“Hello?” I said.
“Come on in,” she replied.
Marnie was sitting up in bed, blankets twisted around her legs and her red hair gathered on the top of her head. She was wearing a pale blue hospital gown and she looked beautiful, her skin puffy and soft, her eyes fresh and bright.
“Morning,” I said. I perched at the foot of the bed, the mattress deflating beneath me.
“Who is it’s come to visit us?” Marnie sang, looking not at me but at the baby bent across her chest, her voice high-pitched and tinny. She twisted Audrey toward me, so that I could see the creases in her little cheeks, the folds from sleep, and her lips opening and closing. “Who’s this?” Marnie squeaked.
“Morning, Audrey,” I said.
“Hello, Auntie Jane,” said Marnie, still shrill.
“How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said. “But that’s fine; it’s all fine.”
She smiled and folded the baby back against her body, nimbly, never releasing her head and yet rotating her gracefully.
“And how are you feeling?” I asked.
“So-so,” she replied. “Sore, but that’s to be expected. And I’m happy. I feel good.”
“And this little one’s doing well?” I asked, holding my hand out and letting my fingers hover a few inches away from the baby.
“She’s perfect,” Marnie replied.
“I know,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “and I meant to tell you this—it’s a bit odd—but before I forget: I had a message from that journalist. You know the one? The one from before? She left it last night.”
I wonder what my face looked like in that moment. I know that my hand stayed frozen in front of me. I felt bile building at the back of my throat, and I inadvertently retched and had to turn it into a hiccup so as not to look suspicious.
“You heard from her?” I asked.
“She left me a message,” Marnie replied.
“She left me one, too,” I said.
The ward felt suddenly far too cold. The hairs on my arms stood erect beneath my cardigan. I clenched my teeth together to prevent them from chattering. But Marnie barely noticed the change in me. She was concentrating instead on Audrey, whose white cotton hat had slipped down over her eyes.
“What did she want?” I asked. I felt nauseated not only somewhere in my head and in my stomach, but in my bones and my muscles, too. It was like waves were swelling through every layer of tissue within my body.
“I don’t know,” she replied, still trying to press the hat onto Audrey’s head.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know,” she said, “I don’t really want to think about her. She isn’t a nice woman, and I have plenty of nice things in my life now. I don’t need to allow her that space in my brain.”
“Did you call her back?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “I didn’t even notice the message until this morning,” she said. “I thought it was my mother actually. I don’t think I’d have listened to it otherwise.”
“And?” I insisted.
Marnie lifted the hat from Audrey’s head and scrunched it inside her fist. “Her head’s too small,” she said.
“Marnie,” I snapped. “Will you look at me? What did she say? In her message? Has she found anything? Is she still looking into us?”
“Jesus, Jane.” She threw the cotton hat toward me, and it caught in the air and settled between us on the blue bedspread.
“What?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know if she’s going to be writing about us again? I don’t want to be on that bloody website, not after last time. Do you? Doesn’t that matter to you at all?”
“You need to calm down,” she said. “This isn’t the place. And why do you care so much about it anyway? What does it matter if a journalist investigates us? She can waste her own time all she wants. She’s not going to find anything, so what’s it to us how she spends her time?”
Audrey began to whimper.
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Marnie. “Don’t do that. Here we go.” Audrey was lifted into the air, her body still so curled, and then finally it made sense.
Whatever was in that message was irrelevant. There had been no revelation, no evidence, no something undone. Because, if there had been, this conversation would have been a different thing from the very beginning. Because Marnie has never been someone who keeps secrets. She has never been someone who allows anger to build insistently within her, who lets it percolate and then erupt. If there was something that needed saying, she’d have said it.
But I had been too consumed by my own panic. I had inadvertently created a storm from still air and had carelessly revealed my own fear. I had assumed that it would be mirrored in Marnie. But she didn’t know that there was a reason to be afraid of the articles, or the messages, or the constant meddling. I had foolishly assumed that we still knew everything together, still felt everything together, that any spaces that ever opened between us were quickly cemented, but of course that wasn’t true anymore; it could never be true again.
I needed to de-escalate the conversation, to hide my anxiety, because she was right to be shocked by it.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
There was something distracting in the eerie contrast between what Valerie might have uncovered and the perfect serenity of that small, curtained cubicle.
“I think so,” Marnie said, pulling Audrey close again. She fished another small hat from her rucksack, which was crammed with rolled-up onesies and frilled socks, and she slid this one over Audrey’s forehead until it sat snug above her eyebrows.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “And you’re right. We should just ignore her. She’ll stop eventually.”
“Exactly,” Marnie replied.
A midwife arrived, a different one, to assess Audrey, to test her hearing and to weigh her again and to formally discharge her into the world beyond these hospital walls. She was older, warm and smiling, with a very confident matronly stature. I was grateful for the interruption.
“And how are you getting home?” she asked, her eyes flickering between the three of us.
“I was going to book a taxi,” I replied. “Shall I do that now?”
“Do you have a car seat?” she asked.
I nodded toward it, squared away at the back of the ward.
“Then perfect,” she said. “You’re all ready to go.” She tickled Audrey’s toes. “Aren’t you a lucky little sausage to have such lovely mummies taking you home?”
I didn’t correct her.
* * *
Jane,” said Marnie, as we waited for our taxi outside the hospital. “Can I ask you something?” She was shivering in her summer dress despite the sunshine.
“Anything,” I replied.
Audrey, already strapped into her seat, bundled beneath blankets, whimpered and then sneezed.
“You seem different,” she said. “Has something upset you?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Was it that journalist?” she asked. “That message?”
An ambulance stopped in front of the main entrance, its sirens still shrieking.
“Jane,” she said, exasperated.
“What?” I asked. “What did you say?”
The sirens ceased. A gurney was lowered from the rear of the vehicle and rushed into the building, accompanied by two paramedics in green and a doctor in blue.
“Are you still bothered by that journalist?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Marnie sighed. “I get that. But, if anything, it’s worse in some ways for me. She tricked me. I thought she was nice, that time that we met. She seemed lovely, actually. And very beautiful, too. She seemed so kind and compassionate. I really thought that I could trust her. But it was all a performance, wasn�
�t it? So there we go: lesson learned. I know it’s miserable to have to absorb those accusations—I know what that’s like, remember—but she’s not important anymore.”
I nodded as though I understood, as though this made sense, as though I, too, was unsettled by a false accusation.
“Or is that not it?” asked Marnie. “Was it something she said? In her message? Is that the problem?”
I shook my head.
“What did she say to you?” Marnie insisted.
I paused, searching for a safe answer. “I expect she said the same thing to me that she said to you,” I replied.
“I only listened to the beginning of it,” she said. “I deleted it as soon as I realized who it was from. But what was it? What did she say?”
I felt a shiver of relief shake through me. I had been right not to panic. She knew nothing more than she had known before. And then that brief release was overwhelmed by a subtler fear. Because it wasn’t that Valerie had left an irrelevant message, stating nothing of note. Which is where my hope had led me. But simply that I had been lucky. If Marnie hadn’t deleted that message, who knew what she might now know?
“Jane?” she asked.
“She was calling to apologize,” I said.
The truth—and I’m almost ashamed to say it—is that I fabricated the rest of this made-up message spontaneously, without really thinking about it, embellishing this lie as easily as I had the others.
“She said that she’d been having a bad time, that her ex-husband had recently remarried, and that she had thrown herself too forcefully into her work. She said that she was sorry for the hurt that she’d caused, and that she hoped we could forgive her.”
That was the sixth lie.
I told it for the same reason that I told the others. But it felt different, this lie, because it was a pause, not a stop, to a problem. Valerie had come for Marnie. She would come again.
The pressure to do something was building, and I needed to address it.
“Oh,” said Marnie, staring at me. “That’s strange. I thought she sounded quite distressed at the beginning of the message. What were the words—”
“It’s not important—” I began.
“No, I know,” she said. “But it’s bugging me now. She said something that immediately made me bristle, you know? And I knew straightaway that it was her and that I didn’t want to listen to it. Because I was sure it was going to be antagonistic and full of ridiculous lies all over again, and I just wasn’t in the mood quite frankly. But . . . Oh, I can’t remember.”
“I think she’d been drinking,” I replied.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Although I’m sure there was something more.”
Did she know? Did she doubt me? I couldn’t tell. But I didn’t think it likely. Because this journalist was the unstable presence—who stalked us and harassed us and published malicious lies on the internet. And I was her reliable friend: solid and stable and permanent. If it was the word of one against the word of the other, I know where I’d lay my faith. And yet I felt the smallest of doubts because I don’t think she’d ever disagreed with me quite so easily before.
“Right,” she said, as a taxi pulled up in front of us. “This must be it.”
* * *
I traveled home with them, clipping Audrey’s car seat into position and carrying her things—nappy bags, blankets, spare outfits—up to the flat. I hovered outside the front door as Marnie wrestled with the key, as it scraped and scratched its way into the lock. And then, eventually, it swung open.
The flat was just as we’d left it: tidy but for the blue ball anchored in the middle of the lounge, the hallway uncluttered and neat, the black and white rug squared against the bottom of the stairs.
I stood there with the bags hanging at my calves and then Marnie turned to me and she said: “We’ve got it from here.”
And just like that, I was dismissed.
Again, I was dismissed.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The spring began to inch toward summer, and I felt frustrated.
I wanted to be spending more time with Marnie.
We made plans, and she canceled them with very little notice. I visited her several times in those first few weeks, delivering supplies—new nappies, medicines, an ice tray—but I never stayed for very long. Because there was always something happening, someone interrupting, a phone call from the nurse or a visit from the midwife.
She was so determined to tackle this new stage of her life independently. She relied on other women, other new mothers who could provide advice that was alien to me. I felt inadequate. She trusted medical professionals who could prescribe ointments of all sorts that were apparently necessary in the first few weeks of an infant’s life. I wanted to be there—I really did—and I promise you that I tried to be supportive. But I often felt like a hindrance, not knowing where all the new paraphernalia belonged or how to support a baby’s head or which way around a nappy went.
I wanted so desperately to be part of their world, and it didn’t make sense to me that they wouldn’t want that, too. I wanted to learn along with Marnie, to discover the challenges standing beside her. I had a vision for how our lives should look, the way the three worlds would be woven into one, and at this distance it felt impossible.
We went for brunch once, when Audrey was maybe six weeks old. I was so excited to see them both, and I bought a jingling ring of plastic pieces as a present for Audrey. But she wasn’t interested in the gift. She cried constantly, distressed by the new noises and smells and the bright lights of a café in the sunshine. She was livid, flustered—her little face red like a blister—and Marnie was bouncing her up and down, hushing and shushing and sweating herself.
“Fuck it,” she said. “The fans. The fucking fans.”
“What fans?” I replied. The waitress brought our plates to the table: scrambled eggs for Marnie and a bacon bap for me.
“I was meant to pick them up,” she said. “It’s too hot, the apartment. It’s a nightmare, to be honest. She’s not sleeping, and I have this little thermometer and it’s bright red all the time because it’s so damn hot—I’ve never known a spring like it—but there’s not a lot I can do about the weather, is there? So I ordered three fans. That’s probably a bit over the top—maybe I only needed one—but I was in a flap. Anyway, they’ve got to be picked up by noon and I’ll never get there now, not with her like this. I’ll just have to go tomorrow. Which is another night of screaming.”
“I can go,” I offered. “Where is it?”
She paused. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Do you mean it? You’d have to leave now.”
“Of course,” I replied. I wanted to help.
“Well, let me just—” She rifled through her handbag and pulled out a receipt. “It’s probably only ten minutes if you walk fast?”
“Sure,” I said, taking the thin piece of paper from her hand. “It’s no problem.”
“But your food—don’t you—”
“I had some cereal earlier,” I said. “I’m fine. Really.”
“Well, take this,” she said. And her right hand disappeared into her bag again. She pulled out a small gold key and I recognized it immediately. “I’ll pay up and I’ll meet you there, but I need to sort her out first, so you might get back before me. Are you sure about this? It’s all paid for.”
“Absolutely,” I said, and I reached out to take the key. I felt the scratch along the flat circular top and I knew that it was the exact same one I’d held before. “I’ll see you there.”
I collected the fans, and I carried them back toward her flat; they were heavy and awkward. I let myself in. It felt different there then: inhabited, hectic, full. I opened the three boxes in the hallway, and I assembled the fans, and I plugged each into the socket beside the radiator, one by one, to check that they worked. There, crouched on the floo
r, I was drawn again to that black and white carpet. I lifted one of the corners to peer beneath. Nothing. I pulled it back a little farther, but there wasn’t even a stain by the bottom step.
I left the fans at the foot of the stairs, and I sat on the sofa and waited for Marnie and Audrey to return home, and I didn’t touch anything because I didn’t want to further upset the sense of the place. They returned just after one o’clock, and Marnie said that she was tired and needed a rest and thanked me for the fans and said that we must try for brunch again soon, or maybe lunch, that she’d be in touch.
We haven’t managed to see each other since.
I was meant to be seeing her for dinner last week, but then she called my office in the afternoon to say that she didn’t feel much like cooking, she was exhausted, and could we please rearrange? I said not to worry, to come to me and I would cook, or I could cook at hers, or how about takeout. But she was insistent. Not today.
It has been over a month.
I have been using the time—this space—to concentrate instead on Valerie.
I wish I could say that it had proved a satisfying distraction, but that would be untrue. And I did promise you the truth. So here it is. I found myself contemplating things that would—how might you say it?—prevent her from interfering in a very permanent way. I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I might not have known her secrets in the way that she knew mine, but I was quietly confident that I could create a fatal situation.
But it wasn’t that straightforward. I couldn’t find a way to do it that didn’t make me feel queasy. I liked the idea of pushing her in front of a car. It would have had a satisfying symmetry. I imagined ways to snaffle her pills—I’d seen her posting about hay fever tablets—and replace them with something more deadly. But I bristled every time my thoughts became more pragmatic and less fanciful. Which, in many ways, served to prove her wrong: I wasn’t a murderer after all.
Seven Lies Page 24
