The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  But I cannot cope with this. Neither part of me can deal with seeing my birth mother’s bedroom. I walk along the alley, away from the guest house, away from that woman, who isn’t coming after me, away from my wonderful Jasmine, away from the poor landlady. I don’t know where I’m going. I know I can’t hurt anyone or I would be like her. I know I can’t kill myself because I tried that before and I couldn’t do it. I know I can’t run away and live off my wits because I did that and it wasn’t fun. I don’t want to go back to the Blacks. Not now; not like this.

  When I get to a bigger road I head uphill. This is where the drug dealers live. I carry on walking to the very top. It’s not sunny today. There are clouds in the sky. No one would expect me to be here. I hope they won’t look for me here. I can see rainforest on the other hills, and a distant Christ the Redeemer with his back to me.

  I sit down at the edge of a stony path and just stare out at Rio. It’s wonderful, beautiful, alive. It’s everything I imagined it to be and a million things more. I take a sharp stone in my hand and draw shapes in the sand. Drawing calms me down. It always has done. That’s why I do it.

  I can’t go back to my old self. I don’t know what to do.

  I have looked my birth mother in the eye.

  It isn’t enough. I have a lot of things I need to know, and I’m never going to get another chance to ask her because after today I cannot see her ever again.

  20

  1 Hour

  I thought the fat woman was a local person who watched the world go by. I thought that one day I would talk to her, now that I could speak Portuguese. I didn’t imagine she would speak English because she looked like someone who had been in the favela, drinking coffee, part of the scenery, for her whole life.

  I never thought for a moment that she could possibly be Amanda Hinchcliffe. To my eye she looks nothing like the teenager in the newspaper clippings, though Jasmine saw it. She looks nothing like the mother in my head. She is not actually gigantically fat, but she looks much older than thirty-six. Her eyes are sad and her face is jowly. She looks like a woman who has had a hard life. Not a murderer; not a released prisoner; not my mum.

  We sit opposite each other in Super Sucos. The air is hot and heavy: there will be a storm later. Jasmine is nearby, poised. I stare at Amanda Hinchcliffe. She has a mole on the side of her face with a little hair growing out of it. Her hair is short and thick. It’s not as short as mine. I look at her nose. I know it’s like mine. I check my lines of escape again. I can leave easily. I can get out of this place, and vanish back into the favela, in no time. I can run faster than she can, particularly uphill.

  ‘Jo,’ she says, and her voice breaks. I see myself in her eyes. In the weirdest, most disturbing way, meeting her is like coming home. I know that this is where I grew from an embryo into a foetus, into a baby. I know this is the first person I ever saw. I know it.

  I know that this is my curse.

  They took me out of her arms and gave me to the Blacks, but this woman is my mother. I don’t know what I feel, apart from that certainty. The woman in front of me, the woman I have seen almost every time I ventured out of the school, just sitting at a table or walking slowly up and down the hill, is the woman who conceived me in between murders.

  ‘Did you name me Jolene?’ That is the first thing I want to know.

  She smiles. She is just staring at my face and smiling. It’s horrible.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Jolene. I liked to listen to Dolly Parton. I always loved Dolly. You know the song? It was old before you were born. It was old before I was born too. And then you called yourself Jo. That’s a sign, my chick.’

  ‘It’s not a sign and I am not your chick. You did that, didn’t you? You left me food and money on the beach. You wrote Something to help you Jo on the bag. That’s why I called myself Jo. It’s not some mystical sign. I would have picked another name if I’d known.’

  She is unbothered by that. I hate her. I hate her but I can’t take my eyes off her. This is like a horror film come true. The monster is sitting opposite me and calling me Jolene.

  ‘How did you find me?’ That’s the other thing I need to know. ‘How did you do that? You were here when I was sleeping on the beach. You found me when no one else did.’

  ‘I stopped that man from attacking you,’ she says. ‘Do you remember?’

  I close my eyes. Of course I remember. I nod the tiniest nod. I am not going to thank her. I remember her voice, yelling at him in English. She was watching me all the time. Every single moment.

  All the time.

  Like a cat with a mouse.

  Like a cat with a baby bird.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  She sighs and finally looks away. She is evasive.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘when you lost your phone? Then you found it because someone handed it in to the police and they gave it back to you.’

  I do remember. It was annoying to lose it, then nice that somebody found it for me. That seems less heart-warming now.

  ‘You got a tracker put on it.’

  ‘My sister. Yes. She took those pictures of you. She got it from your bag. It’s easy to install a tracker if you know what you’re doing. She has a friend who knows what he’s doing. She took your other mother’s phone too and did the same, and put it back in her bag and she didn’t even notice. We knew they’d take you away from me when I got out. I had to see you, my chickie. I had to. You see …’

  I don’t see anything. ‘So you knew as soon as I was in Rio.’

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘And you came here.’

  ‘I just needed to see you. I’m not going to be around much longer. You see, I’m ill, and –’

  I don’t want to hear her stories. I am incandescent with rage. Everything about me is boiling over. I’m entirely on Team Bella. She has broken the law a million times over and I can send her back to prison and I will. I will. The police will be on my side now. The blood is pounding through my body. I am hot all the way through, to the core, and Bella wants to reach across and push her to the ground and smash her with a hammer like I smashed that bird.

  But I can’t do that because that would make me as bad as she is.

  Also I don’t have a hammer.

  ‘You got someone to put software on my phone and my mother’s phone so you’d always know where I was. If I’d thrown it away in Paquetá you wouldn’t have found me here.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. And that would have been a shame for you, my chickie, because I did help you out as best I could. I gave you that food. I chased off that man. I paid your fee for the English school.’

  I want to say it would not have been a shame for me, but actually she’s right. It would. That man’s hand around my ankle. She sees me hesitating and jumps in. ‘Jo,’ she says. ‘Jo. I’ve been waiting all your life to talk to you. I’m so sorry, but I have to. I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but everything I’ve done has been for you, as best I could. It wasn’t much.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t like the things we did, me and your dad. I mean, at the time it was all I knew. It was strange.’ She has a horrible reminiscing expression on her face, and I look away. ‘Anyway I couldn’t let the baby be born when all that was happening. I was pleased when we were caught, for your sake.’

  I hate her. I hate her so much I want to die. I screw up my eyes and will her to stop talking. I look at Jasmine, who asks, with her face, whether I want her to call the police. We have agreed that as soon as I’ve found out the things I want to know, Jasmine will call them. I shake my head. Not yet.

  ‘You had a good life. I was so proud. My sister. Audrey. She kept an eye on you. She’s been here too. It wasn’t so hard to find out where you were, not if you know people.’

  ‘She took those photos of me.’

  ‘I wanted to look at your face. My baby girl.’ She reaches out to stroke my face. I lean back so she can’t.

  I
am not her baby girl. I am myself, but I don’t even know what my name is. I think I need to go back to being Ella Black. I can’t be Jo, now that I know it was the name of Amanda Hinchcliffe and William Carr’s baby.

  ‘You were doing well.’ She looks up. ‘You had a bloody amazing life. Excuse my language.’

  ‘I wasn’t happy.’

  ‘You were perfect. Jo. My Jo. My Jolene grew up perfect.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You would have had no life. You don’t understand.’

  I clench my fists. ‘I wasn’t happy though. I had a kind of …’ I stop. ‘I had weird thoughts. Did you …? When you were doing the bad things, did you feel like you had another self who took you over? Did you have ringing ears?’

  She looks blank. ‘No, my chick. I was always myself. I did those things.’

  The relief is so intense that I can barely stay upright. I had no idea that this was what I wanted to ask, but now I see that it was the only thing I really needed to know. Bella is just mine. She’s not a genetic inheritance.

  She stares. Then she shakes her head and takes a deep breath. ‘Let me be in your life,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t my fault, not all of it. I know I can’t really be your mum. Let me be a friend. I only want the best for you.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just no. I don’t care if you say you’re dying or whatever. I don’t care. No. No. You don’t get to do that. No.’

  I stand up. I can barely see. I have to get away from her so I walk out of the café. I don’t look back, although I want to. Part of me wants to ask a million more questions, even though I know the answers would be awful. This is too much.

  I nod to Jasmine and she gets out her phone. I can’t wait. I just have to get away from Amanda Hinchcliffe, so I run down the hill.

  There is no taxi and I can’t get on the bus that’s waiting there because she would get on it too, so I decide to keep walking. I walk towards the tunnel so I can flag down a cab as soon as one arrives.

  When I look round I see that she is coming after me. Her face is crumpled and she looks so distraught that I want to help, but I know I can’t because I know that to make her happy right now I would have to call her ‘Mum’, and I will never, ever do that. I think of the other women who felt sorry for her, the ones she lured to their deaths, and I keep walking towards the mouth of the tunnel.

  ‘Jo!’ she shouts. ‘Jo. Just wait a minute.’

  I don’t. I keep going. I need to get away from her.

  ‘Jo.’ She has nearly caught up right at the mouth of the tunnel. Cars come out of it fast, then slow down if they’re stopping at Rocinha. They whizz by so quickly that I feel the wind in my fuzzy hair. She grabs my arm, and I try to pull away, but I can’t because her grip is very strong. ‘Jo. Listen. You don’t have to see me. You can do what you like. I just needed to see you, and I promise I’m ill and I won’t be around for much longer. Just … just know that I love you. I’ve thought of you every day. I was your age when I went to prison, and I’ve been there all your life and it’s … Well, I got out and I came straight to find you. Audrey and I got a different passport each – you don’t need to know. Just know that I would do anything for you. I’d die for you, Jolene. If you need anything, tell me. I’ll get it for you. I’ll get you whatever you want. I need to give you eighteen years’ worth of birthday and Christmas presents.’

  ‘You don’t. Please don’t.’

  ‘I want to. You’re a better girl than I ever was. Just – live your life. Live it and do things and be happy. Don’t put your trust in a man. Look forward, not back. My Jo. You can do anything.’

  I cannot stand the greetings-card sentiments. I know she is trying to say things that are important to her, but I can’t listen. I have nowhere to go, and so I run into the tunnel. There is actually a little pavement in here, and I follow it alongside the road, hoping that she won’t follow. I’ll run through and out the other side, and then I’ll find a cab.

  I need to stop running away. I’ll stop running just as soon as I’ve run away from the murdering monster that is my birth mother. Jasmine will have called the police by now and they will arrest her.

  I am not looking back. The traffic fumes are making me choke. The car headlights dazzle me. The sound of all the engines is amplified and it fills my ears so if she was running up behind me shouting I wouldn’t be able to hear her.

  I don’t know for sure that she’s there until she grabs my arm.

  ‘Jo,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being me. Just let me hug you. Just one hug.’

  She attempts to grab me with both arms. She pulls me towards her. I try to escape. This is mad: we are in a tunnel that is clearly forbidden to pedestrians. I see a police car coming the other way, slow down opposite us and then speed up. It’s going to do a U-turn and come to rescue me. Another siren sounds from the other direction. I am finally ready for the police.

  I pull away. She tries to grab me again. I step backwards, wanting more than anything else in the world to get away from her.

  It happens fast. There is the long note of a car horn. The screeching of brakes. Her grip on my arm pulling me back, shoving me into the wall of the tunnel so I hit my head. A thump and a thud and an echoing crash of cars driving into each other.

  Then there is just me, and I am standing with my back to the tunnel wall, and she is lying in the road, and most of the cars are swerving to avoid the pile-up and just carrying on in the other lane.

  Then the siren is deafeningly loud, and then there are police.

  I sit down and try to breathe.

  She did say she would die for me.

  One Year Later

  Dear Fiona and Graham,

  Thank you so much for your email. I was really happy to get it this morning and incredibly pleased to hear from you both sounding kind of upbeat. I’m glad Humphrey is OK. Give him a big kiss from me and tell him that, no matter what he might think, I actually haven’t forgotten him. And the same goes for you two. Thank you for the photo of the three of you. I’ll print it out when I can.

  Life here is good. Who would have thought I’d still be living in Rio? I bet you regret bringing me here.

  I know we’ve been in touch more and more lately and now I want to say a few things, because I’ve been thinking about them a lot. You can stop reading now if you want. It might be easier for you. If you want to come back and read it another time then do that.

  I try not to think about the past and my origins and all of that because honestly if I start thinking about it then I never stop and I get sucked into all sorts of destructive stuff. But I’d like to get this down, and then maybe we can never talk about it again.

  You did an amazing thing nineteen years ago. You adopted a baby from the middle of something unspeakable, and you gave me a home and all the love in the world. You did everything you could possibly have done for me. You gave me a home and healthy food and a family and an education. You protected me: you protected me like mad because you knew the dangers that had surrounded me. You knew what I’d been part of, before I was born. If it wasn’t for you – well, I wouldn’t have been born into that world because I would have been adopted by someone else, but you did a lot for me and those other people might not have been so nice.

  So – thank you for that. Sincerely, and with all of myself. I mean it.

  I wish you’d told me though. The other people might have told me. That will always be the thing, and I will never quite get past it. You knew the day would come when I’d find out and you must have known that the longer you left it the worse it would be. An adult needs a birth certificate from time to time. I bet you kind of pushed the issue aside through my childhood thinking ‘it’ll be OK’ and ‘we’ll tell her later’. But it was always going to happen, and, truly, the longer you left it the worse it was going to be, and then it was bad, wasn’t it? You took me to Rio, and my birth mother tracked me there because her sister had stolen my phone, and then it all blew up and here I still am.


  I know it was difficult, when I saw you before you went home. Fiona, I realize that the way this happened has been devastating. I wish I could be your real daughter. I wish I could have said it was all OK, that we could go home and I’d finish my A levels and we’d go back to normal but with no secrets this time. I do wish that. I hate to think of you at home, at a loose end, just waiting for me the way you used to do when I was at school.

  But … although things can’t be the same, maybe they can be different. It’ll be New Year soon, and this could be a year when we see each other. You know I’m studying online (I am doing a much better picture of Rio for my A level than the one I did for GCSE, that’s for sure). I’ll work out where to apply to university soon. I do appreciate your offers of financial help. I’ll pay you back, I promise. I don’t even know which country to study in, let alone anything else. But I’ll probably stay in Brazil if I can: Christian is living here too, now. We’re getting a flat together in Rocinha. It’s the place where I feel I belong.

  And finally – this is the difficult bit.

  You hid a huge thing from me, and I hid one from you too. I did everything I could to fit into the world you’d made for me. I’ve been seeing an English-speaking counsellor out here, a friend of Maria’s, and talking it through with her has made me understand a bit more. So you know I studied hard and I had my friend Lily and my boyfriend Jack (he was never my boyfriend btw) and I did well at school and I was never wild and never difficult? Well, I kind of separated myself out a bit – because remember that I did actually know I was adopted, because you used to tell me when I was small, but I shut it out and refused to hear it and you stopped telling me?

  And what I think happened is that I made myself so resolutely ‘good’ so that you’d keep me, but then my ‘bad’ side had nowhere to go. So I separated it out from myself, and kind of fenced it off, and gave it a name. I called it Bella. I know to most people that means ‘beautiful’ but to me it means ‘Bad Ella’. Bella would overwhelm me sometimes. I would shut myself away and give in to her. A couple of times she tried to make me hurt myself, but I could never actually do it: I lashed out instead. I killed creatures that Humphrey brought in. I broke things. I smashed things to pieces with a hammer. I destroyed my stuff.