-Chapter 22-
Pulling myself onto my knees, I grit my teeth and try to push out the pain in my bones with a heavy breath. It doesn’t work but I draw my head up, trying to catch sight of my assailant as the top of the stairs becomes illuminated with the warm yellow glow pouring out of individual rooms.
“Tish,” voices call from upstairs. There are footsteps as Olivia, Niall and Harry rush down. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I murmur sluggishly, my head still aching, still drawn to the top of the stairs. Liam descends last, and he isn’t like the others, he doesn’t rush. On his face is that same blank sort of expression that I saw him wearing before. Harry cups his hand under my chin and I grab his wrist tight as I flinch away from Liam which he takes as a sign that I want to be held close. All I can do though is remain stiff as I watch Liam through narrowed eyes.
“What happened?” Liam asks. “Did you trip?” Like he’s so concerned over my welfare or something. I press my mouth down for a moment, but when the others tip their heads towards me I can’t resist,
“No. I was pushed.”
I know what I felt. It wasn’t like catching my foot on a piece of the floorboard that had come loose, it wasn’t like walking too quickly and finding that the rug had slipped and shifted beneath my weight. There had been hands on my back, they had shoved and for a moment I had sailed through the air before bashing into what felt like every step on the way back down to earth. I curl my hand into a fist,
“By him,” I say, nodding my head towards Liam.
True, I hadn’t seen anyone do anything. But who else could it have possibly been? I trust Olivia and Niall and Harry not to hurt me like that for no reason, why wouldn’t I after everything we’ve been through? But I don’t know Liam, hell, for all we know it might not even be the real Liam. Those thirty clones from the woods all looked identical after all.
Liam takes a step back, “What? No I didn’t!”
“No…that didn’t happen,” Harry adds, his brow furrowed as he looks between me and Liam.
“Yes it did,” I insist and sound more certain than I actually am. Maybe I’m just one of those naturally contrary people, but the more Liam protests, the more Harry frowns and Olivia shakes her head, the more I feel like it’s true, or at least that I have to argue my point to the death.
“Did you actually see him push you?” Olivia begins sensibly and I have to say silent at that one, not wanting to admit that no, I hadn’t, seen him do it per se. But I know I wasn’t imagining being pushed.
“He did it,” is all I repeat, wrapping my arms around my waist to try and do my best to dull the pain as I pull myself up off the ground so I can at least look Liam in the eye as I accuse him. He’s looking nervous now at least, mouth dropping open as he turns to the others beseechingly.
“I swear I didn’t…Haz, you gotta-”
“I know,” says Harry, getting up and putting a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “It’s dark and it’s late, Tish. Just cool off, okay?” I think back to when I’d been with Harry earlier, and he’d kissed me and told me never to do anything he said. Well, that’s how it felt now. The moment he tells me to cool off is the exact moment I feel a fire starting in my chest and my lip curls.
Why does he immediately assume that I’m mistaken? Like this is some bros before hos bullshit about a small incident in the pub, when as far as I can tell Liam Payne tried to seriously hurt me, maybe even tried to kill me. “How do we even know he’s the real Liam?” I say hotly, turning my head to look around the others. But they all lower their heads as if they don’t want to look at me, the way that you might avert your eyes from a crazy person ranting and raving on the subway or on a bus or something.
I clench my knuckles so hard that they go white and am surprised when it’s Niall, with his mangled face almost always serious, his eyes always darting around and looking for danger who shakes his head at me, “It’s the real Liam.”
“Of course I’m real. I know who I am; for two years that’s all I had to cling onto,” Liam adds darkly. “I don’t know who the hell you are though. Seriously,” he adds turning to the others, “why is she here?”
There’s an animalistic growl at the back of my throat and for a moment I forget about the pain in my battered and bruised bones as I lurch forwards at Liam. How dare he? Is the single most pervasive thought I’ve got in my head. He doesn’t know shit about what I’ve seen about how scared I’ve been. My front teeth are missing because of this, my ex-boyfriend is dead because of this, my little brother was stabbed, I had to carve myself up like a Christmas ham just to stay alive. So he could try and get back.
Apparently I feel as though I’m going to eloquently state my case by punching Liam repeatedly in the face. But before I can, Harry has me around the waist and it hurts, not just because of the pressure on my bruises, but because of the way he grits his teeth and looks at me, almost disgusted.
“How do you know?” I demand, my voice rising and getting shrill, still struggling against him to try and get at Liam. “How do you know he aint a fucking clone and a liar.”
“You think I wouldn’t recognise my friend? I know okay,” his voice gets lower, “Like you know that the Harry who hurt you wasn’t me, right?” Slowly, my limbs tend to get a little limper, my struggles dying down and pathetic sort of like a fish out of water flopping hopelessly before dying.
Liam grabs the collar of his shirt as our eyes meet and yanks it down quickly. It slides over his collar bone and then down to the shoulder blade where I see a bloody bandage stuck to the skin. “You know what was in there right?” he growls. Of course I do. I was there when they inflicted the same wound on Harry, hearing in my head now the sound of his gasps of pain. I remembering tracing the scar with my fingers earlier that night. Where they’d taken out his tracker.
So maybe he is the real Liam, but I’m not exactly ready to apologize, nor am I ready to admit that it wasn’t him who pushed me down the stairs. It still could have been. But it seems as though the others have had enough.
Liam slinks off first, followed by Olivia and Niall, Olivia’s head whipping back to me as she gives a sort of ‘I’m sorry’ shrug and a small reassuring smile. Niall on the other hand says rather coolly, “He saved our lives.”
Harry places a light hand on my arm, but I shrug it off and wrap my arms around myself, all of my body language pulling away from him.
“Nice one, Tish,” he says coldly before leaving me at the bottom of the stairs. He doesn’t look back or anything.
***
A few days later, Theo assures us that he’s come through on getting us a place in the competition, though he never really explains how- not that I probably would have been able to understand it anyway; the most I know about computers is that you can switch them off and on again if they get frozen and if that doesn’t work then bashing them a couple of times seems to do the trick. But with the tickets secured, it’s up to Olivia and me to get ready to try and blend in with your average One Direction fan.
She seems to be enjoying it at least, sitting on the edge of one of the beds in Theo and Ruth’s big old house running her fingers over makeup items as though they were more precious than gold. I might have found it sweet, if I the weight of our task wasn’t weighing so heavily on my mind.
“What’s this one do then?” she asks, holding up a slim tube of concealer. “It looks like foundation.”
“If you have a spot or something, you put it on and the redness gets concealed…that’s why it’s a concealer,” I mumble into my knees. Quite honestly I don’t much feel like messing around with make-up. Harry and I haven’t spoken much since my argument with Liam, but for a few perfunctory statements. It’s a shitty way to leave things, especially since I could end up like Ruth and the next time he sees me we probably wouldn’t have to worry about arguing. I’d just agree with everything he said.
It feels like a million years ago now when I said all of that stupid stuff about running away to New Zealand, bodies pressed up against each other so close that not even a slim strip of paper could get between the two of us.
Liam keeps shooting daggers at me, but I don’t really care. Also my pride doesn’t seem to want to let me dwell on it. He did save us, though I kept on thinking. Back in the woods. If he wasn’t on our side then he wouldn’t have done that surely?
But if he didn’t push me, then who did?
“Ahh…” Olivia says with a nod, drawing her eyes towards my hair, “Twenty minutes left, okay?”
Theo had the genius idea to make me a blonde- trying to make me less recognizable as ‘Tish Williams Murderess at Large’. It makes me think of my Mum- how she would always make me help her out with her roots and say something like ‘blondes always have more fun’. Let’s hope so.
“I think I’m going to have this colour,” Olivia continues to chatter, showing me a tub of gloopy pink lip gloss and it’s too much for me-
“Whatever, Livvy. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about, I don’t know, getting brainwashed or dying,” I snap, waving my bandaged arm in her face. Her face falls as she puts the lip gloss down, head bowed as she shakes her big fluffy curls.
“I know it’s stupid…I just…always wished I could do stuff like this. Put on makeup or whatever. Not because…I dunno, it mattered. It just seemed like fun.” Miserably she flicks a tube of mascara. “It seemed like what real girls did. Instead of… someone like me.”
How does she always manage to do that? My heart feels like someone has wrapped their fist around it and is squeezing tightly as I begin, “Shit Olivia….” And run out of words to say that could offer her any kind of comfort so I just nod my head, “The colour and everything looks like it would really suit you. Good job.” I force myself to make an effort, pick out a bit of foundation and rub it into my skin to check if it’s a match.
It’s almost hard to remember that this was how it used to be. Putting on makeup, going to work and all of the rest of that stuff, I sigh and can’t help but voice, “I can’t wait for everything to go back to normal.”
“Heh,” Olivia lets out a bitter laugh, dabbing a little gloss on the end of her fingers. “What’s normal?”
I laugh a little, but she fixes her round brown eyes on me and becomes suddenly serious, “I mean it. What’s there to go back to? For any of us? Niall keeps saying he wants to go home and be with his family but I worry…would they even know who he was now? And me…this is everything, isn’t it? I’ve been running so long I don’t even know how to stand still anymore.”
I might be able to, I want to say. But then I chew my lip as I think about what normal is for me. Moments of boredom interspaced with moments when I do stupid reckless things. She’s right…I can’t imagine going back to supermarkets and the school run now. I can’t imagine not flinching at the sound of an engine starting, or wanting to break into a run if I hear footsteps behind me.
“Harry might make it,” says Olivia suddenly, tipping her head to one side as she thinks about it further. I’m about to ask her why she says that, but then I think about it…about how he trusted Liam immediately, about the way he fought not to kill the clones and was so mad about the old lady they tied up. Olivia is right. Harry still has lights where the rest of us have grown shadows.
“He’s probably the only one of us who could...”
“Okay….I’ve decided,” Olivia announces, and when she looks at me again her mouth has curved into an ominous sort of smile, “Do you want me to teach you some combat moves?”
“Not even a little bit,” I say flatly, but I pull myself off the bed and prepare to get my ass thoroughly kicked by the girl wearing pink lipgloss in front of me.
**
The night before we have to leave, Theo brings us new clothes, just to make sure that they fit right in time for tomorrow. With blonde hair, bright makeup and a One Direction T-shirt and skirt I don’t really feel like me anymore. This Tish or old Tish either- this is somebody I don’t recognise. Along with that we get a camera. It’s small and thin, slotted into an empty packet of gum which Theo hands to me, even though I probably would have said that Olivia was the safest pair of hands for it really. I was never the kind of kid to go into a James Bond film and think international espionage was fun and glamorous. Trick had an appeal, a danger to him, but it was something hot and rushed and greasy and sweaty more than anything. If you steal a car you’re allowed to let your fear show. This is different. I can’t let my hands shake even once.
I managed it at the facility though, I remind myself as I pull the cuff of my sleeve down to hide the bandages, when I didn’t have a choice, I managed it.
He tells us to talk to the girls on the bus, capture what they are like before and what they are like after.
“You mean…we’re going to let them get brainwashed?” I realize as he says it, handing Olivia and I separate pairs of squishy ear plugs to block out the song.
“Yes…what kind of evidence did you think we’d get?” says Theo with a blink. I realise now that stupidly, I’d thought we were going to waltz in, record a little bit of spiel like a super villain monologue in a film and somehow manage to warn everyone. He sees my misgivings and then says softly, “Look. It’s not ideal, you think I don’t know that. Of all people, with my wife the way she is. But sometimes things are necessary, for the greater good.”
A necessity for the greater good. Why do I feel like I’ve heard that before?
Olivia seems happy to take her orders even though I really have my misgivings. After that there is nothing to do but wait. Until the sun comes up and we to walk right into the last place on earth that I want to be. When we get to the top of the stairs, Olivia surprises me with a tight hug.
I get a mouthful of her curls and she doesn’t let go. I think she might be trembling, just for a second, until she pulls away with a small smile. “We’re gonna be brilliant.”
Somehow I’m not so sure about that.
Running a hand over my stiff neck, I sigh and find myself twirling a strand of my hair around and around my fingers.
Harry is waiting for me on the other side of the door when I go in to go to sleep. He gets up from the bed and nods his head a little stiffly, “Good luck for tomorrow….that’s all I wanted to say.”
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. But Harry shakes his head.
“It’s not me you need to apologize to. Liam stuck his neck out for us. You can’t run around accusing him of stuff. Why would he have pushed you down the stairs?”
Sighing, well more grunting angrily- this is not how I want to spend tonight when tomorrow is looming large in front of me all I say is, “I don’t know…just… whatever. Okay?” I’ve been more eloquent in my life. Turning around I stalk to the door and hold it open so he can leave. “I’m really tired so…see you tomorrow I guess.”
Harry sighs too and stops for a moment. And I admit that part of me is hopeful that he’s going to tell me he’s not going to leave, that he’s not going to let me spend tonight alone stewing about what’s going to happen. Alright, not part of me- most of me. And most of me feels the bitter sting of disappointment when he makes his way towards the door.
Until he pulls me close to him and presses me into the kind of deep searching kiss that reminds me of our very first, on the floor of the old safe house as we tried to cook sausages.
I try to smile a little as he pulls away and touches my hair lightly, before he looks down at my breasts and the One Direction T-shirt over it and frowns. “You know your right boob has my face on it don’t you? That’s all kinds of weird.”
***
So I guess we leave Tish and Olivia behind at the Palmer’s house and step into the shoes of Anna and Stacey from somewhere around Yorkshire or something. There’s a nervous ticking feeling inside of my chest and the fresh air on my face feels strange. Almost suffocating. Each glance from passer’s by as we walk from the tube station to the small venue where this ‘intimate’ gig and brainwashing session is supposed to be held makes me convinced that someone will recognise me almost immediately and call the police.
Perhaps if the newspapers hadn’t been so obsessed with using pictures of me from my sulky, angry, bad girl phase then it might have worked, but Olivia has to tug on my shoulder and tell me not to walk so quickly, to look a little more natural than the head hunched fast shuffle I’ve adopted. Trick used to say that too- that sometimes you had to walk with confidence and hide in plain sight to avoid being spotted.
We are surprised though that instead of a venue, the location is actually a bus stop with a gaggle of maybe a hundred girls waiting behind a barrier with posters. A couple of them are in tears already and I feel a tugging in my chest. All these girls about to be brainwashed.
I know what Theo would have said. That it’s for the greater good. But the only time I ever heard that before was when Wells was trying to justify what The Spindle was doing to Harry and the others.
“We should try and make conversation,” Olivia says quietly, her head nodding slightly towards the camera stashed away innocently as a pack of chewing gum. But I can’t bring myself to pull my head up, to try and force out some kind of truly terrible English accent.
Two buses gets closer and someone starts keening softly, but I feel like the bottom is going to fall right out of my stomach or something as a woman aged around forty maybe in a neat pin striped suit, flanked by a pair of burly security guards steps off the first bus. Her hair is curly, streaked with grey and pulled back into a neat bun, while her skin is the colour of Irish cream coffee. She doesn’t say much as she gestures to us and we form a line while I try to steady my breathing. I suppose though, it might simply read as my being incredibly excited about the concert or something. But Olivia suddenly grips onto my arm as we are told to move back into line.
“Ow,” I hiss, looking down to where here finger nails are digging into my skin. I turn to her, about to demand that she release me when I look over and see that her normally rather dusky skin has gone incredibly pale. “What is it?” I whisper, as the line files down and gets closer to our turn.
“It’s her,” Olivia whispers. “How…”
When the girls in front of us take their turn to say their name, and give a reference form that Theo had printed off for us from the internet I see why Olivia has gone so pale. The woman . If Valerie and Olivia didn’t look at all related, it’s obvious from the same nose, the same freckles that these two could be mother and daughter. Or person and their clone.
It’s the original Olivia, I guess. And I’m about to tell her to drop everything and run, but it’s our turn.
“Name,” she says coolly, not looking up from the sheet of paper. In a quiet voice I say them, though it’s a wonder I can choke anything out as paralysed with fear as I am. She nods, crosses our name off a list and hands us our passes.
My hands are sweaty as I reach for them, not wanting to stick around in case she gets a good few of either of us. But just as I am about to get on the bus, Olivia trailing behind me I hear a, “Wait!”
Wheeling round, my heart gets stuck somewhere in the back of my throat as I find her staring at us out of round brown eyes.