‘That poor thing.’
I think those were the right words. I have to measure my words all the time when I’m with the Alpha girls. The slightest misstep and they become vicious. These aren’t the worst, not at all; but they are still bad, and everything is reported to everyone.
I imagine for a second what might happen if I told them that it wasn’t actually me who killed the bird, that it was my other self, Bella. My inner monster, who takes me over from time to time, who is scaring me by being brazen every time it happens. It would be the beginning of the end of everything. Within a couple of minutes I would be notorious throughout the school and beyond it.
The woman in the film has just got into the shower and I know this means the famous scene is about to happen. Everyone seems to have lost interest in me and we all stare at the screen as the Psycho music starts and Janet Leigh is murdered.
‘Ella, I’m so sorry,’ Lily whispers, right into my ear. ‘I didn’t mean them to –’
‘It’s OK.’ I cut her off. ‘Truly it is.’ And it is. I could be annoyed with her for telling them about the bird, but I’m not. She said it to make them sympathize with me, and it’s not her fault it didn’t work.
She takes my hand. ‘Love you.’
I spend the rest of the day as the hanger-on, being as nice as I possibly can. I always try to do that. Because I’m scared of the bad thing that lives inside me, and because Lily walked in when I was under Bella’s control, I work on being normal more than ever before. I concentrate all my efforts on being kind and helpful, not that anyone but Lily cares what I do. I sit with Mollie and talk her through the essay on Sons and Lovers, which I’ve done and she hasn’t, and she accepts my help and says, ‘Thank you.’ That feels like a breakthrough.
‘Why did you do that to your hair?’ she asks, picking up a strand of it in her fingers as we work side by side, and looking at it in distaste.
