Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  I stood up in the bath, the water lapping at my calves, and I peered out through the mottled glass, pressing my body against the wall to shield it from sight. She was very young, maybe seven or eight, and wearing only a swimsuit. Her father was wearing swim shorts, still wet, the water seeping into the hem of his T-shirt, and I remembered when my father walked around like that, on beach holidays in Cornwall, after a day spent nestled in sand. A woman—her mother—was behind them, two towels flung over her shoulder and a big woven basket swinging by her ankles. The girl started laughing again and bent in the middle, literally doubled over, unable to continue walking because the movement within her was just so much. Her father was laughing, too—at her, at her joy, at her fearless, noisy laughter. I wanted so much to be part of that family.

  I pulled on my dressing gown, grabbed the hair dryer from beneath the sink, and went back into the bedroom. I plugged it in. I would dry my hair. I would put on my clothes. And I would be part of that family.

  I don’t mean literally. I wouldn’t literally be part of that family.

  But I was determined to be part of something more than myself.

  I walked back along the corridor and through the reception area. I stepped out of the doors and onto a narrow road, bookended on either side by two small streams. There were lights everywhere: in the pubs, in the restaurants, in other hotels. I walked toward the sea, along a path with a steep slope down to the pebbled beach. There were children, naked but for the towels wrapped around their shoulders, skipping up and down, running to the top and then back to meet their parents, who were climbing more slowly, tired after a long day of sand and sea and games. There were two men carrying parasols and windbreakers and with sunglasses propped on their foreheads. And two women with their hair pulled back in tight ponytails, damp bikini triangles imprinted on their linen shirts.

  I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of one of those women, rucksack on my back, my children circling, sand embedded in the creases of my elbows, and I couldn’t help but imagine Jonathan there at my side, a brightly colored parasol slung over his shoulder.

  Even then, I couldn’t envisage a version of my future without him in it. Which was ridiculous. Because, by then, he had been dead for longer than we’d known one another.

  Somehow it felt like no time at all.

  Before he died, I had never given much thought to widowhood. Although I suppose if you had asked for my thoughts on it, I’d have offered a confident, considered response. I had lost grandparents and I knew the weight of that familiar ache. Those losses had been substantial—the culmination of long, well-lived lives—and yet their passing felt insignificant, too. Those deaths were not tragedies. They did not become ghosts.

  Whereas Jonathan did. I still carry him into every conversation. I bring him to every table. I am the young woman whose husband died. His ghost sits beside me at weddings—do you know that she was married, yes, she was, her husband died—and at funerals—she buried her husband a few years ago, did you know, yes, her husband died.

  He is there in every future, in every hope, in every dream.

  He haunts me, always.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I visited Emma on my way home. She was living in a studio flat south of the river. It was a twenty-minute walk from the nearest tube station and the closest bus stop was almost ten minutes away and across an unlit car park. I didn’t have much to spare, but even with my small contribution and the odd payment from my mother’s account, it was all that she could afford.

  We’d become even closer since she’d moved out of our parents’ house. Away from my mother—who’d always insisted on being part of whatever we did together—we discovered that we really quite liked each other. She was refreshingly honest, as only a sister can be. And I think—and I hope that this doesn’t sound petty—that being needed by her was fulfilling for me.

  She didn’t work regularly anymore. She had been a freelance editor and, for a while, she was incredibly busy, with manuscripts stacked on the linoleum tiles, working through the night in order to meet her deadlines, always in demand. She’d been so diligent and focused, never afraid to interrogate a problem, to ask the difficult questions. But her concentration dwindled, and she started to pore over every text, too indecisive, afraid that she might upset a rhythm, taking so long that eventually everyone stopped sending her new projects. She then spent much of her time working with local charities. But it was all voluntary.

  I stood on the balcony in front of her flat and banged on the bright red door. There was a doorbell nailed to the frame, but it had never worked.

  “I’m coming!” she yelled as I banged a second time. “Learn some fucking manners.

  “Oh,” she said when she opened the door. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Clearly,” I said. “Is that how you greet everyone?”

  The front door opened straight into the only room: the lounge, the kitchen, the dining room, and the bedroom all combined in one small space. The kitchen was at one end; the white units were relatively new but the floor tiles were speckled orange. The blinds were made of plastic and held together with thin white string. There was a coffee table, a sofa, a small television, a wardrobe, and a few bookshelves. And beside the door that led to the small bathroom, framed above the radiator, there was a large sketch of a very thin woman. It wasn’t much, but Emma had never needed very much.

  “No one visits,” she said. “It’s only ever someone trying to sell me something.” She stepped back to let me in. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Charming,” I replied.

  “I don’t mean it like that,” she said.

  “I’ve been to Beer,” I said.

  “To Beer?” she asked. “In Devon?”

  “Where Jonathan and I went. Do you remember?”

  “Why’d you go there?” she asked.

  “Marnie and I argued.”

  “You told her.”

  I nodded.

  She gestured toward the sofa.

  “I told you not to say anything,” she said.

  “I had to,” I replied.

  “You bloody didn’t,” she said, taking three dark chocolate digestive biscuits from a packet and placing them onto a napkin for me. “Watch the crumbs.”

  I nodded and sat down at one end of the gray sofa. She unrolled it into a bed each evening.

  “You could have just pretended that everything was normal,” she said. “Like I told you to. Then you wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  “But she needed to know the truth about her husband. Wouldn’t you want to know the truth about your husband?” It seemed obvious to me that if something couldn’t be said and yet still needed saying, then it had to be said.

  Emma sat on the sofa beside me. Her trouser leg lifted slightly so that I could see the bones that made up her ankle. She clutched a mug of warm tea between her hands. I bit into one of the biscuits and it was softer than I’d expected, almost damp inside.

  She was quiet, thinking.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I would.”

  “If your husband was a pervert?” I said. “You wouldn’t want to know? And imagine that I knew he was a pervert. Put yourself in Marnie’s position. You wouldn’t want me to say something?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you,” she said.

  I sat up and several crumbs shook themselves loose from the napkin and fell onto Emma’s sofa. She leaned over to brush them away.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said, and then she paused. “Oh, don’t be so naive,” she said eventually. “If I told you that Jonathan had hit on me, you wouldn’t have believed me, not for a second.”

  “I’d have listened to what you had to say and then—”

  “And then you’d have taken his side. You know what they say, and it’s what eve
ryone always says, to never give up your friends for a man, but it doesn’t matter because everyone does. Friendships are one thing, but a true love, a romantic love? That trumps everything. Always has. Always will. You might like to think otherwise, but you’d have hated me.”

  “It’s different,” I said. “Jonathan was . . . He would never—”

  “Ah,” she interrupted. “That’s what everyone thinks. That’s why you can’t blame her for choosing him.” She sighed. “They don’t know they’re thinking it, but it’s always there, whenever anything bad happens to somebody else. A little voice that says, But it wouldn’t happen to me.”

  I laughed and more crumbs fell from my T-shirt. “What a luxury,” I said.

  Emma smiled. We both knew how it felt to be the people to whom bad things happened. It wasn’t that way for most of our childhoods, but something changed in our adolescence. My father’s relationship with his mistress became common knowledge and we became that family, those girls, the daughters of that man. Emma fell first; she became that girl, the thin girl, the girl who didn’t eat. My husband died. Our father left. Our mother was diagnosed. Maybe once you start—once you become one of those people—you can never stop being one.

  Emma and I are united by a history of stares and secrets and whispers. Perhaps that is why we both choose to live anonymous lives in a city so big it swallows you.

  “Do you think she’ll forgive me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Emma replied.

  “I think she will,” I say. “I think I can make her.”

  “You going to record him and send it to her?” Emma smirked. She loved that story.

  “You said you wouldn’t mention that again,” I replied. She was always teasing, always trying to ease the tension within me. “And, no.”

  “You would if you could,” she insisted. “I know you. It’s still your style. Skulking in when the place is quiet, clambering into a wardrobe. Detective Black. Delighted to make your acquaintance. All those martial arts classes. Do you have a black Lycra jumpsuit?”

  “He’s too smart,” I said. “He wouldn’t say anything incriminating.”

  “Oh bloody fuck,” she said, and she laughed. “You’ve really thought about it.”

  “Only just now because you brought it up.” It was so typical of her. It was her idea but she was blaming me.

  “Chill,” she said. “You’re getting crumbs all over the place.”

  “But you do think it’ll be okay, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Probably. She’ll see sense eventually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not going to last, is it? The marriage?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Emma laughed. “You! Everything you’ve said. All the things he’s done? The arrogance and entitlement, the pretentious affectations, those irritating phrases that are so bloody offensive and he doesn’t see it at all. My favorite,” she said, “was that one at the bar when he needed to squeeze past that woman and so he didn’t say ‘excuse me’ like a normal person but put his hands on her hips to steer her aside—do you remember telling me this?—and she turned around and said, ‘What was that? That you just did?’ and got all huffy and in his face and he panicked and called her stupid so she told him to fuck off. Maybe you should tell him to fuck off more often.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Marnie will definitely forgive me then.”

  “Good point,” she said. “And anyway, if other people keep telling him to fuck off, then sooner or later she’ll get the message. Just relax. It’ll unravel itself.”

  * * *

  What do you think? Whose side would you have chosen? Would it have been him or me?

  I’m going to assume that you’d have chosen me and, frankly, you’d be stupid to say otherwise, because he’s already dead.

  I think that if you’d known him, if you’d had the space in which to form your own opinions, you would have listened to me, agreed with me, trusted me. I think you’d have found him overbearing and vindictive. We would have sat down together and listed his many wrongdoings and we’d have laughed at them. I would have been your ally.

  But that will never happen. Because you will never know him. Which is why it’s so important that you hear this story. I will tell it only once, and it has to be now.

  This is how he died.

  Pay attention.

  The Fourth Lie

  Chapter Sixteen

  I finished work early the day Charles died. I remember it so clearly, every part of it, from my alarm ringing that morning and the discovery that there was no milk for my cereal, to arriving home later that night after it had all happened. I can reel through the images like a film and I’d like to say that they move me in some way, to regret or to horror or to shame, but they don’t. It was in so many ways an entirely unremarkable day.

  Is that true? I am trying so hard to be honest. But sometimes it’s difficult to know what you truly think about any one thing. For example, I wonder if I’m telling you that it was dull simply because I would rather not tell you about that day at all. It doesn’t much matter either way; I promised that I would tell you the truth and the facts themselves are indisputable.

  Work had been expectedly quiet for a couple of weeks. The summer months had been wet and overcast, but September was set to be bright and warm. We were receiving ten percent fewer calls than we had in the same period the previous year. I assumed that people were being drawn away from their homes and out to parks and pub gardens.

  It was a Friday and I decided to leave early, thirty minutes before the phone lines had officially closed for the weekend. I simply picked up my handbag and, in a very nonchalant way, walked out of the office. I wondered if anyone would notice, but I don’t think that they did and I wouldn’t have cared if they had.

  The sidewalks were quiet. The evening exodus had yet to begin. I contemplated heading toward my normal tube station and the line that took me home, but I decided against it. It was a Friday, after all. And I didn’t go home on Fridays. I went to Marnie and Charles’s.

  I headed toward a different station: it was a longer walk, but I wouldn’t need to change tubes halfway through the journey. I waited only a couple of minutes and picked a seat near the middle, where I was less likely to be disturbed by pensioners with their walking sticks and pregnant women with their protruding bumps. A young couple was sitting across from me, dressed casually, he in tracksuit bottoms and a matching sweater, and she in leggings and a navy blue hoodie. They were about sixteen—I wondered if they ought to have been at school—and utterly exquisite. They were so self-contained, so smitten. His hand rested on her thigh, higher than was really appropriate, and yet it felt endearing rather than vulgar. Her head was anchored to his chest; I expect she could hear his heartbeat. He dipped his chin and pressed his lips to her forehead repeatedly, not so much kissing, just touching. They seemed entirely unaware of everyone watching, everyone wishing that they, too, could be so oblivious, so in love, so naive.

  I was so distracted by the young couple that it wasn’t until they stood up and got off that I began to wonder about the reception I’d receive from Marnie and Charles. Would they let me into the flat? Would they even answer the door? I used to carry around a collection of worries just like these. All of them now seem wholly insignificant: the state of my nails, the gossip lost in office politics, the things my mother had and hadn’t said. Jonathan taught me to unravel my anxieties by giving them context: my nails mattered to no one but me, even the very worst rumors could only lose me my job, my mother’s words were beyond my control. I tried to apply that logic to this new concern, but it didn’t dial down my panic but simply amplified it. Because within a broader context, this wasn’t about whether the door was opened and whether they were cruel to me. It was about the trajectory of one of my most important relationships. I couldn’t step back the way
I had with my mother and simply accept that she was in a terrible place. I couldn’t pretend that the very worst outcome would affect just a small corner of my life. Because there are only so many small corners that can be emptied before the room begins to look barren.

  Marnie and I hadn’t spoken in a week. I know that doesn’t sound like a substantial period, but for us it was unusual. At school, we were always together: laughing too loudly on the bus, side by side behind two desks, eating lunch in the cafeteria. And, at university, we spoke every day because there were so many things that happened, so many moments, when we thought, She’d find that funny, or interesting, or pertinent somehow. And, even as adults, we communicated at least once a day, not always a phone call, sometimes a text or an email or just a photograph, but—like children with paper cups and a ball of string stretching between their bedroom windows—there was a channel that connected us always.

  I hadn’t known how to reinitiate a conversation. Whenever I thought about it, I felt a surge of panic swelling within me. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had been forced to choose and that she hadn’t chosen me. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had, for the very first time, demanded that I leave her apartment. I couldn’t begin to think that this might be unfixable. I wanted to send her a photograph of my beans-on-toast dinner, or the sun setting over the sea, or the strange curl in my hair that day.

  I considered getting off the tube and heading home instead. I would have been fine at home, I think. I would have ordered takeout and watched a film. But I didn’t. I wanted to see Marnie. I needed to see her.

  I flickered between pretending that I was entirely comfortable—this was a familiar tube station, a familiar walk, a familiar building—and sudden floods of abject fear. I knew, I was sure, that she wouldn’t sacrifice our friendship completely. And yet I wonder now if I was really as sure as I thought I was.