The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  When the first bustle of post-vomit activity had died down and the house had resumed its more usual afterdinner air, Jennifer sat on her bed, her knees drawn up 70 tight to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins, her throat raw. She stared straight ahead at a pile of geography and history textbooks on the floor, at the open jar of nail polish on the dressing table, at a poster Charlotte had blu-tacked to the wall. There were no posters on her own side of the room because at seventeen you no longer stuck pictures of pop stars on your bedroom wall. She reached behind her pillow for Peter Rabbit who was old and soft and battered and whose presence she hadn’t noticed in five years. She held him close. Something was wound up very tight in her chest, so tight that were she to loosen her hold on him she felt that she might unwind suddenly, horribly and irreversibly.

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Charlotte’s still and silent form beneath the sheets. The lid of the nail polish lay on its side on the dressing-table and the cloying smell of varnish hung in the air and coated the back of her throat.

  She found that if she stared hard enough at the opposite wall, at the pencil case and the school bag on the floor, at the flaking putty on the window sill, at Steve Strange’s eyes watching from a poster above the bed, she didn’t need to think about anything else. If she just kept her arms wrapped very tightly around herself and refused to let go, everything else could be pushed to the edges, so far to the edges that it almost vanished. If she could just concentrate hard enough.

  The dining-room chair lay on its side in the middle of the bedroom floor and, oddly, Mum appeared not to have noticed it.

  Jennifer let go of Peter Rabbit, jumped up off the bed and fled the room. She bolted down the stairs to the lounge and the television and the remains of dinner—shepherd’s pie and peas—which was beyond cold by that stage.

  Mum was still in the kitchen while Dad, who had finished the washing-up, was reading the business pages, which meant the newspaper was open on his lap as he sat in front of the telly. On the screen Capital Tonight was ending and the new presenter, Derek Longstaff, smiled affably. ‘...looking like the end of the road for jellied eels’ he declared, one eyebrow raised in conspiratorial irony. Dad got up and flicked the channel back to BBC One, where the opening credits of Angels had just ended.

  Grandma Lake had positioned herself in Dad’s armchair to watch and was already asleep. At the other end of the sofa, Graham was curled up sucking a pencil stub, precociously studying The Times crossword puzzle. This necessitated much thoughtful frowning, pencil tapping and triumphant scribbling. As Jennifer appeared in the doorway, he paused long enough to glance up and cast a speculative glance in her direction, surprised, no doubt, that the sudden bout of illness that had so dramatically felled both his sisters had struck in the evening and not in the morning when it was time to leave for school.

  ‘One who pretends ill-health to be part male but more than dally. Ten letters, something a something i n something something r e r,’ pondered Graham out loud.

  On the television a young male nurse in a lemon-coloured uniform ran silently in white plimsolls along a busy hospital corridor.

  Jennifer stood in the doorway and reached up to touch her throat which was smarting from being sick.

  ‘He’s stopped breathing!’ gasped the nurse in the lemon-coloured uniform.

  Standing in the lounge doorway, Jennifer found she was unable to go any further. Little tremors ran through her body as though she had just climbed out of an outdoor swimming pool on a particularly wintry day. This was the final day of August, it was still mild, the weatherman had said so. Graham was in a T-shirt, Dad had his shirt sleeves rolled up. Grandma Lake was in a heavy-duty tweed skirt circa 1935. The skirt looked as though it had seen duty on many a cross-country ramble which was odd as Grandma Lake herself considered a walk to the pillar box at the end of the street to be an unnecessary journey fraught with peril.

  There was a place on the sofa between Grandma Lake and Graham, and Jennifer made for this spot with wooden but dogged steps, finally reaching it, turning around and sinking down onto the sofa. It seemed an immense effort.

  No one noticed. No one said a word. She stared straight ahead at the TV screen.

  Somebody on Angels was on a life-support machine. Somebody was always on a life-support machine—last week it had been a young bride on her wedding day after a car crash (died), the week before a little boy after being bullied at school (survived), now it was one of the nurses following a drink-driving crash that had dramatically closed the last episode. This nurse—a young woman whose fiancé, another nurse, had been discovered having an affair—lay on the bed with a white sheet across her and a bandage around her head, various tubes taped here and there, her eyes shut, breathing noisily as though she had a blocked nose.

  That would be a cushy acting job, Jennifer thought. I could do that.

  ‘Malingerer!’ cried Graham triumphantly and Jennifer spun around.

  Graham innocently scribbled the letters into the crossword.

  ‘Reminds me of when I wanted to be a nurse,’ said Grandma Lake unexpectedly, and they all looked at her because they’d assumed she was asleep. Dad raised a silent eyebrow. She wasn’t his mother, after all. It wasn’t his suggestion she come and live with them.

  No one said, Does it, Gran? or When was that? or Why didn’t you become a nurse, then?

  ‘The Great War,’ Grandma Lake continued, conversationally, as though they had asked all these questions and more. ‘All sorts of young girls became nurses. Volunteers they were, and stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers and all sorts.’

  Graham, who was good at maths and equally good at history, chewed his pencil for a moment then said, ‘But you’d have been about sixteen when the First World War ended.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying—I wanted to be a nurse but I was too young, the war ended.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Dad wryly. ‘You must have been choked when they signed the Armistice.’

  ‘I was. I’d have made a good ambulance driver. I could drive, you know, I had an uncle taught me when I were a nipper. You didn’t need no licence then, just hop in and off you go. I drove tractors and all sorts. Yes, I’d have made a good ambulance driver.’

  With this she resettled her hands on her lap and concentrated once more on the television.

  The nurse on life-support lay very still and breathed noisily. Beside her, her mother held her hand and looked worried. An image of Grandma Lake in two cardigans and an antiquated tweed skirt, skilfully driving an ambulance across a muddy field in France, flashed unconvincingly before Jennifer’s eyes.

  She wished they would all be quiet.

  ‘Overdose,’ announced another young doctor in another part of the hospital. ‘But why?’ cried the patient’s distraught mother. ‘Why would she do such a thing? Why would she try to take her own life? She seemed so happy.’

  There must have been some colour left in Jennifer’s face because she could feel it now drain away like blood down a sink in some B-grade horror film and at the same time Graham and Dad and Grandma Lake and Mum, who was laying out breakfast things in the kitchen, and the hospital ward and all the frantic nurses and distraught patients seemed to peel away on every side so that she was left, clinging to a tall and very narrow pinnacle where no one could possibly reach her but where everyone could see her. She swayed dizzyingly for a moment or two, expecting to fall. Expecting someone, everyone, to stare at her, to demand of her Why? Why did you let this happen? What could you have been thinking? How could you have been so—

  ‘We’ve moved her to Intensive Care,’ said the young doctor. ‘But she’s stable.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said the girl’s mother.

  Cruel. That was the word Jennifer might have used.

  ‘Do you think she’ll be alright, doctor?’

  ‘We’ve pumped her stomach. But...’

  The young doctor—a Brummie with a broad accent—spread his hands in a gesture that cl
early said, the rest is up to you, Mrs Whatever. The camera zoomed in on Mrs Whatever’s face as his words sank in.

  And Jennifer realised, too, with a thud that felt like a netball hitting her in the face: Charlotte was up there alone and what was to stop her trying it again? What was to say she wasn’t even now climbing back up onto the dining-room chair, retying the bits of dead tie together, slipping the loop over her head and kicking the chair away?

  Jennifer leapt up from the sofa, dived through the door and hurled herself up the stairs with an acceleration that would have astonished Miss Penge, who coached the school netball team. Scrambling up the stairs, partly on hands and knees, she threw herself at the bedroom door, every fibre already recoiling at what she might find.

  What she found was Charlotte lying exactly where she had left her, on her bed, the sheet across her chest and under her arms, breathing noisily, a scarf wrapped high around her neck and beneath her chin. Her head was turned towards the wall but, as Jennifer burst in and stood there, reeling, she turned slowly, awkwardly, and gazed up at her. The pieces of dead tie were gone. Charlotte’s slippers, the hideous blue and green tartan ones, stood side by side, neatly and innocently, beneath the bed.

  Only the dining-room chair, still on its side in the centre of the room, hinted at anything amiss.

  Fear turned to fury and Jennifer grabbed the dining-room chair and noisily marched it and herself out to the landing and downstairs and into the dining room where she thumped it down in its usual place. Mum looked at her and said, ‘Oh, thank you, dear...’ and then, because the anger had dissipated as rapidly as it had come and she realised it was merely a reaction to being scared, Jennifer went slowly back upstairs.

  Now that she knew Charlotte was not trying to kill herself, at least not right at this moment, she paused, long enough to notice that the landing was swaying dizzyingly. She held on to the wall and wondered finally if she ought to tell someone, Mum for instance, and dump the whole thing in her lap. But as the vertigo slowly eased and Charlotte lay, unmoving, in her bed, the moment for telling passed, the likelihood that she could form the words to describe what had happened evaporated. It would mean questions. Questions that didn’t need to be asked let alone answered.

  She returned to the bedroom. Charlotte still gazed at the doorway and this time Jennifer spoke because someone had to.

  ‘Are you...okay?’ she asked, which was pitiful, all things considered, but it was important someone said something.

  Charlotte’s answer was to turn back to face the wall, so Jennifer lay down on her own bed and stared up at the ceiling and understood that this was it, that from this point onwards this was how it was going to be: that she would never know if Charlotte was upstairs in their bedroom trying to kill herself. Or not.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A SKIN HAD FORMED on the surface of Jennifer’s tea where the milk had cooled. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and vaguely recalled some conversation she had had with Charlotte a few months back about skin forming on milk. Charlotte had, inevitably, turned it into a cultural theory lecture. Come to think of it, that could have been the last time they had spoken.

  ‘I never realised you disliked those tartan slippers, dear,’ said Aunt Caroline a little indignantly. ‘I remember choosing them very carefully from Dean’s, the shoe shop in the high street. Old Mr Dean especially recommended them. He said they were Gordon tartan. Or perhaps it was McLaren? I really can’t remember.’

  They were sitting—Aunt Caroline in an upright winged armchair of the variety you saw in nursing homes, and Jennifer on the edge of the two-seater settee—in the front room of Aunt Caroline’s bungalow in Skipton. A plate of Sainsbury’s Eccles cakes lay untouched on the coffee table between them.

  It was Thursday afternoon and it had been a long drive from Clapham to North Yorkshire. Jennifer had missed the A65 turnoff at Leeds and almost ended up in Bradford. Driving into Skipton she had intended to bypass the town centre and had instead found herself in a congested market-day street on the wrong side of the canal and the castle. Negotiating snow drifts, partially gritted roads and a one-way system that seemed to serve no purpose, she had eventually arrived at Aunt Caroline’s neat ivy-covered bungalow on the other side of the town just in time for a late lunch.

  Now she reached uneasily for her jacket and wondered if it was too early to leave. She’d dressed in work clothes—a charcoal-grey suit and black leather boots—and was hoping to make it into the office by late afternoon. Gloria had been told she was visiting a supplier. What her real purpose was in being here, Jennifer still had no idea. Except that she had been summoned. And now she found herself defending what she’d said on TV. The slippers! Those awful tartan slippers that Charlotte had been wearing—why had she ever mentioned them?

  ‘We aren’t Gordons or McLarens,’ she pointed out patiently. ‘We’re Denzels and there isn’t a Denzel tartan as far as I’m aware. It’s French,’ she added.

  Aunt Caroline sat back in her armchair, as far as it was possible to sit back in such a severely upright piece of furniture, a china teacup resting in its saucer on her lap, and considered this.

  ‘Yes, dear, I know. And your mother and I were Lakes and they haven’t got a tartan either.’ She shook her head a little sadly at this obvious family deficiency. ‘Of course your grandma and her sister were both Flaxheeds and that’s a very old word dating back to the Anglo-Saxons, I believe. It means flaxen-headed. Blond.’

  Jennifer stood up abruptly, almost spilling the contents of her teacup, but the membrane of milk prevented the tepid liquid from leaking over the side and onto Aunt Caroline’s settee. It was a tartan settee, she noted even as she stalked across to the window and stood there looking out at the street. Outside the snow was coming down in ever-increasing flurries.

  She hadn’t meant to get into this discussion with Aunt Caroline. She hadn’t meant to come north at all. It was totally unreasonable to just ring someone up and expect them to drop everything and come motoring all the way up to North Yorkshire at a moment’s notice. Especially someone who had the Christmas sales figures to sift through and now the January sales to analyse, who had fifteen casual staff to monitor, not to mention the third-quarter figures to present. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Aunt Caroline was living in a different era. An era where people still took afternoon tea.

  And yet here she was. She had hurried through yesterday afternoon’s staff meeting, got Gloria to rearrange two other meetings, lied to a director, her PA and two senior staff members and invented a supplier who didn’t exist, and now here she was drinking Earl Grey tea in Aunt Caroline’s front room in Skipton.

  She ought to have ignored her aunt’s summons. After the phone call from Gaspari the only thing that mattered was her immediate future as a Gossup and Batch employee, a future that now looked likely to include a series of alarming possibilities: an appearance before the board, a letter of reprimand, a letter of termination, an undignified clearing out of her desk, Gloria’s barely restrained glee, explanations and lies to family and friends, the Jobs Vacant pages of the Guardian, unpaid rent, the benefits office, despair.

  It was only once this appalling downward spiral had been envisaged, rationalised and tentatively dismissed, and a suitably cringing letter to the board composed in her head, that she had even remembered Aunt Caroline’s phone call and guiltily rung her back.

  A cold flicker of unease that had nothing to do with Mr Gaspari and the board and everything to do with the repercussions of her television appearance had fluttered in her stomach. It had been naive to think they would all just let it pass unremarked.

  Would it help to explain it had been an accident? That she had only been told at the last moment of the program change? That she was merely helping Kim, whose show was dying in the ratings? She hadn’t even told Aunt Caroline she was going to be on TV in the first place.

  Funny, you couldn’t imagine Aunt Caroline watching daytime television. But watch it she had, and after they had d
iscussed the icy roads and the roadworks around Newport Pagnell and the health of various family members over bowls of minestrone and crusty bread rolls and had sat down in the lounge with cups of tea, Aunt Caroline had said: ‘So, dear, this thing you talked about on the television. Tell me again. And tell me what happened—afterwards.’

  So Jennifer had repeated her story, and had told her aunt what had happened afterwards, though not what had happened beforehand because Aunt Caroline hadn’t asked for it and because, even if she had asked, Jennifer wasn’t sure she would have told her.

  Aunt Caroline sat quite still, wrapped in a furry blue cardigan and a Marks and Spencer wool skirt, a rug over her knees and only a politely curious expression on her lined face.

  She doesn’t know whether to believe me or not, thought Jennifer. I should have lied. I should have told her I made the whole thing up.

  But she hadn’t said that. And she hadn’t driven up here just because Aunt Caroline had requested it; she had done it because it was important to be believed, it was important they knew. That someone knew.

  ‘I hope you didn’t make too much of a mess on the carpet.’

  Jennifer stared at her aunt blankly. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘When you were sick. You didn’t say whether you made it to the toilet or whether there was a rubbish bin or perhaps a plastic bag you could use.’

  Jennifer stared at her. Then she remembered.

  ‘I did make it to the bathroom,’ she replied thoughtfully, which was odd, because in her memory there was no gap between what had happened in the bedroom and then having her head down the toilet bowl, though she must have leapt up and scrambled out of the room, crossed the landing and got herself across the bathroom lino in time.

  ‘That’s a relief. I know Deirdre was always fussy about those carpets... I suppose she still is.’ She looked up suddenly. ‘Are they still beige?’