The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (11 page)

‘I’ll be back for more, my dear,’ she’d said, winking, ‘and I just have to have more of that perfume.’ And then she’d squeezed Fabbia’s hand. ‘You’re like a  breath of fresh air in this town,’ she’d said, looking her straight in the eye, and then she was on her way again, stepping over the cobblestones in what looked like a new pair of particularly elegant court shoes, leaving Fabbia smiling to herself.

And now there was Jean Cushworth’s Royal Wedding Party. All her friends, ordering dresses. In only three short months, Mamma had become very much in demand. Each evening now, she sat squinting under the lamp in the upstairs sitting-room, altering a seam or a hem, or crouched over the sewing machine she’d set up on the kitchen table, its treadle producing a steady chant long into the night.

‘I can help,’ Ella said.

Mamma smoothed a stray tendril of hair from her cheek. ‘Ah,
tesora
, thank you but I’m not having you cooped up here, ruining your eyesight. You’re young. You should be out doing things after school, enjoying yourself with Billy, making some nice new friends too, now we’ve settled a bit…’

Ella looked away. She tried to hide her face from Mamma’s scrutiny. The truth was that when anyone new tried to talk to her, in the playground or in between lessons, she felt her face get hot and she didn’t know where to put her hands. She found herself imagining what they might be thinking about the new girl, the strange girl with the slightly funny way of talking, although she also knew that her words were losing their southern sound, becoming more clipped in some places, more elongated in others. It was as if her lips and tongue were learning how to fit into this new place before the rest of her was ready.

‘I like your hair. Lovely and dark, innit?’ said Lizzie Towcroft, one of the girls in her year, holding out a paper bag full of sherbet. ‘Go on. Just stick yer finger in then and give it a good ol’ lick. That’s right!’

Ella felt herself being watched carefully as her finger, covered in vivid orange powder, found its way to her mouth. The unexpectedly sharp taste, popping on her tongue, made her gasp and her nose wrinkle.

Lizzie giggled.

‘Funny stuff, innit?’

‘Sorry. I’ve never had it before.’

‘Don’t they have sherbet then, in the country where you come from?’

‘I come from England, like you do,’ Ella said. ‘From the south, from Eastbourne. By the sea. Well, that’s where I was born… and they might have sherbet there. But I don’t know. I never tasted it, anyway…’

‘Do they all talk like you, down there, then? It’s a bit posh, innit?’ Lizzie said, grinning.

‘I talk like this because my mum is… well… she lived in Paris before I was born. She speaks lots of languages. Her accent’s all mixed-up,’ Ella said.

She could feel her insides beginning to slither around. That familiar feeling, half-defiance, half-panic.

Lizzie’s eyes were wide and shining. ‘What about yer dad, then? Where does he come from?

‘My dad’s dead,’ Ella said. For a moment, it was almost satisfying to watch Lizzie’s face turn red.

‘Aw. Soz. No offence.’

Then her eyes lit up again. ‘We’ll have to teach you how to speak proper, just like we do up ‘ere. Then you’ll fit in better, right?’

She laughed a carefree laugh that seemed to force its way from her belly into her throat, her mouth opening to reveal her pink tongue and perfectly white teeth.

Ella wondered what would happen if she were to link arms with Lizzie, right there. She looked at Lizzie’s wide hips, the soft swell of her stomach under her sweater, the way she carried herself with a lazy kind of confidence. She watched with fascination the way that Lizzie’s mouth fell right open when she laughed, easily, unselfconsciously, so that you could see all the fillings in her teeth and the point of her tongue flicking across her lips. Being friends with Lizzie might be so simple, so straightforward. She sensed that if Lizzie decided that she liked you, then everyone would.

But then Lizzie stopped laughing. She was looking at Ella differently now, from under those hooded lids.

‘What you gawping at?’ she said. Her hand went up and she began to twirl and twirl a strand of her hair around her finger. ‘Ohhhhhhhh,’ she said, and the sound came out like a long release of air. ‘Now I gerrit… You don’t want to talk like the rest of us, do yer? Yer think I’m common, don’t yer? Miss Fancy Pants. Miss Lah-di-dah, speaks all these languages, thinks she’s too good for the rest of us.’

She leaned in closer. ‘Well, you know what you can do, Miss Fancy Pants?’ she hissed. ’You can stick it.’

And before Ella could answer, before she could explain that this wasn’t what she’d been thinking at all, Lizzie turned sharply on her heel and walked off in that slow easy roll of hers down the corridor.

For the rest of the day, throughout every lesson, Ella felt pairs of eyes boring into her and heard whispering and faint giggles whenever Mrs Cossington turned her back to write on the board.

She knew what they were saying.
Miss Fancy Pants. Miss Up-Herself. Thinks she’s so much better than the rest of us.
She’d heard it all before.

She wished that she could be like Mimi Parr or Lulu Barker, girls who seemed to make not fitting in into an attitude, a kind of talent.  They wore clothes bought from charity shops – geeky cardigans buttoned up to the neck and A-line skirts and old lady chunky-heeled shoes – and they did it with a kind of flair, a carefully cultivated air of eccentricity.

When everyone else was eating lunch in the school canteen, Mimi and Lola made picnic tea parties out on the playing-field to which only a chosen few girls were invited. They read poems to one other and played singles on an old portable record-player and danced under the trees, waving their arms in the air and closing their eyes.

That was how to be different, thought Ella. Different as cool. Different as something other people wanted to be a part of.

Once, only once, Mimi Parr had smiled at her, coming into the girls’ toilets.

‘I like your hair,’ she’d said. ‘Wild.’

And for a whole day after that, Ella had liked her hair too. But the feeling had quickly faded, like a flower growing in the wrong kind of pot. There were too many other feelings, all pushing and jostling against it.

*

The story of Wolf Girl

‘Once upon a time,’ Ella wrote in her notebook, ‘there was a young witch, a very powerful sorceress, who lived alone with her mother in a little flat above a shop in a half-hidden courtyard.

‘By day, the witch was just like any other girl – except that she kept herself to herself and people thought she was strange, a bit too quiet, stuck-up even. They didn’t know how she felt on the inside.

‘She always wore black, but that was because it helped her to hide.

‘Sometimes, in fact, the girl longed for colour – sunflower yellow or flame orange or cornflower blue. But black felt warm. Black felt impenetrable. She could pull it around her like a second skin and no one would ever get close enough to find out her secret.

‘Because by night, while her mother lay sleeping, the girl sprouted thick fur on her legs and forearms. Her hair, already long and dark and wild, grew further down her back until it reached the floor. She leaped from her bedroom window and ran through the town, skirting the stone flanks of the Minster, taking the steps to the city walls in a single bound, moving swiftly from shadow to shadow, enjoying how the cobbles and the worn stone flags felt under her paws. Like this, taking the shape of the wolf, she could fly for miles out of the city, across fields and farmland.

‘Sometimes, she’d scale rooftops and garden fences and peer through windows at people sleeping in their beds – people she knew like Billy Vickers and Katrina Cushworth and the girl from Braithwaites – and she’d… she’d…’

Ella chewed on the end of her pen. What would she do? Put a curse on Katrina so that her skin itched and her ears glowed bright red for the rest of her life? No, of course she wouldn’t, although sometimes it was tempting. Maybe she’d weave a powerful love charm over the girl from Braithwaites so that a millionaire business man, passing by, would see her in the window and fall in love with her and she’d never have to weigh apples or sweep floors again? And Billy…? She felt her face flush.

She began again.

‘And she’d  breathe powerful charms into their ears so that they’d stir in their sleep and smell the scent of the old wild places in their dreams. ‘

That was better.

‘But the Wolf Girl loved the woods, the fragrance of earth and wet leaves, the deep pools of darkness that waited between the trees, the cold, clear glint of the stars.

‘She would run and run beyond the edge of the city and plunge deep into the woods to find the darkest places and she’d begin to gather twigs and branches to make a fire. Then she’d crouch on her poweful haunches beside it and breathe flame into the dead wood and as soon as the fire was leaping hot and high, she’d begin to sing.

‘She’d call out the shapes from the flames and the spirits from the leaves and branches. She’d call out the song of the little owl and all the birds that nested here in the deepest parts of the wood and the story of the moon that slept here in the arms of the trees. Finally, just before the sun began to rise, she’d sing the shape of her own true nature, the part of herself that she could never reveal in the light of day.

‘And as she sang, little by little, she’d feel herself return to herself. ‘

Ella looked up from the page. An overfed pigeon strutted on the roof and, below her in the courtyard, the marmalade-coloured cat rolled in a patch of sunlight.

‘There in the woods,’ she wrote, ‘the Wolf Girl never felt ugly or lonely and she never felt afraid. But she always knew that she had to return to the little flat above the shop and her other life in the city and hide her wildness again and her true nature. ‘

*

‘Don’t mind
them
,’ said Billy. ‘They’re a load of gassing idiots, that’s what they are. Novelty’ll wear off sooner or later…’

They were walking down by the river, throwing sticks from the bank, seeing whose would catch the current faster.
Laikin
is what Billy liked to call it,
laikin’ out
. Ella tried the words silently on her tongue. It felt like licking an ice-lolly.

And then the words were out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

‘But why are
you
my friend, Billy?’ she said. 

He stopped dead on the riverbank, a stick in his hand, staring at her. His face looked white, stunned.

‘What kind of question is that, then?’

‘Well, no one else seems to like me.’ Ella hated the way her voice sounded in that moment. Silly, a whiny girl’s voice, drifting down the riverbank.

A blackbird chirruped away above her head and it seemed almost to be mocking her, but she carried on.

‘They all think I’m stuck-up They think that I think that I’m better than them somehow. Except Katrina. And she doesn’t count. But I’m right, aren’t I?

Billy looked down, kicking at a tussock of grass.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Ella thought he sounded irritated. ‘I wouldn’t know what they think. I mean, why’s the grass green? Why’s the sky blue? Why do you have to ask why all the time?’

But Ella felt suddenly reckless, as if she’d been pressing against some invisible wall and now it was beginning to give way beneath her fingers. She had to know. And Billy was the only one who could tell her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘for instance, why do we never go to
your
house? What I’m thinking is, are you
embarrassed
about me? Are you ashamed, for example, about being friends with the daughter of an Eye-Tie and a Middle-Eastern terrorist, a potential member of Al Quaeda?’

Billy looked appalled. He flung his stick down and turned away from her. He ran a finger round the inside of his shirt collar and shifted from one foot to another. Then he turned back again.

‘Is that really what you think?’ he said, quietly, ‘because in that case, you just don’t know me at all…’

But Ella pressed on.

‘Well, what is it, then? What’s the big secret?’

Billy turned away and started walking. She ran to keep up with him.

‘It’s really very simple, El,’ he was saying. ‘My house isn’t a place that you’d like very much…’

‘But how do you know?’ she heard herself protesting. ‘Why does everyone always assume that they know what I’m thinking?’

‘I don’t know how to explain it to you. But it’s not because I’m ashamed of you, alright?’ Billy said, beginning to scramble up the riverbank away from her, ‘If anything, El, it’s that
I’m
a bit ashamed of
them
. And that doesn’t exactly make me feel good about myself. My Mum left school when she was fourteen. My dad’s worked in a factory all his life. My brothers are big, daft uneducated bruisers, the lot of ‘em. It’s not what you’re used to. You’d have nothing at all to talk to them about…’

Ella tried to scramble up after him. She didn’t know whether to feel angry - that he’d assumed he knew what she could and couldn’t talk about - or embarrassed that she’d gone too far. Why did she always have to spoil things?

‘I’m sorry, Billy, I didn’t mean to… I just started to think…’

‘Well,
don’t
,’ said Billy. ‘Try
not
to think, why don’t you? How’s that for a new idea? If you ask
me
, maybe you do
too much
thinking… Always making up stories when there’s nothing there. Always scribbling things down in that little notebook of yours.‘

He stopped at the top of the bank, offering her his hand and then, when she took it, hauling her up so hard that she thought her arm would come out of its socket.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her hand was still in his. He was kneading it between his fingers. She saw that he was shaking.

10.

Scarf by Chanel. 1965. Cream silk with black motif.