Unbelievable, Chapter One, Edited, plus a bit more!

Unbelievable

Chapter One: Identity

The school rose up before me, tall and bland. The buildings were blocks, cold-faced, the paint peeling from the wooden window frames; a faint tang of neglect tainted the air. I watched the steady troupe of uniform-clad pupils drain in through the gates and dissipate inside the buildings through various doors, as the huge wall-mounted clock ticked ominously towards half-past eight.

Suddenly, I was achingly alone. No familiar faces of friends; no desperate text from Phoebe demanding to know where I was. I imagined the familiar faces inside the familiar classroom walls back home, and wondered if they missed me as much as I missed them. Of course, I hadn’t been to school for weeks; I hadn’t been able to handle the fuss. Christmas had also been ruined, and then there were all the preparations, my mother’s friends helping me pack our belongings away into storage; the house being put on the market; the eternal absence of my father poignant. I wished I was old enough to make my own decisions, but sixteen wasn’t eighteen and even if I had had those valuable two extra years, I couldn’t have afforded the house on my own. The cold, elderly lawyer appeared from time to time, but I barely noticed any of it. My mind was already flicking forward to the future, trying to recall my Grandmother’s face from my rare visits, remembering instead the endless bus and train rides, instructions clutched in hand, as I made my solitary way to stay with her every summer holiday.

‘Hey, are you going to stand there all day?’ A voice broke across my conscious like a wave, stunning me back to the present, where I appeared to be standing, door handle in hand, while a queue of students formed behind me, growing later for registration by the second.

‘S…sorry,’ I stuttered, and dragged my feet inside, heading for reception. The secretary at the front desk looked harassed; the phone was ringing off the hook, the second week in January plagued with illness and absence.

‘Good morning,’ she grinned brightly, leaving the phone off the hook while she dealt with signing me in and explaining my timetable. Furnished in about two minutes flat with a map, registration documents and the name of my tutor, she directed me to a small table in the corner to fill in the relevant paperwork.

Name of student. I took a deep breath and committed myself.

‘Neona White.’ I felt a little guilty, stealing my Grandmother’s surname, but let myself nonetheless.

Name of parent/guardian. Screamed the second box.

Hesitantly, I wrote: ‘Magena White.’ Maggie’s name overrode my mother’s, beating it to the nib of my pen. I let it spill out, as Selena DeWitka was swallowed back into the cartridge. My mother’s name sounded so exotic next to mine, thanks to my father. I did not remember what he was like, really; he had left when I was only a baby, but I remembered his presence, his face. I remembered how I had felt when he held me, even though I was tiny. I had decided to take my Grandmother’s name; new city, new identity. I thought it might save me a few questions; besides, my first name was exotic enough.

‘Finished, love?’ the receptionist asked, interrupting my thoughts. Hastily, I filled in the rest of the form and almost shoved it at her, as the bell went for first period. I checked my timetable. English. Thank heaven for that; I could relax. Even though I had a lot of catching up to do; I’d missed a whole two terms of the course, but it wasn’t as if there was anything else to concentrate on; it wasn’t as if I had any friends to distract me, or any idea how to make new ones; I’d known most of my friends at home since the first day of primary school, and Phoebe even longer than that; our mothers had been best friends.

Gritting my teeth and keeping my eyes firmly on my map in the busy corridors, full of curious eyes, I found my way to the English department. At least I was too old for uniform; my jeans were comfortable and familiar, my oversized jumper and warm coat a cocoon of defence. Sliding inside the door, I made my way to the familiar safety of the back of the room, luckily well-practised in the art of eye avoidance, since several pairs followed me. I felt the weight of judgement, the usual weighing up, daggered stares from the girls; from the boys, a strange hostility, their eyes seeing only shapeless, baggy clothes. I must look drab in comparison to the made-up faces, the short skirts and skinny jeans of the other girls. Nothing had changed; a different county, same reactions to me.

The low hum of conversation filled the room; it ebbed and flowed around me, as I unwound myself into an uncomfortable wooden chair and sought out pen and paper. A hush fell as a tall, elegant blonde woman strode into the classroom, clutching a stack of books, which she placed delicately on the front desk. The patterns of a lesson unfolded; register, then, noting the unnamed, a brief exchange between us:

‘Neona White, I presume – the receptionist handed me a note on the way here. You’ve missed the first modular exam; we took it last week, but there will be an opportunity to re-take in May. You’ll have a lot of catching up to do at home.’

I nodded. Did I say exchange? I didn’t speak.

She handed out the books, passing me a copy of Frankenstein. I held the book gingerly in my hands, weighing up the story, which I knew well. The freak holding the book about the freak: a perfect duo of irony.

Luckily, the first thing to do was watch the film adaptation, so that we had ‘the whole-story overview’. The flickering images painted my eyes with colour, humour and light, and I was surprised to find a tiny glimmer of enjoyment creeping through the numbness. I suppressed it instantly; those were floodgates I didn’t need opening, especially not in my present environs.

Maths was harder to escape into. I had thought it would be easy, but the young, enthusiastic teacher was determined to include everyone in his relentless demands for answers to questions that were somewhat beyond me. I guessed, failed, and then guessed again, hitting the right mark occasionally, pleasing myself. I placed myself on mind-arrest; separated the freedom of obscurity from the past. I could enjoy being myself with nobody to judge me; nobody here knew the truth, and it was liberating. School back home had become marinated in a toxicity; here, I could breathe and relax a little.

Last lesson: Biology: drawing the shapes of cells; labelling their relevant parts; answering some questions from the dog-eared textbook which a fellow classmate had lent me. The teacher was old, long past the stage of being bothered with new faces. He had merely grunted at me, got me to scrawl my name on a piece of paper, and dismissed me to my back-row haunt.

And then, the day was done with me. I slid out of the school gates into the darkening world, as what was left of the light slipped away under the cover of heavy cloud. I sensed it would rain again soon: a perpetual echo of my mood; blank bleakness. The streetlights buzzed and flicked on as I passed them on the way to the bus stop, and I left the town behind me, heading back to the wide green spaces where my Grandmother chose to live, alone no longer.

On Saturday, I had felt like an intruder, storming in from the North, bringing the rain with me. Once we had exited the taxi and were safely inside, out of the weather, I had the chance to assess my new guardian. She hadn’t changed much; she didn’t bear the name ‘Grandmother’ well. I had called her ‘Granny’ as a child, but now she insisted upon ‘Maggie’, grinning out from between the curtains of her long brown hair, released from her hat in a swinging, rich curtain, her blue eyes sparkling at me. She had cooked me lunch enthusiastically: some sort of stew with dumplings and a large glass of red wine ‘To settle the travelling nerves.’ My Grandmother: the alcohol pusher. She didn’t look a day over fifty. I might have to lie to my friends at school if they ever made it here for a visit. That is, if I ever made any. It seemed unlikely. Once inside her cottage, I felt able to speak, and as the wine flowed, so did the conversation. The ease of family returned and we chatted about things that did not matter, both easing carefully around the topics we considered most dangerous.

We had whiled away the rest of the weekend somehow or other. Midsomer Murders repeats were a popular choice on the television, and in true ‘Granny’ style, we spent most of Sunday ‘experimenting’ in the kitchen. She encouraged me to try various forms of cake and cookie from her hallowed Chocolate Recipe book, while she concocted various herbal brews for every sort of ailment. Maggie was famous locally for her skincare products and bath soaks; she’d even sold some formulas to a large beauty company, who now stocked a range of her products in their nationwide stores. ‘Enough to pay the rent!’ she’d laugh when I pressed her for the amount she raked in. ‘Better than working in the chemists, anyway!’

She had given me my old room, but not as I remembered it. The smell of fresh paint filled my nostrils those first few nights, and the new double bed took up most of the available space of the cottage room, the rest of the floor a battleground between the desk and wardrobe. She’d even bought me a laptop; it sat proudly on the table. I had been amazed to discover it ready loaded with programmes for schoolwork as well as Broadband Internet, and I wondered who had aided her in this endeavour to make her somewhat old-fashioned home into such a fantastic imitation of the twenty-first century, so that the transition South would be easier for me. The room and its attributes solidified the incomprehension already deep-rooted in me: why had my mother been in such a hurry to leave, all those years ago? And why had she never returned?

Neither Maggie nor Mum had ever explained the truth to me. I had nagged and sought their explanations, of course, but years of probing had revealed no clues; they each stuck to their stories like glue, repeating the same tired lines with the same faint smile of regret.

‘I had to escape; you’ll see, one day,’ Mum used to tell me. ‘I escaped to University, and once you leave, I mean really leave, it’s impossible to go back.’

‘Not even to visit your own mother?’ I pushed.

‘We fell out, irreconcilably, a few years after I left,’ she had admitted as I grew up, but would never tell me what it was that had caused such an unbreachable rift. ‘Going back after that was just impossible.’

Maggie was more light-hearted, simply laughing and repeating,

‘Blood is thicker than water, love, and for some, impossible to swallow!’

The old saying seemed to tickle her, the emptiness in her eyes as she laughed the only betrayal of a deeper hurt, a wound that would never heal. She had never come to Nottingham, and Mum never came back here. I had passed brief messages of greeting between them whenever I had visited Maggie; they sent cards on Christmasses and birthdays, but never letters; no real communication ever permeated the shield that lay there.

I could feel the atmosphere, even in here. For this room, of course, had been my mother’s before it was ever mine. No personal belongings remained, however; I assumed Maggie had shut them away in boxes somewhere, the attic perhaps. The only evidence that my mother had ever been a presence in Maggie’s life were the photographs on top of the baby grand piano that dominated the living room, and the framed degree certificate on the wall. I knew that my Mother’s graduation from University was the last time they’d ever had face-to-face contact. I traced the old pictures; nothing past the age of eighteen. To think that I was nearly that age now. My photos jostled for position; Mum had always sent my school ones. But there were others that I hadn’t expected: photos of me and my friends; photos of me as a child with our dog; and one, the shocking one, the one that rooted me to the spot and held my mouth agape in a rigid, silent ‘O’.

My father’s face stared out at me from behind the glass. He stood proudly, holding a baby, me, in his arms, pointing at the camera to direct her eyes to the lens. My mother must have sent it all those years ago. I had never seen it before. I think she must have erased all traces of him from our house; no pictures, nothing to remember him by. I felt the tears begin to well inside the pools of my staring eyes, and shuddered, breaking the spell, turning away from the photograph and closing my mouth, blocking the passage of my throat, keeping the numbness down. It felt familiar, writhing in my stomach, blotting out all feeling from my heart. I raised a comforting hand to hold my belly, taking comfort from the nothing I felt as I swallowed the tears back down.