Face (25 page)

He
looks delighted at his own description.

             
“How come Mum didn’t recognise her?”

             
“She was a right Marilyn. It hadn’t taken, that face. You know when you try not to stare.”

             
“Mum thought she was your girlfriend.”

This is not strictly true, but I enjoy his face.

              “Funny she hasn’t mentioned it. I’ll talk to her about it when she wakes up.”

Dad seems to be getting something out of
my face too. He goes bit soppy over Daimon, the son he almost gave up, and it oozes into other things. Babies do that. I wonder if things will ever get back to normal between us, or if normal has to be different now.

             
“You know, I got so desperate to see you when you wouldn’t answer my messages, he says, “I’d even go into shops and examine the Ultiface Update boxes, searching for a glimpse of my daughter behind Merlot’s latest- whatever. It threw me when Mum said you’d gone Maverick.”

             
“Did you find me? On the packaging?”

Dad goes back to chopping vegetables extr
a fast, the kitchen super-hero and his reply is drowned out.

“Dad, s
top chopping for a sec. What did you say?”

             
“Of course not! You’re more than a picture to me.”

Chapter Thirty-One

I slam the front door and hear the cry of Daimon rise up behind it. It’s supposed to be his nap time- his and Mum’s. I’m gone though.

             
I check my appearance in the reflective house on the corner: my face is fixed and moving fast on angry limbs. I hate what he’s already done to me, made me check my face for give-aways. Hold that expression, battle-ready. They could market me right now as the polar opposite to Merlot. No joke.

As
I walk I plan what I’m going to do when Cliff answers the door. I’ll let him fetch that damn hat like last time- if he dares -then I’ll snatch it straight off his smug head and trample it on the pavement and that will be the finale for “Us,” the nanocameras crunching one by one under my feet, no faces at all, then triumphant darkness.

Instead, I get Penny Mortimer looking down on me from her doorstep. She p
ulls her half-smile and those front teeth come out to perch on her bottom lip, it’s the right tooth that overlaps the left, I feel my return smile Block. This not-good-enough girl demands instant access to her Original son. I must conceal my intent. (I preferred her when she was asleep.)

“I guess you’re after Cliff?” Penny says.

“Yep.”

Her voice was
testing the water. Mine comes out like a challenge.

             
“I’m afraid he’s out” she says

How come he always gets to
hide? To escape when it suits him?

             
“He’s been out all day...” Penny continues, “... actually, he left these.”

Penny turns
and crosses to the bottom of the stairs, reappearing with Cliff’s grey scarf unwound across one hand, and his fedora clasped in the other. We regard them in silence. The fedora makes me nervous. I get this sudden lurch that maybe Penny is in on the whole film trick, she’s holding that evil hat at my face level after all, but I change my mind pretty fast. It’s obvious that she’s worried sick about him, but she’s not about to come right out and say it, not yet- not when your kid is sixteen. I guess he swopped scarves before he went out. But the fedora hurts; was that item only ever part of the uniform in my presence?

“W
e had an argument, Cliff and I.” Penny begins. “I decided to set a new house rule: no scarves indoors. Not in our house, because you know what we believe? We didn’t bring him up to feel ashamed.” I nod, and she continues. “Cliff had been in a bad mood since breakfast so...my timing...well, anyway... I made my demand and the next thing I know he is ripping off his scarf and storming out of the house. He wouldn’t show me his face.”

Penny’s eyes
trail to the end of their street, indicating the direction of his exit. My face must have let slip her son matters, because now she’s looking at me like, maybe I’m not the enemy.

             
“I hoped he might be going to meet his Dad out the front of Ultiface, because he had on one of our t-shirts.” Penny continues, “the one that has a white arrow pointing up to the face, and says: “£23.99? Priceless Original...”

             
“I’ve seen them.”

“...but Forest hasn’t seen Cliff
all day either; and Cliff won’t answer my calls. I was hoping he was with you...”

I shake my head. “Not today.”

“They’re all taking their scarves off outside Ultiface today. The whole crowd.”

Penny seems to expect further questions.

              “I expect you’re wondering why I’m not there?” she adds.

Actuall
y I wasn’t; Cliff is outside with a bare face?             

“I don’t go along when they all take their scarves off together.
” Penny wraps her arms around herself. “There is usually trouble of some sort. I can’t bear it.”

             
“I can trace him.” I say, and pull my phone out of my pocket.

             
              “Should you...will he mind?” Penny says.

             
I shrug. “He can always turn his phone off. If the phone is on, he wants to be found.”

             
“Not by Mum.”

Kind of obvious,
but I don’t say. She must know her signal would be on a permanent block. I mean, we’re not little kids. I select Cliff’s last form of contact: the text with all the attached film footage of my unknowing face. I have been captured forever; he is free to do what he likes with his precious Original face. Withhold it from friends, or give it out to any old random strangers on the streets.

             
“I tried already,” Penny blurts. “He blocks me.”

I smile at her, my real half-dimpled smile and she smiles back with all her
funny teeth. When I look back to my phone screen the map has come up, and I see at once that he is on the move and in the vicinity of Ultiface. Any minute now Merlot will be laying her sad gaze upon Cliff, curved as if into an invisible wind. Unless he walks differently now: the Original filmmaker in his Original t-shirt, the successful manipulator and actor. He always did have a tendency to strut.

             
“I’ve got him. He’s almost at Ultiface.” I tell Penny.             

I keep the map open but move it aside, because I’ve had a message from Seven and it’s called ‘
True ‘n’ Cliff: hot or not?’ I open it up and there’s the photo she took of me in my bedroom, with my Smile Blocker face mockingly thrust up close to my first ever portrait, clearly labelled ‘Repulsive Cliff.’ She has sent it to everyone. It was sent first thing this morning. I jerk the screen away from the roving eyes of Penny, but Penny has seen something on my face. I lower my gaze and try to summon my dimple with a vision of Dollar as Rex Rayne, sleeping attractively in a tight white t-shirt in the dawn light. But a different memory comes: the feel of her son’s face in my hands. I manage to smile at Penny. Now I must get to Cliff.

             
It’s at least a half an hour walk to Ultiface via the High Street. I consider a detour home to get the car, but that would mean avoiding parents, waiting in traffic, this way I keep moving. A lot can change in half an hour. I’m barely out of Cliff’s road when he turns off his phone; he’ll have got a warning that his location was requested and obtained by me. I try to imagine Cliff’s Original face defiant, to the gathering crowd. No image comes, only the certainty of his voice.

I see myself in a shop window and
imagine myself into some kind of stupid frilly gown of washed-out peach, taking his arm, Cliff in black tie, because we’re off to attend the film premiere dahhhling- the premiere of “Us”! How perfect. No, what was his title, again? Beyond the Mask: Girl Meets Boy. Boy Traps Girl. Boy Lies.

The
High Street is the usual flow of neat faces and interchangeable features that fit. The perfect symmetry of people making use of their local amenities, designed and recycled to fit and balance their every need. Their eyes summon me without meaning to, the empty glow of their Updates are the brightest thing on a grey day. A retro heavy-lidded version of Merlot moves into my visual field, I turn my head away. A pair of golden eyes on a young man talking with Dollar lips, the Dollar lips twist, it’s the PsychoDollar sneer used as an everyday greeting. Reminds me of Daimon’s face twisting gently, curiously at himself in the mirrored surface of his toy cube. Daimon’s face covered in silky rows of teddies. Rows of teddies that are: grinning, scowling, laughing, howling, snoozing, repeat to the edge. Next line, and repeat. One day, what will Daimon’s face say to strangers?

I turn a corner too fast and barge right into Cliff; a boy that could have been Cliff only this morning. He’s tall, the same kind of gang
ly build, but masked in scarlet and wearing the wrong t-shirt, no price tag. He glares back angry, protective and not Cliff. I have to remind myself that Cliff has already given all of his secrets away.

A
whole line of Mavericks are approaching me. Five of them at once! A mix of girls and boys a couple of years older than me, each teenager holding their face for show. An outstandingly beaky nose leads; challenging eyes that shine from the wrong place; and then frustratingly we have all passed each other and I can only take in the continuing responses around them.

Fight the distraction
of these Maverick strangers; because this is a search for the familiar body of Cliff, his loping walk and his lean height and his ugly bitten-down fingernails, his intense voice and his explanatory arm gestures and the way he follows the every move of my Maverick face. What is his face saying to strangers right now? The strangers gathering to gawp and point at the Naturals, unmasked? I think of Cliff pulling his fedora off so unexpectedly after the cinema, the raw shock of all that exposed hair and skin fresh to the air- and he still had his scarf on that day.

I reach the steamed up window of the Van Gogh Cafe in twenty-five
minutes, hurting. There is the crowd of unmasked Originals as promised by Penny. Perhaps thirty or forty people, not in rows, but forming three outward-facing circles, with their arms linked at the elbow. Each of the circles turns in no particular rhythm and I stand there on the opposite side of the road and search, not for features- I’m not taking them apart- I’m putting them together, to find Cliff, exposed. Each circle turns at a different speed, revealing a limited number of faces to me at any one time, even as I pace the whole length of the pavement, to alter my sight line. Forest is in the centre of it all of course, I hear his voice before I see him.

“Cheer up Merlot!” he bellows to the side of the building. There is a theatrical pause for th
e onlookers to laugh, which some do, nervously. “Updates not contributing to your happiness anymore?”

Forest pulls a massive
fake grin and holds it, pointing to his happiness with the index fingers of both hands at once; his team copy this expression one by one, all those differently expanding faces. Some collapse into giggles and Forest is laughing for real now. I laugh too, it’s impossible not to. I wish he could see me, but I understand he’s in his element and this moment is mid-performance. They hold banners of Merlot, frozen with her eyes as down-cast as her mouth.

When
Merlot’s Ultiface advert begins its loop again, the Originals cheer a rousing greeting. Merlot is the size of the building. She is oblivious to the debate, her vast eyes carry over the road with ease and seemingly through me, ever inviting. My phone beeps in my pocket: it’s an automated message to inform me that my location has been requested and obtained by someone. That someone is Cliff. 

I cross the road
, closing in to Cliff’s most likely hiding place. Three circles of inter-linked faces just like Forest’s- only they’re not like Forest’s of course; each face does its own thing. Quiet eyes check me out, it’s hard to gauge how many, as this community doesn’t demand to be seen on automatic. A woman in her sixties or seventies stops mid-chatter to size me up. I can’t smile to reassure, so I simply stand still and maintain my distance of perhaps, three metres. She takes shuffling steps sideways, tiny feet turning her away from me, when the circle takes a sudden lurch backwards tugging her with it, her lips form a brief hollow of surprise and her vigilant eyes disappear into the creases of her laughter. Murmurs and exclamations of surprise ripple into the air; arm links undulate and are maintained, tightened.