The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  So I’ll need a passport.

  Ben comes into the room and says: ‘Morning, Jo! You’re up earlier than you should be, surely?’

  ‘Do you know anyone in Salvador?’ I say.

  ‘Salvador?’ He sits on the table beside me. ‘Are you on the move?’

  ‘Not sure. I might be.’

  ‘Just when your mum’s paid all that money?’ He sees me flinch and shakes his head. ‘Sure – I’ll see if I can do anything. I don’t know anyone up there doing what we do here, but I’ll do some research. I’d happily give you a reference. You should think about doing a TEFL qualification, you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I won’t really go to Salvador, but now Ben might tell anyone who asks that I was thinking about it.

  Because it’s Saturday, there’s just a class of teenagers to teach at ten. And then I’m free and after I’ve had a proper conversation with Jasmine, that’s when I’ll leave. Everyone who’s not working stays in bed. Lauren teaches with me but we ignore each other as best we can, and the moment the students have left she goes out. Jasmine’s not up yet. I will be embarrassed to see her, and I know I have to tell her a version of my full story now.

  The school’s computer is in the back room. I haven’t done this since Paquetá, but I take a deep breath and type the name of my birth mother into the search engine.

  Amanda

  Hinchcliffe.

  I hate those words. I cannot bear writing them, and I hate the words that come up, and I also hate the pictures. However, I need to take a proper look at them. I need to have an idea of what she might look like if she comes here to find me.

  I am looking for pictures of her on her release from prison, but however many pages of Google images I scroll through, they are all old ones. In the end I read some articles instead, and discover that she has been ‘given a new identity’ because public feeling about her crimes is too intense for her to be able to live safely.

  There are no photographs of what she looks like now so I have to look at her when she was seventeen. She was younger than I am now when she was arrested, and eighteen when she went to prison. When she was my age she was heavily pregnant. Now that I’m that age I am living under an assumed name in Brazil. That’s definitely a thing that criminals do: perhaps we are alike in a way.

  That thought is enough to propel me into fury. I am like my mother. Not so long ago I smashed a bird apart with a hammer. I attacked Fiona with a broken bottle. I slashed a man across the face. I stole a tourist’s bag from a beach. I slept rough. I lied and lied and lied.

  I am not going to be like her.

  I am not I am not I am not.

  YOU ARE.

  I don’t want to be.

  I stare at the photos. When I did this before I was looking for signs of myself in her face (and they are there, I know it; they are there more than I let myself see before). This time I am looking for signs of anyone I have ever met since I’ve lived in Brazil, or even before the Blacks whisked me away here.

  I stare at the grainy pictures, and it’s difficult to tell anything really. She could have made the calls and paid the money from anywhere. If she was here she would have come to find me by now.

  I read old articles about her life before she went to prison. She was the eldest of three children, with a younger brother and sister and an abusive father. She met Billy Carr (and I skip over him and everything about him and I always will) when she was fifteen. They did the bad things.

  If I let myself think about the things they did I would never think of anything else. If I thought about the fact that I was there – embryonic and innocent, but me, and on their side – then I would never be able to live a life.

  ‘Oh,’ says a voice behind me, and it’s Jasmine. ‘That’s that woman, isn’t it?’

  I turn round and look at her. She doesn’t seem scared of me. She doesn’t look as if she hates me now, after last night. In fact she puts a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘What’s that?’ I say. Jasmine has caught me looking at my birth mother. She knows who ‘that woman’ is. That woman from the news. That woman who did the killing.

  ‘That woman. That’s a long time ago – but isn’t it the woman from, you know, out there?’

  It takes me a while to get there. Jasmine is pointing vaguely towards the outside world, in the direction of the Estrada de Gávea. I turn and look at her, at Jasmine, at my friend. Her face is open and she’s smiling a little. She is dressed for the day in a black dress and strappy sandals: she’s not wearing her Favela English School T-shirt because she’s not working.

  I hear the class next door singing the ABC song.

  Jasmine pulls up a chair and sits down beside me. ‘What are you looking at this for?’ she says, and I realize that although her words have stabbed me through the stomach there is nothing that seems different about me yet. ‘Oh, God, is she from prison?’

  ‘Which woman?’ I say, and I hear my voice sounding light and casual, which is odd.

  ‘Oh, you know. She stopped me in the street a few weeks ago and asked where the language school is. She’s always around the place. Big woman.’

  I stare at Amanda Hinchcliffe’s face.

  I think of the fat woman.

  I stare at her face.

  I think of the woman.

  I stare.

  It doesn’t make any sense, but the thing that Jasmine saw instantly is there: they are the same person. She has put on weight, but prisoners probably don’t actually spend their time doing press-ups in their cells and striding around a yard. She has the same face now as she had back then, and parts of it are my face and I never noticed it even though Jasmine did.

  Mentally I scroll back through the times I’ve seen that woman. She was there when I was homeless. She was there when I met Ana and came here for the first time. She is always around, sitting in cafés drinking coffee, watching, half smiling. I thought she was local. I was going to strike up a conversation with her.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I say, and Jasmine looks towards the classroom, but they won’t have heard me because they’re chanting the colours. ‘Jasmine. Look. I promised I’d tell you the truth and I will.’

  Jasmine is rubbing my shoulder, and just for a second I lean back and let it happen.

  I tell Jasmine everything. I actually don’t leave out any of it. I tell her that my name is Ella Black, that a month ago I had purple hair, and then I tell her all the things that are harder to say than those ones are. I tell her that I was unhappy at home, that my only friends were Lily and my gay boyfriend, Jack. I tell her a bit about Bella. People start to come in and use the office so we move upstairs to our bedroom, and I talk about the mysterious dash to Rio, and show her the photograph of Christian and me dancing in the street. I tell her that I found out I was adopted, and attacked my mother, and then found out who I was adopted from. I tell her that I slept rough and a man grabbed me by the ankle and I stole a bag from the beach.

  I tell her that the monster is my mother.

  As I speak I stay calm, because Jasmine is there, listening to every word I say, biting her lip and not shrieking or looking horrified that she’s shared a room with me all this time, lending me her things and making me coffee when I most needed it. I know that Bella is in me, but she doesn’t need to take me over yet because Jasmine is here. Bella is saving herself for later. I know that.

  ‘So,’ says Jasmine, and she is so gorgeously calm about it all that I want to hug her. ‘What do you want to do?’

  I take some deep breaths.

  FIND THE WOMAN.

  Later.

  WE HAVE TO FIND HER.

  I know we do.

  OK. LET’S DO IT THEN.

  I can’t fly into a rage and attack the woman because that would make me as bad as she is. However, I know that nothing I do or say will stop Bella going out there to find her, and I don’t want to try, because I am Bella and Bella is me and we are going to find our monster and look her in the eye and we hav
e agreed on that.

  ‘I’m going to go and look for her,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  For once she isn’t at the café. She isn’t at the other café either. We walk down the hill but we don’t see her. That woman is the only person who has always been around: she is the first ‘local’ person I recognized. And now she’s not here.

  ‘We’ll find her,’ says Jasmine. She walks over to the nearest motorbike taxi and starts talking in her basic Portuguese, miming someone larger than herself, asking where she is. The guy shrugs and asks his friend. I sit at a table in Super Sucos, overwhelmed. This happened quickly and I cannot get my head round it; I try to convince myself that this woman might not in fact be Amanda Hinchcliffe. Surely she’s not allowed to come out of prison and fly straight to Brazil? I can’t begin to make sense of it.

  The motorbike-taxi guys are talking about her. They do at least seem to know who Jasmine is looking for. One of the waitresses from Super Sucos gets involved in the discussion. I don’t tune in properly. I would only understand half of it. I know enough to realize that Jasmine hasn’t told them why we’re looking for that woman.

  ‘We need to go up past the welder and turn left,’ she says when she comes back to me.

  I stand up and we do. We walk up the hill to the welder and turn left and walk for a little bit, and then Jasmine stops and asks an elderly woman who is sitting on her doorstep with a baby on her knee whether she’s seen a woman who speaks English and is quite big anywhere around here, and the woman nods and points and explains something too quickly for us to understand, but in the end I manage to catch it. We do our best to follow her instructions, and when we find ourselves in a tiny alley with a sign in front of us that reads PENSÃO, we look at each other.

  ‘Give it a go?’ says Jasmine. ‘That means guest house. So we could go in and ask. If you want to.’

  I open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out, so I take a deep breath and nod, and then I force some breath out of my lungs and say: ‘I want to.’

  Jasmine takes my hand and squeezes it. I squeeze back.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper.

  ‘She might not be here,’ says Jasmine. ‘But she might. It’s worth a try. I think you have to see her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My legs tremble as we walk up the path. I can’t knock on the door so Jasmine does it, and there’s a woman standing there who is not the woman we’re looking for. This woman asks if we want a room and Jasmine says yes, and I don’t know why she does that but I follow them in. The landlady is talking, showing us stuff. She takes us into a room with two beds in it and points to things, and although she’s talking slowly because we’re foreign, and although I can understand what she’s saying, I don’t focus. I slip away, out of the door, and look around.

  There is a bathroom. It’s small and clean and white. I go through another door and walk into a kitchen, which is empty, with a pot bubbling on the stove. The door next to it is a bedroom, perfectly tidy with the sheets pulled tightly over the bed.

  Then I push open the door next to it.

  And I stop, and I stare. The ringing in my head is so intense that I can’t do anything except stand there. My vision is blotchy around the edges, but I can’t have that.

  You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to take control. We can do this together.

  WE’LL GO IN?

  Yes.

  JOINING FORCES?

  Yes.

  WE’LL SORT THIS OUT.

  Together.

  The other rooms here were immaculate. This one is quite messy.

  That is not the thing.

  There are clothes spilling out of a suitcase.

  That is not the thing.

  There is a glass of water beside the bed, a book of meditations, a bead necklace, a tiny teddy bear.

  Those are not the thing.

  The walls. The walls are the thing.

  The person who lives in this room has covered the walls, which are wallpapered in green and white. She has covered them with pictures.

  She has covered the walls with

  pictures

  of

  me.

  I stand there, swaying, and stare at the largest photo on the wall opposite me. It’s a photograph of me when I was Ella Black. I know when it was taken. I am wearing school uniform, and I am smiling at a camera and holding a little cup.

  I won that cup for cross-country, and a girl called Margot, who came second, was furious with me. The photo was on my school’s website: I have never had an actual copy of it. Amanda Hinchcliffe has printed my photo from the school website. I am trying to remember whether my name was on it. I think it was: it was from a ‘news’ section, because my victory in the cross-country was news.

  I am trying to remember because this feels important. Did this picture say Ella Black underneath it? I cannot be sure. If it said Ella Black, she could have googled me and found it, but if it didn’t, she could only have found it by knowing my school and what I looked like, and monitoring the website for sightings of me.

  This whole room is evidence. The person who lives here is obsessed with me in all my incarnations. Ms Hinchcliffe was so desperate to see me that the Blacks moved across the world to get me away from her. This is Amanda Hinchcliffe’s room.

  She lives here. She isn’t here now, but she lives here. She followed me. She found me when no one else could find me. She has never spoken to me, but she could have done. She could have done anything she wanted to me. Anything at all.

  There are pictures of me everywhere. Some are posed (me in a school photo; me smiling into the camera on Copacabana, in the picture I last saw in the newspaper at that other guest house), but more of them are not. I see myself getting out of Fiona Black’s car in my school uniform, walking down some pavement with Lily, and hand in hand with Jack, my lovely fake boyfriend.

  There I am in Rio, but still Ella, with purple hair. I am sitting sketching on the beach while the Blacks are fuzzy in the background, talking to one another. I am sitting at a bar looking bored, with the two of them on either side of me.

  There is no picture here of me joining the zombie parade, or on Paquetá. But there is one photograph of me homeless. I am on the beach that I now know as São Conrado, sleeping. That must have been around the time my money was stolen.

  She stole my money. She might have stolen my money.

  Then I realize that she gave me those cheese balls. She was my benefactor. She might not have been, but I know she was.

  There are a couple of photos of me in my Favela English School T-shirt, and that’s all. After that, I suppose, she knew where I was, and then she didn’t need to stalk me and take photographs because she could just look at me in real life.

  She doesn’t get to do this.

  She doesn’t get to be my mother.

  You don’t get to do this.

  You don’t get to be my mother.

  I am saying the words under my breath, and then I am in the room, tearing down the pictures, ripping them apart and throwing the pieces all over her stupid bed. I tear every picture of myself off the wall, and I know the woman whose house this is is shouting, and Jasmine is standing there not really knowing what to do and probably talking to me, but I can’t stop, and it’s the whole of me because Ella is the same as Bella, and I don’t try to stop myself because I don’t want to. I shake them off when they touch me. Every picture of me has to be off this wall because I don’t belong to this woman and she doesn’t get to lie in her bed and look at my face and pretend I’m her baby.

  In the corner of the room, by the table, is a really bad drawing of a baby. She didn’t have a photo of me so she drew me, her lost baby. That makes me pause for a second, and Jasmine grabs my arm and leads me out of the room, and the woman is yelling at me, and Bella wants to go back and carry on smashing things up but she can’t because even Bella is feeling too sad.

  Someone took those pictures and I never notic
ed. She had someone on the outside taking my photograph and I never had any idea. No wonder the Blacks had all that security. I wonder whether they saw people taking my photo, whether they suspected this might be happening.

  I long for my real parents, the ones who looked after me.

  I am lost.

  I

  am

  lost.

  Jasmine is talking to the landlady, explaining that I am the girl in the photographs, and the landlady already knew that because there aren’t many baldish white girls around the place. She is talking fast and I’m not listening.

  The door opens.

  She is there.

  19

  5 Hours

  I see bits of myself in her face. This is my mother.

  ‘Jo,’ she says.

  ‘Ella,’ I say.

  We stare at each other. I don’t know what to do. Bella is coursing around me, raging, and while I’m staring I have an internal argument.

  LET’S JUST SMASH HER UP.

  We can’t.

  WE CAN.

  We can’t.

  WHY?

  Because then we’d be just like her.

  That stops it: even Bella doesn’t want to lunge at her now. I don’t want to turn it inwards and hurt myself either. Actually I do a bit, but I am not going to because I have to be better than that.

  Jasmine takes my hand and squeezes it hard. I let her do that. I am staring into Amanda Hinchcliffe’s eyes, and she is smiling at me.

  ‘But you’re Jo,’ she says, and her voice is soft and different from the way I thought it would be. ‘You’re my Jolene.’

  I cannot say a word. I am not her Jolene.

  ‘My baby,’ she says.

  I am not her baby. I was though. Once.

  I walk out of the door and down the alley and away from her.

  Bella knows she can’t attack this woman, but as soon as we are out of the door bad things start to happen. It’s not like I can’t control myself, because I can these days. I’ve had to incorporate my Bella into my being, just to get through. I’ve used her strength, I think, for survival. That’s why, for the first time in my life, I’ve felt like a whole person.