Face (24 page)

T
his is starting to read like one of Dad’s old pleading texts! Fast delete.

I need to see your face so much it hurts.

I actually send it. I sit there, watching my phone like it’s become the enemy. What if he never replies? I will surely die here, hunched over my phone. How my body aches. It’s been eight minutes.

The phone
rings, it’s Cliff’s name, and I sort of twang off the bed. It rings some more and I stare at it. Resenting it, the power this device has over me in this moment. What will happen next is this: I will press the button to answer the phone and this action will bring Cliff’s face into my bedroom in 3D.
What if it’s his actual face this time?
It rings and rings. I fumble with the button.

             
              First thing out of my phone is his fedora, with his grey eyes under the rim.

             
Then the edge of the fabric, the scarf is still on, it’s the grey one. How stupid can I be?

I can’t look at that s
carf anymore. I look at my stupid texting fingers.

“There’s something I have to tell you.” Cliff says.

His voice is tense. Here it comes. My big fat NO. NEVER.

“Please don’t be angry, hear me out first.
..”

He’s nervous, as nervous as me. He fidgets, gearing up to speak.

             
“The thing is True, I’ve been filming us since we met.”

Chapter Thirty

“Us” turns out to be just me, my face captured in close-up. Cliff had a bunch of nanocameras concealed in that damn fedora of careworn black, 360 degree vision, even when his grey eyes lay elsewhere.

Cliff has sent me seven recordings, which together claim to form the sum total of “Us”: ‘Making Contact,’ ‘Park: First Meeting,’ ‘True’s Surprise Visit’; ‘Cinema,’ ‘New Baby,’ ‘Protest’ and ‘My New Avatar.’ The whole collection even has a title: “Behind The Mask: Girl Meets Boy.” Cliff has made a secret film about me.

“I’ve got some information that might interest you.”

This one is ‘Making Contact’:
Cliff’s voice is an enhanced whisper, the phone too close to his mouth as if his purpose is to freak me out. Seven has just pronounced him my stalker. Here’s my Maverick face coming out of his phone, my eyes uncertain, alert. I was being presented with a wood-effect wardrobe; was he trying to drive me crazy, pretend the furniture is whispering? The hat was hooked over the wardrobe door - that’s how he secretly filmed me that day. The
second
time he’d hidden himself, if you count the Library. I hold my breath for the attack that’s coming:

“
Cliff, can you see why this is bothering me? Can you? Stop and think how weird you’re being. Phoning up a complete stranger, claiming to know secrets about their private family life?”

For the first t
ime I get an objective view of the Smile Blocker in action and let’s just say- it works. Hang on, let’s stay objective here. I was provoked. Isn’t this a valid response?

I re-play my
rant at the wardrobe and my phone hang-up on Cliff.

The
real story of “Us” must start in the Library: True helping the new boy to access his homework assignment. I offered to shake his hand! He didn’t take me up on it. He crept up on me, passed judgment on my brand new face without revealing his own.

M
y face was out of control that day- it wasn’t yet mine. He met me on a bad day; my best friend had just stopped talking to me because of the whopping great crater in my face. I need to know if school keeps a record of goings-on in the Library. It’s an educational record isn’t it? They must do. I shall demand that he finds that footage, demand that he puts it in at the start. Why does this feel like I’m on trial?

My bedroom never felt more claustrophobic
. I make a point of having a slow stretch. It hurts. ‘True’s Surprise Visit’ is the only one I can’t immediately place, so I play it next. A single pre-rehearsed line pops out of my vast, looming face:

“...wanted to check if you were okay
?”

This is after Friday Sport.
Cliff was standing at his front door, startled. I was messing with the plot. (Did he have it all pre-scripted in his head, each of our meetings?) He had disappeared straight away- to grab the hat, of course. (That stupid hat didn’t come off again until after the cinema.) Seven had ordered him to show himself, he’d been surrounded, shoved to the ground and hurt. He couldn’t have planned that. My Maverick mouth is open, catching flies. I remember that turquoise scarf.

“Kind of puts you in an awkward
position, doesn’t it?” Cliff ‘s voice in neutral. “Having to justify your friend’s behaviour to a Natural.”

I can’t watch this!
I tried to apologise for Seven and Cliff forced me to choose between them. What I’ll do is, I’ll get a Merlot- mouth for the final scene- the final climax Cliff’s got coming to him when I finally get my hands on him- and drag a sympathy vote from the viewers. Dad leaving had messed me up, doesn’t my dented face prove that? Perhaps there could be a voiceover, a neutral commentator to explain my loyalty to Seven, our history, how we protect each other.

             
I open up “Cinema” in a state of fluttering desperation. This is the first time I began to relax in Cliff’s company. At least, I think I did. Yes, you can see from the way I’m holding my face that I want him to like me. Subtle though. I bet he can’t spot what I’m doing with my eyes in the dark; it’s holding him back, suddenly I’m doing well. He certainly acted like he’d had a good time, but then I suppose he would: he was acting. Skip to the end, because it was his lateness that accounts for any tight expressions I may have pulled at the start. I was almost stood up, the whole queue was laughing at me. Oh God, maybe it was some kind of technical delay with all the nanocameras? Perhaps he was learning his lines?

             
So I’ve got my head back laughing, enveloped in smoke.

             
“You and Your bad decisions,” rolls Rex Rayne, and it becomes clear that we are having a moment in the aftermath of the plane crash. Cliff is the outsider. What’s he doing watching me in the dark, instead of the film? Wait, it was just the hat watching. (The hat I am going to trample flat.) My Maverick mouth dominates the screen, laughing. It moves how I secretly hoped it might but that’s not the point. It’s Dollar’s final hook: shirtless and glistening against the flames.

             
Rewind back to Cliff telling me he was Rex Rayne in training; drawing me in with humour to encourage me to turn towards the cameras. Pre-planned trickery? Because it makes for a better scene, doesn’t it? I see that now. Eye contact connects me to my unseen audience. I had to watch him loosen his scarf to eat popcorn and that won’t be in the film, just my frozen face over-reacting to something out of the frame.

             
I jump forward to a random point. My face is doing a Seven, defying the limits of these humble features of mine. A stampede behind my eyes, the dimple wavers. There it is, and gone again. Am I going to smile? The Smile Blocker swiftly takes care of that. Forest Mortimer lurches into the frame.              

Teamwork, they lured me in. Couldn’t know I’d stand in the road of course, but who could refuse
Forest? My face is stuck. Forest’s face drops and will my eyes never leave him alone? I assumed he was trying to convert me; he certainly delivered his lines like an actor, a fine Shakespearian type. Now it’s my own face that frightens me, the transparency. I could pay for a PokerFace. Some sort of filter for the emotional range, a cure for loss of face control. Hang on, isn’t that supposed to be my brain? I wish my eyes could empty out like Mum’s did after Dad left.

“Dad.
Get the kettle on.”

I’d barely been inside two
minutes. Is this a knowing performance by the both of them? Forest’s face has passed out of the frame and I want it back in- as evidence. I re-play the moments in which I first laid eyes on him four, five times, and I still don’t know what happened. That lived-in skin so concealing, I can’t be sure what Forest did with all my shock and horror. How that felt. The soundtrack is Forest’s preaching tone, but there’s an undercurrent of something equally fierce that I missed: protection. My son.

“We meet at last.”
 

Cliff hammers out a drum roll on the tunnel.
He’s so nervous, how come I never noticed? I was terrified too. I am distanced at long last, framed by the rim of the tunnel, peering in. Next there’s my legs, climbing onto the tunnel roof, and leaving Cliff with a circular view of the park. I had to get my back to the sunset. Any eye contact would be a sign of interest, the wrong sort of interest. You can’t see his endless staring, only my profile, on edge. We talk over each other. Cliff’s voice is tighter than I remember it. He laughs like somebody else- he was somebody else, that day.

             
“I’m not a Natural, I’m an Original.”

I hunch over and study my fingernails. I knew he was deluded, and I was coming up
with an exit strategy. My image enlarges a fraction, evidence of his sliding closer. I knew it!

             
“For future reference: you are allowed to look at me. It’s not against the rules.”

Did I not look closely enough? Did I miss the signs?

“Do you like my hat?” Clever. “I find that people need to see my eyes.”

He expertly draws
my gaze back to the nanocameras in order to complete his performance: falling off the tunnel. A sliding mass of evening sky as he drops, and my panicking face over a twisted shoulder, from above. The hat is lifted back on him and it jerks down. To finish, a lurching shot of my whole self abandoned on the tunnel, moving in and out of the edges of the frame as he lopes away. Not lopes, struts. I’m going to kill him.

             
‘Protest’: my screen shows nothing that makes sense, blurred shapes and shouting. That’s Forest’s blood on the pavement. Cliff’s fedora had come off with the scarf, now it’s back on his head, because he’s filming me over the other side of the street, next to Otis. Intensely avoiding Cliff’s face all over again. This is the only scene in which I wish my face were closer, my expression clearer in the frame. Cliff got me all wrong that day.

“
See?” I tap myself on the screen and my face disappears under a finger. “My face is a container full of things you missed.”

I’m talking
aloud to my empty bedroom and I’m sick of the sight of my unedited face. I don’t care about ‘My New Avatar.’ This can’t end on PsychoCliff leaving me in the classroom in the dark. What about my hands slipped under the scarf? Did I imagine the invitation in his eyes when he let me touch and hold his face? The hands he pushed away. But it started in those grey eyes, and all the other hidden ones. I am going to rip that mask right off.

              I’m halfway out the door when Dad bellows from the kitchen.

             
“You here for dinner?”

I
s absolutely everybody monitoring me? Dad has got his sleeves rolled up, dicing wildly. He cuts like a machine, all the vegetables into matching cubes.

             
“You okay, sweetheart? You look like you saw a ghost.”

He sends
me a mild smile, he’s had a hands-off parenting thing going on since his return. He understands he stepped out of my world and he’s looking for a route back in. Food’s a lot better though, more reliable. Plus Mum needs the company.

             
“I’m in a rush- I’ll sort myself something later.” I say.

I get
a sudden surge of irritation at this cosy picture of Returned Dad, slotting right back into the gaping hole he left behind.

“Mum saw you with a woman at the supermarket.
The day you spoke to Mum?”

Dad
frowns, mentally scrolling through female faces. He’s such a Done Deal, such a Dad, I can’t see him ever fascinating women. I never saw him attempt the Dollar gaze, thank God. Many have tried and failed.

             
“Mum says she was a right Marilyn.”

Dad’s face slides
smoothly into recognition without guilt.

             
“Oh, yeah. As your mum left the supermarket, I noticed this woman staring at her, and at me: look at that evil man, not offering to carry the heavily pregnant lady’s bags! Turns out I was wrong. It was Begin- you remember her? Mum’s old friend from school?”

             
“The one that used to apologise all the time.”

             
“Yeah, she said, so sorry to interrupt, but she’d just moved back to the area and she wanted to catch up with Mum. I told her to give her a ring. I think she sensed the atmosphere. The aisles were seething with the aftermath of Mum’s rage.”