Franny and June Read online

  Oh my.

  Just look at me though.

  Franny

  I think I might be dying. I seem to have pain everywhere. Not just in my head. Although that's bad enough. Mum always drones on about her migraines and I roll my eyes, but if this is what she means then I may need to re-evaluate my position of indifference.

  Sorry Mum - promise to be more considerate next time. Promise not to bang around so much, or shout or start arguments when you're in the throes of a bad one. I head no idea.

  I can barely even see anything out of one of my eyes, whilst the other is almost as blurry, and my neck and shoulders are ablaze with streaks of pain. What did I do?

  I feel like I've ran fifty miles then been hit in the head with a grand piano. And why?

  I didn't drink alcohol; well not much, just a couple of those icy cocktail things, but they were a couple of hours apart, and yes I know it's naughty, but it's not the first time alcohol has passed my lips. I am fifteen, after all. Nearly sixteen.

  So, I shouldn't be hungover. As yet I never have been.

  Then I remember the argument, the explosive screaming match at the perceived slight. So very Mum, but so very me I suppose. She says I'm passive aggressive, but I say she's just bloody aggressive, aggressive.

  If there were two of us in this house acting like her then one of us would likely end up dead.

  So passive aggressive is my best defence.

  She always calls me ungrateful, but what was that last night? I can see where I get it from, if I am.

  Still, something happened then. What was that? What happened to us? It seemed like we melted into each other, literally consumed by the other. Then there was that skull, and the snake. What was that?

  I look at the clock and see I've woken pretty early for once. Mum would be proud. Or not. Because she leaves being proud to Dad.

  Strange though.

  Everything beyond my alarm clock seems a little blurry, like someone has shoved an Instagram filter on my vision. This headache I suppose. It will clear or I will die.

  Both these outcomes seem appealing, right at the moment.

  As I lift myself up I find the pain stretches electrically through my limbs, then there is a new pain, sharp and persistent digging into the bottom of my knee. Ow, ow, ow, I don't like this.

  I honestly worry I could be dying. What is this?

  There's a floor to ceiling mirror on the door of my wardrobe, but I can't quite make myself out. I don't like this. Because, something else is wrong. My blurry form, seems off somehow, my hair too short maybe. I touch it with my fingers, my long hair gone.

  It's definitely shorter. How did that happen? Did Mum do it? And why?

  I go to walk but the knee gives way, so I settle for crawling across to the mirror, my features slowly becoming focused, until I find myself staring into the ancient face of my mother, and I weep. How could this have happened? We all have the horror within of turning into our parents, but no-one told me it could happen overnight.

  For a moment, I think I can hear my mother sobbing somewhere nearby, but then I realise it’s me, Mum’s voice and all, so I crawl into a ball and try to pretend it isn’t happening.

  June

  I’m not sure I can piece all this together.

  We’re sitting opposite each other in the kitchen, me chasing muesli round my bowl, she picking at a piece of toast covered in that disgusting chocolaty, nutty stuff which she likes so much.

  "You want to watch that," I tell her, "I don't want you making me fat when we swap back again?"

  She looks up at me hopefully, desperately, then asks, then pleads in a way which makes me want to weep, "you do think we will swap back then?" followed by, "but, we must have gone insane, haven’t we? This can't be real can it? This can't be real?"

  It can’t, of course, but it seems real though.

  “No dear, none of this us real,” I snap, “it hasn't been for maybe fifteen years now. One of these days I may well wake up.”

  We spend this Sunday morning circling each other, watching ourselves from the outside; barely talking, because what is to be said?

  "How did this happen?" I eventually ask, "I mean I've seen those films, body swap things, that one with Tom Hanks was good, but, how did it happen , and how do we swap back do you think?"

  Franny

  We try it all.

  Hugging; strange to find mum so soft, because she is in my body. Saying sorry. We even held the amulet together holding hands and pleaded with the universe to switch us back, but nothing happened.

  I'm terrified what will happen if we don't swap back.

  I've often joked about how old Mum is, but until I found myself looking out of her half-focused eyes I had no idea how out of sorts she felt from the inside. I went for a shower earlier, and, well you know how it's a bit weird to see your parent’s naked, glimpsed through a doorway, trying to avert your eyes, well, try being your parent naked, showering and all. Urgh. I can barely look down when I go to the bathroom.

  I feel like gravity is peeling the skin off me. Or, like I'm melting into the floor; if we don't swap back soon I'll just be a puddle of bones.

  ***

  Each time I eat something I catch her eyes on me, unhappy at the weight I may be adding to her hips, so to compound a truly awful day I'm starving hungry as well. I suggested I might be allowed to pilfer a drop of her vodka from the freezer, but it seems that although my body is grown up, this counts for nothing.

  June

  The most pressing worry I have is work tomorrow. And school.

  God that will be weird. Studying for my/her GCSE’s, which were O levels in my day. Or CSE’s maybe. Maybe they were the same thing, I’m struggling to remember. Plus, in the office, there's a big client meeting on the new product range we're buying in at the supermarket, but I reckon I can talk her through the presentation just so long as she doesn't get too many questions.

  We're both just going to have to bluff it. The meeting's just apples, after all. Some new fancy breed they've grown in the US. Tasty and blood red. The juiciest I've ever eaten, almost like ripe pears. I can brief Franny I reckon, then she can sit in her office all day browsing the web and hiding out, whilst I have to learn about: Maths, French, Italian and PE.

  In films the body swap thing was always high jinks and hilarity, but in reality this is just additional hassle. Like life isn’t already hard enough work, I’ve got to learn to be someone else.

  Awful pain in the bum.

  Except...

  Except. There is this one thing.

  When I look in the mirror. Again. Oh my.

  When I was actually 15, I was gorgeous, but had no idea. Ungainly and awkward. Now though, I look in the mirror and I can see how stunning I am. Not quite a woman yet, but becoming one, nearly accessing all that power.

  When I look back at photographs of me at this age I am always stunned to see the face of a naturally beautiful young woman radiating from the prints, yet to realise what she possessed, thinking she was gangly and ugly, no clue at all. Not until I opened a photo album years after the event and saw this beautiful film starlet staring back at me did I understand. If only I had known.

  I suppose Franny also has no idea.

  Franny is also gorgeous. Darker hair and fairer complexion than me at her age, having been a strawberry blond with skin the colour of caramel, but she is going to be stunning.

  Not that anyone sees it yet. Whenever I see Fran she’s covering up with a mix of hats or hoodies, hiding away, but as I draw her hair back from her face I see there is something wonderful hiding in the wings.

  Franny

  Mum said I’d be okay, then gave me all these tips whilst I re-read her script something like fifty times, but still, I think I’ve fluffed it.

  I’ve got this tray of apples on my desk and although I’m trying to hide out in her office, I get the feeling everyone’s giving me a wide berth. Like I just officially hit old age and
senility and it’s all my fault the new product line isn’t going to happen. The walls of Mum’s office are glass, but in the last hour no-one has even glanced in my direction.

  The initial pain which had wracked my body for the last two mornings has subsided now thanks to medication, although as I pace the grey carpeted room I keep thinking my knee is going to lock up. It’s as though someone has filled it with tiny fish hooks which keep threatening to catch into the bone.

  Mum told me to rub it carefully either side and with my thumb and finger and if that didn’t work to surreptitiously slip a heat pad from my drawer and hold it until it unlocks. Surreptitiously was the word she used, not wanting me to remind anyone how old she was.

  I thought she was mad, paranoid, but after I saw the way Cam from, where was it, accounts maybe, when I saw the way his mouth thinned in amused disgust at my awful presentation, I wonder if she has a point. Maybe it is really that hard to make sure people take you seriously and so easy to just lose it.

  I understand. I have empathy too now. It wasn’t just her making a mess of us. It was both of us.

  I close my eyes and dwell on this thought. I understand, I tell the universe, now can we swap back now, please-

  “Having a little, nap?”

  It’s Cam. Smirk still twisting his features into something I want to punch and clearly up for the opportunity to poke me a little more.

  “I was thinking.”

  Cam nods, looking unconvinced.

  “Sure. My nan used to say something similar when she dozed off watching the telly, if you turned it over,” he said, then his voice suddenly going all Monty Python high-pitched, “I was watching that she’d say, why’d you turn it over? She was in a retirement home six months later, in the grave after six more. Still, at sixty-three, she’d had a good run.”

  “Oh,” I scramble for words, “just piss off, you’re not exactly winding back the clock yourself; you want to get yourself down the hairdressers to see if they can weave a little young man hair into your bald spot.”

  Cam starts to lift his hand to his head then stops himself, so I sense I’ve hit a nerve, but then notice the look on his face seems less wryly amused and more hateful, and I wonder if I’d have done better to smile and play nice, as he stops off at the desk of my PA, says something which makes her laugh and suppress the giggle with her hand, her bottle blond hair quivering, as again I experience a wave of comprehension.

  June

  Well that was a bloody nightmare.

  I reckoned I’m pretty good at Maths but just sat a surprise test which may as well have been in Latin, then received about ten different types of homework to do. I had to go and hide in the toilet during Italian. I studied it myself for O level, but haven’t used it since and could barely remember a word.

  Still, there’s was a cross country run in the afternoon and I have to admit the thought of running again without pain has kept me from bunking off.

  I used to love to run, before it became a weight control device, running for the county as a teenager. Franny used to run like a whippet, but stopped breaking a sweat in Year Nine, the Third Year that is, in old money, once one of the boys made some snide remark about her breasts bouncing and I don’t think I’ve seen her move faster than a stroll ever since.

  Well, I wanted to see how fast these young legs could take me, experience the rush as I pelt round the field, where I found easily kept up with Alicia Keane, one of the ‘sporty’ girls, with sporty apparently meaning ‘probable lesbian’, then eased to a win over the gasping teenager who hugged me at the finish line and told me how fantastic my run had been and asked me if I want to train with her sometime.

  Mr Hodges, the Italian teacher, was standing at the edge of the field and wryly observed that my illness had cleared up nicely.

  “Women’s problems, Sir,” I told him, staring until he shifted his gaze, then I noticed a group of boys making their way back from the tennis courts, eying me up and down, but unlike my dear Franny. I know what they are thinking; I know I hold the power there, not them, so one by one they too drop their eyes as I return their gaze.

  Once I get back home Franny is sitting at the kitchen table weeping, the Mexican Day of the Dead necklace in one hand, a compact hand mirror in the other, a pile of apples on the kitchen table in from of her.

  She's got a point.

  I wonder some days how I got through it myself.

  I suppose mine was a gradual journey to the place she reached in one day; I feel a pang of pity for her, for where she has found herself, without first living the life to earn the face. She of course has a lack of appreciation for all the possibility she has, in this body, wearing this face; of all the new worlds which will open up to her if and when we fix this, but still, I take her in my arms.

  My baby.

  Franny

  She hugged me, properly for the first time since, well since I can barely remember and I could feel the medallion throb and glow between us. I could see the death skull in my mind’s eye. Rebirth and reunion crashing towards us.

  I love her. My mum. I love her.

  But then she pulled back away.

  No, she didn’t just pull back, she threw me away from her. Launching me the room across as though she'd just found a big spider on her arm, leaving me sprawled on the floor. The hardest look in her eyes I have ever seen.

  June

  Am I ready to let this go?

  I sensed the pendant doing its thing, about to right the universe, but then all of a sudden, I don't know if I want it to. Do I want to go back to bad knees and back pain just yet? And if my spoiled little child has come so far towards empathy during these last two days, how much better will she be in a month?

  Or a year?

  So, I retreat.

  There's a look of horror on my little girls, old lady face (she's really going to have to learn to apply the war paint to get by in public), then I tell her she needs to wait a day or two. Really get the feel for what it is to be a grown up, with grown up responsibilities and woes. Maybe then she'll learn some responsibility, some empathy for what I go through for my little girl. Maybe we’ll swap back then, I tell her.

  It makes my stomach ache to see the look of grief in her eyes, but it will teach her not to judge me so harshly in future.

  Franny

  She won't swap back with me.

  It's been a week now. I beg her, we need to finish this, I say, but she just says she will swap back once I'm ready. I'm getting on okay in work now, settling into the routine of the office and I've found mostly I can bluff my way through.

  I threatened to tell Jacs, but Mum just stood there laughing at me. Cackling virtually and told me I'd end up being sectioned if I did, then how could we swap back.

  What's worse, I think she's dating Jonas, or some boy at least; she keeps on staying out late, all furtive and sneaky. I'm sure his name keeps appearing on her/my phone. And she's skimping on my school work. After all her nonsense about me needing to be dedicated and focused in school, I haven't seen her do a dash of work for three weeks. She just gives me the books and tells me to study, because she's off out; with who, I wonder, with Jonas?

  There was a moment there, when we hugged, when we were about to swap, when I really thought I understood her and her pain, the weight of being a parent, when really knew I'd misjudged her, but now I reckon I had it right all along.

  She's a mean old cow and I hate her. Except she's not old any longer.

  I am.

  ***

  I thought I saw that man in the street today, the one with the Bedouin tent who sold me the necklace, standing behind the grey metal of a bus-stop, but he was gone when I glanced back. I dashed over to the spot, thought I could smell the odour of mahogany and candle-smoke, but there was no other sign and it could well have been the fading smell of some pot head.

  Will I never escape this life?

  June

  Two weeks now of this lovely life.

&
nbsp; I skipped school today. For the first time in thirty-six years, I skipped school.

  It was for a good cause. I stayed home and made us both a lovely dinner for when Franny got back from work. She won't appreciate it, children never do. They just take and take and take, but what can you do?

  Today though, this dance needs to end. I’ve decided. We can't go on like this any longer, it isn’t fair, this uncertainty, so I've made us a lamb casserole and individual apple pies accompanied by homemade custard, just like I used to when she was little.

  I used to cook a lot back then, introducing my little vampire baby to all the tastes of the world, before she sucked me dry. But, I shouldn’t think like that tonight. Tonight is about fine dining and a beautiful red wine I’ve had in the study since before Jack left me. That's one taste she has acquired a taste for during her sojourn into my life, red wine.

  Anyway, tonight it ends. We can't go on like this. It isn’t fair on either of us.

  Franny

  At last. I think we're going to swap back.

  Mum says enough is enough, I've learnt my lesson, she says, and I'm so relieved I could whoop. She's even made me my favourite dinner and she's not even moaning about me drinking wine and making her flabby old body even flabbier. Sorry, Mum, shouldn’t say that.

  I'm sixteen next week, then have my exams a couple of weeks after that, and I’d been living in horror that I was going to have to watch my Sweet Sixteen from inside a Thrifty Fifty (does that work? Thrifty Fifty is the best I can come up with at short notice), but I'm on the verge of getting my life back. and it is wonderful.

  I wonder if Mum will let me keep on drinking wine once we switch. Probably not, although she's knocking it back herself right now.

  The lamb casserole was gorgeous; the homemade apple pie a little tart, but the custard is sweet enough to mask it. I think this wine's a little strong to be honest. Mum says anything over thirteen and a half percent leaves her legless, so that's probably it, except she's watching me, like a, not a hawk, like a deer hunter and I then I suddenly feel so very frightened.

  The hunger I see in her eyes is as deep as the grand canyon, then I know, just know I need to expel the contents of the meal, because otherwise this the end for me, but she pins me down, her young hands too strong for me as my body weakens, as she whispers, "now, now my dearest, time to go to sleep, don't fight it dear, time to go to sleep."