The Lying Tongue

by Andrew Wilson

  “Good. I’m pleased to hear it. I still can’t believe that that boy came back and behaved like that. He must be a truly awful person. I’ll bet you are pleased you fired him when you did.”

  “Indeed,” said Crace, using his napkin to wipe a smudge of tomato sauce from the corner of his mouth. “He was insufferable.

  And anyway, if I’d stuck with him, I would never have found you.”

  He gave me that look again, the one that turned my stomach. I smiled, pretending that I was pleased by the compliment. It was only a matter of time, I kept telling myself, before we would have to have our little talk, when he would have to face facts. I doubt he would be smiling after that.

  “That was delicious, Adam. Really lovely. You caught the sauce just in time.”

  “And thank you for this,” I said, taking another sip of the Margaux. “It’s wonderful.”

  He held out his glass.

  “Cheers,” he said. “Here’s to you—for everything.”

  “Cheers,” I said, looking down. “Right, let me clear away these plates.”

  “Oh yes, you’ll be keen to get on with your reading.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Gordon, about the reading—”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wondered if you could give me an hour or so. I just want to look over the piece, rewrite a couple of sentences here and there.”

  He looked disappointed.

  “It’s just that I want to make it as good as possible for you, that’s all.”

  “Oh, very well,” he said, looking at the mass of dirty plates, cups and bowls that scattered the work surface. “Why don’t you leave the dishes? You could do them later if you like. There’s so much mess in here, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference, do you?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I get you anything before I go into my room?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, holding out his glass for a refill of the wine. As I poured the dark, almost black, liquid into his glass, he moved his hand so that it brushed against mine and smiled. I wasn’t sure how much more of this kind of behavior I could stand, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” he said as I walked out of the kitchen.

  In my room I looked over my writing. The story centered on a young man named Richard, who could not accept that his girlfriend, Emma, had ended their relationship. I described the boy standing outside Emma’s flat, watching her windows, unable to understand why he had been rejected. Memories of their time together infuse him with a kind of ecstatic happiness, and he becomes so possessed by the past that he believes he and Emma are still together. He goes back to his new, empty flat, picks up some shopping on the way and cooks a delicious supper. He sets the table for two, and during dinner he talks to the space across from him as if it were occupied by his girlfriend. He makes a toast and raises his glass to Emma, the perfect woman he would always love, who would, in his mind at least, forever remain unchanged and untouchable.

  I found Crace in the drawing room, his eyes closed, his brow furrowed. When he heard me walk into the room, he opened his eyes, smiled and told me to sit on the chair opposite him.

  “Make yourself comfortable and then you can begin,” he said, obviously amused.

  I coughed and explained that the story was just a fragment of what I hoped would form a larger work. Tentatively, I started to read. At various points I looked up to see Crace listening carefully to my words, occasionally nodding his head in appreciation, agreement, recognition or merely force of habit. I’m not sure how long I read, perhaps a quarter of an hour or so, but by the time I reached the end of the story, the part where Richard sits down to dinner and addresses his fantasy girlfriend, I noticed that Crace had tears in his eyes. When I finished, he looked so moved that he couldn’t speak.

  “Sorry,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face. “That…well…that was beautiful. Beautiful.”

  “I’m afraid it still needs a bit of work,” I said, astonished and embarrassed by his reaction.

  “No, no, I think it was just perfect.”

  “Of course, I’d appreciate any criticism, anything you think I needed to change or alter.”

  “You mustn’t change a word,” he said. “No, not a single word.”

  “Thank you, Gordon. That means a great deal to me.”

  “Not at all, my dear boy. It really was very well drawn. You have a great talent for invention.”

  Over the course of the next few days, I carried on with my duties, getting the Francesco de’ Lodovici woodcut fitted with a new piece of glass and rehanging it on the wall, straightening the rest of the pictures that Crace’s former employee had disturbed, cleaning the kitchen of dirty pots and pans and tidying the drawing room. As I worked, I rehearsed the scene in which I finally confronted Crace with the evidence about his past. I imagined myself walking into the drawing room, where Crace was reading, and asking him to listen to me; I had something important that I wanted to say. He would look up without interest initially, but then, when he heard the contents of my speech, panic would infect his eyes. I ran through our conversation over and over, and in my imagination I acted out my lines using different intonations, emphases and punctuation. I would pause for a few moments, watching Crace’s face for a flicker of emotion, after I let it be known that I had obtained Chris’s suicide note. Yes, that would add greater dramatic effect. That would work splendidly.

  It was important to present myself in a persuasive, confident manner; after all, I didn’t want Crace to twist my words. But there was no way he could absolve himself of guilt on this occasion. I had it all in black and white, the truth of the written word.

  Timing, choosing the right moment, was important. Before confronting him, I wanted to try and lull him into a false sense of security, so I did everything according to his instructions, careful not to upset or antagonize him in any way. I ignored his occasional bursts of rudeness, his impolite dismissal of questions and inquiries, and endured his pathetic attempts to flirt with me. When he “accidentally” brushed against me, the jut of his ribcage pressing against me as he tried to squeeze by me in a corner of the kitchen, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was somewhere else. Since my return, his interest in me had heightened to a level that I would describe as near-obsession. The act of leaving the palazzo to get the glass fitted on the Francesco de’ Lodovici woodcut, for example, had almost reduced him to tears. But after I promised to be as quick as I could and presented him with the alternative—hanging the picture back on the wall in its damaged state—he relented. Often I would catch him looking in my direction, a dreamlike expression on his face, living out some fragment of memory from the past.

  One evening after Crace had told me he was retiring for the night, I ran a hot bath. I eased myself down under the water and closed my eyes. I heard the murmur of my heartbeat like an uncertain drum in the distance. I stayed under the water for some time; I’m not sure exactly how long, but I do remember the sense of freedom I felt in that dark place, deprived of my senses. Before the water started to cool, I soaped and rinsed myself, climbed out of the bath and had just started to dry my body when I saw the handle of the bathroom door slowly beginning to turn. I realized I had forgotten to lock it—Crace, after all, had already wished me good night—but as I quickly reached out to slide the bar across the space between the latch and the frame, the door began to open. I secured the towel around my waist, but Crace was already in the room before he asked whether he could come in. He apologized, but he had an urgent need to pee, he said. He was still fully dressed in the pair of bright orange corduroys, white shirt and light brown tweed jacket he had been wearing all day. Obviously, he had decided not to go to bed after all. His eyes gazed upon my chest, running up and down my torso as if he were about to feast on my flesh.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” I said, feeling my face redden.

  “There’s no need to leave on my account,” he said. “After all, we ar
e all boys together, aren’t we?”

  “No, honestly, Gordon, it’s fine,” I said, leaving the room as he started to unzip his trousers.

  As I stood in the corridor, I could hear him relieving himself. A few moments later he called my name, saying that the bathroom was free. He waited in the doorway, knowing that I would have to brush by him. I smiled, hoping that he would move, but he remained fixed to the spot.

  “You know, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and me. Here and now.”

  “I don’t quite follow, sorry.”

  “It was almost like it was meant to be, don’t you think? I mean, everything you’ve done for me since you arrived here, all your kindnesses and careful attention to detail. You saw how I fell apart when you went away for a week or so. Terribly pathetic on my part, I realize, but your influence has been life changing, it really has.”

  “I’m pleased that you’re happy.”

  “Oh, yes. Happier than I have been for years.”

  I stepped toward him so as to suggest that he stand away from the door, but he did not move, so I jumped nervously from foot to foot in a mock attempt to keep warm.

  “How inexcusably insensitive of me. You’re still wet; you must be freezing. You must get dressed at once. What was I thinking?”

  He turned sideways in the doorway so as to offer a space by which I could pass him. Holding the corner of my towel with one hand and bending my head slightly forward so I wouldn’t meet his eyes, I passed by him, half expecting to feel the touch of his hand on the base of my back. Although he let me walk by him without assault, once I was inside the bathroom he continued to stand in the doorway with a curious expression on his face. I willed him to shut the door and go away, but he carried on looking at me as if he were testing my reaction. What did he want me to do—let him watch me as I finished drying myself? The idea was abhorrent to me, enough to turn my stomach. My face reddened again, anger pulsing inside me, and I felt my wrist beginning to ache from the intensity with which I gripped my towel. I had to concentrate to keep my hand where it was as I was afraid of what I might do. But just then, in the instant before I lost control, Crace shifted his body and stepped back.

  “You mustn’t let me keep you,” he said. “Look at you, you poor thing, you’re shivering. We don’t want you to catch your death, do we?”

  As soon as he walked across the corridor and into his bedroom, I slammed the door and collapsed, shaking, onto the edge of the bath. I couldn’t allow myself to think about what had very nearly happened. I proceeded to dry my body, wiping myself clean of the drops of water that spotted my skin, and as I dressed I tried to convince myself that this was merely another example of Crace’s eccentric behavior. But the way he looked at me when he was standing in that doorway. It was not so much an expression of desire as one of expectation.

  In the dream I was in my parents’ house, only the corridors seemed to stretch on forever and the building had a lot more rooms. I was running, searching their home for something, but I was uncertain what it was I was looking for, although I was sure that I would recognize it when I found it. I climbed the stairs, which felt as though they were melting away beneath me, but when I stretched out my foot to step onto the landing, instead of rising upward I felt myself falling for what seemed like hundreds of feet through darkness until I landed in the corridor outside my teenage bedroom. From outside I heard music playing, a CD I knew I had bought but couldn’t place. I turned the handle of the door and stepped inside to see the figure of a boy sitting on the bed with his back to me. He was wearing the same black trousers, blue blazer and white shirt that made up the school uniform and, because of this, I took him to be one of my friends from my year. But, curiously, I didn’t know his name. I took a step closer to the bed, but as I reached out to touch the curve of his cheek and he began to turn his head toward me to reveal himself, I felt something brush against me in the exact same spot on my own face.

  I opened my eyes and sat bolt upright, certain that whatever had touched me was not confined to a dream. Outside my room I was sure I could hear footsteps disappearing down the corridor. I rubbed my eyes as I tried to look into the darkness of my room, gradually making out the curved frame at the foot of my bed, the shape of the shutters by the window, the line of the desk and the mound of my rucksack in the corner. I tried to listen for more signs of Crace, but all I heard was water lapping outside the palazzo. I checked my watch by the bed. It was 3:26 AM.

  It had only been a matter of hours since Crace had surprised me in the bathroom. Now he had taken to stealing into my room in the middle of the night. I ran my fingers over my cheek to the spot that I was convinced he had just touched, somehow believing that it might feel different or that he had left a trace of himself behind. The nerve endings still tingled with the memory, almost as if Crace’s hand still lingered over my skin.

  I pushed myself out of bed and, as quietly as I could, walked over to the door, which was slightly ajar. I was convinced that I had shut it properly when I had entered the room earlier. I opened the door and stepped into the dark corridor and, running my hands along the wall, felt my way along to the portego. Moonlight streamed into the hall from the window overlooking the canal, casting its eerie silver sheen onto the pictures and etchings. I eased my way down the corridor but stopped outside Crace’s quarters. I was certain I could hear him inside. I was about to turn around and trace my way back to my bedroom when I heard Crace’s door opening and a shaft of light slashed into the darkness.

  “Adam? Is that you?” said Crace, standing in his doorway.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I’ve just been to use the bathroom.”

  “Oh, you gave me a terrible fright. I heard someone lurking outside and thought it must be that awful boy again.”

  “No, it’s only me,” I said, pretending to yawn.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Crace, walking out of his room and opening the bathroom door. “I need to get some pills. Now, where are they? I know they’re in here somewhere.”

  I turned down the corridor and started to head back to my room when I heard Crace call my name.

  “Would you mind helping me?” he said with a note of desperation in his voice. “I can’t find the fuckers. What is it with all this stuff? Where the hell are they?”

  In the bathroom he had pulled out all the contents of the medicine cabinet—plasters, empty tubes of hemorrhoid cream, nail clippers, a few sterilized wipes, and dark plastic bottles containing old drugs—and thrown them into the sink where he rummaged about among the mess, occasionally tossing items over his shoulder as he dismissed them from his search.

  “Gordon, here, let me,” I said, easing my way by him. “Look, why don’t you go and try to lie down and I’ll find the tablets and bring them to you.”

  “Would you? That would be very kind. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I suppose I haven’t been the same since…well, you know.”

  He raised his thin, almost invisible eyebrows in a gesture of acknowledgment and mutual understanding, but the manic glint in his eyes and his rictus smile unsettled me.

  “Which tablets are you looking for? What’s the name of them?”

  “I think they’re diazepam.”

  “You go back to bed and I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

  His eyes lingered on my face before he turned around and walked back into his room. I searched my way through the bottles of old cough medicine and calamine lotion, tubs of decongestant and dozens of different pharmaceuticals until I found the pills he was looking for. I set them to one side and then placed everything else back into the cabinet. As I closed it, I caught a glimpse of myself—or was it Chris?—in its mirrored surface.

  In the kitchen I filled a glass full of water and returned to Crace’s bedroom with the pills. He was sitting in his elaborate bed, surrounded by the red velvet c
urtains, his head resting on a pillow propped up on the ivory headboard. His bedside light cast strange shadows about the alcove and over the figure of the Madonna.

  “What would I ever do without you?”

  It was a refrain he had repeated several times to me since I had arrived back at the palazzo. I gave him the sleeping pills and the glass of water.

  “Thank you, my dear, thank you,” he said, his thin tongue flicking over his lips.

  The loose flesh on his scrawny neck quivered as he swallowed the tablets. He reached out and placed his hand over mine, clasping it in silent appreciation, where it stayed until I could no longer bear the feel of his skin next to mine.

  “Here, let me plump up this pillow for you,” I said, reaching out. “We’ll get you nice and comfortable so you can have a good sleep.”

  Whether it was from the drug itself or a psychological effect brought about by merely swallowing the pills, Crace’s eyes began to flutter. He tried to engage in snatches of conversation so as to fight the impulse to sleep, but eventually he could no longer resist. I pulled together the thick curtains that shrouded his bed, sealing him into his velvet cocoon, and was about to turn off his bedside light when Crace sighed deeply. I leaned forward and pulled back a little of the thick fabric to hear him whisper the name “Chris.” I left him in the dark, dreaming of the past.

  As I walked out of my room each morning, I felt as though I were stepping onto a stage, ready to perform a certain part in front of Crace. Each day I had to tell myself that it wasn’t for much longer; if only I could endure a few more weeks with him, then I would be in a position where I was in ultimate control, free to tell his story in any way I saw fit, able to mold his history according to a pattern I had conceived. The pressure to behave in a certain way, appearing to be constantly courteous and ever obliging, caused my genuine feelings of dislike and disgust to intensify. My only outlet was my notebook, which I took out of its hiding place at the end of each day and used as a means to purge myself of my increasingly poisonous emotions. It became a receptacle of all that was dark in myself.