Beside Myself

  Beside Myself

  ANN MORGAN

  For Mum

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-Ono

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-Ono

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  Out into the garden, sunlight blaring. Ellie lumbering after. Run along you two and don’t get into mischief. The leaves of the apple tree blotching us with shadows.

  Away from the dark house with the curtains pulled shut. The cushions huddling. The mumbles and sighs that boil up into yells and sobs at the sight of water rings from the bottom of a glass. A manner missed. Not me – it’s always Ellie. Never my fault. I’m the good one because I was born first.

  On to the bottom of the garden, behind the blackberry bush. A turn back to watch for eyes, but the coast is empty. Then up with the latch, the gate swings open and the warm sun of the lane spills in. A giggle from Ellie. A jiggle like she needs the toilet.

  ‘Shhh, Ellie,’ I say. ‘Do you want the world and his wife to hear?’

  Ellie’s eyes go serious. People say after I came out the cord got twisted around Ellie’s neck and because of that she’s sometimes not as good as me. But I know she does it on purpose. I see the look she gives down at me when the teacher picks her up because she’s tired.

  ‘Do you think we should go out there without Mother knowing?’ she says.

  ‘Shut up,’ I say and pull her through. ‘It’s only Mary.’

  Mary is where we go when it’s time to teach Ellie a lesson. She’s older so she’s the best at thinking up games. Like, one time when no one came to collect us from school we took Ellie to the park and left her there by herself and ran all the way home. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe with how good the lesson was and how much better I liked it than tiptoeing around the missing furniture at home.

  And another time we tried to make Ellie eat a yoghurt that we found in a plastic bag on the wall by the bus stop. We did every trick in the box, but it had gone all fizzy and smelly and hard and she wouldn’t touch it. Even though we threatened down on her and everything. Even though we told her it was cheese.

  Mary’s house is up the lane. It’s not like our house because it’s all on one level, like someone rolled it with a rolling pin. Plus there’s all this stuff lying about where the grass and flowerbeds should be. But it is like our house because inside there’s only one grown-up – Mary’s dad, who does things with hammers and spanners in the garden and sometimes in the bathroom too. Plus there’s also Mary’s brother who is sort of in-between.

  We knock and after a while a shadow comes to fill the swirly circle of glass so it looks like a dragon’s eye opening. The door swings back and the sour smell comes out. The brother looks down at us, his face thin and whiskery like a wolf’s.

  ‘Hello. Is Mary in?’ I say.

  ‘Nah,’ says the brother in the flat, hard way Mary says comes from Manchester where they used to live before. ‘She’s fucked off.’

  A tremble comes over me, but I bite it back and stare up into his wolfy eyes.

  ‘Fucked off where?’ I say.

  The brother smirks. His eyes go between Ellie and me. Behind him in the house, something glints.

  ‘Twins, eh?’ he says. ‘How old are you girls?’

  He reaches out a hand and curls a finger round behind my ear, stroking the hair there.

  ‘You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?’ he says.

  The breeze blows.

  ‘Say “fucked” again,’ he says.

  Suddenly the day comes at me in a rush, all the colours singing. I turn and grab Ellie’s hand.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ I say, and I yank her off down the path, her mouth going ‘But, but, but’ so it sounds like bubbles bursting all around.

  I want to get away and out of there – to unzip my skin and step into another me. But out in the lane here is Mrs Dunkerley from across the way, back from shopping with her cabbage smell that always follows her around.

  ‘Well, girls,’ she says. ‘Helen and Eleanor, isn’t it? But which one is which? I can never tell – you’re like two peas in a pod.’

  The fidgets are on me, but I stand politely and tell her who is who. Even though I have to do this every time we see her. Even though everyone knows who we are. Even though no one calls Ellie Eleanor.

  ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ says Mrs Dunkerley, like she always does. ‘Well now, won’t you girls come in and have some tea and biscuits?’

  I know about Mrs Dunkerley’s biscuits. They live in a rusty tin on top of her fridge and some of the Garibaldis have fur on them.

  ‘No thank you very much, Mrs Dunkerley,’ I say in my best voice. ‘We are preoccupied.’

  ‘Preoccupied, are you?’ says Mrs Dunkerley. ‘Gracious. But are you sure you haven’t got time for a quick cup of tea?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Dunkerley,’ I say. ‘We’ve got to help our mother.’

  ‘Ah well, in that case,’ says Mrs Dunkerley, her voice rising as I take Ellie’s hand and drag her off towards the gate. ‘But you will come again soon, won’t you? And bring your friends!’

  The gate bangs behind us. We stand in the brambly shadows.

  ‘What does Mother want us to do?’ says Ellie.

  ‘God-uh,’ I say, thumping the ‘d’ so it sounds like a thud on the big bass drum in the music room at school. ‘Ellie, what’s wrong with you today? You are being stupider than ever. Mother doesn’t want us to do anything. I just said it so we didn’t have to go to tea at Mrs Dunkerley’s.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Ellie, and her eyes go quiet. And I know what she is thinking. She is thinking about Mrs Dunkerley’s budgie, Bill. She likes to watch Bill twitch and bow in his cage. She sits with her face close to the bars and gets this silly, soft look like Bill is her only friend and maybe one day they are going to run away together. That look makes me want to teach her a lesson really hard.

  Ellie scuffs her shoe in the dirt. She looks at me.

  ‘Why did he want you to say “fucked”?’ she says.

  A t
ingling feeling comes. I stand and look at Ellie in her shorts and the red T-shirt with the splatter of food where she missed her mouth at lunch. Then I narrow my eyes until all I can see is the dark shadow of her, with her wispy bunches straggling either side of her face and the sun shining behind. And in my head, like Mother’s favourite record jumping when Ellie scratched it last year, is Mrs Dunkerley’s voice saying ‘like two peas in a pod, like two peas in a pod’ over and over again.

  ‘Come on, Ellie,’ I say. ‘We’re going to play a game.’

  1

  Ribbons of sound. The bright streamer of a child’s giggle, an ice-cream van’s flourish swirling like a sparkler in the gloom, the chatter of a long-finished game. Birdsong spiralling, then stiffening and falling to the earth, congealing into something hard and metallic, measured out in mechanical portions, a harsh trilling. Again. A pause. Again.

  Smudge opened her eyes and squinted. A ray of light thrust its way in past the tie-dyed sarong tacked up over the window, to pick out the dead flies, plastic bags, the vodka bottle lying on its side. Morning, was it? No, afternoon – always afternoon when the sun came in at that angle. The day almost spent.

  Pens, matches, tampons strewn across the table. A half-smoked cigarette burrowing into the plastic veneer, puckering it like a scar. A toothbrush lying on its side next to an ice-cube tray with magenta and purple paint clogged in its recesses like dried blood.

  From the armchair, she stared up at the canvas propped on the shelf above the broken gas fire. Canvas was pushing it: it was really a piece of newspaper pinned to the seat of a chair. Still, it had been enough last night, or the night before – or whenever it was – to get her up and buzzing, charging about the flat in search of anything that would help her create the colours and shapes surging in her brain. She wished she could recapture it now, the inspiration that rolled in like a breaker only to smash against the sea wall of her consciousness and drain away, pulling her with it to drift on a grey ocean, leaving only wreckage behind. The canvas testified to what had happened – the bright squabble of colours in the top-right corner giving way to a thin wash and then nothing. A headline about a pensioner being mugged in the alleyway up the road.

  The absorbing idea was gone, but the voices that usually crowded in to fill any blank spaces in her mind – muttering and snarling – were still, for now. Good. That was something. That was something, at least.

  She rubbed a hand over her eyes and the ringing started again. The phone, she thought dully. Hadn’t they disconnected it yet? There must be more than twenty final warnings in the drift of mail in the hallway.

  She listened to the ringing unmoved. No point answering. It would just be one of those recorded messages. That, or the Samaritans phoning to see how she was, unaware that tomorrow she’d be calling another branch with a different story.

  Or maybe the ringing was just in her mind. She wouldn’t put it past her mashed-up brain to pull some kind of new stunt like that.

  She squinted up at the ripped calendar on the wall. What day was it anyway? Hard to keep track. Before you knew it, Thursday had muscled in where Tuesday was supposed to be and you were staring down the barrel of Friday. And meanwhile some bastard like Monday went droning on for weeks. The calendar was giving nothing away. Not Giro day, anyhow. Never that. She drew a deep, snagging breath and her stomach gurgled.

  Be good to get some food inside her. She levered herself to her feet and the floor fell away like a trap door on a theme-park ride. Fireworks exploded on the edge of her vision and she gripped the chair. (‘Indisputable!’ sniped a voice somewhere inside her brain.) Steady.

  Out into the corridor, ragged nails trailing over the peeling wallpaper, the kitchen doorway belching the smell of sour milk. Inside: the plump plastic bags, tops tied, ranged across the floor and surfaces like barn hens. Rubbish cascading from the bin, the sink piled.

  Smudge opened the fridge door and the phone trilled again, making her lose her footing. She put out a hand to save herself and caught it in a wire, dragging something off the wall as she sat down heavily amid the rubbish bags. The ceiling gaped above her, a heavy weight being hoisted the better to fall on her head.

  Then she heard another voice, this time seeming to come from somewhere outside her.

  ‘Ellie?’ it said in a stern, tinny tone. ‘Ellie?’

  She looked around. Apart from the dripping of the kitchen tap, the room was still. She clapped her hand over her eyes, feeling the rasp of cracked skin against her face, and shook her head, trying to dislodge the hallucination.

  ‘Ellie?’ said the voice again.

  She turned and peered through the gap in her fingers. The sound was coming from the phone receiver dangling next to her. Cautiously she reached for it and held it to her ear.

  ‘Ellie,’ said the phone, ‘it’s Mother.’ And then, ‘Look, I haven’t got time to play silly buggers. I know this is your number. Nick gave it to me.’

  A silence. Above her, its door still open, the fridge began to beep.

  ‘All right. If that’s the way you want it,’ continued the phone. ‘I’m ringing about Helen.’ A sigh. ‘Well, there’s been an accident and I’m afraid she’s in a coma. There. The others thought I should tell you. Left to myself, I probably wouldn’t have b— But there we are. At least this way you won’t hear about it first on the news.’

  Around the kitchen dark shapes were stirring, unfurling themselves like monstrous, poisonous blooms. The voices were snickering, getting ready to rush her. She felt numb and powerless before them.

  ‘Needless to say, we’re all pretty cut up about it this end,’ said the phone. ‘Horace is beside himself. Richard’s put in for compassionate leave.’

  The shapes were moving towards her, billowing like smoke, curling across the polystyrene ceiling tiles as a prickling sensation worked its way up her arms. She tried to move but the feeling gripped her tighter, its fidgeting fingers edging their way up towards her neck. Panic beat in the rhythm of the fridge’s beep.

  ‘We’re all spending every hour we can at the hospital,’ continued the phone. ‘And of course there’s a lot of media attention.’

  Another pause and then, angrily, ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

  The darkness was nearly upon her, stifling, choking, stars prickling on the edge of her vision. She swallowed, took a deep breath and gripped the phone, blinking.

  (‘Whickering,’ carped a voice inside her mind. ‘Reprehensible.’)

  Smudge closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,’ she said, laying the words out one by one like coins on the counter of the offie.

  Then the receiver dropped as the clamouring rushed in to claim her. She slumped back among the bags. A carton began to leak on to her shoulder, but she did not feel it. There was only the hubbub inside her head and, somewhere beyond it, the light from the fridge playing on her eyelids like sunshine, its beeps mimicking those of a lorry reversing long ago in a suburban street one summer’s afternoon.

  2

  Sunlight spilling between the leaves and the smell of cut grass. A lawnmower buzzing somewhere and a beeping coming from the street in front of the house. We creep back into the lane in our swapped clothes – swapped shoes, swapped socks, swapped hair bobbles, everything. I’ve even done Ellie’s bunches in my hair and raked hers into the plait Mother always does on me so she never has to think about who’s who if the fog of a glum day comes. Just the knickers are the same because who is going to look at those? I feel Ellie’s orange shorts, rough and crinkly between my legs, and when I look down I see the splatter of food on the red T-shirt. A giggle comes and trying to stop it bursting out and wobbling the world is almost more than I can bear.

  I make Ellie go first because she has to be the leader, but she keeps stopping and looking back with that poor-me face she gets when she’s learning a hard lesson or she’s trying to make the dinner ladies give her sympathy at school.

  ‘Go on, Ellie,’ I s
ay. ‘You have to be the leader!’

  But Ellie just stands there with her fingers at her nose.

  ‘How do I be that?’ she says, and I think it’s funny how, even now she’s wearing my shorts and my green T-shirt with the patterns of birds flying across, the Ellieness is still there. You can see it in the lost look in her eyes and the jiggle of her leg.

  ‘God-uh, Ellie!’ I say. ‘Just do the things I do. Be me!’

  I look down and see Ellie’s white sandals and the socks with holes like a snowflake on my feet, standing on the dusty tarmac of the back lane, and the giggle comes at me again. I start to walk in that wonky way Ellie has when she’s tired at the end of the day.

  Ellie copies.

  ‘No-wuh, Ellie!’ I say. ‘Not now. Normally. Like, how do I walk when I’m going around the playground with Jessica?’

  Ellie thinks for a moment.

  ‘You do this,’ she says, and she walks in a straight, marchy way with her hands by her sides like a soldier.

  ‘OK,’ I say. I’m not sure that’s right, but at least Ellie is trying and you’ve got to be thankful for small mercies. ‘And what do I sound like? What sort of things do I say?’

  ‘You say: “God-uh, Ellie! What’s wrong with you today!”’ says Ellie. And she looks at me and I look at her, and suddenly we both giggle because it is funny to hear the things I say coming out of her mouth.

  ‘Ellie, I’ve had it up to here with you!’ she says, and we giggle some more.

  Then Ellie looks at me and wags her finger. ‘You are going to have to learn a very hard lesson,’ she says. And this time we really laugh, holding our tummies and bending over like we are going to be sick.

  She puts her hand up to the neck of my green T-shirt and tugs at it, looking pleased. It’s one of my favourites, the last thing left from millions of years ago when Father bought us something of every colour in the shop in the precinct – the day when we three skipped all the way back from the bus stop, laughing our heads off like we would never stop, until we got home and Mother saw all the plastic bags. I’m afraid Ellie will stretch my T-shirt and make it hang down like an open mouth, the way she does to all her tops, so I go over and pull away her tugging hand.