The Dress

7.

A girl’s grey school skirt, standard issue, taken up at the hem and in at the seam. Briggs School Uniform Suppliers. 2010.



They’d been in York for a couple of months. Ella was just getting used to the short cold days, when the mist crept up from the river and rubbed itself through the narrow streets like a giant cat with damp, grey fur.

And then suddenly, a March wind blew into the city, whipping the river into brown froth, sending people scurrying through the streets, their shopping bags filled like sails, and the pigeons flapping frantically under the eaves. In Museum Gardens, gusts of rain chased away the squirrels and the early tourists and battered the first beds of tulips. Even the gargoyles on the Minster seemed to huddle down closer on their carved plinths and the stone angels tucked in their crumbling wings.

Mamma didn’t like the wind. ‘It makes me restless,’ she grumbled, fingering the flimsy sleeves of her favourite dresses. ‘When will spring arrive?’

‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out,’ said Gracie, tapping the side of her nose with a mittened finger.

‘May?’ gasped Mamma. ‘Dio mio. We’ll all be frozen half to death by then.’

But Ella loved the wind. She loved how it slapped her cheek and tangled in her hair, how it smelled of things rising and quickening. She loved to stand on the riverbank and stretch her arms out wide so that she could almost imagine she could fly.

‘Have you been wearing your scarf?’ said Mamma, when she came home from school with one of her sore throats. ‘You haven’t, have you? Your ears are like lumps of ice.’

This time not even Maadar-Bozorg’s famous gargle of sea salt, lavender and honey could soothe it. By evening, the fever had taken hold of her. It raged all over her body. It floated her up to the ceiling and shook her eyes in their sockets. Now she was even too weak to resist Mamma’s plaster of sage and rosemary.

Ella’s voice came in squeaks and croaks. Mamma ignored her, basting her chest with a determined expression.

Ella submitted, exhausted, as Mamma produced an egg from her pocket and rubbed it all over her body. This was Mamma’s favourite technique. Ella knew that Mamma would place this egg in the freezer compartment of the fridge, up against the ice-cube trays and the frozen bottle of vodka.

‘To take your heat away,’ she always said.

Finally, her hand resting light and cool on Ella’s forehead, she announced, ‘We need a doctor. I’m going to go next door and ask Gracie who to call.’

Ella nodded, feeling the heat rise up from her stomach and sweep over her in a red wave.

When Dr Carter arrived, he was not at all how she thought a doctor should be. To begin with, he seemed very young. When Mamma pulled back the curtain, he crouched on his haunches at the side of her bed in a not-very-doctor-ish way and his face up close was smooth and clean-shaven, with a firm chin and eyes as twinkly as Billy’s.

‘Now then, young lady,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

‘May I, senorita?’ he asked, before placing his stethoscope inside her nightdress, as if he were asking her for a waltz around the bedroom. Not very doctor-like at all.

‘Tonsillitis,’ he pronounced. ‘Antibiotics. Necessary for this type of infection, I’m afraid.’

Through a haze of pain, Ella saw Mamma smoothing her dress over her hips, heard her offering the doctor a cup of coffee. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the luminous hands of her Betty Boop alarm clock, one of Mamma’s more irritating eBay finds, pointed to half past midnight. She heard footsteps on the stairs and Mamma humming that little tune of hers under her breath. She closed her eyes again and felt the press of the cool flannel on her forehead.

A little while after that, she heard the clink of glasses in the kitchen sink, then bare feet padding across the hallway and the swish and rustle as Mamma undressed in the dark, sliding herself into her own bed on the other side of the curtain.

‘Mamma…’ she tried to whisper but her mouth made no sound and she floated on a flotsam of feathers.



*

Funny, Ella thought, how your body could be doing one thing – buttering a slice of toast or listening to Mrs Cossington explain that the earth’s core is made of molten magma – when your mind was somewhere else entirely.

And it was at times like this that The Signals would arrive, flying into her head like a flock of angry birds, all red beaks and green wings, like nothing she’d ever seen before - not with her ordinary eyes, anyway.

What did she mean by that, with her ordinary eyes? She didn’t know, exactly. It was just that she had no idea where these images came from or how they got there, inside her mind. It was as if she were pressing up against the outside of her body and she could feel the air against her skin beginning to change its colour and texture.

She noticed that it always happened before something went wrong or when someone was angry or upset or just when she was sitting in a big group of people, like in assemblies.

She’d asked Mamma about it again just the other day, the strange swirling colours, the feelings.

‘That’s right,’ Mamma had said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘The Signals. Nothing to be afraid of, Ellissima. They can come in very handy.’

But there were so many other questions Ella wanted to ask. Would they start coming more and more often? And how was it that she seemed to be able to tune in to other people’s thoughts sometimes? Was she supposed to do that?

But Mamma was always so busy these days, with one of her customers or Dr Carter.

She’d noticed that The Signals happened in particular around her new friend, Katrina Cushworth. Because flippin’ Norah, here was the Big News. Ella finally had a new friend and the friend was even female.

Katrina Cushworth had blonde hair, one blue eye and one brown. And flippin’ Norah was something she would say. She’d been telling everyone that she and Ella were Inseparable. That was the word she used to her mother, who was Mrs Jean Cushworth, a Very Important Person in this city.

Snooty old cow, said Billy, and her stuck-up daughter too.

When Billy had come up to them in the playground today, Katrina had sighed loudly and said, ‘That Billy thinks he owns you, like a bag of bloomin’ marbles or a library book. Look at him, all soppy on you, the big daft thing.’

And another time she’d said, ‘He can’t put you in his pocket like a prize conker, you know. And anyway, everyone says he’s Trouble.’

When Katrina said anything, it always seemed to begin with a Capital Letter.

Katrina Cushworth lived off The Mount in one of the biggest houses in the city. You walked out of the crooked arrangement of streets at the city centre, past the funny lopsided shops and tearooms and the squat little buildings with beams and mullioned windows that Ella now knew well, out over Lendal Bridge and up, way up past the station towards the racecourse. There, where the sky opened out, the houses changed to rows of grand Georgian terraces with large windows and glossy black railings or elegant stucco villas fronted with flights of stone steps. And Katrina’s house was one of the largest and grandest.

Her garden was the size of a park. There were enormous chestnut trees and swings and monkey-bars. There was a funny little garden house too – Katrina called it the summerhouse – where they took picnics, sandwiches with the crusts cut off and biscuits and cupcakes and glass bottles of Coke, their outsides all filmy with cold, which the servant, Leonora, packed for them in a special hamper.

‘She’s not a servant,’ said Katrina. ‘Blimey, you make it sound so medieval. It’s just Leonora and I’ve known her since I was a baby. She used to be my nanny.’

But there was also Milton, a man with a sulky expression who drove Katrina and her mother around in a big silver BMW and lived in a flat above their garage. He wore a special cap with a crest and carried Mrs Cushworth’s bags of shopping.

‘And boy, does she know how to shop,’ said Katrina.


‘Pssssssst…’

The sound was like a small firework going off.

‘Hey, Ella. Deaf as well as daft, are you? I’m trying to talk to you!’

The secret missive landed on the desk in front of her, a piece of paper torn from an exercise book and folded over and over until it was the size of a hailstone. Ella dropped the paper into her lap, unfolding it one-handed under the desk and glancing down.

The handwriting was small and very round, the letters pressed deeply into the page, as if the writer had formed them under slow, determined pressure:

‘Today after school. Meet me outside the girls’ cloakrooms.’

Ella felt the hairs on the back of her neck where they were caught up into a tight pony-tail, begin to prickle. She dug her fingernails into her palms and tried to catch Billy’s eye.

Smile. Look them straight in the eye.

But when she glanced over her right shoulder, Katrina’s face was grinning, her face so open and her eyebrows raised in such an expectant way that Ella couldn’t help her lips from forming a smile too. The appointment was sealed. And with it, she thought to herself, she might as well give up any idea of keeping herself to herself. Anyone could see that Katrina Cushworth didn’t operate like that.

But she was also curious. What was it about this Katrina – or Kat as she liked to call herself, ‘Because Katrina sounds so, well, as if you’ve got a broomstick up your bum, don’t you think?’ – that had led her to make the first move? She’d been circling slowly since Ella had first arrived, not altogether un-catlike, come to think of it. A little like the tabby cat Ella liked to watch from the shop window, skulking through the courtyard, circling its prey. Katrina had been sniffing her out, watching and waiting to see what she might do next.

At half past three, Katrina was already waiting, slouched against the wall at the door to the girls’ cloakrooms, her hips thrust forward, her left foot in its dainty patent shoe running up and down the back of her right leg.

As Ella came down the corridor, she saw Katrina yawn, stretching her legs and arms in a dramatically bored expression.

‘Ready, then?’

Waiting but not waiting.

‘No Billy, tonight?’ said Katrina, pulling a fake pouty expression.

Ella shook her head.

‘I am allowed to have girlfriends, Billy,’ she’d said to him that afternoon. ‘It might be nice. I want to do girls’ things too.’

‘Fine,’ said Billy, ‘but Katrina Cushworth?’ He made a face and minced off in the opposite direction, wrists flapping, knees together, bottom protruding at a comedy angle as if he were wearing Katrina’s too-tight too-short skirt and her shoes with the not-quite-allowed-at-school high heels.

She knew his feelings were hurt.

‘You know where I live, right?’ Katrina was saying. ‘It will take about ten more minutes to get there. I haven’t got the car today because mum’s out. As usual.’

‘That’s OK. I like walking.’

Ella kicked a pebble along the pavement in front of her. Secretly she was relieved. The idea of sitting in the back of that car whilst that strange man drove them had seemed a bit creepy. Rain had started to fall, spotting her shoes and the sleeve of her coat.

As they passed up The Mount, she sneaked glances at pianos and dolls’ houses artfully framed behind large sash windows. She admired perfectly sculpted box hedges and zinc tubs of topiary spirals and enormous wrought-iron door knockers.

Then they turned into a sweep of gravel driveway and tall trees that hung down to form a damp green tunnel. Between the dripping leaves, a house emerged, a white house that looked like a wedding cake with layers of windows stuck to its walls like jellied diamonds and icing-sugar columns flanking the front door.

Katrina scowled. ‘Home sweet home.’

Ella stood in the huge hallway, looking around. It was beautiful. She wanted to run her hands over the plaster borders that twined around the walls, their raised pattern of flowers and vines, or step between the coloured pools of light – ruby and emerald and sapphire - that fell across the polished floor from the stained glass windows on the landing high above her.

Then she stopped. She’d felt, very faintly, something cold rush through her, a clammy feeling that made her pull her coat closer around her.

Something on the very edge of her awareness began to vibrate, gently at first, then louder, louder. Blue and red squiggles. Hard jagged white lines. The Signals. She blinked hard, trying to blank them out.

She turned and smiled at Katrina.

‘It’s a lovely house,’ she said.


‘So what’s it like, then, up at the Big House?’ said Billy, as they sprawled across the sitting-room carpet, supposedly doing maths homework.

Ella thought of Katrina’s bedroom, her dolls carefully arranged on her bed, the dolls’ house that was an exact replica of the house that contained it, right down to the lion-head door knocker, the stained-glass windows, the curved staircases and the furniture in all the rooms.

She’d tried not to stare at Katrina’s enormous four-poster bed in the centre of the vast pink rug, draped with gauzy pink curtains and fairy-lights, and the en suite bathroom with its mirrored wall and rows of luxurious bottles and jars and piles of softly folded white towels.

All the time, she’d felt Katrina’s eyes on her, watching for her reactions.

Then she thought of Leonora, bringing them tea on two small trays and how they’d sat and ate in the matching pink leather armchairs in the room that Katrina called ‘the playroom.’ This room was Katrina’s too. There was a perfectly tidied desk and an enormous flat-screen computer monitor and life-size studio photos of Katrina on the walls, soft-focused with bright white backgrounds. There were boxes of computer games and DVDs stacked neatly on the shelves and a pile of magazines on the pink perspex coffee table.

She thought of how large and full of creaks and echoes the house had felt and how there was no one to ask them about their day and what homework they had to do, just Leonora shuffling off into the shadows in her stained slippers.

‘It’s very, very big,’ she said. ‘And expensive – you know, stuff everywhere – and in places it’s very pink… I mean, really pink…’

She watched as Billy relished this information, rolling his eyes.

‘And it’s sort of… sad. Despite all the pink. You know, it doesn’t feel like a happy place. If that makes sense…’

‘My mum went there once,’ said Billy. ‘Some garden party or something. She wasn’t allowed to go inside. Well, only as far as the hallway and kitchen. She was working as a kind of waitress, wearing a right stupid get-up, if you ask me, handing out those tiny snack-things on trays and glasses of champagne. But she sneaked a look through the window and she said just about the same… She said it was a very, very big house…’

Billy shook his head as if trying to make enough space in his mind to contain the idea of such a house.

‘Not surprised it feels sad, though,’ he added, scratching his head. ‘What with the boy dying and everything.’

‘What boy?’

‘Oh, hasn’t she told you yet? Well, I suppose she doesn’t want to talk about it much. Her brother. The elder brother.’

‘What happened?’

‘Some horrible disease. Something to do with his kidneys. He went to our school. It was awful. Towards the end, he started turning all yellow…’

Billy looked off into the corner of the room as if he were remembering something. ‘And then, all of a sudden, he was a goner. Dead. Just like that. Poor lad. Must’ve been four, five years ago now. He was older than all of us. Katrina would’ve still been at primary school.’

Then he turned to her, a wicked grin on his face. ‘That house is probably full of ghosts… I mean, if Katrina were my sister, I’d definitely come back to haunt her.’

He flung himself at Ella, pinning her hands to the floor, tickling her under the ribs, putting his face up close to hers and making whoo-ing noises.

‘Stop it, you idiot.’ She pulled her hand free and swatted at him, laughing in spite of herself.