The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  I wonder whether my adoptive parents are still at the hotel, a few miles from here. As soon as they come into my head I try to force them away because I’m not ready for it. I know that I need to tell them I’m all right but I can’t see them yet. I dither, staring up the alley, knowing there is a payphone just up the hill, but then Bella steps in.

  NOT YET, she says, and she keeps my bottom planted firmly on the doorstep.

  I never feel in danger here because I rarely step out of doors. I’m done with wandering the streets, even just to get somewhere. When I do go out I am wearing my Favela English School T-shirt and everyone is friendly because I represent the organization, and the local people, I now see, are happy to have a free English school for their children in the area.

  I have stopped eating meat completely; it turns out that if you say ‘I’m vegetarian’, no one questions it or considers it momentous or even interesting. I remember looking at the poor battery-farmed chicken on the plane out here. I don’t need to use the corpses of animals to fuel my body. I don’t want to damage any creature. I have done quite enough damage. It’s actually easy not to eat meat because there are the always-wonderful cheese balls and there is rice and there are beans. We cook on a rota, and the menu often features the bean stew that saved me when I needed it. Last night it was my turn, and I tried to cook it without meat, and it came out just about edible, which was a triumph. Bella and I rejoiced together. She is always with me now, and I’m beginning to think that Brazil and this crisis have tamed her.

  It turns out I don’t even know how to chop an onion properly. Last night I started by plunging my knife into one and trying not to let it slide out of control.

  ‘That’s an interesting technique,’ said Jasmine, who was cooking with me, laughing as I tried to steady the slippery onion on the end of my knife. ‘How have you got to this age without knowing how to dice an onion?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nineteen years somehow passed me by, onion-wise.’ (I am pretending to be nineteen and no one questions that either.) I watched what she was doing, then cut it in half and sliced it in what I immediately saw was a far more sensible manner. I wished then, and I wish now, that the poor couple who adopted me had taught me this stuff. He used to make a Sunday roast from time to time. She would cook constantly, peeling vegetables, making her worthy soups, concocting bland dinners with lentils and ethically sourced meat, baking biscuits that didn’t have enough sugar in them. She never taught me a thing.

  I try not to think about my Hinchcliffe-Carr heritage. I don’t see the TV news or newspapers here. I am starting to learn to speak and write Portuguese: the first full day I was here I got a couple of nine-year-olds to start me off when they were finishing their pictures after the lesson. They found it hilarious that I was so bad.

  I focus totally on the children. Any child in the favela can come to classes here as long as they are registered, and there are lots of them. They come into the schoolroom from four years old until eleven, but it doesn’t stop there: we go out into secondary schools to teach English, and several times a week we run adult classes in different places around the town. I haven’t taught an adult class yet and I’m a bit scared by the idea of it.

  I am not starry-eyed about life here, no matter how different it is from the way I pictured a ‘shanty town’. I know that these children and their families are up against all kinds of things that I cannot imagine. I know there is a drugs problem. I know there are gangs and guns. I know there isn’t enough money. I know this because Ben and Maria talk about it; and from the things they say I know that it’s complicated. I haven’t seen any of it myself because I stay firmly where I am.

  I also know, when I let myself think about it, that if my birth parents hadn’t been caught when they were, then my life would have been hell. I would never have been Ella Black: I would have been someone else; and they probably wouldn’t have looked after me and I would have died like one of the neglected children you see in online news stories. They might have thrown me into the canal too.

  I was saved by the people I attacked, and I find myself wanting to save other children from the troubles their circumstances bring them. I want every child to have the same opportunities to get somewhere in life, no matter where they’re born, because otherwise it isn’t fair.

  I am starting to see how monstrously unjust the world actually is.

  As I settle in I start to understand a little more about Rocinha. It is not actually a favela, but a ‘favela neighbourhood’; a city in its own right, originally settled by people who came from the north of Brazil in search of work. It used to be run by drug-dealing gangs, but according to Ben and Maria that was actually less scary than it sounds as long as you weren’t involved. Some years ago the police came in and ‘pacified’ the place, which meant they got rid of the gangs and imposed law. People seem to be more ambivalent about this than you might expect.

  I still know nothing really. I’ll probably never even scratch the surface. It’s a hill with a huge number of people living on it, and it is energetic and desperate and brilliant and alive. Rocinha is now my home, and I am going to stay here for as long as I can.

  I would probably stay forever if they let me.

  I might not be able to leave Brazil actually, since I haven’t got a passport and I am probably on some database for attacking that man. Soon my entry permit will run out, I suppose, and I’ll be an illegal immigrant.

  ‘Some of us are going out tonight,’ Jasmine says to me at the end of the first class of the day. It was an art class and the children are still milling around. ‘Nothing massive. We’re just going to a bar up the hill for a couple of beers. Do you fancy it?’

  I love Jasmine, but I don’t even think before saying: ‘No, thanks. Hang on a second,’ I add to the little girl I’m drawing. ‘Stay still. That’s right.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame, Jo,’ Jasmine says. ‘It would be really nice if you came.’

  I have to try hard to remember all my lies: I am Jo, I have been in Venezuela, I broke up with a boyfriend. I stay away from social situations because I’m sure I’ll say the wrong thing. I also stay away because I have no money whatsoever. I used the last of the cash I had to buy toothpaste and soap and things like that. At least I don’t need shampoo these days.

  Jasmine is genuinely lovely though, and I wish I could be a proper friend to her. She reminds me of Lily because she is so kind to me. Without even knowing it she has done me immeasurable good. If she hadn’t invited me in when I first turned up I don’t know where I would be.

  ‘I’m finishing this tonight,’ I say, nodding at the pile of sketches I’ve been doing of the children. I don’t care that everyone thinks I’m weird or that most of the volunteers are nervous around me, probably because of my shaved head. I just want to stay in, out of sight.

  I finish my portrait. It’s a sketch of a girl called Gabriella. I shade in her plaits and hand her the sheet of paper. She gasps and checks that she’s actually allowed to keep it, then says, ‘Thank you, thank you, Teacher Jo,’ and rolls it up like a scroll to take home.

  That evening all the volunteers apart from me go out drinking. I stay behind and clean the kitchen. I may be weird, but this makes me happy.

  13

  16 Days

  I wake up smiling because I know it’s my birthday. Today I am eighteen, and that is a secret from everyone here. I will celebrate in secret, in my head. I always loved my birthday at home, and today I will love it here in Rio. I would hate it if anybody knew.

  Bella sings Happy birthday to us in my head and I like that. I hum along, hoping that it won’t wake Jasmine. I’m glad I know that this really is my birthday. Eighteen years ago I was born, no matter how fucked up it all was. I burst into the world, and I’m still here.

  I have been at the school for ten days, and today is the day on which Amanda Hinchcliffe can look me up on the Adoption Contact Register. She will find me there if she does: I applied to add my details a million years ago, when
the mother in my head was a wayward teen with a strict family who was going to be a big sister to me.

  It feels like a million years ago, and I feel like a different person. It was actually two weeks. Time has gone very strange.

  She will look for me now, but the contact details I left with the register were an email address that I will never check and a phone that I stamped on and shoved into a bin.

  I am eighteen. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. This is me being an adult. It doesn’t feel momentous. I had planned a little celebration for today at a pub in Kent to mark the fact that I am officially old enough to drink. There was going to be me and Lily and Jack, and probably a few of the others if they could be bothered to turn up.

  In fact my best birthday present turns out to be the arrival of the tiny child who unwittingly turned my life round when I was at my very lowest.

  ‘Ana!’ I say when I see her in the doorway. She laughs at the sight of me and runs into my arms. She giggles as I twirl her around.

  ‘Teacher Paula,’ she says carefully, beaming at me.

  ‘Oh. Here I’m “Teacher Jo”,’ I say in a quiet voice. ‘Teacher Jo.’

  ‘Teacher Jo.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Teacher Jo-Paula.’

  ‘If you like.’

  Ana sits at the front of the class and gazes at me as we sing the songs and point to colours. I smile at her the whole time. If I could change the world for one person it would be her.

  Later Jasmine hands me a brown envelope with the word JO written on the front. ‘I found it on the doorstep,’ she says. ‘Looks like it’s for you.’

  There is something small inside: when I open it I find two bracelets with pink flowers on them. They are clearly meant for children.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say. I haven’t mentioned my birthday to anyone at all. I put the bracelets on my wrist. It must be one of the children, giving me a present in exchange for my portraits or something. The timing must be coincidental.

  It must be.

  ‘Someone likes you,’ Jasmine says. ‘That’s because you’re so lovely with the kids. Bet it’s from one of the little ones.’

  I check the envelope, but there’s nothing else in there.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I guess.’

  It must be that. It must be a child giving me a sweet little present. It cannot be anything else. It can’t be a birthday present because no one knows it’s my birthday. No one knows where I am.

  Someone left food on the beach for ‘Jo’, and now someone has left a birthday present on the doorstep, also for ‘Jo’. But when I got the food I wasn’t called Jo, and now I am, and so it’s a completely different thing.

  It is.

  It

  is.

  14

  15 Days

  When I am eighteen years and one day old something bad happens. I am wearing the bracelets, hoping that one of the children will notice and tell me who gave them to me. I am feeling so strange about it that I don’t feel like myself. It is horrible. I haven’t felt this strange for a long time.

  It happens in the first class after lunch. An eleven-year-old called Bruno is cheeky, to make his friends laugh, and it pushes me right over the edge. Not very long ago I did the same thing myself to get Lily out of trouble: somehow I told Mrs Browning that her hair looked nice. But I didn’t do it to make anyone laugh. No one ever laughed at my jokes. I did it to get myself into trouble, and Lily out of it.

  No one gets to act like that in my class, for any reason.

  I am attempting to do some singing, and I know I sound ridiculous blasting out ‘Humpty Dumpty’, and I also know they’re too old for such a babyish song, but this is Heidi’s lesson plan, not mine, and I don’t appreciate Bruno’s giggles behind his hands, his whispers, his stirring up of revolution.

  ‘What is this song?’ he asks, pretending to be polite.

  ‘It’s about Humpty Dumpty,’ I say. ‘I know it’s a bit silly. But anyway, let’s try it again. All the King’s horses …’

  ‘But who is the Humpty Dumpty?’ he asks.

  ‘He’s an egg.’

  There is a moment’s silence.

  ‘An egg,’ echoes Bruno. ‘A fucking egg?’ They all burst out laughing. Fucking is one English word everyone knows. Bruno has the audience in the palm of his hand and they are laughing at me.

  I cannot let that happen.

  ‘Don’t use that word, Bruno. It’s very rude.’ I sound so fucking lame, when I am actually very fucking angry.

  Bruno turns to his classmates and does something with his face that makes them roar with laughter. I am Mrs Browning. I try to breathe deeply, but I can’t let it go.

  ‘Bruno,’ I say. ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything,’ he says, in Portuguese.

  ‘You know what you did,’ I answer, also in Portuguese. I switch to English because my Portuguese isn’t up to a lengthy conversation yet. ‘You swore at a teacher, for one thing. If you don’t want to take part in the class and talk politely, then you can leave.’

  He stares at me, as insolent as Bella. I stare back. He reminds me of myself in the grip of my demon and I don’t like it. Neither of us looks away. I know he wasn’t really swearing at me. But still. My head is starting to ring. I push her away frantically. I thought she was better now. I thought we were on the same side. I mutter the words that sometimes banish her.

  ‘No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should,’ I say jaggedly under my breath, and I don’t know if the children can hear me or not, and I don’t care. ‘The universe the universe the universe.’ Everything swamps me and I want to do something bad because it’s all too much. I was a child in a classroom and I was rude to a teacher, and that same day I was taken away by the Blacks in a panic, and then everything I thought I knew crumbled into dust and I can’t bear it.

  Bella wants to mess this up. She can see that we’ve salvaged a life here, and she wants to blow it up because that’s what happens.

  IT WON’T LAST, she whispers.

  It will.

  IT WON’T. THEY’LL FIND OUT THAT YOU LIED ON THE FORMS. THEY’LL THROW YOU OUT ANYWAY.

  No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

  I thought she was on my side, but now she’s not. I have to be the best person I possibly can because I want to stay here. It’s my home. I can’t be taken over and do something crazy. This mustn’t happen.

  My vision goes blotchy. Everything disappears around the edges, and I can only see Bruno. I need to attack him. I want to scare him. I mustn’t.

  LET ME AT HIM.

  No.

  HE’S BEING RUDE.

  No.

  HE CAN’T DO THAT. HE NEEDS A LESSON.

  He’s a little boy. He’s fine.

  I’M GOING TO TELL HIM.

  ‘You need to leave,’ I hiss it in English and then in Portuguese. I have to make this boy go away before I attack him. If I hurt a child everything will be over. I will be homeless, jobless, hopeless, and it will be what I deserve. I am sweating, struggling with Bella, with myself. I point to the door.

  ‘Go on, Bruno. Come back when you can behave and talk nicely. Go home. Go right now.’ I can barely get the words out.

  I watch him hesitating. He has to leave. My hands are twitching, desperate to grab him. I want to push him up against the wall and yell into his face. I want to pinch his skin. I want to hurt him.

  I have to get him away.

  Strive to be happy.

  The rest of the class sits shocked and silent. Bruno, thank God, gets up and walks out of the room, his shoulders drooping, clearly about to cry, and Heidi, the other teacher, looks surprised but doesn’t intervene.

  The universe the universe the universe. I have not needed those words for a long time.

  I sit down and let Heidi run the rest of the class.

  Go away, I say to Bella. I think my lips are moving but it’s OK.

  CAN’T.

  Ple
ase. Be nice. Help me. You were helping me.

  YOU KNOW IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME.

  That’s why we’re taking it one day at a time.

  YOU’LL BE FOUND OUT. YOU’LL STILL HAVE NOTHING. YOU MIGHT AS WELL GO OUT WITH A BANG.

  No, I tell her. No no no.

  My head clears slowly, and my ears go quiet, and I swallow back the tears and anger at myself and try to take deep breaths.

  She’s right. I will be found out any day now. I’ll still have nothing. That is all true. She is right.

  I go into the loo and wipe my eyes and wash my face. I want to be better than this. I lost control because I saw my bad self in that boy, but it was me projecting, and not Bruno. Bella was trying to sabotage everything, and she is a part of me, and I can’t let it happen.

  Later in the afternoon I find Bruno’s registration forms and ask around until I reach his house. He is sitting on the doorstep drawing a picture. I stand in front of him in the tight alley, and when he sees me he looks away again.

  ‘Sorry, Teacher Jo,’ he mutters. He looks back at the door of his house, clearly worried that I’m about to tell whoever is in there that he said ‘fuck’.

  I sit next to him. He bristles.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I am truly sorry. I was mean to you. I was feeling stressed.’

  He doesn’t understand stressed, and I don’t know how to say it in Portuguese, so I take his pencil and draw a little picture of myself with claws and fangs and a monstrous expression. I draw Bruno cowering. I draw myself back to normal with a speech bubble saying Sorry.

  Bruno smiles. I give him a little hug.

  ‘Sorry for fucking swearing,’ he says, chancing his luck, and I laugh and he does too.