It was a long walk up the hill to school on the Tuesday morning after my mother died. I’d taken the 8:25 train that I knew would make me late. I often caught this train to school, despite all my efforts to leave the house on time, and would rush into the classroom for registration just as my name was being called. But this time I was late deliberately, so that I wouldn’t see the other girls on the platform and have to sit with them on the ten minute ride from Tunbridge Wells to Tonbridge as they chattered and chewed on breakfast bars with no idea that I had watched my mother die that Saturday.
I watched the fields roll past the train. The businessman in the suit next to me took up almost a seat and a half, so I curled myself as close to the side of the train as I could, my face almost pressed against the grimy window. The muffled music from his Discman crackled into my ears. I think it was something embarrassing, like ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
Tonbridge had always been a bleak place. Everyone walking out of the station onto the High Street for the first time must feel the same sag of disappointment.
‘Oh,’ I remember thinking, when I arrived there for the first time with my mother three years before. ‘So this is where I’m going to go to school.’
Back then, I’d thought we were moving to the countryside. The train with slamming doors that took us down from London left behind the skyscrapers and the rows of terraced houses and took us into the fields. But Tonbridge was different. It looked like a grim little town built from concrete and necessity. A collection of takeaways and pound shops lined the main street that ran to the Norman castle no one visited. The River Medway that runs beside the High Street flooded in 2000. After the waters receded, not much changed.
The road up to Tonbridge Girls Grammar was on a steep hill. Usually, in the mornings, I’d walk with some of the girls from my class who took the same train as me, and we’d join the dozens of others making the same journey in our green polyester jumpers and itchy tartan skirts. That day, at that time, the hill was deserted. With every step I thought, I hope Mrs Pane has told everyone. I’m sure I’ve given her enough time to tell everyone. I was terrified I’d have to do it myself. Tell each girls individually, ‘my mum died on Saturday’, spending the day uttering the same sentence over and over again with a punch to the stomach each time. It feels like that still, each time I have to say it, fourteen years on.
My classroom was in a two-room pre-fab block near the main gate. The school was one of the top grammar schools in the country, but most of the classrooms were in pre-fab blocks that were set up as temporary solutions to the expanding student numbers back in the ‘70s. They rocked when you ran inside them, and smelt of rotten lunches and the cold.
I opened the door with a creak and walked down the small, gloomy corridor that ran between the two classrooms. Next door was 9B; I was in 9A. I put my hand on the handle and opened.
The classroom was brightly lit; everyone turned to look at me. Mrs Pane was reading the register and turned her head as I walked in, pausing from calling out names for a moment. I walked slowly over to a desk at the front, and sat next to Ella Phelps. Mrs Pane resumed reading the register.
Ella leaned over and whispered, ‘Did you miss your train?’
And suddenly I realised: no one had been told. I was sitting in this classroom, and the register was coming to an end, and no one had been told.
‘Yes,’ I said, and nodded.
I looked down at the white desk. I heard the last name being called. The moments rolled forwards inevitably, passing with each heartbeat. I am not here, I am not here, this is not happening. My body tried to dissolve, and failed.
The bell rang suddenly. The room exploded with chattering and scraping chairs and heavy feet on the lino floor. The other girls jumped up, charging to their lockers to gather their books, the whole classroom shaking as they did so. I stayed sitting still.
I looked up and saw Mrs Pane’s face bent close to mine. She had ginger hair and freckled skin that was now blooming with patches of red. She looked terrified.
‘I’m sorry Ellie−I got the call from your Dad−I didn’t have time to tell them…I wasn’t sure…’
She carried on frantically, whispering half-finished, guilty sentences. I nodded at her. I stayed sitting still.
‘Do you want to come…?’
She gestured to the door.
I followed her out and walked into the corridor. And then I couldn’t hold it down any longer: I let out a choke, a sob, a gulp. I began to cry.
Mrs Pane looked even more terrified.
‘I’m so sorry Ellie, I’m so sorry,’ she said as she led me down the corridor. She fluttered her hands. I was slightly taller than her, and felt lumbering as I walked. She opened the door.
‘You can cry all you want, just let it out,’ she said, as we walked up the steps to the English block.
As soon as she said that, I stopped. I swallowed. I sniffed. I tried not to look at her. I felt like there was a bomb in my hands and my finger was on the switch. She was trying to negotiate with me. She was going to find someone who would know what to do.
She set me down in the room at the end of the English corridor. The windows were tall but the room was full of shadows. She flicked the switch and the fluorescent lights spluttered, casting synthetic strips of light over the piles of books, the bookshelves, the old TVs. These were wheeled out only occasionally if there was a suitable film to fit the book (usually Shakespeare). There would always be ten minutes of waiting while the teacher flicked various switches and checked the power supply, the lights on the front flickering on and off.
‘Why won’t it work?’ they’d sigh, frustrated. Usually it took one of us to help them out. All this stalling was good, though. Like fire drills and long assemblies, it meant less time working at our desks.
I sat down in a chair that was surrounded by stacks of Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein and Macbeth. We were once allowed to watch an old film of Macbeth. Everyone laughed when MacDuff chopped Macbeth’s head off, and an obvious waxwork with a stuck-on wig bounced down the hill.
‘Just sit here. I’m going to get Mrs Elton,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said.
She rushed back in twenty seconds later with a box of tissues.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Then she rushed back out again.
I sat with the box of tissues on my lap. I wasn’t crying anymore, but I took a tissue out the box and dabbed at my eyes, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I looked outside at the car park. The other girls were walking across the tarmac, chattering, on their way to lessons. Mr Cooper, the six foot four Maths teacher, clambered out of his tiny red Mini and locked the door. The sky was clear and it was January, so everyone had come in their coats. I’d hung my coat in the corridor outside my classroom as I did every day. That means I’ll have to go back there, I thought.
I looked at the clock on the wall: 9:05. I wondered how long I would be waiting here on my own. I thought about looking through one of the books, but thought better of it. Wouldn’t that look like I wasn’t really upset at all, that I was faking the whole thing? Trying to get out of school for false reasons was a monstrous crime, I knew that. Much better to sit in the silence with the clock ticking on the wall, twisting the tissue.
I twisted the tissue into eight different coils so it looked like a flaccid octopus. Then I started on another one.
9:20.
The door opened and Mrs Elton walked in. The deputy head, she had short silver hair and looked mumsy in her cardigans and below-the-knee skirts, but she was strict. When she spoke, her mouth moved to the side of her face and she looked a little like a talking fish.
‘Hello, Ellie,’ she said.
At least she didn’t look frightened. Mrs Pane followed her, still flushed red with eyes wide.
‘Verity and Karen are here to see you,’ she said.
Her voice was calm, sing-song. She spoke carefully, in case a sudden sound or movement startled me. In case I might go off.
Verity and Karen were two of the few girls at school who knew that my mum had been ill. I had few friends so told few people. Most of the girls and teachers at the school had been unaware that, for the last two years, my mum was sick with ovarian cancer. And I don’t think anyone knew that for the last two months, she had been dying.
‘Why can’t your dad drive us to the shops?’ they’d say, irritated. Even the ones that knew about my mum.
‘I don’t know…He’s busy.’
Sometimes I’d say he was being unreasonable. It was much easier to say that than to say that he couldn’t leave my mum on her own. That she was a skeleton now and dragged an oxygen tank around the house with her. That she ate minuscule portions of food or sucked on ice cubes and that, when I hugged her, I was frightened she would break.
Verity and Karen were in tears when they walked in, and I started to cry again too. They sat down in chairs next to me and the three of us sat crying while Mrs Elton and Mrs Pane stood and watched. Mrs Elton offered me the tissue box, even though it was sitting on my lap.
Ten minutes later, we’d stopped crying. You feel silly after a while, gulping and gurgling with nothing to say. Especially at school. Especially in front of teachers. This was breaking all the rules.
Verity and Karen made some jokes and I laughed obligingly. So did Mrs Elton and Mrs Pane. I sensed their relief, saw their bodies relax. I smiled.
The bell rang for the next period.
‘What do you want to do, Ellie?’ said Mrs Elton.
I had no idea.
‘Do you want to stay here a bit longer?’
I thought of sitting there, sitting in this room with the stacks of books and broken TVs that usually pupils weren’t allowed into. If I stayed here, teachers would come in to get books for the class. They would smile sympathetically. I would grow uncomfortable, and bored. I didn’t even have the urge to run away. I was so obedient, the thought didn’t once cross my mind.
I had Maths next. The subject I hated most, the subject I struggled with and resented having to learn. But I felt guilty: I felt that I was milking it. I was an attention-seeker. How long do you need to wallow in your grief at school? I didn’t know, but an hour seemed like a long time. An hour felt like the amount I was allowed.
‘I can go to my next lesson,’ I said.
‘Are you sure?’ said Mrs Elton.
‘Yes,’ I said.
There was a pause, so I smiled, to reassure them all.
‘What lesson have you got Ellie?’ said Mrs Pane.
‘Maths,’ I said. The word felt like ash. I was worried I hadn’t hidden my distaste well enough, so I smiled again.
I went to the loo first, and sat in the cubicle reading the writing scrawled across the walls.
‘What’s the point in anything?’ asked one. Encouragingly, this had been replied to: ‘You are special, don’t forget that.’ Although, further down the wall, another reply read: ‘Get over yourself.’
I looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was blotchy and red. I was the same person; I could see that. I was the same, but the mirror was different. Its eye looked back at me. Its one eye winked. The mirror was a double-agent, an imposter. I could tell no one, it knew that. I could tell no one, or else be exposed as mad.
Verity and Karen were laughing now, as if nothing had happened.
That was, at the time, what people thought was best. Going back to normality, abruptly and almost instantly. My father said to me and my younger brother and sister: ‘If you don’t go back to school now, you’ll never want to go back.’
He’d said that on the Monday. The day before the three of us had sat watching through the bannisters at the top of the stairs as my mother’s body was wheeled out the house in a green body bag.
The day before that we’d sat in the small front room she had once used as her office, and watched her die. On the Friday, she’d been given a fatal dose of morphine by our GP. We weren’t told what effect this would have, but we saw the next day. For her last day on earth my mother sat in her red armchair like a ragdoll, her eyes half-closed. When she tried to speak, her words came out slurred and incomprehensible. She moaned in pain and slid down in her chair. My 12-year-old sister and I had to pull her upright again. I didn’t know if I could talk to her, I didn’t know whether her brain was still fully working, so I sat down next to her and read a book.
Early in the afternoon, a neighbour rang the doorbell. My sister and I opened the door and the woman beamed at us.
‘I’ve brought this for Maureen,’ she said, holding up an inflated aeroplane neck-pillow.
We showed her into the room and the smile fell from her face.
‘Here you go sweetheart,’ she said, and put the pillow round the back of my mum’s neck. My mother moaned and rolled her head from side to side.
‘How are you girls doing?’ she asked us, her beam back on.
My eyes left my mother for a moment.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Are you OK?’ Lucy mouthed as I sat down behind her in the cold Maths classroom. She was one of the most attractive and popular girls in our year. She never usually spoke to me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Thank you.’
She smiled at me, and I did the same.
There was a cold light filtering in through the large windows round the room. Shoes squeaked loudly on the lino floor. All sounds were heightened: this was a louder room than the one I knew. Another imposter, like the mirror. They were all around me.
Mrs Smith, a substitute teacher well past retirement age, was marking numbers and lines onto the blackboard. She didn’t say anything to me. Perhaps she didn’t know.
Mrs Cross, our usual teacher, had known, but not because any of the other teachers had told her. I had never been good at doing my homework on time–I had been constantly in trouble for it since I was five years old–and that day I walked into my Maths class and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cross, but I haven’t done the homework.’
She sighed and shook her head.
‘What reason is it this time?’ she said.
I handed her a note that my father had written and she frowned. I went back and sat down at my desk as she read it. Her face changed. The other girls were chattering and getting into their seats.
Across the classroom she looked at me and said, ‘That’s fine, Ellie.’
The night before we had gone up to London to visit my mother in a specialist hospital. We’d got the train and then a bus. My mother was sitting up in bed in a brightly lit room, attached to wires and tubes. We stayed with her for an hour, then we went back home in the dark.
That Tuesday, I went to all my lessons. I had Biology with Mr Barker, where we drew diagrams of eyeballs. Usually I would chatter away (‘Can someone be born with four arms, Mr Barker?’, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ‘Could someone be born with two heads?’ ‘Yes, they could.’ ‘What? Really?’ ‘Please, Ellie, get on with your work!’), but that day I didn’t. My body moved through the corridors and my mind floated behind detached, a balloon on a string. At lunchtime I watched myself from the ceiling. I watched girls come up to me and say they were sorry, the few who knew.
‘That’s OK,’ I said. Or ,‘Thank you.’
I think the air was different. So were the buildings and the furniture. Their intrinsic structure, the matter, had changed. First it was the mirror, then the Maths classroom, but soon I realised that it was the whole place that had changed–had been replicated and filled with imposters.
I knew what had really happened was that I had woken up in duplicate world that looked the same as the one I’d left behind, but was not the same. I was the only one who knew I was an outsider, the out-of-place, a visitor stuck in the wrong time. This is where I still reside, of course. To this day, I have never let on.
I walked down the hill with Amber, with whom I had a love-hate relationship. When she first joined, halfway through Year 7, she told everyone she’d had sex in a tent and had to have an abortion. I think she was trying to make friends.
She linked arms with me and said, ‘I don’t really know what to say. I’ve no idea what you’re going through, really.’
I liked her directness. I realised that’s what I had been missing. Teacher’s euphemisms and trembling sentences were frightening. They had not been briefed, they had tried to be sensitive. Most of them had said nothing at all, and would continue to do so for the next five years I was at that school.
Mrs Berry was the headmistress who had delighted my mother when we visited the school with her talk of how all the girls were individuals even though there were so many of us and we all had to wear the same thing (she didn’t say that last part). She would speak to me only once in the seven years I was at Tonbridge Girls Grammar. On a hot summer’s day in 2004 I would be walking to assembly in a long patterned skirt and a brown tank top with thick straps. She would grab me by the shoulder with her clawed hand and turn me to face her. With a look of disgust she would shriek:
‘What on earth do you think you are wearing?’
I would open my mouth and search for words.
‘Go back to your classroom this instant and put something on!’
I would stand still for a moment; I would not be able to move. I would want to say to her that my mother had died three years before and she had never said a word to me, never written me a letter, never acknowledged it in any way. I would feel a flush of anger that would shoot through my body and make my right hand twitch. I would turn and walk back to the classroom. I would collect my cardigan and put it on, even as the hot sun glanced through the windows of the pre-fab classroom (yes, I would be back in the same one again). The thought of running away would not occur to me then, either.
‘Do you have any mother figures?’ Amber was asking.
My parents had left both their families behind in New Zealand when they caught a plane to India in 1975. My father was an only child whose mother died when he was in his early 20s. My mother had been estranged from her mother, father and two of her three sisters. The other sister, Shirley, lived in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, and still does. We have one family member, Aunt Peggy, my mother’s great aunt, who lives miles 150 miles away in Gloucester.
‘No,’ I said.
We crossed the traffic lights opposite Lidl and walked into the station. Amber went to a different platform from me: she lived in Edenbridge, but I was going back to Tunbridge Wells.
‘I’m going down to Stroud for the funeral tomorrow,’ I said. ‘So I’ll see you on Monday.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘See you on Monday.’
I walked down the steps to the platform that was already busy with people. The boys from Judd in their dark blue suits, the boys from the posh school in grey blazers, and the Hillview Girls whom we were terrified of and who would yell things like ‘Did you shag him?’ to each other and squawk with laughter. Grumpy old ladies with too much time on their hands sometimes wrote to our school to complain about how rowdy we were, running round the platform and dropping sweet-wrappers, allegedly. I wonder if they ever dared complain about the Hillview girls?
I got onto the train and found myself a seat by the window. The whistle blew and the train rumbled under the bridge and out the station. The fields and trees rolled backwards and the clouds were re-wound. I realised that neither direction was favourable: not the one forward, nor the one back. Back to home; a place I was supposed to call home but had now become strange and unknowable.
I stepped out of the station into a different town from the one it had been that morning.
This new place, this other world I had entered, had tried to clothe itself in my memories. My walk back home was through unfamiliar streets, but ones masquerading as somewhere I knew. My leafy road looked safe, but the hedges watched me as I passed. I looked at them sideways, but kept my composure. It was too dangerous to let on that I knew what they really were.
The house too was a fake, a fraud. My real home did not have this emptiness. This emptiness that hollowed out like hunger. That reached inside me when I walked in and shut the door. That made the house perpetually cold, that sent in the spiders.
This was a house at the edge of the world, and so was the town. I had come here by mistake. I was an alien. My single fish swam in the tank in the kitchen, an automaton. The stairs I walked up to my room were not safe. Their colour was shifting, they lay quiet as a snake. I pressed my hands to the walls of my bedroom. They seemed solid, but I knew this was not true.
I took my planner out of my bag and lay it open on my desk. I would be exempt from homework for this week. I wrote FUNERAL into Thursday and crossed out Wednesday and Friday. In all the pages before my mother had signed it off for the week, to prove to the teachers that I had done my homework. The planner was full of her name, repeated over and over again. It was silly to get sentimental about that. And it would not be a reasonable excuse to get a new planner.
‘How was school, kids?’ said my dad that evening as we ate take-away at the kitchen table.
‘Fine,’ we all said.
The food tasted of nothing, which made sense in this world. The robot fish eyed me from behind the fish-tank glass. I watched my family eating and wondered whether they were automatons too. Some things don’t bear thinking about too much, though: life must go on.