Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Don’t get upset. Just edge that way.”

  I shuffled a few inches to my left, back onto the grassed pathway.

  “There you go,” he said. “Okay?”

  I nodded. I held my hand to my chin; I thought it was bleeding, but my fingers came away clean.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the top.”

  I nodded and he darted upward.

  I said, I know, that I’d have followed Jonathan anywhere and that was true. But there was something about his fearlessness that was so at odds with my innate fearfulness. And, try as I might and try as I did, sometimes fear won out. I opted for the safer route and our paths crossed again a few minutes later, back at the top of the cliffs.

  If I had known then that we had just a few months ahead of us, I’d have found the courage to spend those few minutes with him.

  There is a tragic irony that—with hindsight—has embedded itself in every fiber of my relationship with Jonathan. We met in a small corner of the city and that place became a fundamental part of how we lived and loved and existed together. Until it became the place where our relationship ended. Jonathan and I fell in love on a corner of Oxford Street and—fatefully—that was where he died.

  I can tell you far more about that day than I can about the day we met. I rolled through that dark slideshow, the sequence that led to his death, nonstop for weeks. Sometimes I still do.

  * * *

  Jonathan was running, for the first time, in the London marathon. We were expecting rain and sleet, insistent winds. But he was excited. He had been training since the autumn; he was used to running in the rain and so he wasn’t concerned.

  He was uncontainable that morning, fidgeting and waffling on about something and nothing, his anticipation contagious. We were so ordinary. Our morning was set against a backdrop of alarm clocks and coffee and breakfast and showering and looking for the house keys and almost running late but not quite and the steady, reassuring rhythm of the everyday.

  I wanted to share his victory and so I went straight to the Mall. I stood there by the metal barrier waiting for hours and barely noticed the time slipping past. The atmosphere was electric, excitement and nervousness and encouragement sweating from the crowd around me. The elite racers flashed by first—they made it look easy—followed soon after by a few men, and then some women, and then a couple dripping profusely from their faces, their bodies encased within dinosaur costumes.

  Jonathan was determined to complete the race in under three hours, and I didn’t doubt that he would do just that. I watched him speed past after two hours and fifty-one minutes and he crossed the finish line just three minutes later.

  I have never been destined for great success. I have always worked hard, but never excelled. I have always participated; I’ve never won. But Jonathan did; Jonathan won. He surpassed even his own bold goals.

  I was therefore not at all surprised when he was announced as the millionth marathon runner to pass the finish line since the inaugural London marathon of 1981 and interviewed for a recorded segment to be aired that evening on the BBC News. He had always been behind the camera at sporting events, filming for news channels or sports broadcasters, but he was so charming and modest with his answers that day. I remember wondering if he should consider a career in front of the camera rather than behind it.

  After his interview, we headed to The Windsor Castle for a quick drink, just one, to celebrate his success.

  We never arrived.

  As we threaded our way from the tube station at Oxford Circus toward the narrow cobbled street, a drunk driver burst across a pedestrian crossing, mowing my husband down.

  I can remember him lying there on his back on the sidewalk. His knee was twisted at a jaunty angle. His eyes were closed, peaceful almost, his chin resting snug against his chest. He was still wearing his black shorts and his tight yellow T-shirt. His rucksack was a yard or two away and the thin foil wrap he’d been given peeped from between the zippers. His bottle of water was rolling—so slowly, it seemed, inching like tar—toward the curb.

  A crowd formed, cyclists and pedestrians, but not the driver of the taxi, who remained frozen in his seat.

  Jonathan was frozen, too, strangely still, too rigid and yet somehow too serene to be asleep. A puddle of blood began to form beneath his cheek, to pool beneath his body.

  I remember the ambulance arriving, pulling up beside us, its siren screaming. It was quickly muted; I recall the sudden absence of noise where before it had been deafening, but the flashing continued, red and blue and red and blue. Paramedics jumped from the van, two of them, both dressed in green, and they marched toward us, shouting over the hood of the ambulance. Everything was unfolding in half time: she snapped on white latex gloves, her right hand first, and then her left, pulling at each fingertip. A bag was swung over his shoulder. There was a policewoman wearing a hat and I can still see her now, gesturing at the crowd to please take a step back, move along now, please, nothing at all to see here.

  The paramedics fussed around us, taking Jonathan’s pulse, spreading their hands over his body, cutting off his T-shirt, shining a bright white light into his eyes.

  “If you could just—” the woman said, and I sat back on my heels and out of their way. Their arms stretched around me, the reflective strips of their uniforms redirecting the van’s headlights into my eyes. I squinted and I realized that they were wet.

  They slid him onto a stretcher, a strange plastic slab, and lifted him into the back of the ambulance. We crawled through the streets of London and south to St. George’s Hospital. The police car followed and the policewoman—still in her hat—reached for my elbow as I stepped down from the back of the ambulance, and she sat with me in the waiting room. She told me to keep breathing: in through my nose for six, and hold for six, and then out through my mouth for six. And then she left and then I was all alone, still waiting. It was dark outside when a doctor called me into a side room to tell me what I already knew, to confirm that Jonathan had died.

  He offered to call someone for me, and I don’t remember if I answered his question. I left and hailed a cab and recited the address for the flat in Vauxhall. When I arrived, there were three young men in shorts and T-shirts sitting around a picnic table at a pub on the river, gold marathon medals hanging around their necks. I pictured Jonathan sitting there with them, his shorts and his T-shirt, his medal, celebrating his victory and a bubble burst within my chest. I felt bile rising in my throat and I swallowed it because it wasn’t time, this wasn’t real, and yet I couldn’t remember what I ought to be doing or how to be me in that moment.

  I sat down against the entrance to the building. I pictured him standing up, rubbing at his elbow, brushing his hands down his chest to release small specks of pavement. I imagined him shocked, and sort of angry, and a small cut beneath his right eye where he’d landed, but otherwise fine: walking, talking, moving, alive. I closed my eyes and saw his hair, too long, his arms crossed over his chest, and his chin slightly pointed, freckles scattered on the bridge of his nose, from all those afternoons running for hours in the sunshine.

  I retched because it wasn’t real—there was no small cut beneath his eye, no hair too long, no freckles, no more hours of running—and I would never see him again and he would never again be seen and that was simply too big, too impossible, to be a thing.

  Chapter Four

  For a time, I was winning. And I mean that in the simplest sense of the word. If life is a competition, something that can be lost—and I am certain that it can be lost—then it must also be something that can be won.

  Marnie was going on dates with a never-ending barrage of unsuitable men who drank too much and got stoned in children’s playgrounds on the weekends and snorted coke off toilet tanks, and I was falling in love with a brilliant man. While her university friends were spending their Friday nights in horrible clubs with
loud music and neon lights and sticky floors, I was planning a honeymoon. While they grew despondent, lamenting the failure of yet another dead-end relationship, drowning their heartbreak in gin and feeding it takeout, I was married. I had a husband. And—even better than that—I really, truly loved him. They were arguing over small bedrooms and split bills and spilt milk, tackling the buildup of pubic hair in the drain, the shower overflowing, the piles of dirty dishes sitting just above the dishwasher. Whereas I was living in a lovely maisonette with high ceilings and big windows. I had paint samples in patches on the walls and framed prints propped against the fireplace, waiting to be hung.

  Marnie had handed in her notice. Others were being made redundant and sometimes fired and bitching about their bosses and the menial tasks that made up their day-to-day: fetching coffees and booking taxis and ordering reams of paper for the printer. I was being promoted. I had started in an administrative role for an online retailer—they sold everything: books, toys, electronics—and they offered me a position in a new team sourcing furniture. I was in a role that I liked, in a job that I felt had a future, in a growing company.

  I was better than all of them. I was happier than all of them.

  I suppose I liked that I had found love first. I feel uncomfortable saying that now, because it sounds so stupid, so childish, but it’s the truth and that’s what I’ve promised you.

  Marnie was the first of us to find a boyfriend. We were thirteen and Richard was a year older. His parents were divorced and he lived with his mother. He had bright orange hair and his cheeks were speckled with freckles. He and Marnie went to the cinema and their fingers touched in a box of popcorn halfway through and they held hands for the rest of the film. She went to his house for their second date and his mum cooked them chicken nuggets. But Richard broke up with Marnie the following day. He had decided that he had feelings for another girl in our year—I think her name was Jessica—whose hair was similarly orange and who was consequently much more compatible.

  I was determined that I, too, needed a first boyfriend and so, in the midst of Marnie’s heartbreak, I negotiated a date with a boy called Tim. We didn’t go to the cinema but instead on a walk, and he bought me an ice cream and I was quite sure that I had found my soul mate. It helped that he was, by quite some margin, more attractive than any of the boys that my classmates had dated. He increased my popularity dramatically and suddenly I was very much the go-to for everyone’s dating conundrums. Unfortunately, I wasn’t having quite such a positive influence on his reputation, so he called things off after a week and a half.

  Marnie and I grieved together, determined never to fall in love again and to become lesbians instead.

  Which in itself is sort of curious, don’t you think? Already we were very aware that a simple friendship wouldn’t suffice into adulthood, that it wouldn’t be enough. We knew—from our early teenage years—that romantic love would always become the most important.

  I couldn’t tell you quite when everything changed. For years—over a decade—we were at the epicenter of each other’s lives. We told each other everything, and that included boys and then men, and dating and then sex, and relationships and then love. And then, at some point, a chasm opened between us and our romantic lives became something that existed outside of our friendship: something we filtered in conversation, pulling out highlights or updates, rather than living through it together.

  I suppose this, too, was a situation of my own making. Did I tell her how it felt to fall in love with Jonathan? Did I tell her how it felt that first night? I don’t think that I did.

  Instead, I abandoned her. I had been to visit Jonathan after work, and he had cooked me dinner, and commented on all the spare storage in that flat, the empty shelves, the half-filled drawers, and he’d asked if I’d like to fill them. The promise of a home like that—a home with him—was simply too enticing.

  “I’m moving out,” I said to Marnie when I returned that evening.

  “Oh, right?” she said, distracted. She was sitting on our blue and white sofa, her slippered feet on the coffee table, drumming her fingers against the keys of her new laptop. She had recorded her first video the previous evening: her recipe for carbonara, which had always been my favorite. “This is just impossible,” she said. “How do I—” She picked up her phone and began stabbing her thumbs furiously into the screen.

  “With Jonathan,” I said.

  “When’s that?” she replied.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  She looked up. “What?” Her forehead was creased with confusion. “Tomorrow? But you’ve only just met him.”

  “It’s been three months,” I replied.

  “But that’s nothing!”

  I shrugged. “It’s something to me.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly. “And you’re sure?” She folded the screen of her laptop. “It has to be tomorrow?”

  I nodded.

  It would be easy to look back now and to judge myself for moving too fast, for being too eager, but the truth is that I wouldn’t change a thing.

  She helped me to pack my bags and she gave me a set of sharp knives, a casserole dish the size of a cauldron, and a red dinnerware set. “Because you’re going to have to learn to cook,” she said. “You can’t live off beans and toast.”

  “I’ll be back at mealtimes,” I joked.

  “I hope you will,” she said. “I’ll have no one to cook for without you here.”

  I wondered at the time if she was indulging me, if she thought I’d return in a couple of weeks. But I don’t know now that she was. I think she understood that this was my next step, the start of something new.

  I watched as she wrapped an old Evening Standard around a set of red ramekins that I knew I’d never use. She set them down on the side and sighed. “You’re sure about this?” she asked. “Because you know I think he’s great, and I promise I’m asking this for you and not for me, but this is quick, and are you sure—are you definitely sure?”

  “I am,” I said, and I was.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “I know,” I replied. “Me, too.”

  A bubble of tears rose in my throat as I thought of all the things I’d miss: her brightly colored socks drying on the radiator, plastic-wrapped leftovers waiting for me in the fridge, smiley faces drawn in the mist on the bathroom mirror. I swallowed it and I smiled, and she took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly.

  The first weeks felt a little frantic as I tried to be everything to both of them. I didn’t want Marnie to feel that I loved her any less—because I didn’t—and yet I so wanted Jonathan to know that I was his completely. When Marnie’s grandmother died, just a few weeks later, she called me in tears in the middle of the night. I got dressed and fumbled my way onto the street and into a taxi, and I was at the old flat in less than thirty minutes. I think, after that, she knew that she only ever had to ask, that I’d always be there, just as I’d always been before.

  Marnie and Jonathan became good friends. She had never been taught to cycle as a child, and he took it upon himself to show her how. He gave her one of his old bikes and she liked that it was built for a man. She taught him how to cook carbonara. She had tried to teach me, she said, but it was too thankless a task, and so she was going to share her culinary secrets with him instead.

  We worked perfectly as a trio. Jonathan had so many hobbies—cycling and camping and climbing—and I had only Marnie. So when he spent the weekend in the countryside in a tent that flapped in the wind with spiders in his sleeping bag and shoes damp from the rain, I stayed in the old flat, cozy and warm with my very best friend. Those few years were the greatest of my life. It was such a joy to discover that I was worthy—and capable, too—of two great loves.

  When Jonathan died, I thought that our friendship would snap back into the thing that it had been before. It didn’t quite. I don’t
know if it was his absence, but everything in my life felt emptier.

  I missed so many things while I was with him. I hadn’t seen a cloud for over two years; I was always blinded by blue. I’d found joy in stupid places: in children walking slowly, and dogs barking in the park, and the light of the moon through my blinds late at night. I thought that his eyes were green like olives. And yet I haven’t found an olive as beautiful since. Each laugh is hard won. Each smile is fleeting. Every ache feels eternal. My ability to take the good and the bad of this world and to balance them has disappeared completely. I am uncalibrated.

  I thought that I would find myself again with Marnie. I thought that I could reset myself. But things had moved on while I’d been looking elsewhere.

  Chapter Five

  Stanley and I were silent as the elevator descended to the lobby. We were silent as we exited from the front doors of Marnie and Charles’s building. We were silent as we walked down the pebbled pathway that led out to the street. We were side by side and yet I felt very much alone.

  “That was nice, wasn’t it?” said Stanley eventually. He secured the buttons on his coat and lifted the collar up toward his ears. “Did you have a good evening?”

  I looped my scarf around my neck a second time. It was September and I tend to think that September is still summer but it never is. It is always a little sharper, a little cooler, despite the bright evenings.

  I didn’t answer the question. “What do you think of Charles?” I asked instead.

  Charles had regaled the table with the story of his and Marnie’s first meeting. It had been in a bar in the city. He had sent Marnie and her colleagues bottle after bottle of champagne until finally she acquiesced and joined him at his table. He thought it showed the strength of his love. She thought it demonstrated charm and commitment. I thought it made him seem desperate.

  “Great guy, right?” Stanley replied, turning toward me and grinning. “Really great guy.”