The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  DO IT, says Bella.

  I don’t even make her ask again. I know exactly what she means, and I do it because I want to do it too. I pick up the bag casually, in passing. I don’t pause. The people beside it are asleep, just as I was when my stuff was stolen. I am shaking all over as I carry on walking, and when I reach the wide pavement I run. I run through crowds of people, back in the direction I came from. I wish there was a zombie parade now. I know that by running while looking what Fiona Black would have called ‘a fright’ and holding what is probably an expensive bag (I hardly looked), I am drawing so much attention to myself that I might as well have THIEF written on my forehead in Portuguese.

  I take a deep breath and slow down. I pull the bag up over my shoulder and try not to look suspicious. The last thing I want is the Rio police picking me up now that I have chosen this path. I cross the main road, running between cars that hoot at me and slam on their brakes, and head up a side street, and down another. This is tourist Rio; I would be better off in the alleys of the favela.

  I stop and edge over to a building and let my legs give way so I’m sitting on its marble doorstep, because I’ve just realized something that changes everything. I have lost my passport too.

  It was in my bag, and now it is not in my bag.

  I can hardly do a thing now. Not officially.

  DOESN’T MATTER.

  YOU WEREN’T GOING TO USE IT TODAY.

  WORRY ABOUT IT LATER.

  I stand up and force my legs to walk down the road. In a tiny park I sit on a bench and try to look casual as I open this new bag. It’s a stripy canvas one, bright pink and bright blue, with a gold clasp. It is distinctive, and I need to lose it. I take all the things out of it and drop them straight into my old bag, stuff the new bag into a nearby bin and walk off.

  I keep walking in the direction of the favela, and when I find another bench I sit on it and open my old bag to have a proper look at what I have stolen.

  There is a purse, but it only contains a small amount of cash. I have a credit card in the name of Jens Bierhoff, but I don’t have a clue how to get money from that because its PIN almost certainly won’t be my birthday. I have an iPhone, and a book that I think is in German. There are a few other cards in the purse, but they will be no good to me. If I was nice I would just take the cash and leave everything else on the steps of a police station, but I have committed two crimes now, so I am not nice at all. I keep the purse, put all the cards in the trash except the credit card, just in case, and count the money as quickly and surreptitiously as I can.

  On the other side of the street a group of boys with skateboards are staring at me. They know what I’m doing. I start to walk away but they follow, and so I walk faster and they call things out at me. I don’t think they like my skinhead look. It’s impossible to tell what kind of things they are saying: they could be yelling at me for being a thief, or they could be inviting me to join their gang. When they start to hiss I speed up, running back to the main road and getting on the first bus I see. I grab some coins from kind Herr Jens Bierhoff to pay my fare.

  The bus takes me away. I don’t care where it’s going. I stay on to the end of the line, and then I get off in a random suburb and sit on a bench to wait for another bus to take me somewhere else.

  I look at the German’s iPhone.

  I STOLE FROM A STRANGER.

  I STOLE.

  I

  AM

  A

  CRIMINAL.

  I

  AM

  AMAZING.

  I’m not amazing.

  It all crashes quickly. At home Bella was separate from me, compartmentalized. Now I need her strength but I cannot bear the badness. I crumple as I stare at the phone. My strength and excitement drain away.

  My catalogue of bad things is growing.

  I tried to hurt Fiona Black, and in fact I wanted to kill her.

  I hurt that café man, and I did it on purpose.

  I stole a bag from a beach so I didn’t have to ask anyone for help.

  I want to say it was Bella, and not me, who did those three things, but it wasn’t, because Bella is me.

  No one will find me here. The phone doesn’t have a passcode. Before I know what my fingers are doing, they have called Fiona Black’s mobile number, with a 0044 country code at the start.

  I only want to hear her voice. I tried to kill her, and she knows that, and I want to hear, from her voice, whether or not she can forgive me.

  I struggle to breathe as it starts to ring. It rings with an international tone, and then the woman I always thought was my mother actually answers.

  ‘Hello?’ she says, sounding fast and desperate. I don’t say a word because I tried to hurt her, and I really meant it and she knows I did, and that fact will be there forever.

  I form the shapes of the words I cannot say with my mouth.

  Hello.

  Mum.

  Seconds pass. This is the voice I heard from babyhood, the one I believed when it told me who I was. It is not, however, the first voice I ever heard. She used to say she had given birth to me, but she never did. She is not my mother.

  But she is my mother. She took me in and cared for me and I hate her and I love her.

  I’m hungry. I want to go home. I don’t know where that is.

  ‘Hello?’ she says again. ‘Ella? Is that … Ella?’

  I cannot bear to listen and yet I cannot hang up. I take a deep gasping breath and she hears it. A weird animal sound comes from the back of my throat.

  ‘Ella,’ she says. ‘Ella, darling. If it’s you, then don’t –’

  I press the button. I cannot hear what she was going to say. I throw the phone into a bin and find a bus that’s going to Rocinha, which seems to be the way you spell the favela I slept in last night. I get on, and I stay there until it goes through the tunnel, and then I get off by the juice shop, and this time I walk up the hill myself.

  I haven’t had anything to eat or drink for a long time, and that doesn’t help anything, and I have nowhere to sleep. Still, for some reason it feels better to be here than it does to be anywhere else. I buy a bottle of water and a bar of chocolate and I eat and drink as I walk. I see a sign for a guest house and knock on the door, but the man who answers it says they are fully booked.

  I need to find a place to go and I don’t know what to do.

  10

  27 Days

  I am dozing and then alert.

  I am asleep and then awake. I am awake because something bad is happening. I am awake and my heart is pounding and there is something around my ankle and it’s someone’s hand. It is someone’s hand around my ankle, and it’s gripping me and pulling me hard towards it.

  I was asleep in a corner of an alley, and then this happened. A man I can’t see has grabbed me by the ankle, and my back scrapes along the ground as he pulls me towards him. Bella is yelling FIGHT! at me, and I scream and scream and scream, but then he puts his hand over my mouth. I struggle and try to bite him, but it doesn’t work because I can’t get my teeth around his hand. I kick and kick and flail around with my arms. I wish I had that broken bottle in my hand right now.

  I can’t scream, but someone else is yelling. Another voice says: ‘Get off her, you bastard! Get off her now!’

  Then the man is gone. I hear his feet running off down the alley. He was chased away by a woman shouting in English, but that can’t have happened and it must have been me, even though his hand was over my mouth.

  I don’t know what happened, but the man has gone and there is no one else around and it is still night and I know I can’t go back to sleep, and I can’t sleep on the streets any more and that means I am finished.

  I sit in the same place, the sheet of plastic I was using as bedclothes wrapped around my shoulders like a blanket, and wait, jumping at every sound, for it to be morning. I am so, so, so fucking bored and scared. I have broken myself and I’m hungry and I need water, and all I have is my little bag with s
unscreen and a few clothes in it.

  I get through to sunrise by thinking of lists and telling them to Lily. I send them to her in my head and hope she finds them popping into her brain and knows where they came from. That is all I can do: I can’t tell her who I am or the things I’ve done.

  The top three worst things about sleeping in the street, Lily, are:

  Danger. It’s dangerous: specifically with regard to rape and murder. So that makes it difficult to sleep.

  Sleep. It’s truly impossible to sleep because it’s not comfortable. Remember how hard it is getting to sleep when you’re camping, like when we did our D of E. Then at least you have a soft mat. Now I would give anything for a soft mat.

  Food. You’re so hungry all the time. And thirsty. And a bottle of water a day may be what you’ve decided you’re allowed, but it’s not actually enough. Food and water become impossible luxuries: you can’t decide you’re a bit hungry and go and get a piece of toast or a cookie. We used to withhold food from ourselves to make ourselves thin. That feels like a joke now. When you’re hungry it’s the only thing you can think about.

  Then I make another list.

  The top three people I miss so much it hurts:

  Christian. I wish you could meet him, Lily. I fell in love at first sight – I love everything about him.

  You. Lily. My best friend. I asked you to be my best friend forever and I wish you were here now because you’d know what to do. You would help me out of this. If I had to go to prison, you would come to visit me.

  Jack. I never told even you the truth about my relationship with Jack. I miss him. I miss our secrets. I hope he’s happy. I wish him all the light and joy in the world.

  I watch the sky becoming lighter, and as soon as it’s daylight I get up and fold my square of plastic and walk down to the beach so I can try to sleep there. The beach is out of bounds during the night: I know because I stood in the shadows and looked at it, and there were groups of men, and I don’t know what was going on but I knew it was no place for me.

  In the light of day I can see that I am filthy. I must smell terrible. I have no idea how Bella and I fended off that man, but we did. I guess you do strange things when your life is at stake.

  I walk down to the clean end of the beach, leave my bag on the sand, then take off my shorts and top and walk into the sea. I lie on my back and let the dirt wash away. My skin is terrible: it’s gone all dry down my legs. I won’t sleep outside again. I found the best spot I could, in the shadows away from the road, and it was no good.

  Today I need to steal another bag, hoping that this one will have enough money in it for me to sleep in a bed for a few nights, and to eat something that will fill me up. I wish I could go back. If I had my passport I could try to leave the country, but as it is I’m stuck.

  I get out of the water and pull my clothes on to my wet body and lie on the beach. A man comes over to me. I make a point of not looking but I sense him there, tall and muscular. I feel his gaze.

  ‘Hola,’ he says. I look up and he runs his hand over his head and smiles. I thought not having hair would stop me being interesting to men, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. They seem to want to touch my head. I thought that my skinny body with its horrible skin would put men off too, but it doesn’t.

  I shake my head. I want to shout and scream at him to go away, but I don’t want him to know that I’m foreign because that would make me more vulnerable and he might have seen me in the news, so I keep my mouth closed. He shrugs and goes away.

  I feel the hand around my ankle again and again. The fingers that gripped me are still there. Someone saw my body and wanted to take it.

  I put on some sun cream and lie down because I can’t do anything until I have slept.

  When I wake up I have no idea how much time has passed. I sit up and stare out at the paradise sea, the gorgeousness of Brazil, and I know that I have to decide whether to give myself up.

  There is something lying next to me that wasn’t there before. It’s a paper bag with words written on it. I pick it up to look at the writing.

  It says:

  Something to help you Jo. From a friend.

  It’s written in English, but not, I think, by someone who speaks English fluently: the letters are too carefully formed. This, though, is from someone who knows I am English.

  They think I’m someone else. They think I am Jo, but I’m not. This is meant for her, whoever she is, and they’ve given it to me. I open the package and find cheese balls, a little bottle of water and some money. It’s enough money to buy a coffee and more food. I drink the water quickly in one gulp and pause, breathing deeply, hoping that it’s not going to make me sick.

  When my stomach has settled I take a bite from a cheese ball. It has ham in it, and that is one thing I was not expecting. I have to run into the sea, my legs wobbling, so that I can be sick without anyone seeing. My stomach heaves and empties itself into the water with a surprising amount of vomit considering how little I have eaten; it disperses and a shoal of little fish appear and start to eat it.

  I get myself under control and walk back across the beach. All the water I drank has gone, and I am dehydrated again. I now know that this food has ham in it and I eat the balls slowly, one by one. They fill me up, and I feel stronger, better.

  A stranger left food beside me. That is actually scary. Someone has seen me and helped me, and quite possibly saved my life. I wish I knew who it was, and why, and who they think I am and who Jo is. I imagine a second homeless girl, a Jo. I wouldn’t be alone if I met her.

  I will go and buy more water because I am so thirsty I can hardly think. I will drag myself back to Rocinha and get water and coffee. Whoever just helped me is the opposite of the stranger who took my money yesterday when I was sleeping at the other end of this same beach. I get up and start walking, imaginary Jo at my side, keeping me going.

  I get there in the end, hot and with my head pounding and my legs screaming. I stop at the first café I see, and force a smile while I ask for a white coffee in the hope that milk will give me extra sustenance. I drink my water as slowly as I can. I order two cheese balls, which feels like a luxury when I have already had several ham ones. I don’t think about the spoiled girl who piled up food on her hotel breakfast plate without being hungry. However, I do remember Ana-Paula handing me a plate of rice and bean stew on Paquetá Island. Perhaps one day I could try to go back there. I could live with her and help her with the baby. Even Bella would be nice to that baby because Ana-Paula was so kind to us.

  Baby. That thought cracks me open, and I push it away.

  When I feel I can loiter no longer I go to the counter to pay. There is a woman at another table, a fat middle-aged woman, and she is looking at me with far too much interest. I keep my head down and turn my back. I know I look weird. I look homeless, and white and bald. Of course everyone stares. There is another woman with long tangled hair at her table, and she stares too for a while.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I say to the café woman, just in case, because why not?

  ‘Speak English?’ She nods, and shouts behind her. I am expecting her to produce another adult, but instead a tiny little girl emerges. The girl has shiny chocolate-button eyes and she looks away from me, shy.

  I realize that the woman is pointing at the girl’s T-shirt, which is white and clean and uncreased. It says: FAVELA ENGLISH SCHOOL in red capitals in a circular logo.

  ‘Favela English School,’ I say aloud. I try to get the girl to look at me.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I ask her, though I know she can’t because she’s only about three, or maybe five. I don’t really know much about children.

  Favela English School.

  ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star,’ she sings, and I laugh and join in, and she looks me in the eye and laughs too.

  ‘What is your name?’ I say. I crouch down so that I’m looking right into her face. This is the closest I have been to anyone for days, apart fr
om the man who grabbed my ankle.

  ‘My name is Ana,’ she says clearly, and everything about her is perfect and gorgeous. I want to cry. I was a perfect little girl once too. I thought I was. I didn’t know I was damaged and second-hand, even then.

  I point to myself. ‘My name is …’ I pause. Not Ella. Not Lily. I need a new name, and it needs to be bland. I need a name that could be Latin American so I don’t stand out. I have no idea what to call myself, and when I realize that the silence has gone on too long, even for a tiny child, I say the first thing that comes into my head. ‘Paula.’ I pronounce it Powla, the way Ana-Paula did on the island. The girl nods. She is called Ana and I am called Paula.

  ‘Hello, Paula,’ she says. ‘I am pleased to meet you.’

  ‘And I am pleased to meet you too.’

  She reaches out and strokes my head, and I let her. I am having a conversation, in English, with a toddler. I have food and coffee inside me and everything feels a tiny bit better.

  People who say that money isn’t everything have never tried to live without it. Money is literally everything. I sometimes used to give money to homeless people. I would fish out fifty pence and feel awkward and bad. Fiona Black donated money and food to food banks and said that was better than giving someone money when they would only be tempted to spend it on alcohol or drugs.

  Of course they want alcohol or drugs. I would love something that blotted out reality, even just for a few minutes. If I ever managed to go back to my old world, I would give money to every homeless person I saw. I would give them food. I would give them hot drinks filled with sugar, and I would give them alcohol too.

  ‘Where is your English class?’ I ask the girl, and her perfect forehead wrinkles as she doesn’t understand.

  ‘English school?’ I shrug. I look around, pantomiming a search for something. I point up the hill. I point at the house opposite, raising my eyebrows. I have to make this work. I hope I’m not too close to her because I know I must smell disgusting.