Beside Myself

Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan
Beside Myself

Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

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Overview

Six-year-old Helen and Ellie are identical twins, but Helen is smarter, more popular, and their mother's favorite. Ellie, on the other hand, requires special instruction at school, is friendless, and is punished at every turn.

Until they decide to swap places--just for fun, and just for one day--and Ellie refuses to switch back. Everything of Helen's, from her toys to her friends to her identity, now belongs to her sister. With those around her oblivious to her plight, the girl who used to be Helen loses her sense of self and withdraws into a spiral of behavioral problems, delinquency, and mental illness. In time, she's not even sure of her memory of the switch.

Twenty-five years later, she receives a call that threatens to pull her back into her sister's dangerous orbit. Will she take this chance to face her past?

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781632864352
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date: 01/12/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 420,449
File size: 677 KB

About the Author

Ann Morgan is the author of The World Between Two Covers, based on her year-long journey around the world via books from every country. She continues to blog about her adventures with world literature at ayearofreadingtheworld.com. Morgan's writing has also appeared in The Independent, The Financial Times, The Scotsman, BBC Culture, and The Guardian, among many others. She lives in London.
Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor based in London. Ann's writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times and the New Internationalist. She has sub-edited for publications including Tatler and Vanity Fair. Following the success of her project to read a book from every country in 2012, Ann continues to blog about international literature at ayearofreadingtheworld.com. Her first book, Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015. Ann Morgan drew on her experiences as a Samaritans volunteer for her powerful portrayal of psychological stress in Beside Myself, which is her first novel.

annmorgan.me
@A_B_Morgan | #BesideMyself

Read an Excerpt

Beside Myself


By Ann Morgan

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2016 Ann Morgan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63286-435-2


CHAPTER 1

Ribbons of sound. The bright streamer of a child's giggle, an ice-cream van's flourish swirling like a sparkler in the gloom, the chatter of a long-finished game. Birdsong spiralling, then stiffening and falling to the earth, congealing into something hard and metallic, measured out in mechanical portions, a harsh trilling. Again. A pause. Again.

Smudge opened her eyes and squinted. A ray of light thrust its way in past the tie-dyed sarong tacked up over the window, to pick out the dead flies, plastic bags, the vodka bottle lying on its side. Morning, was it? No, afternoon – always afternoon when the sun came in at that angle. The day almost spent.

Pens, matches, tampons strewn across the table. A half-smoked cigarette burrowing into the plastic veneer, puckering it like a scar. A toothbrush lying on its side next to an ice-cube tray with magenta and purple paint clogged in its recesses like dried blood.

From the armchair, she stared up at the canvas propped on the shelf above the broken gas fire. Canvas was pushing it: it was really a piece of newspaper pinned to the seat of a chair. Still, it had been enough last night, or the night before – or whenever it was – to get her up and buzzing, charging about the flat in search of anything that would help her create the colours and shapes surging in her brain. She wished she could recapture it now, the inspiration that rolled in like a breaker only to smash against the sea wall of her consciousness and drain away, pulling her with it to drift on a grey ocean, leaving only wreckage behind. The canvas testified to what had happened – the bright squabble of colours in the top-right corner giving way to a thin wash and then nothing. A headline about a pensioner being mugged in the alleyway up the road.

The absorbing idea was gone, but the voices that usually crowded in to fill any blank spaces in her mind – muttering and snarling – were still, for now. Good. That was something. That was something, at least.

She rubbed a hand over her eyes and the ringing started again. The phone, she thought dully. Hadn't they disconnected it yet? There must be more than twenty final warnings in the drift of mail in the hallway.

She listened to the ringing unmoved. No point answering. It would just be one of those recorded messages. That, or the Samaritans phoning to see how she was, unaware that tomorrow she'd be calling another branch with a different story.

Or maybe the ringing was just in her mind. She wouldn't put it past her mashed-up brain to pull some kind of new stunt like that.

She squinted up at the ripped calendar on the wall. What day was it anyway? Hard to keep track. Before you knew it, Thursday had muscled in where Tuesday was supposed to be and you were staring down the barrel of Friday. And meanwhile some bastard like Monday went droning on for weeks. The calendar was giving nothing away. Not Giro day, anyhow. Never that. She drew a deep, snagging breath and her stomach gurgled.

Be good to get some food inside her. She levered herself to her feet and the floor fell away like a trap door on a theme-park ride. Fireworks exploded on the edge of her vision and she gripped the chair. ('Indisputable!' sniped a voice somewhere inside her brain.) Steady.

Out into the corridor, ragged nails trailing over the peeling wallpaper, the kitchen doorway belching the smell of sour milk. Inside: the plump plastic bags, tops tied, ranged across the floor and surfaces like barn hens. Rubbish cascading from the bin, the sink piled.

Smudge opened the fridge door and the phone trilled again, making her lose her footing. She put out a hand to save herself and caught it in a wire, dragging something off the wall as she sat down heavily amid the rubbish bags. The ceiling gaped above her, a heavy weight being hoisted the better to fall on her head.

Then she heard another voice, this time seeming to come from somewhere outside her.

'Ellie?' it said in a stern, tinny tone. 'Ellie?'

She looked around. Apart from the dripping of the kitchen tap, the room was still. She clapped her hand over her eyes, feeling the rasp of cracked skin against her face, and shook her head, trying to dislodge the hallucination.

'Ellie?' said the voice again.

She turned and peered through the gap in her fingers. The sound was coming from the phone receiver dangling next to her. Cautiously she reached for it and held it to her ear.

'Ellie,' said the phone, 'it's Mother.' And then, 'Look, I haven't got time to play silly buggers. I know this is your number. Nick gave it to me.'

A silence. Above her, its door still open, the fridge began to beep.

'All right. If that's the way you want it,' continued the phone. 'I'm ringing about Helen.' A sigh. 'Well, there's been an accident and I'm afraid she's in a coma. There. The others thought I should tell you. Left to myself, I probably wouldn't have b — But there we are. At least this way you won't hear about it first on the news.'

Around the kitchen dark shapes were stirring, unfurling themselves like monstrous, poisonous blooms. The voices were snickering, getting ready to rush her. She felt numb and powerless before them.

'Needless to say, we're all pretty cut up about it this end,' said the phone. 'Horace is beside himself. Richard's put in for compassionate leave.'

The shapes were moving towards her, billowing like smoke, curling across the polystyrene ceiling tiles as a prickling sensation worked its way up her arms. She tried to move but the feeling gripped her tighter, its fidgeting fingers edging their way up towards her neck. Panic beat in the rhythm of the fridge's beep.

'We're all spending every hour we can at the hospital,' continued the phone. 'And of course there's a lot of media attention.'

Another pause and then, angrily, 'Don't you have anything to say?'

The darkness was nearly upon her, stifling, choking, stars prickling on the edge of her vision. She swallowed, took a deep breath and gripped the phone, blinking.

('Whickering,' carped a voice inside her mind. 'Reprehensible.')

Smudge closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 'I'm afraid you've got the wrong number,' she said, laying the words out one by one like coins on the counter of the offie.

Then the receiver dropped as the clamouring rushed in to claim her. She slumped back among the bags. A carton began to leak on to her shoulder, but she did not feel it. There was only the hubbub inside her head and, somewhere beyond it, the light from the fridge playing on her eyelids like sunshine, its beeps mimicking those of a lorry reversing long ago in a suburban street one summer's afternoon.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Beside Myself by Ann Morgan. Copyright © 2016 Ann Morgan. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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