The Other Me (2 page)

The collar of my white shirt is rubbing my neck. I wish I could rip off my top button. Thick grey socks make my knees itch. At the next desk a girl called Amber is frowning at the board. She has a bobble nose, curly black hair and blue eyes. Not like an Amber at all. She looks like Snow White. Her lips are blood-red as if she’s bitten them. Perhaps she has. Perhaps she’s as scared as me.

She glances across under sooty lashes and grins. I catch my breath. I want to be friends with her more than anything.

Mrs Jones’ chalk goes on scratching numbers. A dry, pale scent mixes with a faint tang of sweat and rubber, and the warm exhalations of a roomful of eleven-year-olds. I copy the numbers as carefully as I can, but they jumble up on the page, making no sense. Dad says that I’m lazy at maths. He says I don’t try hard enough.

Mrs Jones has stopped writing to stare at us. Her cheeks have burning scarlet patches as if she’s boiling hot or really embarrassed. But I don’t think she can be either. She rakes her nails against her scalp, fingers disappearing inside short curls. Her navy cardigan is peppered with bits of dead skin. The eyes behind her spectacles search around the room. She taps one finger on her chin. She’s looking for someone to ask. I drop my forehead so low it almost touches the wooden desk, hunching up, fixing on the blur of numbers on my paper, praying dear God, dear God, don’t let her pick me.

Then lots of things happen at once. There’s a soft thump, and the high-pitched sound of breaking glass. A missile has flown clean through the window on the other side of the room, making a jagged hole. Cracks run across the remaining panes in zig-zag lines. Someone screams. A cricket ball bounces and rolls slowly, coming to rest under my desk. There’s broken glass all over the floor under the window. Bits gleam and sparkle.

My whole life I’ve been saying prayers, but they’ve never been answered before. I sit up in surprise, fighting to control my face, wanting to laugh at the miracle. Mrs Jones has her hand clamped over her mouth. Amber and I exchange triumphant looks.

Kids have jumped out of their seats. There is an excited chatter. Mrs Jones has recovered enough to shout, ‘Sit down – everyone keep calm and sit down.’ Another teacher comes in. He must have heard the noise. After a hurried chat, he leaves with a frown creasing his face.

‘Whoever hit that ball is going to be in dead trouble,’ Amber whispers to me, eyes round as she makes a slicing motion across her throat.

‘I know.’ I nod. ‘Look.’ I peer at the ball. ‘Under my desk.’

She stretches out her leg to push it with her toe; then she glances at me and giggles. I’m so happy that I want to grab her hand and squeeze it tight. I want to ask her to be my best friend right now. Do people do that? I don’t know how to behave. I don’t know how to have a friend.

‘Is everyone all right? No cuts or injuries?’ Mrs Jones is saying. ‘We’ll have this mess cleared up in no time.’

The door opens. We turn expectantly, and I catch my breath. I can feel the class watching my father stalking to the front, a broom grasped in one huge fist and a dustpan in the other. I look away from his towering shape, buttoned into a brown cotton coat. But I see his profile etched against the inside of my lids: the sharp line of his nose, the downward pull of his mouth.

I grip the edge of the desk. How weird is it that my father is the caretaker? What will Amber think?

I can hear the swish of bristles and the tinkle and scrape of glass fragments being swept into the plastic pan. I clench my teeth.

‘See him?’ Amber nudges me. ‘He’s German.’

I swallow, clearing my throat, trying to work out how to reply.

She hisses, ‘My sister says he’s a Nazi. He gassed the Jews.’

The desk tilts under me and I curl my toes inside my shoes to stop the sudden lurch in my belly. She puts her finger under her nose, straight across her top lip like a moustache, and winks at me. I examine my hands clamped against the desk: white speckles on my nails, pink, ragged skin around them with bits that shred and sting.

‘Well, I think that will do. Thank you,’ Mrs Jones is saying.

At the edge of sight, I see him moving away. He’s stuck a piece of cardboard over the open wound of the window. He’s going to leave. I squeeze my knees together, dropping my chin and rounding my shoulders to fold myself up. Don’t look. Don’t make eye contact. Underneath everything the word ‘Nazi’ is repeating inside my head. But Nazis are heel-clicking men in scary uniforms, with polished black boots, scars cutting across their smooth monster faces.

I hear the scrape of heavy footsteps passing, and then the door closes quietly. He’s gone. I draw a deep breath and dare to raise my eyes. The class is back to normal: muttering, scratching heads, scribbling in exercise books. Nobody is looking at me. Mrs Jones is writing on the board again. Amber makes a funny face for my benefit, miming a yawn.

My father was in the war. I’d never thought what that meant before. I know nothing about it, except that we won, and the Nazis killed the Jews. Of course my father had nothing to do with that. My insides start to crack like the glass in the window frame. He doesn’t talk about the past. I put my thumb between my teeth and bite. He’s just my dad: tall and serious with a funny accent. And ordinary. He can’t be part of history.

The thing to do, I decide, is to keep quiet. Maybe nobody will think to connect us; it doesn’t have to mean we’re related, just because we have the same surname. I’ll avoid him at school. I won’t tell anyone.

I tilt my chin up and stretch my lips, grinning for Amber. She pats her opened mouth, pretending to yawn again, and I copy her, rolling my eyes at the numbers Mrs Jones is inscribing onto the board.

The thing about September that I’d failed to mark on the calendar, but of course Mum had in her neat script, is that it’s the beginning of the Methodist year. So we’re sitting in our usual places in the second row of the church, listening to the long-winded Covenant Service. The lay preacher proclaims, ‘We are here to celebrate God’s gracious offer to Israel that
I will be their God and they shall be my people
.’

In my head I’m offering God my own prayer of thanks, because He’s given me what I’ve always wanted, even more than a pet: my own best friend. Amber is the most popular girl in my class, and she’s chosen me. Every day since that first one, I’ve been impatient to get to school, my chest tightening with nervy excitement as I walk through the gates, waiting for Amber to run over and link her arm with mine. Sometimes I even forget that I have anything to hide.

My father breathes heavily through his mouth. He’s placed his palms on his knees, leaning forward as if he’s about to spring to his feet and take part in a race. My mother is dressed in her best clothes, hands linked in her lap. Both of them keep their eyes on Mr Lewis in his grey suit as he talks about Christian perfection.

I wish we could have been Baptists. Like those African women wrapped in swathes of silver fabric, heads bound in brilliant turbans, clapping as if they’re at a party. Or Catholics, with candles and blood-spurting statues, and incense-clouded air, altar boys in white lace singing like angels. But if I could choose any religion, I’d choose Hinduism – I like the sound of gods with elephant heads and sinuous ladies with multiple arms, the way they can change shapes and grant wishes. Lots of our neighbours are Hindu. The Choppras and the Guptas. My father says it’s a shame that they are heathens. Mum says, ‘It’s not for us to judge, Otto. With God’s grace, we know that salvation is possible for everyone.’

Aseema Choppra is in the year above me at school. On my first day she smiled at me as we passed each other on the stairs, and I turned to watch her walking away with her friends, her long black plait hugging the curve of her spine.

I fix my eyes on the plain wooden cross that hangs behind the preacher’s head, trying to concentrate. He pauses to push a slick of hair back into place across his bald spot, then rubs his palm on his trousers, a fleeting expression of distaste on his face. Brylcreem, I bet. It’s really sticky. Dad keeps a pot of it on the bathroom shelf. My father insists on cleanliness, seeing as it’s so close to godliness. He gleams from top to toe. This morning I’d woken to find my shoes polished and placed outside my bedroom. My father cleans all our shoes, setting them out on sheets of newspaper and rolling up his sleeves, spitting and rubbing. He says you can tell a lot about a man from what he’s wearing on his feet.

Dad also says that to follow Jesus Christ we need discipline. We should be fit and ready for the challenge He will set us. My father does his morning exercises in the garden. Whatever the weather, he’s out there going through the same jerks and jumps: bending and straightening, touching his toes and dropping down to do press-ups. Watching him in his vest and rugby shorts, shoulders heaving at the timid air, his hair sweat-darkened, and the light catching his pale, bunched calves, he looks like a warrior in God’s army.

My father can be frightening. But I’ve never thought of him as being someone to make fun of. Not until I saw the boys at school marching behind him, making silent salutes, their fingers under their noses, arms like pistons punching the air.
Sieg heil.

‘Klaudia, I notice that you don’t speak to me at school,’ my father said today. ‘Is there a problem?’

I wrapped one leg around the other and gazed at a spot just behind him. ‘No.’

‘Well,’ he shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are embarrassed to have a father that is a caretaker. Perhaps you think it’s too lowly a profession?’

I shook my head. He was testing me.

‘Good, honest work is nothing to be ashamed of.’ He poked his chin forward, so that I saw the throb of his throat. ‘We are plain people. But we’re giving you the advantages we never had. After everything your mother has done for you, you must work hard, help pay her back for all the sacrifices she’s made.’ His disappointment in me pulled the edges of his mouth down. ‘Your mother is a saint, Klaudia. Neither of us deserves her.’

His face transformed at the mention of her name, mouth and eyes turned upwards with delight, his eyes glowing with the same fervent look he gets when he is praying.

But then he frowned again. ‘A lot of those kids, they have no discipline. No belief. No work ethic. They are foolish. And they get into drugs and so forth.’ His hairy eyebrows met in the middle, his eyes narrowing into a blue glitter. ‘I never want to see you behaving like them. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘It would kill your mother.’

He glared at me as if I was already a heroin addict, had already driven my mother into the depths of despair.

Mum is gesturing for me to stand, the hymn book flopping open in her other hand. The congregation is on its feet, singing ‘Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies’. I catch my father’s deep, throaty roar. For once his accent is disguised inside music and all I hear is the power of his voice.

My tongue is dry. No sounds come out. My mother holds the book towards me so that I can read. ‘
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief… scatter all my unbelief.
’ I mouth the words looking down at my shoes, seeing the hazy reflection of myself in their blue-black shine.

ELIZA

1995, Leeds

May

Lights flare out of darkness. Guitars screech over a pounding bass. The place has all the pulsing energy of a funfair at night. I’ve never been a fan of fairs. Or gigs. I’m trying to keep my feet inside the crush, bracing myself against the push of elbows and shoulders, as a crowd, high on music, cheap lager and drugs, judders and jolts against me. I scan the moving heads; I’ve lost the friends I came with. Except Meg, just in front of me, waving her arms, hair sizzling with static. Then, as the lead singer leans over the edge of the stage, howling into his mike, spraying the front row with saliva, I feel a weight dropping onto my toe, crushing it.

The hulking culprit at my side is oblivious. His arc of hair glows purple in the strobe as he yells along with the lyrics. Pain shoots through my foot. I shout. But my scream hits a wall of sound.

‘Meg. I’m leaving. Now!’

I prod her damp T-shirt. She turns, puzzled, watching my mouth moving. I point towards the exit, making a face meant to express frustration and agony. Pushing my way through the doors at the back, I limp into the bright lights of the pub. It seems quiet after the raging concert, but it’s a usual busy Friday evening: locals and students converging on the bar, flock wallpaper, brass fittings, cigarette smoke and conversation.

Sinking into the nearest empty chair, I slip off my shoe and sock, worrying that my toe is actually broken. My nail is stained, colour seeping like a smashed plum. It’s hot. Throbbing.

Meg arrives at my side. ‘Let’s have a gander…’ She peers at my foot and purses her lips, sucks in air with a quick rush. ‘God! Looks like an elephant stepped on your toe!’

‘One with a Mohican.’

I flex my toe gingerly. It seems to be working. ‘I knew we should have gone to see
Braveheart
.’

A slight frown of concern creases Meg’s elfin face, and then she gives me her familiar cheerful grin.

‘You’ll be fine. And we couldn’t miss The Flying Ducks. Only one night in Leeds. Would have been a crime.’

She sits down, chin in her hands. ‘Want a bevvy?’

I nod. ‘The pain-killing kind.’ Although it’s not the pain that worries me, it’s if I’ll be able to stand in pointe shoes tomorrow.

‘Cider it is then. Hang on a mo.’ She grins and is off to the bar, pulling at the hem of her skirt, covering her bottom and swinging her hips.

I see the ice before I see him. A hand curled around a large plastic beaker. The faint crackle of cubes, piled to the brim.

‘Excuse me,’ I call from my seat. The ice cubes stop, suspended in mid-air by a male hand. I take in the flimsy plastic container, mercury-like drops of condensation, the gleam of frozen water. My gaze follows the line of his wrist up his arm to the shoulder, and a face. Surprise raises his eyebrows and then recedes. He has friendly, crinkly eyes I notice, and a generous mouth that’s mid-wince at the sight of my toe. Sitting with my bare foot up on the velvet seat, I have the instinct to cover it up.