The Liar's Room

by Simon Lelic

  Susanna assumed the police were there because of the blaze. It was gone midnight and she’d just spent the last several hours attempting to help the teachers, the headmaster, the police shape some sort of order from the overspill of panic. Although, in fact, once a cordon had been established and all the children and parents accounted for, she had mostly stood around watching like everyone else. It was like bonfire night in the end but without the festivity. Some of the older kids, inevitably, were laughing and cheering but mostly the mood was somber, the crowd muffled by a blanket of shock. Other than those pockets of celebrating children, the only sounds were the shouts of the firemen and the whip-crack rage of the fire itself. It was astonishingly loud, far louder than Susanna would have imagined. The noise was almost more alarming than the sight of the flames dancing on the roof. Every snap, every bang, was another body blow, an audible reminder of how much damage was being done inside the building. In contrast the flames appeared almost graceful. If it hadn’t been for the sound and smell of the fire, you almost wouldn’t have believed that anything so beautiful could inflict any damage at all.

  So, yes, when Susanna saw the police car in her driveway, she didn’t doubt that they’d come about the school. Initially she had simply assumed the blaze had started by accident but, while she had been standing outside the building, rumors of arson had spread as quickly as the flames themselves. So probably the police were looking for witnesses. What they imagined Susanna would be able to tell them, however, and why they were so prompt in coming to her, she couldn’t have said.

  She remembers getting her key ready before she had even reached the front door. She remembers stepping into the hallway, through to the kitchen, without taking off her shoes or coat. Her handbag was still in her hand when the male constable, surprisingly old given his rank, deferred to Neil to establish Susanna’s identity.

  “Is this your wife?” he asked him, as though—what? She might just possibly be his mistress? She was too female to be able to answer for herself?

  Neil, uncharacteristically silent, only nodded.

  “Can I help you?” Susanna asked, out of irritation addressing the policeman’s colleague, a young woman in a constable’s uniform as well.

  “There’s been an incident, I’m afraid,” the male police officer said, before his colleague could respond. “You and your husband will want to come with us.”

  “The fire, you mean? I know, I was there, I saw it. I’ve just—”

  And then it struck her: why was Jake not downstairs too? With the police here, and all the lights on, why had she not seen her son eavesdropping from the stairs at least, or passed him loitering in the hallway?

  “Oh my God, has something happened? Has something happened to Jake? Was he there, at the school? He said he wasn’t going to be there!”

  In her panic she was casting from face to face. Neil continued to avoid making eye contact. The male police officer remained impassive. And the young policewoman, unless Susanna was imagining it, stared back at her with outright hostility.

  And so it began.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jake: her baby: her sweet, loving little boy: sitting all alone in a prison cell.

  It is an image, a motif of that period in her life, that has stayed with her more than any other. More even than the day Susanna walked through the front door to find her son hanging from the banister. She’s relived that moment innumerable times too, of course she has but the visuals of it, the optical imprint on her brain . . . it’s blurred. Her brain has shrouded it, hidden it from her the way a nurse might draw a curtain. Instead it is her emotions from that day that have scarred her more than anything. Her grief, shock, panic, which threaten to boil over whenever she has cause to recollect.

  But Jake sitting alone on that bench, his face shadowed by soot (and something else, Susanna remembers thinking, which rendered his features even darker—unless that only appeared in retrospect): Susanna sees that image almost every time she shuts her eyes.

  She recalls as well how long it took her to find out exactly what had happened. At first nobody would tell her anything, not even Neil. The drive to the police station had elapsed in silence. And then, once they’d arrived, the story emerged only gradually. Even when it had she couldn’t comprehend it. These words she was hearing—

  assault

  incident

  complaint

  victim

  rape

  —she understood them. It was just, in the context of her son, they made no sense. None whatsoever. Rape, for heaven’s sake? How? When? Who? There’d been a mistake, clearly. A mix-up. Mistaken identity, that was the phrase that kept recurring in Susanna’s mind.

  Except: Jake. The way he was refusing, like Neil, to even look at her, to say a word in answer to her prompts. For that entire first night Susanna couldn’t tell what was real. Was she asleep? Dreaming? What about the fire? Had that happened?

  And then Jake’s confession the next morning, when the facts of the matter became inescapable.

  * * *

  • • •

  As Susanna sees it what happened next can be split into two distinct phases. The period in which the world hated Jake. And then, harder to bear, the period it didn’t.

  His identity emerged almost immediately. The newspapers couldn’t reveal it because of Jake’s age, obviously, but everyone knew that Jake was the boy involved. The street, the school, the community, everyone who mattered. And so when the media reported the “facts” of the case—a (young, idealistic) teacher raped by one of her (wicked, loner) pupils, the scene of the crime (a school!) set ablaze to cover the assailant’s tracks (all “allegedly,” of course)—it was an open secret that Jake was the boy responsible.

  There was outrage, inevitably. The newspapers might not have been able to point the finger at Jake specifically but they stirred up enough moral indignation that those who knew who the guilty party was (Susanna has never been quite sure what happened to the “innocent until proven” part) took up the cause with vigor. At Jake’s remand hearing the van he was being transported in was almost toppled. Bricks, eggs, feces, all were hurled at the windows of Susanna’s house. What Jake had done, at the age he was: it summed up everything that was wrong with modern society. And modern society, in response, was about ready to lynch Susanna’s child.

  So that was the point she thought it couldn’t get any worse. Or, more accurately, the point she thought she could tell exactly how things, from here, would deteriorate. Jake had confessed everything to the police. Alison had told her side of the story, as had Scott, Pete and Charlie. The other boys’ accounts differed from Jake’s, yes, but the important thing was that everyone by this stage knew what had really happened. And so the course of their lives was laid out in front of them. The recriminations, the reprisals, the retribution. Susanna thought she knew exactly what was heading their way.

  But she was wrong.

  Alison Birch, six weeks after Jake’s arrest, changed her story. Not only that, she disappeared, as suddenly and completely as Susanna would attempt to after Emily was spat at in the street. Susanna assumed that Alison was as repulsed by the furor around what had happened as she was. In theory her identity was protected, just like Jake’s, but in reality—in the community—Alison was about as anonymous as Susanna’s son. And with the prospect of a full-fledged trial coming up, there was no doubt she would have been afraid. Ashamed as well, probably, in precisely the way Susanna framed it when she explained it to Adam. Susanna had tried to contact her soon after Jake’s arrest (knowing it was a terrible idea, knowing her lawyers would object if they found out), to explain to her how sorry she was but, understandably, she was rebuffed. So she had no way of knowing why Alison ran. It stood to reason, that was all. It was the only thing in the whole sordid situation that in Susanna’s mind made any sense whatsoever.

  The papers, though, s
aw it differently. That was their job, apparently. Not just to see things differently, to present them differently too, irrespective of the facts. They wanted blood, that was the problem. Their readers demanded it. And when the Crown Prosecution Service was obliged to drop Jake’s case, to declare that, without a complainant and after Jake had recanted his confession, they had no firm basis on which to proceed, the baying crowd found itself deprived of its prey. Which obviously wouldn’t do at all. So the press did the only thing it could do. It found a new prey.

  The news cycle turned at such a rate that Susanna was left feeling spun dry. Not only was Jake not guilty, the papers declared, he was innocent. Wronged. Falsely accused. Jake was the victim in all of this, not Alison. And Alison Birch—whom the newspapers could now name and shame with impunity—was the criminal. To think, not only had she accused a child of rape—a child, dear reader!—she’d stood by her perverted fiction for more than a month, wasting police time, misleading the public and coming close to ruining a young boy’s life. And why? Because she was a fantasist. An attention grabber. A whore, they might as well have said. Indeed, to Susanna that was almost the most shocking thing of all—that this was the outcome the newspapers seemed secretly to have been hoping for all along. BOY RAPES WOMAN? Huh. Not exactly MAN BITES DOG. But a false accusation of rape, where the woman is really to blame . . . Well. There are your op-eds for the next two weeks at least, your Sunday supplements for a solid month. Even better, there was no counterargument to contend with. No pesky lawyers crying libel, no perplexing shades of gray. With Alison not around to defend herself, it was a story that could run and run and run.

  * * *

  • • •

  Susanna recalls her arguments with Neil. Arguments/argument—there were a string of them but really they were just that: a single looped and twisted thread, with each flare-up contributing another knot.

  The rape was forgotten, the arson all but forgiven, and Jake—their son—was off the hook. What the fuck was Susanna’s problem? her husband demanded to know.

  “Nothing’s been forgotten!” Susanna insisted. “Nothing’s been forgiven! They’re calling the fire an accident, a prank gone wrong, but he’ll still face charges. And Jake’s not the innocent victim they’re all claiming. You know he’s not! He’s guilty. He did it, all the terrible things they’re accusing him of!”

  “But they’re not accusing him. That’s the point. They’re not accusing him, not anymore. Why can’t you just be happy for him? Glad that it’s all gone away? The way any normal mother would be!”

  “Normal?”

  “Yes, normal! It’s your duty to stand by your son, no matter what. It’s your responsibility.”

  Susanna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You,” she said. “You are talking to me about responsibility? The man who spends every spare hour he has hiding from his family? Whose idea of fathering is to act like a teenage boy?”

  Neil scoffed and waved a hand, would have walked away if doing so wouldn’t have proven Susanna’s point.

  “And what about taking responsibility?” Susanna pressed. “At what point do we teach our son about that? Jake did it. He confessed. He raped someone—rape, Neil!—and then he set fire to his school.”

  “That wasn’t even him! Jake didn’t set fire to anything!”

  “He was about to! You know that as well as I do!”

  “Lower your voice, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What, are you worried your son will hear what his parents really think? Are you that afraid of showing him what’s right?”

  “Your son now, is it?”

  “Ours. I meant ours.”

  “And what the hell do you mean, what’s right? It’s out of our hands. She ran. She decided to withdraw the charges, to claim she made it all up. What are you or I supposed to do? What’s Jake supposed to do, other than be grateful he’s been given a second chance?”

  And that was the thing.

  Susanna didn’t know.

  All she knew was that it wasn’t right. None of it. Yes, Jake was her son and she understood that above all she should be grateful, in precisely the way Neil argued. Jake was just a kid, he’d made a mistake, and everyone who makes a mistake should be given a second chance. That was the reasoning, the line Neil was toeing. But it was the magnitude of Jake’s mistake that Susanna stumbled on. Plus, how can you call something like rape a mistake? A mistake, in sexual terms, was . . . making an advance at a party and being rebuffed. Having sex with a stranger without protection. But rape, a mistake? Knocking a young woman to the floor, pinning her there, forcibly penetrating her, violating her, and then saying, what? Oops.

  No.

  No.

  Rape wasn’t a mistake. It was a travesty. It was the antithesis of every value Susanna held dear, had always assumed she’d instilled in her son. Compassion. Kindheartedness. Consideration. Respect for others and oneself. Without which we would none of us be any better than animals.

  No. Rape wasn’t something to be forgotten. It wasn’t something so easily forgiven. Rape, in Susanna’s mind: it was inhuman.

  * * *

  • • •

  She couldn’t pretend. She just couldn’t. But what else given the circumstances was she supposed to do?

  People knew, of course. Not the public at large, who swallowed every fabrication the press fed them. But friends, family—they knew. Some chose to allow themselves to be deceived, and sided with Neil. That’s how Susanna saw it. There was Neil’s side, and there was hers. Except her side, the people who knew what Susanna knew, even if they weren’t privy to all the facts: they weren’t really on Susanna’s side either. There were the people from the school, who, in deference to what Jake had ostensibly been put through, had allowed the arson charge to be downgraded but also made clear that Jake would need to find somewhere else to complete his studies. There were Susanna’s neighbors, who thereafter refused to look her in the eye. There was her brother—her brother, her only surviving close relative—who, barring the time Susanna turned up on his doorstep with Emily crying in her arms, never spoke to Susanna again.

  Shunned on one side, confounded by the other, Susanna didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Betray your son or everything you believe in. That was the choice. Was it a surprise that she so utterly failed to make one?

  * * *

  • • •

  And Jake. All the while there was Jake.

  Susanna can’t imagine how he must have been feeling during those weeks after he was arrested. And when he came home, when the charges were dropped, he was as quiet and insular as Susanna had ever known him. He barely left his room, and when he was up there he never opened the curtains. He slept with the duvet above his head, the way he had when he’d been young, when he’d been afraid of what was waiting in the dark. Now, when he ate at the kitchen table he wore his hood up, with his headphones covering his ears. Susanna wasn’t even sure they were playing any music.

  She tried to speak to him but not very hard. It was Neil, to be fair, who tried hardest. Except Neil’s approach seemed to be to attempt to convince Jake that none of it had ever really happened. That the story the press was spinning was the truth. Susanna wasn’t even sure Neil didn’t actually come to believe it himself: that Jake really was the victim in what had happened, and Alison deserved all the vitriol that was flowing her way. Susanna watched him frowning at all the newspaper stories. Not because he found the reports so difficult to reconcile but because he was concentrating so intensely on trying to persuade himself they were true. Maybe that had been what really happened. Susanna could practically hear the thoughts in his head. Maybe Jake hadn’t done anything wrong. And he left the newspapers splayed out for Jake to find.

  One time Susanna found the two of them in Neil’s playroom. She came home from . . . somewhere, a walk probably, which she’d taken to doing a lot by then, just walking, always a
way from town rather than toward it. But she came home and heard the sound of Neil’s computer and she found them up there seated side by side. Neil was the one with the controller, his eyes fixed on the screen. He was playing some stupid video game in which the central character was a buxom young woman running around in hot pants. Susanna found herself staring at the screen in disbelief—until she noticed Neil had also given their son a beer.

  She exploded. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She was talking to

  (shouting at)

  Neil, she thinks, but it was Jake she hit. Only on the top of his arm but it was enough of a slap that it would have hurt. Jake barely even flinched.

  “Jesus Christ,” Neil blurted.

  Jake’s beer can had toppled to the floor and there was a frothy puddle forming on the carpet. There were two more beer cans—empty—at Jake’s feet, and Susanna instantly understood that the promise of alcohol was the only reason Jake was in here. He hadn’t even been looking at the video game.

  “You gave him beer?” Susanna said. “Our fifteen-year-old son. You got him drunk?”

  Neil forced Susanna out onto the landing. The two of them were so intent on tearing at each other’s throats, they almost didn’t notice Jake slip out behind them.

  “Calm down, for fuck’s sake,” Neil said.

  Susanna struggled from his grip. “It’s at times like this I wonder what I ever saw in you, Neil! Whether our entire marriage wasn’t some calamitous mistake! What the hell were you thinking?”

  “We were just hanging out!” Neil countered. “Spending some time together! I thought that’s what you wanted!”