The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (8 page)

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.

8.

Blue silk dress with net petticoats. 1950s. Lovely detail at décolleté.

Can be altered to fit size 10-12.

Ella drew the velvet curtain across her body so that she wouldn’t have to see. She hated looking at herself in the mirror. She hated the way that her body felt, the way her stomach pushed at the waistband of her skirt, the way the soft flesh at the tops of her thighs rubbed together when she walked.

Katrina liked those American films, the ones with pink covers and hearts all over them where girls carried fluffy dogs in their handbags and had perfectly groomed eyebrows. She wanted to look like Reese Witherspoon in
Legally Blonde
or the girls in those Californian soaps who drove convertibles and flicked their hair over their shoulders.

Ella had been brought up on Mamma’s vintage collection: the Audrey Hepburn box sets, Marilyn in
Some Like it Hot
, Anita Ekburg splashing in the Trevi Fountain, Sophia Loren.

But when she looked in the mirror, she didn’t see how she could ever look like that. There was her hair, for a start. Long, dark and thick, it was always escaping whatever arrangement she devised for it. When she brushed it, it stood out from her head in a dark fuzz that seemed to crackle with static.

Ella made a face at herself in the mirror. She felt ridiculous for caring so much. Billy would laugh if he could see her standing here.

She could hear him now.

‘That Katrina’s sending you daft,’ he’d snort.

But then she felt the panic beginning to rise in her, as if she were bursting out of her skin, as if her clothes couldn’t hold her. She could barely swing her legs under the kitchen table any more.

‘A fine young lass, your Ella’s making,’ she’d heard Mrs Stubbs, the owner of the shoe shop on the corner say, collecting a new dress for her eldest daughter. ‘Our Elizabeth just won’t grow. I try to feed her up but she’s all skin and bone.’ 

Ella vowed privately to eat even less. She hated being taller already than Mamma. She thought this was how Alice must have felt when she ate the cake and felt her body grow so big that it pressed against the walls of the house and she had to hang her elbow out of the bedroom window and her foot out of the downstairs door.

It was hard not to draw attention to yourself when you felt the boys’ eyes burning into your body as you walked down the school corridor. It was doubly hard to fit in when you felt so different on the outside as well as the inside.

‘You are blossoming,
tesora
, becoming a lovely, curvaceous woman,’ Mamma smiled.

But Ella wanted less, not more. Sometimes she’d prefer to disappear completely.

Even Billy had started to act differently around her. After school, on the days that she’d managed to dodge Katrina, they would dawdle down by the riverbank. Ella loved to lie back in the warm grass, watching the blackbirds building their nests, following the clouds as they passed overhead, spiked by the new green leaves.

Once or twice, it had happened now. She would turn to say something to Billy and his eyes would flick up guiltily to meet her face from where, she quickly realised, they’d been busily burying between the three top buttons on her blouse. She watched the colour creep over his face. He couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead he looked away, pulling at the dandelions, annoyed at himself.

It would take her days to shake off the awkward feeling after one of these moments, as if Billy was suddenly a stranger to her.

Katrina had given her a page torn out of
Mizz
magazine. She produced it from her schoolbag and watched as Ella scrutinised it.

Breakfast:

Omelette made of two egg-whites.

Cup of tea, no milk.

Lunch:

Tin of tuna fish.

Apple.

Cup of hot water with 1/2 tspn. cider vinegar.

Dinner:

Small piece of fish or chicken breast.

Steamed vegetables.

Half a grapefruit.

Cup of hot water with 1/2 tspn. cider vinegar.

Ella’s eyes darted down the page in horror, thinking of butter pooling on golden toast and Mamma’s pasta with olive oil, rosemary and garlic. Perhaps this was why she just kept on growing. Clearly, other people didn’t eat like they did. Mamma was getting it all wrong again.