Good Little Liars

by Sarah Clutton

  Harriet had been holding her forehead with one hand, staring at the shiny taupe leather of her shoes against the marble floor. She looked up. A man in a suit was staring at her. Damn. Hobart was a small town really, when it came down to it. Gossip spread fast. Luckily, she didn’t know him.

  ‘Mum, it was only some caps for a party we were all going to. It wasn’t just me!’

  The words sent another shot of fury through Harriet’s chest. It was the casual undertone of blame-throwing and feigned innocence.

  ‘What are you talking about? What exactly were these tablets, Scarlett?’

  ‘MDMA. Just a few pills, Mum. They’re not a big deal. Everyone takes them. But the headmaster said last night that he’s going to contact the gappie agency and have me sent home.’

  Good grief. Harriet wondered briefly if motherly platitudes were required, but her legal head wasn’t having it. Gather precise information; undertake swift damage control – that was what she needed to do now. Thankfully they were her forte.

  ‘How many pills, Scarlett? How did you get them? Did you sell any?’

  ‘Only three, Mum. Ollie bought them from some guy. I was just holding them for him and me and Lucy. Mum, I’m meant to go to Ibiza with the others in the term break. I can’t be sent home. I can’t miss that!’

  Harriet held her phone away from her ear as the sobs began again. She did a quick tally of the fallout. As a university medallist and the youngest woman to ever take silk at the Tasmanian Bar, she had a plethora of useful skills when it came to assisting her child with a drugs problem from the other side of the world. So far, the tally was not looking great:

  Bringing illicit drugs into a school that housed the children of Britain’s richest and most powerful people – bad idea.

  Scarlett was eighteen; if the police had been called she would be looking at criminal proceedings in an adult jurisdiction, in a place where Harriet had few friends in positions of influence – very bad.

  Scarlett didn’t appear to have been involved in dealing the drugs, nor was it a significant quantity – good.

  The headmaster of the famed Baddington College was probably keen to avoid a scandal, so hopefully the police would be kept away – very good. (Harriet assumed that getting an errant gap student off his property and back to the Antipodean swamp from which she had come was probably the man’s top priority.)

  Scarlett was about to create untold embarrassment to her uncle Jonathan who had personally vouched for her good character (on Harriet’s rather insistent requests, but she wasn’t ready to think about that yet) – somewhat bad on all fronts, but a peripheral concern for now.

  Harriet looked at her watch. She was meeting Jon in two hours. She had time to deal with this. ‘Scarlett, your Ibiza trip is the least of your worries. Have the police been called?’ Her voice was laced with impatience.

  ‘I don’t think so. Mum, what will I do?’ Scarlett’s sobs had descended into hysteria.

  ‘Scarli, stop that. I can’t talk to you right now.’ Harriet looked up but the man had gone. Thankfully the foyer was now empty, but she needed to have this conversation properly, in private.

  ‘I will call you in exactly half an hour. Make sure you answer. And Scarlett, do not speak a word about any of this to anyone. Do you understand? Not. One. Word. If the police come, insist that you have a solicitor present before you speak. And I mean insist!’

  Scarlett whimpered.

  Harriet allowed herself to feel motherly for a moment.

  ‘Darling, stop crying and go for a walk or something. I’ll ring Aunt Lila – you can go and stay with her. We’ll sort this out.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘We’ll talk in half an hour, darling.’ She pressed the screen on her phone to end the call and picked up her briefcase trolley handle from against the wall.

  Bugger.

  She’d better call Ben.

  Harriet walked to her chambers building, three minutes further up the street. The lift door opened and the dreadful mirrored wall reflected every day of her fifty-nine years back at her. She turned away and pressed the button for her floor, just as the new barrister they’d recently taken into chambers flew through the exterior doors and bounded in between the closing lift doors.

  ‘Hello, Harriet!’

  The boy was ridiculously enthusiastic. She forced a tight smile and turned slightly to face the lift door. She couldn’t, at that precise moment, remember his name.

  ‘I wanted to pick your brain about a little matter I’ve got coming up in the Resource Management Tribunal. It’s a really interesting point of law.’ He grinned at her, all fresh-faced and eager. His name was proving elusive.

  ‘Sure. But I’m busy today. I’ll be in on Sunday afternoon. Otherwise Monday after court.’ Harriet dismissed him as the lift doors opened and she stepped onto their floor. She hoped her lack of name usage hadn’t appeared odd. Her exceptional recall of small and insignificant details appeared to have deserted her. She hoped it was a temporary glitch then she wondered if she’d sounded too harsh. Poor kid. He looked about twenty-three. He’d be needing all the help he could get, but right now Harriet needed Ben. She typed a text message.

  Need to meet urgently. Will be at your office in ten mins.

  Within a few seconds her phone buzzed.

  Sorry. In meeting for another hour.

  Harriet sighed. Ammunition was needed.

  Urgent matter about Scarlett. Can’t wait. See you in ten.

  Harriet retrieved some papers from her briefcase. On the way out of her office she stopped at the desk of her secretary, a giant of a girl who was usually quite efficient but had been prone to making mistakes lately, as her pregnancy progressed. She was standing at the filing cabinet, but turned and smiled down at Harriet as she approached.

  ‘Sharon, I’ve made a few notes in court. Please type them up and put them on my desk before you leave. And I need the full extract of these cases printed. Three copies of each please.’ Harriet handed her a list.

  Sharon took the notes in one hand and rested the other one on her enormous stomach, before lifting it to look at her watch. It was ten minutes to five.

  ‘I’m really am sorry, Sharon, but they’re urgent. If you have some sort of pressing need to leave at five, then would you mind asking one of the others to do it? And tell Andrew I’ll be back around seven-thirty tonight to talk to him about the chambers meeting on Monday. I need his input before he leaves for Hong Kong.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The girl sank down behind her desk, looking pale and exhausted.

  ‘Thank you.’ Harriet tried to smile. She supposed she shouldn’t work the poor girl so hard, but really, pregnancy wasn’t an illness. Harriet had worked fourteen-hour days right up to the day Scarlett was born. She’d studied just as hard when she’d been carrying Clementine. Still, she knew most people didn’t have her constitution. She’d give Sharon an early mark next week to make up for it.

  Outside the chambers building, the evening was closing in with unusual humidity. The office of Caldwell & Chadston Architects was two blocks from Harriet’s chambers, across the waterfront. She strode it out, weaving in and out between a couple of Chinese tourists, a mother with a fancy pram, and a group of high school boys walking in a pack, jostling and laughing and swearing. She felt her heart rate rising as she warmed under the fine wool-cashmere mix of her suit. It pleased her. Today there would be no time for the gym.

  When she arrived a few minutes later, Ben was waiting in his glass-fronted office and beckoned her through from the empty reception area. She nodded at two junior architects who sat in the open-plan area towards the back wall, then she closed the door of Ben’s office behind her.

  ‘What’s the disaster?’ Ben tilted his head, the line of his mouth taut.

  ‘Hello, Ben. Nice to see you too,’ said Harriet. He could suffer the curiosity a little longer for his rudeness. By the look on his face, she had a discomforting sensation that he thought she’d called this
meeting under false pretences.

  ‘Harriet, if it’s urgent and about Scarlett, spit it out. I had to leave a new client in the lurch for this.’

  Harriet felt the sting of his rebuke and she let out a sigh. ‘I’ve had a call from her. I don’t have a lot of detail, but a search of her room by staff at the school turned up three pills of MDMA – an illegal party drug. She says it was for her and two of her friends. The school are dismissing her and they want to send her home. That’s all I know.’

  Harriet took a breath and looked out the window across the roof of the old art deco building below, across to Constitution Dock. The Antarctic expedition ship sat like an angry orange pillar of righteous judgement alongside the wharf. She allowed the enormity of the situation to settle on her shoulders. Silly, silly girl.

  Now she was with Ben, it felt real. It was now an official shared parenting catastrophe.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Ben shoulders sagged.

  Harriet felt sorry for him. He hadn’t been expecting it. Perhaps she’d been wrong to spring it on him like that.

  ‘I said I’d ring her back. I thought you should know too, before we decide what to do.’ What Harriet actually meant was, before I decide what to do. They both knew it. Harriet looked out the window again.

  ‘Well it wouldn’t seem there is much to do except organise a flight home I expect, unless they decide to give her a second chance,’ said Ben. ‘I mean… are police involved?’

  ‘Not as far as she knows. If they were going to call them, I assume they’d have done so immediately. They probably want this sort of thing kept quiet. And as for second chances…’ Harriet shook her head, allowing her gaze to drift out the window again.

  When she looked back, Ben’s eyes were wide with questions.

  She gave a loud sigh. ‘They have a duty of care to keep their students safe and having drugs on school grounds breaches that duty. They also have a duty to prevent any foreseeable injury to students, and if Scarlett is a known risk for potentially supplying their children with drugs, or if at some future time she was found not to be in a fit state to undertake her duties and they had decided not to get rid of her now, knowing what they know, that would open them up to further liability. They’d be mad to give her a second chance.’

  Ben’s face crumpled. ‘How could you even think that, Harriet? Scarlett would never do that.’

  Harriet felt the injustice of his outburst like a slap.

  ‘I know that, Ben, but at the moment I’m required to think like a school principal and a lawyer! Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of reacting like a parent because I am yet to sort out the mess that our bloody daughter has got herself into!’

  Why was it always up to her to fix things? She was always the bad cop. The one who had to make the hard calls. Ben got to stand by and be generally loving and ineffectual and the vastly more popular parent. Scarlett worshipped him.

  Harriet took a deep breath then looked at her watch. She harnessed her anger. It was time to ring Scarlett.

  ‘After this I’ll ring Leonard Spanner, Jonathan’s friend who runs the boarding house. To smooth things over we should offer to pay the placement fee for another gap student, then I’ll ask what the extent of the situation is from their perspective. But let’s ring Scarlett first and get the full story.’

  ‘That sounds sensible.’ Ben gave her a tired half-smile and his eyes crinkled kindly. They reminded her of the deep blackish-brown of the tea tree-stained stream that ran alongside their favourite bushwalk. Unfathomably lovely. The thought gave her a jolt. How did he remain so even-keeled during disasters? Maybe that’s why their marriage had lasted for more than twenty years before he got tired of her. He’d always steered her towards a calmer, nicer version of herself. It was a miracle really, that they’d lasted as long as they did. Harriet was self-aware enough to realise that she was probably quite difficult to live with.

  She dialled Scarlett’s number and put it on speaker. As it rang, Harriet imagined her daughter hiding away in the vast courtyard of the school behind a sandstone pillar carved with age-blackened gargoyles, shivering as she tried to find somewhere private to have the conversation.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Hello, Scarlett, your father and I are both here. Tell us what happened. Be precise please – I need all the details.’ Harriet sat on the chair opposite Ben with her pen and a legal pad. She had written the date at the top and underlined the word Scarlett twice.

  ‘Daddy?’ said Scarlett. There was a strangled sound, then at the end of the distant line came the sound of an exploding well of misery. Scarlett’s sobs were so anguished that a wracking silence announced each new one as it built and burst.

  Harriet watched Ben’s eyes becoming moist.

  ‘Yes, darling. Please… Scarlett. It’s alright. We’re both here.’ He pushed his hand through his hair, Harriet noticed, just as he always did when he felt completely out of his depth. He’d done the same thing at Scarlett’s birth when Harriet had refused to take any drugs and the pain kept hitting her with the force of a speeding freight train. Over and over.

  Wine. Harriet turned the idea over in her mind as her pen hovered over the page, waiting for the return of calm. She was meeting Jonathan in an hour at The Cables – a smart new bar on the waterfront. She would order a glass of wine. Nobody ever told you when you decided to become a parent that it would be so bloody excruciating. After the birth, the pain was meant to be over. But it was never over. As a rule, Harriet didn’t believe in alcohol as a remedy for stress. And with nobody to go home to, now that Ben had left, she wouldn’t usually have indulged the idea. She certainly never drank alone. It was, in Harriet’s opinion, a slippery slope towards unmitigated disaster – akin to being stupid enough to get off the ski lift at a double-black-diamond run when you were only a green-run skier. There was only one way down the precipice, and it was fast and perilous and would invariably end badly. But today, she decided, a glass of Pinot Gris was definitely on the cards. Perhaps two.

  ‘Scarlett, pull yourself together now,’ said Harriet calmly. ‘Tell us what happened, starting from the very first time you were offered drugs.’

  From: Jemima Langdon-Traves

  To: Peta Kallorani

  Re: Holidays and reunion and things!

  * * *

  Hi Gorgeous lady,

  How are you and your gang? Sitting here thinking about our school days… eek!

  Can you believe the email from Emma Parsons (assuming that’s Emma Tasker as I can’t remember another Emma)!? I can’t believe she’s bringing up all that stuff! Tessa would never have done it, anyway.

  Not sure how anyone presses ‘reply all’ either, without meaning to. Anyway, I’ve decided to come back home to the reunion in June. Just trying to train up my new au pair so she can be here for the boys, then I don’t have to suffer 23 hours on a plane with them back to Hobart. Could be an impossible job though – she’s forever sleeping in after late night skype calls then moaning about missing Melbourne and her boyfriend. She still hasn’t worked out how to separate the washing properly and it’s been three weeks. Then yesterday I asked her if she’d disinfected the bath toys as per Friday’s schedule and she actually rolled her eyes at me. It’s like I’ve got a third child!

  Onto more fun topics, we are now definitely thinking Italy for the holidays instead of Finland, maybe Lake Como, so if you can make it over this way in July that would be fab! Must run. Having a lovely girls’ lunch today. Lots of bubbles are needed. (My useless au pair would try the patience of a saint!)

  Jemima xxx

  Three

  Marlee

  Marlee took the gin and tonic from the barman and smiled her thanks. A slice of cucumber floated serenely in the glass. Alone at the bar she was wrapped in the swirl of conversations. She felt unaccountably soothed – the rumble of optimism, the anticipation of alcohol’s promise, the hopeful, convivial tinkle of glasses.

  She had excused herself from her new workmates to send a
nother text to Emma, but there was still no response. She scrolled through her phone and looked at Emma’s accidental group email, cringing as she re-read it.

  From: Emma Parsons

  To: Class of ’93 Reunion goddesses

  Re: Fabulous formal photo… the countdown is on, girls!

  * * *

  Hi Marl,

  Had a huge laugh at that formal photo Selina sent. We should have been locked up for crimes against fashion! Can’t wait to see what everyone looks like now. Apparently, Larissa Maiden has an interior design business in Sydney these days and did the house of one of the guys from MasterChef! She was so quiet and shy!! Felt like I was in a parallel universe when I heard that.

  Tessa’s face in that photo made me teary. So sad to realise she won’t be at the reunion. It will be my first time together with everyone since the funeral so I guess it will make the whole thing real again. I can’t believe none of us spoke up about what we knew. It’s only now I’ve got Rosie I realise how hard for her parents it must still be and how dumb we were not to admit what she’d planned. Still can’t explain it.

  Anyway, no point dwelling. Phil gets annoyed if I ever bring up that stuff from the past. ‘Oh, that lovely husband of yours’, I hear you say. Well, I do admit he’s annoying me A LOT at the moment. Last night he was picking his toenails on the couch and flicking the bits towards the fireplace and missing. DISGUSTING. When I complained he stomped off in a huff. I think he might be a bit touchy due to a tiny deficit in his intimate relations with his goddess wife. Well, maybe not tiny exactly. Maybe a medium-sized deficit. It’s probably been three months. But who’s counting? (apart from Phil, judging by the moods he’s in).

  Anyway, I’d better go. Lots to do. Envelopes to stuff and letters to file and so on. Complex, important things, obviously. Can’t be too careful – wouldn’t want to put the wrong letter in the wrong envelope and that sort of thing. Lena is looking super-efficient over in her corner of the office and making me feel guilty.