I sat there for ages. I exchanged smiles with a couple who came to sit next to me. They were both dressed in gold, and I wished it was Natasha, in her silver, in their place. I finished the champagne, and as I was not at all used to drinking three glasses of champagne at a time, I was dizzy. We hadn’t eaten for hours and the bubbles had gone straight to my head.
After perhaps half an hour I realized that Natasha must have done something that went beyond a pointed conversation. Just because there hadn’t been a commotion, it didn’t mean that she was all right. She could have been ejected from this party silently, easily. She might have been trying to reach me, but banned from coming back in. We didn’t have our phones.
I stepped into the ballroom, but I couldn’t see either her or Deanna Glancey. Nothing seemed to have happened. Nobody looked any different from the way they had before. I walked round the edges of the room, ignoring occasional approaches from people, and staring at every woman I saw.
It should have been easy to find Natasha, shining in her dress. But she and I were not tall. Most of the people in this hall were taller than we were and they made a hedge between her and me, like in Sleeping Beauty.
It might, I realized, take hours to find her. There were thousands of people in this room alone, and the party spread throughout the palace. I went back to the alcove, but she wasn’t there either, and now someone else was in my seat.
The orchestra had gone and there was a band on now, playing through the history of popular music. Currently they were on ‘All You Need is Love’ and I thought it was a reminder to me that I didn’t need Natasha. I needed Mum, Sean, Dad, Zoe. Max. We hadn’t brought our phones out, so I couldn’t call or text. I walked around and around, giddy with it all.
Whatever she had done, I was ready to walk away from her. I was done with Natasha.
I looked in the side rooms. She wasn’t in them either. There were nooks and crannies all over the place, and I thought in passing how wonderful some of them would have been for palm and tarot readings and then I wondered whether she might have set herself up doing that, but she would have told me about it if she had because she would have wanted my help.
Halfway up the stairs, I found myself face to face with Deanna Glancey.
She was on her way down. I stopped. I knew I was trembling all over. I stood in her way, as Natasha would have done. Had probably done already.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry, but are you Deanna?’
She frowned a little, but not in a cross way.
‘Pardon?’ she said in French. She gave me a little smile.
‘Excusez-moi,’ I said, self-conscious about my accent. ‘Vous êtes Deanna Glancey?’
She laughed a little. ‘Non, pas du tout!’ She touched her chest. ‘Céline.’
‘Vous n’êtes pas américaine?’
‘Mais non! Non, non, non.’ She touched her chest again. ‘Française, moi. Et toi – anglaise?’
We spoke for long enough for me to establish that Natasha had got entirely the wrong person, and she must have worked it out before she did anything, because Céline said that no girl had approached her. She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said it in bad French, and then in reasonable Spanish, and then in English. This was not, definitively, the right person, nor had she seen a girl in a silver dress except, she thought, perhaps she had seen someone like that leaving, hours ago.
I started to get a bad feeling.
I looked everywhere until I could see that Natasha wasn’t at this party at all. Céline was right – she had left.
The people on the door hadn’t seen her go, but also said they probably wouldn’t have noticed. It was ten o’clock, and I couldn’t think what to do, so I took five canapés from a table and ate them in quick succession, then set off, alone, to walk back to the hotel.
Whatever was happening, I knew it wasn’t good.
I didn’t feel safe walking through Paris on my own, but I didn’t have any money with me, or anyone to walk with, and I knew that if I followed the river I would find my way back. All the enchantment had gone. I just put my head down and set off, in my bedraggled dress. My satin shoes were stained and ripped. The air was thick with electricity, and I felt a storm poised directly above the city.
I walked along the main road rather than the river path because I was scared of people jumping at me from under bridges. I ignored everything. A car stopped and someone told me to get in, but I started to run, and though they trailed me for a while they drove off in the end. I got lost, and the first heavy raindrops fell on my arms, and I was hungry and scared and confused, but then I realized where I was, and I was so pleased I walked faster and faster and then ran, through the storm, to the hotel.
As I hurried up the stairs, the man (who seemed to be awake and on duty at all times) shouted, but I didn’t stop to find out what he wanted, but also, of course, I already knew. He wanted money. Our room was locked, and Natasha had the key. I banged on the door, but she didn’t answer. She had to be in there, though. She had to.
I ran back down, and when the man started talking I just cut across him and said, ‘Je dois avoir le clé pour la chambre numéro sept.’ It was bad French, but he understood. He reached back without taking his eyes off me and took it off a hook, but he didn’t pass it to me.
‘You must pay your bill,’ he said in English. ‘I ask Libby and she say you have the money and you will pay.’
I tried to breathe deeply and didn’t bother to correct him about our names.
‘I can see from your aura that you’ve had enough of this,’ I tried, but he rolled his eyes.
‘You pay,’ he said.
‘When did she say I would pay?’
‘One hour ago?’
‘Please, let me into the room,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘She has the key. My money is in the room.’ I was so tired. I didn’t care about his stupid bill. I would come straight back down and pay it with my savings card. ‘I’ll get the money. And pay you, right now. I promise. It’s all in there. But it’s in the room. I can’t get it unless you give me the key.’ I spread my hands, and then patted myself down, demonstrating that I didn’t have anything at all on me.
He put the key on his high counter and slid it to me, indicating with his folded arms that he was going to wait right where he was for me to come back down and pay him his money.
My hand shook as I opened the door. I was desperate for her to be in there, even though I knew she wasn’t.
I pushed the door. It opened slowly, creaking. She would be there. I closed my eyes and pictured her, sitting on the bed, counting out some sum of money that she had got while she was missing. Ready to tell me everything that had happened. She would be smiling, desperate to share her story. It would be something dramatic and over the top. I wondered if she had found the real Deanna, and what kind of revenge she had got. I wondered why she had come back here without me.
I wondered whether there was a real Deanna. I probably already knew that there wasn’t.
I just had to get myself to the station tomorrow morning and I was done. That would be the end of all this, of all Natasha’s games. She didn’t know I was going home. That was what kept me going.
When I opened my eyes the room was empty.
I closed them.
I opened them.
It was still empty.
The room was not just empty of Natasha. It was empty of everything.
It was almost exactly as it had been when we arrived, except that it was emptier than that. The floor was bare, and the beds were bare too: even the sheets had gone. There were no towels, no bags. Natasha’s backpack wasn’t there, and neither was my suitcase. She had left the pillows and the blankets that we hadn’t used, and that was it.
I walked over to the window and looked out at the building behind and the single tree. When I turned back to the room nothing had changed, except that from here I could see the closed door, and I saw that there was a piece of paper stuck to it. It had words scrawled on it in Natasha’s loopy writing in pink pen.
Darling,
I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve it. Your family are shits but you’re not and I truly have become a bit fond of you and wish you all the good things.
By the time you read this I guess you might have started to work it out. The big thing I needed you for in Paris wasn’t anything to do with Deanna Glancey. It was you. I’m not saying you wronged me, because you, personally, didn’t, or at least not on purpose. People close to you – people in your family – have wronged me to fuck, and this is payback. You did nothing for that money and you won’t need it anyway. Will I need it? Well, I might. I’d like to have it just in case. Be prepared. Also, it’s been fun.
Who am I kidding? Of course I hate you. I’ve hated you from before I met you. I’ve hated you all along.
You were right: I came over to the UK earlier than I said. I came over as soon as I knew what was in Dad’s will. I lived in London for ages. I stalked you around Winchester. I watched you nearly kissing your girl until her girlfriend hotfooted it out of that house to stop you. I liked telling you what to do, and then watching you do it. I felt like God! And I knew (from watching you and from messaging you) that you were my perfect ticket to getting back at everyone. You stand in for your father, my father, Deanna – everyone.
You know perfectly well you were going to run out on me tomorrow morning. I knew it when I saw your face on Monday. I found the ticket the moment you went to the bathroom. I gave you chance after chance to tell me about it but you never did. You were going to sneak off. This is just me doing it first. We’re not so different. You’re lucky actually, because I was going to do something very dramatic and illegal at Friday’s party and leave you to take the blame (twins). You kind of predicted that. You would have been arrested (I would have melted away and left you to see out the end of days in a prison cell). Perfect revenge on you, and on everyone who cares for you!
I’m pretty fucked off that I’ve had to water it down, so well done I guess.
Still. You’ve learned enough to find a way out. By the time you read this I’ll be long gone.
Task 8: get out of this hotel without paying.
Task 9: hustle for some cash.
Task 10: get home with no money or documents! Hahahaha
Good luck, Libby! xxxx
She had signed off as me. That was the first thing I noticed, because everything else was too much.
It took me a while to realize that the fact that she had taken everything meant that I literally had nothing. No money or documents. I looked again for my suitcase and my canvas bag, but they still weren’t there. I had the rain-spattered ballgown I was standing up in, the ruined shoes I was wearing, crunchy hair, and a face dripping with half-rained-off make-up.
It was eleven o’clock. I didn’t dare go downstairs because of the angry man, so I bolted the door and closed the curtains and sat on the bed and leaned back on the wall because my legs weren’t holding me up. My head was spinning. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t even upset, not yet.
She had my money. My passport. My train ticket. She had just told me that.
I sat on the bed all night, shivering and staring into space. I became catatonic. At one point I jerked into alertness and decided to go to the Gare du Nord, because if Natasha was going to use my train ticket she would be there now, waiting for morning. Then it turned out I couldn’t bear to go back out into the storm in the middle of the night in a rioting city in a ruined dress and ripped-up shoes. I slept a bit, waking and remembering and drifting off all night. I had to wait for morning, and in the end it seemed that morning arrived.
My hair was still up, and when I looked, disorientated, around the room, I knew that it had been real. Natasha had, for some reason, taken every single thing I owned.
I had no idea what time it was, but she must have already used my train ticket. Or perhaps she hadn’t. Maybe she’d gone somewhere else.
We owed the man downstairs the money for the room, and also, I supposed, for the things Natasha had taken from it. I checked the window: if this was a film there would have been a handy fire escape, but there wasn’t, and I already knew that really.
Natasha had, somehow, got past the angry man, carrying her stuff, my stuff and various things from the room that she couldn’t possibly have needed, while telling him that I (Natasha) would pay. And she had vanished.
I started imagining ways of getting past him. If I said I was going to a cashpoint, and then never came back, he wouldn’t be able to get me. Probably. But I couldn’t be someone who lived in a hotel for nearly a week and then ran out in a ballgown without paying. That was Natasha, not me. It was that man’s business, his livelihood, his obsession. He had been asking us politely for money for days, and I didn’t want to be Natasha. He needed the money to go to visit his friend.
I knew that this was a distraction. I would get money to him and pay for the room one way or another, just not right now. I was puzzling about that so I didn’t have to look at the actual truth of what had happened.
I tried to look at it head on, but I couldn’t. I was trembling all over. I couldn’t even cry.
I had overridden all my instincts. I had known she hated me since I heard her talking on the train. I had known she lied to everyone, and yet I had gone to the party because I thought it would be fun. I had thought I had the upper hand with my secret train ticket. I cried tears of rage and frustration with myself, and they were hot down my cheeks.
Would I be able to use my savings money to get home? Natasha had my bank card. I couldn’t travel to London because I didn’t have my passport. Did you need a passport to travel between France and Spain? I was pretty sure you didn’t. I needed to call Mum, to call Dad, to call the police, but I had no phone. I was alone in Paris with nothing, and my panic was spiralling. Every half-formed plan I made led to a dead end. She had worked it all out, had left me no lifelines.
I could beg to use the hotel man’s phone. I couldn’t imagine he would look kindly on it but it was the only thing I could think of doing.
She wanted me to make money by hustling with street magic. That was what she had taught me.
I thought for a while that the Creep had already happened. I couldn’t breathe. My head was spinning and I needed to run away, but I had nowhere to run to. I thought I might be sick. I made it to the bathroom, but just leaned over the loo and retched.
I stared at myself in the mirror. Make-up was smeared all over my face, and that gave me something to do, so I washed it off with loo paper and soap. The soap got in my eyes, and the paper shredded itself and stuck to my wet face in tiny pieces.
I stepped out of my dress and switched on the shower. I was the girl who looked like Natasha, the girl who had been taken in by someone too good to be true, the girl who had the great misfortune of having a charlatan and a trickster for a cousin.
Everything was unravelling. This was my moment. There were twenty-two days until the end of life on Earth, and I had wasted my last summer. Natasha was a psychopath. I had known that, really, for a while. I remembered what I had heard her saying on the train and wished I had bailed on her right then. I could have got out at whatever that city was – Nevers? And found a train back to Spain. I’d had my bank cards, and I’d had my passport. I could have done anything.
I pulled the pins out of my hair and stood under the water. It was dribbly, but better than nothing. I washed my hair with soap, scrubbing all the hairspray away, and tried to get my face a bit cleaner.
What had she got? I held on to the wall of the shower and tried to work it out.
She’d taken my passport. I wasn’t sure how the biometric gates discriminated between people, but if she couldn’t use the passport at the automatic gates at airports or the Eurostar terminal, she would manage to show it to a person. She could travel as me if she wanted to, though I didn’t know why she would bother. If Natasha was me then that meant, while she was being me, perhaps I had become her.
I didn’t think so, though. She was me, and still herself. She had stolen my identity and left me as no one.
She had my phone. That was hardly a coup. She could have pickpocketed a better phone than that in a heartbeat. Though if she could open my phone she had access to my whole life, and of course she would be able to open it. She had watched me put my code in any number of times. I, on the other hand, had failed the one time I’d tried to open hers, because I didn’t notice things in the way that she did.
She had the cash she had earned for me yesterday. She had my bank cards. I supposed I needed to call the bank and cancel them, though I was sure she didn’t have the PINs.
Her note had said I didn’t need the money. That meant she had taken it. If she had wanted half my college fund I would happily have given it to her. She only had to say it. They were our joint grandparents. I would have shared. Also – what was she going to spend it on? Why would she bother now?
There was more, though. I remembered my dad saying that his brother had left him a lot of money. But he didn’t have any of it yet. She had said he’d left her and her mother with nothing, but that might have been a lie. I couldn’t think straight. The more I thought about it, though, the more sure I was that she had taken all my money. With the passport as ID, and my bank card, I supposed that it would have been easy.
Nobody needed much money, though. Not now.
I didn’t have a towel (my cousin had pointlessly stolen them), so I dried myself on the threadbare hand towel that was in the bathroom already, and, in the absence of any other option, put my underwear and gown back on. My hair dripped down my shoulders, and the silky dress clung to the back of my neck and felt cold and weird, like a jellyfish.
I opened the bathroom door, and a man was standing there. I screamed, but then calmed myself down. This had to be Arjun, Meera’s husband. I saw, in his face, how weird I must look.
‘Hi!’ he said. ‘You OK, Natasha or Libby?’
‘Libby,’ I said. ‘I need your help. Please can you help me? Please.’
He stopped. ‘Well, sure,’ he said. ‘But what help do you need?’ He looked nervous. ‘Has something happened?’
He was, reasonably, not interested in the fact that I was upset. Everyone was upset all the time. Still, he had a nice face, and he and Meera were all I had. They were the only people on my side of the angry man, unless the grumpy woman from room eight was in, and if she was I was sure she wouldn’t be interested.
‘I’ve lost everything,’ I said. ‘My cousin Natasha. My friend. She’s taken it all. I have to get out of the hotel but I don’t have the money to pay the bill. I don’t know what to do.’
He took a step back. ‘Sorry, my friend, but we can’t pay your hotel bill. Can you just go out and do the things you do – the magic? And I thought you were twins? Separated at birth, right?’
‘No. We’re cousins. We pretended to be twins.’ I shook my head, trying to get some logic into it. ‘I don’t know.’
‘This is all a bit confusing, to be honest. I don’t think Meera and I can help.’
‘I’m not asking for money,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I’m not. Could I make one call with your phone? Or send a message?’
He was backing away now, twitching in disapproval. I was ringing his alarm bells, and reasonably so.
‘I’ll go and talk to Meera.’ And he disappeared. I stood there, on the narrow landing, not quite sure what to do. I was still there when Meera came out of their room and put a hand on my shoulder.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Oh, Natasha. We are so sorry to hear about your trouble. Don’t be angry, but Libby came to see me yesterday evening, and she said this would happen. She explained that she had to go, and that you were having trouble with your mental health. Don’t worry. So many people are finding it difficult now. I mean, I find it impossible some days too – we all do – and you’re so young.’
‘But that’s not …’ I said.
She talked over me. ‘Libby told me you might say that you were Libby and she was Natasha, and that you would ask us for help. She said you would imitate her British accent. But it’s OK. She said it’s OK; you just have to wait here, right here in your room, and help will come. It’s going to be fine. She’s gone to meet your mother and they’ll be back soon. Everyone needs family now. Just stay here and you’ll be OK.’ She put a hand on my arm and steered me towards the bedroom. ‘Just sit it out in here,’ she said. ‘Truly. We’re setting off for home now too.’
‘Can I use your phone?’
‘I’m sorry.’
I stared at her. Natasha had told her a story and Meera had believed every single word of it. Natasha had said that I was angry and deluded, and that she was bringing me help. She had copied my voice. Weeks ago I had heard her practising that.
‘She’s lying. I’m Libby. She’s Natasha.’
‘Your mother’s coming. Seriously, she is.’
I wished with all my heart that she was right.
‘Are you leaving now?’ I said. ‘You two? Going home, right now?’
‘Yes. We have our bags almost ready to go. We’re taking the train to Russia and travelling down from there. We’ll be home in a week. You see? Even I need my family right now.’
‘Can I come with you?’
Arjun was standing behind her with two suitcases. He was using her as a human shield because I made him nervous.
I let Meera usher me into room seven. She patted me on the shoulder again.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Really. You can’t come to Goa. You need to stay here. You’ll be all right. Your mother is coming to take care of you, I promise.’
For a moment I allowed myself to believe her. Then I remembered that it was Natasha’s lie. Of course my mother wasn’t coming to take care of me.
I went and knocked on the other door. Number eight. The woman answered and looked at me with raised eyebrows.
‘Can you hel–’
‘Absolutely not.’ She closed the door in my face.
I was destitute, abroad. There was an angry man between me and any help that might be out there. I sat on the bed beside the window and wished I could even cry.
Because I knew that even this didn’t really matter. I could just sit here on my own, and it would get hotter and hotter, and the gas would creep around the world and that would be the end. For the first time ever, I stared it in the face. I knew how it would feel to try to breathe air that wasn’t there. I felt it sticking in my throat. I gasped, knowing that my body would do everything it could to try to find something to fill its lungs. I saw the things that would flash through my brain as it failed, as this thing we had all known was going to happen actually happened. I felt myself suffocate to death.
And I watched everyone else doing it too. I saw the bodies, everywhere. Earth would be dead, so I zoomed out, into the dying atmosphere, and past it. I went out and out and out, so the planet was just another speck in the distance. Humans had come and gone in the blink of an eye. I leaned my head on the wall and knew that this was meaningless. Love, life, travel, art. None of it had ever meant anything.
I would just sit here and wait it out, and nothing would matter.
Or.
Or I could get out of here. If nothing mattered, then I had nothing to be scared of. The angry man shouldn’t frighten me. I came back, down from the stars and through the atmosphere, and back into the air that I could still breathe right now. I jolted back into my body and opened my eyes.
I took a breath, and it felt like the best gift. I jumped up and looked around the room. I picked up the pillow, somehow hoping I might find my savings card, but there was nothing. I tried the pillow on the other bed. I looked in the dusty cupboards, and under the beds.
I found it when I picked up Natasha’s mattress. There was a passport on the bed slats, and it had a note on it:
Well done! You found it ♡
It was a black passport and definitely wasn’t mine, because it said UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on it. I flicked through the pages.
There were stamps showing that the bearer of this passport had entered the UK in April and left again on the seventeenth of July. On the morning of the eighteenth Natasha had walked into my life, in Spain. This seemed to be her passport, or at least the passport she was using.
I turned to the photo page. That looked like her photo.
She was a few years older than she had said, not a teenager at all but twenty-two years old.
And then I saw it.
Her name was not Natasha Lewis.
I read the words again, and again, trying to make sense of them. The woman who held this passport, whose photograph was right there and who I had known as my cousin, was Deanna Glancey.
I heard Meera and Arjun bumping their bags down the narrow stairs so I snatched up Natasha’s passport and notes (the only things I had), tucked them into my knickers due to the lack of any kind of bag, and crept down after them. If they were going to distract the hotel man by checking out, I would seize the moment. On balance I would rather run away from him than ask to use his phone. There were millions of phones in Paris.
My legs wanted to give way but I instructed them to keep going. I had no idea what was going on. But I summoned everything I had. I called in the spirit of Juliet Capulet, and I co-opted Carmen, and I thought of my baby siblings and my dead sister Violet and Shakespeare and Zoe and Harry the tomato and everything that meant anything to me.
I seized it with both hands. I loved people. Some people loved me. I had to do this. And I set off.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs and peeped round the corner. They were standing at the reception desk, talking to the cross man. He was smiling, and the printer was whirring as it churned out their receipt. He looked nice now, but I knew he would change the moment he saw me.
I waited until all three of their heads were down, all looking at the piece of paper on the counter, and then I ran. I was out of the front door before anyone could shout or try to stop me, and I ran out into the hot street and down the road and round the corner. I dodged past people, and just kept running and running, and then I was at the river.
I sat on a bench and tried to quell the panic.
I had no idea who Natasha was. If the woman I had spent the summer with was Natasha, she had a fake passport with Deanna Glancey’s name in it. That was exactly the kind of thing she would manage to do.
If she was Deanna, then she wasn’t my cousin, but my uncle’s illicit girlfriend. Though that was only according to her own story. I tried to make it fit together. Neither way made any sense.
I walked for a long time before I found a phone in a urine-scented phone box that looked as if it had been forgotten in the corner of a square. It felt like the only payphone in the whole city. Once I found it had a dialling tone, it took me ages to work out how to make a reverse-charge call, but I eventually managed to get through to the operator, and she did it for me.
I heard Mum’s mobile phone ringing in Spain.
A woman answered, but it wasn’t my mum.
‘Hello?’ I heard her say in a British accent. ‘Er … Amy’s phone?’
The operator asked her if she would accept the charges for a call from Olivia in Paris.
‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘Amy’s not actually here. She would love to speak to Olivia in Paris! So much! Can you get her to call back?’
The operator cut it off. I didn’t get to ask the woman who the hell she was or where Mum was. I went through the whole process again with Sean’s phone, but he didn’t answer, and I banged my head on the side of the phone box and tried not to scream.
Who had that woman been? And where was my mother?
I didn’t know my dad’s number. Or Anneka’s. I pictured some woman in Spain, an expat yoga friend, sitting at my place at the table, answering my mum’s phone while Mum was busy trying to repel the new atmosphere with her mind. I pictured Sean’s phone on the terrace while he swam up and down the pool or ignored it while he was drinking wine.
I wished I had stayed there.
I called the international operator again. This time I gave them the only other number I had in my head: Zoe’s.
I heard the operator say: ‘Will you accept a collect call from Olivia Lewis calling from Paris?’
And Zoe said: ‘What? Will I what? Libby? In Paris? How much will it …? I mean, of course. Put her on.’
I had loved Zoe for a long time, but I had never loved her quite this much before.
‘You are connected,’ said the operator, and she was gone.
‘Libby?’ said Zoe. ‘Hey, what’s going on? I was on my way to the station to meet you. I mean, thank you for all the emails. They were. Wow. I had no idea … I mean, I had a bit of an idea. But I’m really overwhelmed. Oh, shall I call you back?’
I looked at the phone box. I couldn’t see a number on it.
‘What emails?’ I said.
‘The ones you sent. Look, let me call you back.’
‘I’m in a phone box. I can’t see any way of getting calls on it. I didn’t send you –’ I stopped talking as I began to realize. No. No, not that. It couldn’t be. ‘Oh my God,’ I said.
‘Are they … Are they not real?’ Zoe’s voice changed.
‘Was it about, maybe, forty messages? Going back for months?’
‘Mmm.’ Her voice was very small.
‘I’m so sorry. It was Natasha.’
‘So not real? You mean, like a practical joke?’
‘Shit, no. Real. I wrote them. She’s just sent them. I would never have sent them.’
‘You said you didn’t trust her. What’s going on? Why are you in a phone box? Why aren’t you home? Are you OK? Safe?’
That pulled me back to my immediate reality. Tears poured down my cheeks. Then I managed to say, ‘I’m not OK. Not.’
‘What’s happened? What else has she done?’ When I still couldn’t speak, she said, ‘Don’t worry about the emails. I liked them.’
In spite of everything, that made me smile, just for a moment. ‘Thank you, Zoe,’ I said shakily, grateful that she hadn’t freaked out about them. ‘But …’ I took a deep breath, trying to hold back my tears. ‘It’s Natasha. She’s not my cousin. I don’t think. She might be. She’s stolen everything. Like, all of it. She’s just … gone. She took the things from the hotel room. Just everything. My passport. And money. And phone – which is why you got those emails. Oh, Zoe. I’d been writing them for ages but I was never going to … And my ticket home. And she –’
‘Hey,’ said Zoe. ‘Libby. Slow down. Where are you? What do you need? Right now? Money? What can I do?’
I tried to think. The sun was hot on the top of my head. I wanted to wear real clothes, not this ballgown. I was ridiculous in it. I didn’t want to be a fake twin any more, the one in the shade. I wanted my old life, to be myself.
I saw then that there was nothing wrong with being quiet. Even if the atmosphere was going to turn to poison in three weeks, I could be quiet from now until then (and after that, I supposed, very quiet). It was OK to live whatever remained of my life as myself, the person I really was. I had been good enough before. I hadn’t needed to try so desperately to change myself, to go along with everything Natasha had said, just because I wanted to be like her.
She was a liar and a thief. Not a role model.
I wanted to be like myself. I was braver now, and … I stopped to consider whether I was right, and decided I was. I was braver, and I could be a better person. I was a better person than Natasha, but I could also be better than the person I’d been for the past few weeks.
I didn’t say any of this to Zoe. I realized that I had made her accept an expensive phone call, and that every second I stood there trying to get my act together was costing her actual money.
‘Can you go to my dad’s house?’ I said. ‘I don’t know his phone number. Get him or Anneka. Tell them I need help urgently. I’m stuck in Paris with no money. No passport or phone and nowhere to go.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Look – we’ll sort this out, OK? Are there lots of payphones around?’
‘There are pretty much none.’
‘OK. Then … go somewhere. Can you go to a place and wait, somewhere where you’ll be safe? And we’ll find you. What about the Louvre pyramid, in the courtyard there? Kind of where you were when you sent me that selfie yesterday. Can you just wait? Then, as soon as we find a way to get help to you, we know where you are. I’ve got the photo from yesterday. What are you wearing? I mean, just in case someone knows someone who can help out straight away. We can give them your photo and description.’
Zoe was springing into action now that she understood the situation. I felt myself starting to relax.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘This sounds insane but I’m wearing a vintage ballgown. It’s white. It’s like the dress I had for Juliet at the start of the play. I haven’t got anything else.’
‘Right. OK. Don’t worry. Can you get to the Louvre?’
‘I can walk there in about half an hour, I think.’
‘OK. Is that OK? Are you all right to walk for half an hour? And do you have sunscreen?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m OK. I mean, I don’t have sunscreen, but that probably doesn’t matter any more, does it?’
‘We’ll sort this out.’ She paused. ‘I’m going to do this, Libby. We’ll work it out. We’ll rescue you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and it was not enough but it was all I had.