Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  “You didn’t invite her,” I said as I measured lengths of ribbon between my fingers.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re lying,” I said. “You didn’t invite her.”

  I don’t think he wanted to confide in me—if he’d had a choice he’d have chosen not to—but his pause revealed the truth. “I don’t want her there, okay?” he said.

  “I get it,” I said, and I did. “I didn’t invite my parents to my wedding.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  And I think that he misunderstood, that he thought that our parents were the same, that we were the same and we weren’t at all.

  “Because she’s sick,” he continued. “And I don’t know that I can deal with that on my wedding day, you know. If she’s there, it becomes all about her. You wouldn’t believe it, the way people are around sickness. I’m out with her and they want to talk, all of them, about her bloody wig and her ongoing nausea and about diets that eradicate cancer. It’s absurd. I think she likes it: the attention. I think it gives her a purpose, gives the sickness a purpose. Anyway, it’s much easier to not invite her.”

  “But she’s your mother,” I replied.

  “What?” He had already pulled his phone from his pocket and was distracted by someone different somewhere else.

  “You can’t not invite her because she’s sick,” I said. “Does she know that it’s happening?”

  “Maybe,” he said, and he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. “I guess my sister might have said something at some point.”

  “But isn’t she devastated?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t asked. We aren’t close.”

  “It’s cruel,” I said.

  He put his phone down on the side table and ran his fingers through his wet hair. “I don’t think you have any right to say that,” he said, and then wiped his hand dry on a cushion. “When you didn’t invite your parents, either. And it’s my wedding, so it’s my decision. And I don’t like sick people.”

  “You don’t like what?” said Marnie, catching only part of his sentence as she entered the room with blue and white ceramic plates and silver cutlery piled in her arms. She lowered them onto the table.

  “I haven’t invited my mother,” he said.

  “Because she’s sick,” I said.

  “What?” asked Marnie, as she arranged first the knives and then the forks. “Because she’s sick? Surely that’s a reason to invite her?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He wasn’t angry, not like he’d been before, not like in the hallway, but he was firm and determined. “It’s my choice,” he said. “And I don’t want her there. I don’t like sick people.”

  “What if I get sick?” asked Marnie as she placed the plates in their positions on the table.

  “That’ll be different,” he said.

  She looked at me and she raised an eyebrow and a conversation passed unsaid between us, one that acknowledged that it really wasn’t that different at all. And yet, while I was horrified by the sentiment, I think Marnie was mostly frustrated. The table plan would need redrafting.

  “As long as that’s true, then I’m just going to pretend that this conversation never happened,” she said nonchalantly. “I think that’s probably the best thing.” And then she went back into the kitchen and Charles turned on the television and I finished the menus and then we sat down for dinner as though it genuinely hadn’t happened.

  But it stayed with me, this strange exchange. Because it confirmed that he wasn’t good enough for Marnie and that he never would be, never could be. I had a concrete moment that I could return to in which he had vociferously reassured me that he wasn’t right for the woman he was about to marry.

  I felt smug.

  Is that bad?

  Because it was confirmation that he really was detestable, that my hatred wasn’t unfounded or undeserved but justifiable and fair. And more than that, because it proved something that I hadn’t felt confident articulating before then: that I really was better than him. I took care of those who needed me: I understood that it was part of the contract of love, of duty, of family.

  I could see then that he wasn’t all in—not at all costs; not at all.

  Chapter Nine

  The day eventually arrived, the first Saturday in August, and despite an unpromising forecast, the weather was unexpectedly warm, the sky unexpectedly bright. There were hundreds of guests, from every avenue of their lives—school, university, work—and some they had never before met: partners of cousins, friends of their parents, and new infants squalling and then giggling, seemingly without reason. Guests had traveled to Windsor from all over the world: Charles’s sister and her husband arrived from New York early that morning, his aunt and uncle interrupted their yearlong sabbatical to join us from South Africa, and Marnie’s brother, Eric, jetted back from his high-flying job in New Zealand to be there for the celebrations.

  You will think that I am lying when I say this, but I promised you the whole truth and this is that: it really was one of the best days of my life. Marnie and I spent the morning together at her parents’ house and we ate toast layered with jam in our pajamas and she had a bath and I sat on the floor beside her and stretched out across the tiles and we talked about how we met in that long, thin queue and the various strings that had been pulled and released and that had led to that very moment.

  I watched her marry a man whom I hated but whom she loved and it wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be. I watched her exclusively—absorbed in the way her red hair was curled into a bun at the back of her head; the diamond necklace; the full white skirt; the long lace veil—and I enjoyed her joy. I felt so proud to be part of such an important moment in her life. I ate too much and I drank too much and I danced until my feet were blistered and sore, and yet I felt wonderful.

  His speech was quite charming, really. I’d expected it to be nauseating—I thought that he’d talk about the unparalleled force of his love, the strength of his attachment, the way that marriage would bolster their bond—but he didn’t and it wasn’t. He said that he’d never met anyone so determined, so creative, so unafraid. He said that he’d known immediately, the moment he’d seen her, that she was somehow different, special, unlike anyone else. He said things about her that I knew to be true, and I found myself nodding in spite of myself.

  I didn’t sit down until after midnight, when most of the guests had left and the band was packing up their instruments and the two bridesmaids were pressing the too-drunk guests into their taxis home. The caterer was organizing the leftover bottles of wine and beer back into their boxes and the manager of the venue was stacking chairs in the dining room. The doors of the conservatory were open, and the air was still warm and fresh with pollen. The fairy lights twinkled overhead, and I knew that I was a little drunk because the brightness was fuzzy, as though the light had been smeared beyond the glass baubles, yellow bleeding into the darkness.

  Charles sat down beside me, and he thanked me for my contribution—those were the words he used—and I almost felt like he was being sincere. His waistcoat was undone, slipping from his shoulders, and he’d abandoned his navy bow tie. We watched Marnie floating across the dance floor. Her dress was almost black at the bottom, the grime and dirt of the day sullying the white silk. Her cheeks were pink and some of her ringlets had fallen from their clips, hanging around her face and damp with sweat.

  “Quite something, isn’t she?” said Charles.

  I nodded.

  I’m not now sure—the passing of time has blurred the edges of my memory—if what happened next really happened. It may have been simply a figment of my hatred, an illusion, the result of too much champagne and too much anger. But I don’t think so.

  Charles sat back, leaning against the glass wall of the conservatory, his hands reaching up behind his h
ead, and then he sighed.

  “Really quite something,” he said again.

  He lowered his arms and one fell behind my head, slithering down the back of my neck. He pulled me toward him and he kissed my forehead. His lips were wet, glazed with saliva, and the moisture burned cold on my skin when he withdrew.

  “We’re a lucky pair,” he said.

  He was slurring. I’d drunk too much, certainly, but he was definitely too far gone, different somehow, sloppier than I’d seen him before. His left hand crawled over my shoulder, toward my collarbone, sweeping past my armpit. I held my breath. I fixed my ribs. I didn’t want to inhale, to expand, to force my chest toward his palm. His hand swung there, inches from my breast, shackling me to the bench. I couldn’t move without moving into him, making him touch me, molesting myself against him.

  He laughed, a coarse and ugly chuckle.

  He said, “Oh, Jane,” and then his fingertips grazed my nipple through the yellow silk of my bridesmaid dress. I lowered my chin, choked by the compulsion to look down at my chest. He pressed his palm into me, and as he withdrew, he quickly pressed my nipple between his thumb and index finger.

  I wish I could tell you that I did something or said something. I wish I’d challenged him. Perhaps he’d have been shocked—I might have recognized genuine astonishment—and I would have known then that what I thought might be happening wasn’t happening at all.

  But I did nothing, so there’s no way to know now.

  “I can’t believe it’s nearly over,” said Marnie, sitting down beside us and resting her head on his shoulder. “What a day,” she said. “It’s been, just hasn’t it been, just the best?”

  Charles slowly pulled his arm away. I felt it slipping across the back of my neck, my shoulders, retreating carefully, until we were no longer touching. I felt the space between us, that sliver of fresh air, cold and welcome, like a fault line splitting enemy states. My nipple ached, a shadow pain.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, smiling. “What’s happening here?”

  Charles looked at me and if you believe that I was sober enough to read a look right then, know this: it was a look that demanded silence.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I said, sliding a few inches farther away, farther down the bench, a little bit farther from them and their love. “Nothing at all.”

  That was the second lie I told Marnie.

  You see, don’t you, that I didn’t have a choice? What could I have said? If I had been honest, she might have felt forced to choose. And, anyway, I was all in, at all costs. And, back then, I thought that meant maneuvering the truth in order to make her happy, to keep her happy, to protect our roots.

  * * *

  Here is an absolute truth. That day didn’t change my feelings toward Charles. I had hated him for years and that day changed nothing.

  Is it cruel to say that their love was the most offensive, unrelenting, repulsive love I have ever known? It is, I know. But their love disgusted me. I hated his face, the smirk that lurked at the tip of his lips, the exaggerated expansion of his chest as he inhaled, the way he drummed his fingers against the table as if to say, You bore me. I hated feeling his hands on my skin through that flimsy fabric, but no more than I hated every other facet of his existence.

  I would have liked to erase him from my life. I need to be careful saying that now, I know, because it sounds like intent. What I mean is that I wish our stories shared no chapters, that the ink of his life wasn’t there on the pages of mine, that our lives had existed concurrently, yes, but had never overlapped.

  But do I regret his death? No. I don’t.

  I’m not sorry at all.

  The Third Lie

  Chapter Ten

  I told her that it was nothing, that nothing had happened.

  And today, more than ever, that feels relevant, an important part of the story, an important part of your story. I’m not talking about a motive—please don’t try to misinterpret what I’m saying—but when something happens, something unexpected, something frightening, the steps that led to that moment are cast in a different die.

  There was one other person, one other and now you, who knew that something had happened that evening. I told her the day afterward, long before I was afraid to say that there had ever been anything other than “nothing” between Charles and me.

  * * *

  The morning after the wedding, I was lying in bed, pretending that I didn’t have a headache, that I wasn’t desperate for a glass of water, that I didn’t urgently need the bathroom, that I was fine, when my doorbell rang.

  My blinds were down but the sun was leaching in around the edges, thin white lines of light speckled by flecks of dust. I ought to vacuum, perhaps mop the floor, I thought, but I knew that I’d do neither. The place was untidy—littered with books and magazines—but I was too hungover, too tired to care. My wardrobe doors hung open and clothes fell from between them and onto the floor, endless pairs of jeans and shorts and sweaters. A rickety wooden chair stood by the window stacked high with piles of clean clothing and bedding and, there on the top, my corseted nude knickers from the night before. My bridesmaid dress was hanging on the back of my bedroom door, dark patches staining the underarms, a few lighter splotches—champagne, perhaps—discoloring the skirt. The air in the room was thick and musty, heavy with the stench of sleep and sweat. It ought to have been disgusting, insufferable, and yet it felt like a familiar space, a familiar mess, a familiar smell.

  I stayed still, as though the noise of rustling sheets might leak through my bedroom door, down the small hallway, and into the corridor beyond my flat.

  The bell rang again.

  There was a thumping—three times—and the door flinched within its frame, shaking on its hinges.

  “Jane?”

  I recognized the voice immediately. It was Emma, my sister, younger by a few years and even more my reverse than Marnie. If I am very much dark and Marnie is very much light, then Emma was very much both. She not only had the fairest skin and the darkest hair, but she was also the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the most vulnerable and yet invincible, afraid and still brave, broken in so many ways but unyielding at the same time.

  The doorbell rang a third time. She depressed the buzzer for several seconds so that the drilling darted through the entire flat.

  “I know you’re in there!” she shouted.

  I stayed tucked beneath my quilt, refusing to move.

  “I have breakfast,” she called.

  Her voice lifted at the end of the sentence and she sang the word “breakfast.” She knew that she was playing her best hand, her ace of spades, and she knew that I knew it, too.

  On weekdays, my breakfast of choice was a bowl of cereal. I tended to opt for oaty flakes that looked and tasted like recycled cardboard floating in thick full-fat milk with the consistency of cream. Curiously, it was less sugary than the semi-skimmed alternative. I had first tried it a few years earlier, just after my husband’s death, when I was on a no-sugar diet, trying to become very thin, as small as humanly possible. Which had been a mistake. Because no small decisions made in the aftermath of an almighty loss are good decisions. And so the other compromises—brown rice, and no fruit juice, and brownies made from beetroots—were quickly forgotten.

  On weekends, I always wanted something sweeter.

  “Can you smell the croissants?” Emma called. “From the bakery less than ten minutes ago. Yum-mee.”

  She paused, listening for my footsteps. I pictured her standing on the worn taupe carpet, under the bright yellow lights, shifting her weight between her feet, impatient as ever, frustrated at being ignored.

  “Come on, Jane!” she shouted. “I haven’t got all day.”

  I sat up and flung my feet over the side of the mattress and into my slippers. I loved her—I really did—but there were never any boundaries.
She didn’t think it was at all abnormal to stand at my door in the morning, without warning, and to hound me with her knocking and her banging and her shouting. Because our lives had always flooded together: the challenges, the struggles, the minutiae of the day-to-day.

  Although that isn’t quite right. It is more accurate to say that her life streamed constantly into mine. I was the vessel for her anxiety. I was the ear into which she confessed, the shoulder on which she felt supported, the hand for her to hold. She bled her burdens into me until she felt a little better. And then I would carry and nurture her fears instead.

  It had always been that way. I was loved too little and she was loved too much, and it might surprise you to know that both are equally unbearable. She was often seeking space, suffocated by being the favorite. I became her ally, her safe place.

  She needed me. I didn’t know then that I needed her, too.

  “Get a move on, will you?” she shouted. “It’s not like I’m going to eat them.”

  I heard her laugh. Her humor was wicked. It still had the power to shock me, even when my mind was filled with her thoughts, her wit, her traumas.

  I pulled on my dressing gown and secured the belt around my waist. It was dark purple and worn, the fibers clumping together along the sleeves where something had once been spilled. It had belonged to Jonathan and was far too big for me. The shoulder seams sat inches down my upper arms and the hem hung below my knees, almost touching my ankles. He’d worn it whenever he’d woken early on weekends to prepare a cooked breakfast.

  I opened the front door. She was wearing a thick navy jumper and loose jeans cropped above her ankles. Her white socks looked like those we’d worn in primary school, thick with elasticated bands at the top and fabric bobbles along the fringes of white trainers. Her hair had been trimmed, cut short to mirror her jawline, sliding into a pointed chin.