“Well, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t. It’s awful.”
“I know,” I said. “I was there.” And I don’t know why I did this because I hadn’t shared any of these details with her before, but I think I wanted her to acknowledge that this grief wasn’t hers to appropriate. “Marnie and I found him sprawled at the foot of the stairs. We saw him.”
“Dead?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“He died alone.” She looked sad as she said it, as though this in particular was something unbearable. I realized then that we had never discussed death, not in any depth, never further than its simple fact, a simple loss. “What a thing,” she said.
“I’m afraid,” I said, “that I might have been outside their apartment when it happened. I was waiting for Marnie to come home. She was at the library. And I was there for an hour, just sitting there, reading and waiting.”
“Afraid that you might have been able to do something,” she said, and it was part question, part statement.
“Perhaps,” I said. “If I’d heard something. If I’d had a key.”
I don’t know why I did this. Except, at the same time, I think I do. I wanted her to protect me, to look inside me and see that something was broken, and I wanted her to mend it. Isn’t that what a mother does? And if she couldn’t do that, if she couldn’t see or fix the fractures, then I wanted her to think that I was the sort of person who could save a life and not the sort of person who could take one. I wanted her to think that if I could have done something, I would have, that if I could be a better version of myself, then I would be.
“A key,” she said.
“I used to have one,” I said. “I watered their plants when they went on holiday. But I don’t have it now, not anymore. I returned it.”
She nodded.
“Do you remember David?” I asked. “He lived next door. He used to water yours when we went away.”
* * *
I arrived at Marnie’s just after two o’clock. Her flat was full of far too many people and it exuded an unlikely medley of cheer and sorrow and pretense. There was a tree in the hallway adorned with silver ornaments, a glittering angel sitting at the top. There were decorations scattered artfully up the stairs and a plate piled high with tiny mince pies. Merry jingles were filtering through the speakers and Marnie was wearing a ribbon of tinsel around her neck.
I sort of wanted to strangle her with it.
“Jane!” Marnie called when she saw me hovering by the open front door. “You’re earlier than I expected. How was your mother? Come in. Come in. What can I get you? A drink? Wine? A sherry, perhaps?”
I handed over a small gift bag. I’d struggled to find a present that was both sentimental and yet understated, too; respectful, I suppose. I’d opted eventually for a set of cookie cutters—they seemed ridiculously expensive to me—that she’d pointed out years earlier in a shop just a few minutes from our first flat. “Wouldn’t they be perfect?” she’d said. They were pairs of breasts, all shapes and sizes, with separate cutters for all manner of nipples. I hadn’t quite understood the appeal.
“Thank you,” she said, leaving it wrapped on the floor by the radiator beside a few other gift and bottle bags. “Come on through. Emma’s here already. I think she’s in the kitchen. She’s a bit . . . When did you last see her? Wine, did you say?”
“Who are all these people?” I asked. I didn’t recognize anyone although there were at least twenty—maybe thirty—others crammed into the flat.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Marnie replied. “They’re a fascinating bunch. That’s Derek.” She pointed at a middle-aged man wearing a checked shirt and a reindeer tie. “He lives three doors down. Wife died earlier this year. Cancer. So we’ve a lot in common. And that’s Mary and Ian.” She pointed at a couple who were both at least ninety. He was trying to eat a mince pie, but most of the pastry was crumbled down his jacket. She had the most exquisite gray hair pinned beautifully so that it fell down one side of her neck. “They live on the ground floor. I met them in the lobby yesterday and invited them along. Over there is Jenna. She does my nails. And that’s Isobel. She cleans the flat. You’ve probably met her before. She’s separated from her husband and she was going to spend the day alone and I just thought, no, that’s not right at all, and so I told her to pop in. Isn’t it lovely?”
“It is, Marnie. Absolutely. But are you sure . . . How are you feeling? What can I do?”
“Everything’s under control. I have two turkeys in the oven. Can you smell them? It’s good, right? And lots of nibbles out already. Have you got your phone? Maybe take some photos? I’m going to do a big post on how to host an ‘everyone welcome’ Christmas.”
“And the baby? Are you resting enough?”
“I’m really starting to show now, can you see”—she turned to one side—“can you believe it?”
“Jane!” Emma grabbed hold of my arm and then enveloped me in a hug. “Merry Christmas! How are you?”
She pulled back and I held on a moment longer, just to be sure that I really could reach both arms around her waist and touch my palms to my opposite elbows. She was so much worse than she’d been in years. I stepped back and glanced at her face. Her cheeks were hollow, so sunken that I could almost see the shape of her teeth through her skin. Her spindly wrists poked from an oversized jumper and her tight jeans were loose around her thighs.
“That man,” she continued. “Do you see? In the salmon pink shirt? He’s been talking to me for about twenty minutes and I’ve only just managed to escape. No offense, Marn, I’m sure he’s a great friend or whatever, but—”
“In the red cords?” Marnie asked.
Emma nodded. “And the paper cracker hat.”
“I’ve no idea who he is. Did he say anything about— Give me a minute,” she said, and she waded across the kitchen to introduce herself.
“Mince pie?” I held out the plate.
“I’ve had a few already,” Emma said, rubbing her stomach as if to indicate that she was already far too full. “And there’s still the turkey to come.”
We locked eyes and several conversations passed unsaid between us.
You’re not eating.
I am.
You’re lying.
I’m not.
Don’t lie to me.
How dare you accuse me of lying?
Or:
You’re not eating.
I’m not hungry.
You must be hungry. Eat something.
Stop telling me what to do.
Or:
You look terrible.
Well, fuck you.
I’m serious. When did you last eat?
It’s none of your business.
None of it needed saying.
“Don’t,” she said instead.
I nodded. “Can I do anything?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “How was Mum?”
“She was okay,” I said. “Tired, but much better.”
“Was she cross? With me. For not coming?”
I wanted to say that she had been cross, that she’d felt let down, abandoned even, so that I could be the better daughter. And I wanted to reveal that she hadn’t noticed, so that Emma could be the forgotten one, relegated to the pits of dementia. But we both knew that I was never the best-loved, most memorable daughter.
“No,” I said. “She was fine.”
Emma nodded, relieved. “Well, that’s something, I suppose. I’m sorry. For not coming. I just . . . I couldn’t.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said, and I wondered if other families had so many lines drawn in the sand, so many words that couldn’t be spoken. “Is that one of her jumpers?” I asked.
“Yes!” Emma grinned. “Do you remember it? It always makes me think of that Christmas when Dad dre
ssed up as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve to sneak into our rooms and then fell over the toy chest and made such a fucking racket that he woke us both up and we all ended up in the emergency room.”
“I remember,” I replied.
“We were in our pajamas and Mum was in this jumper and the rest of the waiting room was drunk and merry and injured, too. Do you remember? And that man who’d sliced his hand open on a tape dispenser?”
“And the nurse who gave us sweets at midnight.”
“She had pink hair.”
“Yes!”
“I always planned to have pink hair after that.”
“Do it, then,” I said.
“Maybe I will,” Emma replied.
“It’s okay,” said Marnie, stepping back into the conversation. “I do know him after all. He works in the post room at Charles’s office, and, anyway, crisis averted. Let me check these turkeys. I thought you were going to take some photos?”
There was sadness that day. It emanated from the two framed photographs on the mantelpiece, side by side, snapshots from their honeymoon. It was there in the wooden bauble hanging from the tree and engraved with Our First Married Christmas. I suppose they must have received it as a wedding present. How was anyone to know then that the marriage wouldn’t last the year? There was sadness in the ghosts that sat beside us all: beside Marnie and me and beside the other guests—drifters and strays—all of whom brought their lost loved ones with them, too.
But there was joy that day as well. And plenty of it. So I did as instructed and ignored all the things that couldn’t be addressed and focused instead on the food and the conversation and the games that we played in the late afternoon, all manner of strangers shouting out answers and high-fiving our teammates. I won at charades, if it’s possible to win. And I lost at Scrabble. Ian placed three eight-letter words and scored well over five hundred points. Emma and I beat Jenna and Isobel at canasta.
By seven o’clock most of the guests had left, and Marnie had abandoned her apron and was sitting on the sofa, her arm draped over her small bump.
“Shall I—”
“Just a quick one?” said Marnie.
Our friendship had been built on “just a quick tidy-up.” In our first year at secondary school—the first year of our friendship—our teacher Mrs. Carlisle was fanatical about neatness and cleanliness. With hindsight, it’s clear that she suffered from fairly extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. At the time, we thought she was simply a neat freak, but, as always, the truth is never evident in the moment.
Most mornings—sometimes more than once—she would insist that the entire class engage in “just a quick tidy-up.” This meant hanging coats and jumpers on the pegs at the back of the room, squaring rucksacks beneath our seats, textbooks in desks, ponytails retied if loose, no hair ties on wrists, no squiffy collars, no laces undone, no rolled shirtsleeves, and an endless list of small demands.
We always complied but it became a stock phrase, a joke that defined our friendship, one of the first things we shared that others—our parents, our siblings, other students in different tutor groups, and those at other schools—failed to understand at all.
Marnie and Emma watched two festive films—back to back—as comfortable together as they had been when we were children, while I flitted around the flat, stacking the dishwasher, clearing plates and glasses and wiping down the counters, until order was restored and I could settle beneath their blanket, too. I remember that the flat felt loud despite the silence. There was the whir of the dishwasher and a dripping somewhere within the walls. It ran along the skirting board and up the stairs and I turned up the volume on the television to drown it all out.
As the opening sequence of the third film illuminated the walls of the room, I felt my phone vibrating against my thigh. I pulled it out—I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I think I wondered if it might be an unexpected message from my father—and found instead an email from Valerie Sands.
The subject line read PLEASE READ: DON’T DELETE.
I felt suspicious, but intrigued, too. We hadn’t heard anything from Valerie: not a word since she’d published the second of her two articles. My initial anxiety had diminished in the intervening period. I had taken her silence and assumed that she was finished. And yet, here she was, on the evening of the most intimate day of the year, a day for family and friends, for home and for happiness, sending an email to someone she barely knew.
I’d stopped following her online as regularly, only occasionally tracing her footsteps and mentally mapping her days. I had seen that she’d attended but not performed in a show organized by the dance studio where she now had lessons at least twice each week. And that she’d written a few festive pieces for the newspaper: when the pop-up ice rink flooded, when the high street Christmas lights were switched on by an entirely forgettable celebrity, and something rather profound about homelessness and loneliness. But I wasn’t tracking her route through the city each day or researching every tagged location anymore. But it seemed that despite my indolence she’d remained just as committed to us.
I opened the email, hiding the brightness of the screen beneath the blanket. She said that she knew that her first story wasn’t entirely accurate, that as soon as she met Marnie, it became painfully apparent and very quickly, too, that she’d misinterpreted her suspicions. She said that she wouldn’t make the same mistake again and wished me a merry Christmas. “But”—she said—“I don’t think your story, your version of events, is entirely accurate, either.” She said that her jigsaw had missing pieces, certainly, but that she’d uncovered enough of them to know that there was more here, more hidden, more that still needed saying. She encouraged me to respond, to fill in the blanks, to finally tell my truth. Because, she said, and she promised this, she would find the answers eventually.
I squeezed my phone into the gap between two sofa cushions. I was feeling it again, the burgeoning fear, a panic reigniting within me.
But then Marnie jolted, the blanket slipping from her shoulders and her hand darting toward her stomach. “I just felt something,” she said. “I think I felt something.”
“Felt what?” said Emma. “What did you feel?”
“I don’t know. The baby? Like a butterfly. Like a butterfly in my stomach.”
“Let me,” said Emma, shifting Marnie’s hand away and folding hers into that space. “I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything.”
“Well, it’s stopped now.”
“Oh,” said Emma, disappointed, withdrawing her hand. “Well, let me know quicker next time,” she said. “So that I can feel it, too.”
I would watch over the next few months as that bump grew and grew, swelling and stretching underneath Marnie’s skin, until it sat in front of her like a ball tucked beneath her shirt. I saw her changing in the flicker of a flip book, inch by inch, week by week, as we fell back into our old routine, dinners at the end of each week. It was sort of beautiful and definitely strange to watch this woman—who I’d first known as a girl—evolving into a mother. At every stage of that evolution, I had protected her. At first, it was from her parents, and then from her boyfriends, and then from her boss. And later from a contemptible husband.
And always, even now, from the truth.
* * *
Emma and I stayed over that night. We shared a bed and I felt like we were children tucked into a coastal caravan all over again. Over breakfast, Emma asked about Valerie, and Marnie explained that they’d met just that once and that she had inadvertently prompted the second article, that it had been all her fault, and that I’d been right: we’d simply needed to be patient. I excused myself under the pretense of going to strip the bed because I couldn’t navigate that conversation with a hangover. And then, as we left, Emma looked down at the rug at the foot of the stairs and she said, “Oh, look. This is where she left your husband to die,” and she rolled her eyes. Her
humor was uncomfortably dark, wicked, and uninhibited, but Marnie laughed, liberated by the bluntness. And I tried to smile, too, to be part of the joke.
But I knew then that it might still fall apart, that the truth might still find me. It was close, always nearby, never fully in the past.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The mornings were dark and the evenings were dark and the nights were darker still. It was cold enough for snow with the sky set in dirty white. The trees were bare, just twigs, threatening to snap, and the air was crisp and biting. My skin was so dry that it itched constantly, flaking into my bedding and towels and there in my clothes when I undressed at the end of each day.
I had been working long hours since the beginning of the month, covering the holidays, the parents who couldn’t come back until the middle of January, when their children returned to school. And the most senior members of the staff, who wouldn’t be back until the end of the month, because the beginning of the year was the perfect time for the Caribbean and much of East Asia.
Every morning when I arrived at my desk, I reread Valerie’s email and I tried to concoct a reply in my mind. I played with the words, preparing a polite version that encouraged her to please step back and find another story, and a vicious, angry one that challenged her, and, sometimes, in only the quietest whisper, one that confessed. But then the workday would begin, and I would deliberately distract myself with issues that were easier to fix.
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had this sense that she was watching me. I sometimes saw her, or at least I thought I did: outside my flat; in my office; sometimes through the plastic windows of the tube, or on the platform or in the next carriage. I saw women with cropped hair everywhere, and I was always squinting to see a tattoo there in black at the back of the neck.
I found myself replaying his death in my mind. I wasn’t lingering on feelings—the adrenaline, the anticipation, the relief—but instead, rather pragmatically, on the clues that she might someday find. There were no fingerprints. There were no witnesses. There were no suspicions from anywhere else. There wasn’t even a body anymore, just a skeleton decomposing six feet beneath the earth.
Seven Lies Page 20
