Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  “What are you doing, Jane? I need help. Can you just—” He flinched again. “Can you just take your hand off me? Take it off. Right now. Come on.”

  It felt sort of wonderful.

  I look back on that moment and I don’t recognize the woman sitting there on the floor with her fingers against the neck of an injured man. I don’t recognize her smile. I don’t recognize her eyes. She feels like an entirely different person.

  I stroked his neck with my index finger and then with my entire palm. He was silent then and there was no more movement. I could feel stubble sprouting across his chin, see the five-o’clock shadow cast across his face, the result of not shaving for a day or two. He closed his eyes. I could see his chest rising and falling, hear the breaths as he sucked them in and threw them out. I ran my palm up toward his cheek.

  I wondered if Marnie’s palm had been there, too, on mornings together in bed or during their first kiss. I placed my other palm on the opposite side of his face and held his head steady. I inched my fingers into his hair, feeling the film of grease at the roots.

  “Please, Jane,” he whispered. “That’s enough. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean the things I said. Let’s just— We can forget all of this. I promise.”

  “I can’t help you,” I replied. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I just can’t.”

  “Then go,” he insisted. “Just get out. I’ve had enough. Go.”

  I felt a sudden surge of anger. Was I really—seriously—being thrown out of that flat for the second week in a row? No. I was not. I was absolutely not. Because I was the one in control and I was the one who was going to make the decisions. No one was going to tell me where to go or what to do or if I was allowed to be there anymore. And certainly not Charles. He’d said his bit and now it was my turn. This was my moment.

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m not going, Charles,” I said, very calmly. I didn’t want him to know that I was angry. I didn’t want him to feel any more afraid than he already did. “I want to stay,” I said. “I’m going to stay.”

  I guess I must have known by this point what it was I was going to do. I didn’t want to alleviate his sense of fear because of some undue sense of compassion or empathy. I wanted him to feel less afraid so that his final burst of horror was all the more intense.

  “Fine,” he said. “Stay, then. It’s not as if there’s anything I can do to stop you.”

  “No,” I replied. “There’s nothing you can do at all.”

  He closed his eyes.

  This was not my finest hour. I don’t need to tell you that, I know. And there’s not an awful lot that I can say in my defense. I simply enjoyed watching him suffer. I liked that his shoulder was dislocated, that his right arm was completely useless, and that it was causing him pain. I liked the sight of the blood on his forehead, the thought of him lying there unconscious for hours, the idea of him concussed. I liked his broken ankle and his swollen cheek and his bloodshot eye. I liked him so much better than I’d ever liked him before.

  I held his head firmly between my hands, my palms flat against his skin. There were tears seeping from the corners of his eyes.

  You have never hated anyone the way I hated Charles, so I know that you can’t understand how satisfying this moment was for me. I had that giddy feeling, that drunk, wild happiness. It was something I had never expected to experience around him.

  I moved my hands a little and he groaned.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “Jane,” he croaked.

  I shifted onto my knees so that my weight was above him and then repositioned my hands. He knew, I think. It was then that he knew.

  I took a deep breath. In for six, hold for six, out for six. I looked away and up the stairs, at the carpet runner, cream bordered by blue, and at the wooden banister varnished a mahogany brown. And then in one swift movement, I rotated my hands and I heard a loud crack and his neck fractured beneath me.

  When I looked down, his eyes were closed and he looked peaceful, his jaw relaxed, his forehead uncreased; the pain was gone.

  It had worked. I hadn’t been sure that it would.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I swiveled around and scooped my things—my phone, my house keys—back into my handbag. I picked up the small gold key, the one that had allowed me into this apartment whenever I’d wanted, and I placed it quietly—I didn’t know why I was being so quiet; it just felt appropriate—into the little bowl on the side filled with a dozen other keys.

  I turned off the light. I stroked my top over the switch. I knew that it was highly likely that my fingerprints were everywhere in this apartment already, but it felt right to be cautious. I unchained the door and rubbed the metal carefully, pushing the fabric of my cardigan into the grooves of the chain. I opened the door, wiped the inside handle, and then let myself out.

  I stepped into the hallway, into that puddle of darkness, and I pulled the door shut behind me, listening for the quiet click of the lock. And then, finally, I exhaled.

  I moved a few feet down the corridor, toward the door to their neighbor’s apartment, and sat on the floor, my back against the wall and my knees bent in front of me. It was brighter there; it didn’t feel quite so frightening.

  I took a book from my handbag and I opened it against my thighs. I wasn’t reading—my bookmark was positioned several chapters forward—but it was reassuring to be pretending to do something. I could hear the soft ticking of the hands of my watch as the seconds slid slowly past. Marnie wasn’t expecting me, and so maybe she was taking her time; perhaps she’d gone for a drink with a friend or was picking up dinner on the way home or walking instead, making the most of the sunshine. There was no way for me to know and so I simply sat and waited.

  Even so, I was desperately aware that Charles’s body was a couple of yards away, lying dead behind their door. I could picture him—exactly as I knew he was—sprawled with his ankle twisted, his neck twisted, entirely dead. I struggled to make sense of my feelings. I didn’t feel sadness, none at all. I didn’t feel satisfaction, either. I didn’t feel very much of anything.

  I focused very hard on pretending that I didn’t know that he was there. I was telling myself that I hadn’t been into their flat—I didn’t have a key, did I, so I couldn’t have entered even if I’d wanted to—and that, as far as I knew, he was still as painfully, permanently present as ever. I convinced myself of things I knew were false. I hadn’t heard any noises from the flat: I rang the bell twice, but there was no answer and, as far as I knew, Marnie and Charles were both still out, he at work, she elsewhere: the supermarket, the florist, maybe even the library. I hadn’t seen anything: I had simply been sitting here, reading, knowing nothing.

  No. Don’t smile. Stop it. Now.

  It’s not like I don’t know why you’re smiling. But if you want me to continue with this story, then you’re going to have to try to see these things from my perspective. It was a rash decision, barely even a decision at all. I didn’t choose to do what I did. I simply did it. So don’t go dwelling on things like motive and intent, because there was neither one nor the other. It was instinctive.

  The question that you should be asking—and if you were paying proper attention, you would be—is whether, in that moment, I had any regrets.

  Well, I’m not answering that yet.

  If you’d have asked it, I might have told you the truth. But you’re too busy judging me.

  Anyway. Where were we?

  I was absolving myself—in a subconscious sort of way—of all responsibility, rehearsing my lie and pretending that the incident itself had never happened.

  I scanned the open page of my book, running my eyes over the lines of black ink, absorbing none of the words, none of the meaning, as I skipped between paragraphs. I turned the pages and studied the shape of the letters: their curves, their bones, their breaks. I couldn
’t tell you how long I was sitting there, filling the time with empty sentences and stroking the lines of text.

  Marnie eventually appeared at the end of the corridor. She was wearing a raincoat, buttoned up to her chin with a hood pulled over her hair and shopping bags hanging from her wrists. She was sifting through her pockets—she pulled out a tissue and then an orange train ticket—and then she looked up and saw me.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” She stopped a few feet from her door.

  I stood up but stayed rooted in the glow. “Is it raining?” I asked.

  “It’s just started up,” she said. She buried the tissue and ticket back into her pocket. “I wasn’t expecting you. Have you been waiting long?”

  I shook my head and then remembered greeting the doorman much earlier in the evening. “Just an hour or so,” I said. “I finished work early and I had my book.”

  “Are you . . . are you expecting dinner?” she asked.

  She approached her door and reached into her handbag to find the key to the flat.

  I had been very calm, my breathing measured and my pulse consistently slow. But I could feel my heart beginning to throb in my chest and sweat bleeding onto my upper lip.

  It’s important to say that I was not at all afraid of being caught, not at this point anyway. I was aware of it as a vague possibility, but I was also arrogant, confident that I had done everything possible to make that impossible. Instead, I was afraid of her reaction. Terrified, if I’m honest, of what might come next.

  “I don’t need dinner,” I said. “But I . . . I just wanted to talk.”

  I was still holding my book and it was swinging awkwardly from my hand and bouncing against my thigh.

  Marnie sighed. “I love that book,” she said. “Have you reached the part where—”

  “Spoilers!” I shouted, and it was a relief to make a loud noise, to expel some of the chaos burning within me.

  Marnie jolted backward, shocked.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Calm down.”

  I took a deep breath—in, hold, out. This was not the time to lose my shit. I laughed and it sounded strange, sort of insincere.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk. But you can come in and we can try. But Charles is ill and in bed and he’s been sleeping all day and I absolutely do not want to disturb him. It’s one of those migraines and loud noises are the worst, so if you . . . if I ask you to leave, you leave, okay?”

  I nodded.

  Marnie turned back to the door and lifted her key into the lock. I heard it scratching there, finding its way into the hollows, the grooves.

  “It is nice to see you,” she said. “I am glad you came. I just—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I understand. It’s complicated.”

  “Yes,” she said, and she looked at me and smiled. “That’s exactly it. It’s complicated.”

  She pushed the door open, just an inch or two. “And you’re welcome to have some dinner—of course you are. I want everything to be normal again. You’re my best friend.” She grinned. “So, yes. I’ll pour us some wine and I’ll put on some pasta and we can talk.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and I smiled, too, ignoring the burn of acid at the back of my throat. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m really glad to be here. I want it to be normal again, too.”

  She pushed against the door again and I closed my eyes.

  Isn’t that cowardly? I squeezed them shut as soon as her back was turned, entirely involuntarily, because I was gutless. I was petrified of her reaction. I knew exactly what she was about to experience—I know how it feels to see your husband lying dead on the ground in front of you—and I know what that sort of shock could do to a person. I know how it builds within you, relentlessly, until you have no choice but to believe it. I know how it evolves into grief, the incessant, terminal nature of the thing. I knew that her heart would break.

  “Charles?” she said. “Charles!” she screamed.

  I heard her footsteps as she darted across the wood, the crash of her shopping as it fell, her knees slamming against the floor.

  I opened my eyes. I followed her in; I paused briefly in the doorway.

  He was most definitely dead. His skin had changed. It was no longer pink and peachy, but sort of yellow, gray. She was hunched over his body, her hands against his shoulders, shaking him. If he had still been alive, he would have been in agony, her grabbing him like that, what with his dislocated shoulder. But he was dead, so I guessed it didn’t really matter anymore.

  “What the . . .” I cried. I spotted a hairpin lying beneath their radiator—I recognized it as one of my own—and so I emptied my handbag onto the floor, my things rolling everywhere, my book landing with a thud, my phone beside it. I reached down for my phone, dialed the emergency services, pressed it against my ear. “Ambulance!” I yelled, as soon as I heard a voice on the other end, before they’d had a chance to say anything at all. “I need an ambulance.”

  “Where to, please?”

  I reeled off the address. “Quickly,” I added at the end. “You need to come quickly.”

  Marnie was sobbing, her head buried against Charles’s chest. “He’s dead!” she screamed. “Jane! He’s dead.”

  “We think he’s dead,” I cried to the person on the other end of the phone line, because I had no idea what else to say or what to do and I was becoming more authentically hysterical with each of Marnie’s screams.

  “And what makes you think that? Give me as much information as you can. The paramedics are on their way.”

  “Marnie, how do you— He’s a funny color,” I said. “Yellow and his body’s twisted. He’s fallen down the stairs.”

  Marnie screamed again and then looked straight at me, her eyes wild and unfocused, and then she shouted, “Tell them we can get him back,” and she lifted herself above him, placed her hands at the center of his chest and began pumping.

  “We’re doing CPR,” I said. “There’s a doorman—Jeremy—he can—there’s an elevator—they’ll need to get the elevator.”

  “They’re on their way now. They’ll be with you very soon.”

  “Keep going, Marn,” I said. “Are you . . . If you get tired, I can . . . I can do it, too.” I was panting and adrenaline was pouring through me, flooding my body.

  “Is he breathing?” the operator asked. “Can you tell me if he’s breathing?”

  “Is he breathing?” I shouted. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “They’re on their way.”

  “They need to come quicker!” I shouted, and I really believed it. I really wanted them to hurry, to drive fast, to be here, even though I knew that there was nothing they could do, even though I knew that it was already too late.

  “They’ll be with you very soon,” said the voice at the end of the phone. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing great.”

  We heard the sirens screaming and Marnie was sobbing, sweating in her raincoat, and I was standing, the phone still held against my ear, listening to empty platitudes and frantically pacing.

  “They’re here,” I said to her. “That’s them. They’re nearly here.”

  Marnie stopped driving her hands into Charles’s chest and collapsed on top of him, wailing into him. She knew, I think, that he was gone. She had known since she opened the door and saw him lying there, his ankle twisted, and his shoulder dislocated, and his neck snapped.

  I crouched down and rubbed her back—small circular motions that I hoped would convey that I was here for her, here for her always, whatever she needed—until finally we heard the lift clanking up to this floor and the doors scraping open.

  I jumped up and leaned out the door. “We’re here,” I called. “Over here.”

  Three paramedics ran toward me. An older man, overweight with no neck wh
atsoever. A younger man, faster and fitter and quickly in front of me. And a young woman, who hung back, nervous, new perhaps, and said nothing at all and never entered the flat.

  “Can you tell us his name?” shouted the younger man.

  “He’s my husband,” said Marnie, crawling away from Charles’s dead body so that the paramedics could reach him. “Charles,” she said. “His name’s Charles. He’s thirty-three. He has a migraine.”

  We laughed about that a few weeks later. “I still can’t believe I said that,” she said. “That he had a migraine. I mean, Jesus. A migraine.”

  Here is something you learn as you get older, as you start to live alongside death in its many guises, as it becomes an ever-present part of your world. Death becomes softer in the months and years that follow. It loses its sharp edges; they don’t cut quite so deep and make you bleed in quite the same way. Sometimes you are laughing at something that made you cry just a few days before. But soft edges are still edges, and they are sharpened unexpectedly, by an ill-considered comment or an anniversary, or are filed to a point at the memory of a happy moment. There is no logic to grief, no well-worn path that we all must follow; there are simply the times when it is bearable and the times when it is not.

  I heard her say those words—“a migraine”—and I saw the humor in them even then. I knew that it was so much worse than a migraine and yet they were the words that broke me. I had seen her see him, watched her desperately trying to revive him, heard her screaming, and felt only a strange—again, giddy—excitement. I had been caught somewhere between panic and hysteria, only ever a second away from doubling over and laughing like that little girl at the beach.

  But those words changed everything.

  Suddenly it wasn’t about Charles anymore. It wasn’t about his rigid body lying concertinaed on the floor. It wasn’t about his behavior or my hatred or the tension that had lived between us. It wasn’t about the fact that he was dead or the fact of his dying. It wasn’t about Charles at all.