04
I heard her laugh. Her humor was wicked. It still had the power to
05
shock me, even when my mind was filled with her thoughts, her wit,
06
her traumas.
07
I pulled on my dressing gown and secured the belt around my waist.
08
It was dark purple and worn, the fibers clumping together along the
09
sleeves where something had once been spilled. It had belonged to Jon-
10
athan and was far too big for me. The shoulder seams sat inches down
11
my upper arms and the hem hung below my knees, almost touching my
12
feet. He’d worn it whenever he’d woken early on weekends to prepare
13
a cooked breakfast.
14
I opened the front door. She was wearing a thick navy jumper and
15
loose jeans cropped above her ankles. Her white socks looked like those
16
we’d worn in primary school, thick with elasticated bands at the top
17
and fabric bobbles along the fringes of white trainers. Her hair had been 18
trimmed, cut short to mirror her jawline, sliding into a pointed chin.
19
“About bloody time,” Emma said. “You look like shit.”
20
I turned to look at myself in the small round mirror that hung from
21
a nail on the wall in the hallway. I hadn’t removed my makeup the night
22
before. My eyes were surrounded by smudges of black and my lipstick
23
had bled into the folds around my mouth.
24
I shrugged. “It was a good night.”
25
“Good?” she asked. “Your best friend’s wedding and all you can say
26
is good? Is that it?”
27
She handed me a brown paper bag filled with pastries. I peered in-
28
side: a plain butter croissant, a pain au chocolat.
29
“For you,” she said.
30
She headed toward the sofa and curled herself into the cushions, her
31S
feet coiled beneath her, sinking into my furniture, very much at home
32N
here. I poured myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge.
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“It was great,” I said instead. “A really great night. That better?”
01
“Urgh, that’s even worse,” she groaned. “You’re rubbish at this. Tell
02
me something interesting. Were there any arguments? Any fights? Who
03
got to sleep with the maid of honor?”
04
“No one got to sleep with the maid of honor,” I replied. “And no
05
fights, as far as I’m aware.”
06
“Charles on his best behavior, then?” she asked. “Not too much of
07
a cunt?”
08
“Not too bad,” I said. “Although there was this one thing right at the
09
end of the evening.”
10
My flat is surrounded by other flats on all sides but one and is always
11
that little bit too warm. So whenever I have guests— which, frankly, isn’t 12
very often— I watch them gradually undress throughout the course of
13
their visit. At first, it’s just their coats and sweaters, then it’s their shoes 14
and cardigans, and eventually they are sitting sockless in strap vests.
15
Emma was no different. But I was frightened by what I saw that day.
16
She lifted her jumper over her head. Her shoulder bones were sit-
17
ting high above the flesh of her shoulders. Her collarbones protruded,
18
pressing against her skin and stretching it, so that it looked too thin,
19
almost translucent. Her upper arms were scrawny, like the wings of a
20
bird, all skin and bone and no fat at all.
21
I took a sharp breath, a sigh in reverse, and Emma looked up with
22
her eyes wide and wary.
23
“Don’t,” she said, reading the concern written in the crease at the
24
center of my forehead and between my eyebrows. “I’m not interested.”
25
“ Em . . .” I said, but then she looked at me, fierce and unblinking,
26
and I knew that there was nothing more to say.
27
Emma was twelve when she first fell between the gaps in our con-
28
centration. I don’t remember the early days of her illness. I was so busy 29
revising, so focused on things that would never matter to me— quadratic
30
equations, the formula for respiration, river landscapes— that I failed to S31
recognize the deterioration of the thing that mattered most of all.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
It was July, I think. Emma and I had both finished school for the
02
summer— if I remember rightly Marnie was in the South of France—
03
and our parents were busy, as ever, hacking away at their marriage with
04
pickaxes disguised in insults and eye rolls. It was hot, too hot for En-
05
gland, the temperature over eighty- five degrees. We went to the open-
06
air pool and I squeezed our towels in between the hundreds of others,
07
the families with five children dipping and diving and running dripping
08
across the grass, the women with their curves, the older couples sitting
09
with their newspapers on folding chairs. I was wearing a swimsuit and
10
I was sweating in the sun, moisture trickling between my breasts, drop-
11
lets simmering on my top lip. Emma was wearing knee- length shorts
12
and a woolen jumper, and she was shivering. I wanted her to go in the
13
pool with me, but she wouldn’t: she said something about valuables,
14
but we had none, just towels and clothing and one book each. I nagged,
15
of course, because I’m an older sister and that is my right, and eventu-
16
ally she relented. I remember her easing her jumper over her head, and
17
her shoulders and collarbones were so much worse then, desperate to
18
escape her body, pushing at her thin, fair skin. She slipped her shorts
19
over her thighs and her legs were shapeless, straight lines of bone with
20
so little flesh, so little depth. She stared at me, challenging me to re-
21
spond to her frail, frightful body, and I said nothing.
22
Over the next few months I forced food onto her pla
te and some-
23
times she ate it and sometimes she didn’t. And then she was better,
24
briefly. And then she was worse again. And the next couple of years
25
continued in this pattern, never in the best of health, never in the worst, 26
until I left for university when she was just fourteen. And then there
27
were very few peaks and so many troughs. Until eventually even my
28
parents could no longer deny the situation sitting there at their dining
29
table and she was hospitalized and then released and then eventually
30
hospitalized again.
31S
I know that this casts her as a very particular character in a very
32N
particular story. But, if you’d met Emma— I wish that you had; you’d
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have liked her, I think— you’d know that she wasn’t that person at all.
01
Emma was never a victim. She was sick, yes, and for a very long time,
02
but that was such a small part of her narrative.
03
Her sickness existed somewhere within her, a strange plague that
04
she couldn’t control, there in her mind and in her bones and in the very
05
tissue of her being. It was a significant part of her life, but think of it as 06
a path that she didn’t choose, didn’t want, but that she learned to travel 07
in her own way. She eventually chose not to be treated anymore and I
08
did my very best to respect that decision.
09
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said, curling up on my sofa,
10
shielding herself, hiding behind her jumper. “Like you’ve seen a ghost.”
11
I raised an eyebrow; I couldn’t help it.
12
For years— for almost my entire time at university— I had night-
13
mares about Emma’s corpse. I would be dreaming of something else
14
when, in the middle of whatever I was envisaging— holidays, lecture
15
halls, Marnie— I would discover Emma’s dead body, her limbs stiff and
16
blue, eyes clouded and open wide. I would wake gasping for air, sweat-
17
ing and shaking in cold, damp sheets.
18
“Fuck’s sake,” she said eventually, pulling her jumper back over her
19
head. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
20
And I had no choice but to let it go. There was nothing to be gained
21
in an argument and everything to be lost.
22
“Charles,” she said, patting the space beside her on the sofa. “You
23
were saying.”
24
I sat down and recalled the events of the previous evening. I told her
25
about his slurring, the endless bottles of champagne, the relentless top-26
ups. I talked about his arm draped over my shoulder, the coarse fabric
27
of his starchy white shirt at the back of my neck. I closed my eyes; I
28
knew that I was blushing as I described his palm falling over my breast,
29
his fingertips over my nipple. I explained the space that expanded be-
30
tween us, the bright white of Marnie’s dress as she approached and her
S31
beside us and that sense of something being sucked back into its box.
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01
Emma was wide- eyed, openmouthed. “And what did she say?” Emma
02
whispered.
03
“Nothing,” I replied. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t see any-04
thing.”
05
“She didn’t see anything at all?” Emma looked down at the cushion
06
clutched to her chest.
07
“Are you quite sure?” she asked. “Definitely sure? This definitely
08
happened exactly like that? He wasn’t just drunk and loose- limbed and
09
a little bit handsy without really meaning to be?”
10
I shrugged. “Maybe,” I replied.
11
“Although it’s not very Charles to be anything other than exactly
12
what he means to be really, is it? That’s not really him at all.”
13
I smiled. Emma had never met Charles. So the only version of him
14
that she knew was mine.
15
Here, then, is something that I’ve thought about regularly over the
16
last few months. Emma didn’t know Charles. She had no reason to
17
doubt my experience, no reason not to believe that he really was a de-
18
praved pervert who would grope the maid of honor at his own wedding
19
and in front of his beautiful wife. And yet Emma’s instinctive response
20
was to question not Charles’s character but my version of events. What
21
does that say about me? About my capacity for truth? About my ability
22
to accurately read a situation?
23
Does it, in fact, suggest that Charles was innocent of all wrongdoing
24
that evening? That the error of judgment was mine and mine alone? I
25
don’t think so, but it’s worth your consideration. This is my truth, after 26
all. And that is not the same as the truth.
27
“Are you going to tell Marnie?” she asked. “That her new husband
28
groped you? Because I really think that would be a bad idea.”
29
I shook my head.
30
“Still creepy, though,” she continued. “Definitely odd.” She rotated
31S
the cushion in front of her chest, pinching it at the corners, spinning it 32N
like a wheel. “Were you scared?” she asked.
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“Of Charles?”
01
“Yeah,” she said. “Like, did it frighten you?”
02
“No,” I said, instinctively. “No. Not really.”
03
And as soon as I’d said the words, I realized that they weren’t true.
04
I had been scared. Not terrified. It wasn’t like that. But unnerved and
05
uneasy and suddenly very aware of myself as something much smaller
06
stuck in the presence of something much bigger. And it was more than
07
the small fear that I often feel in situations that I cannot predict. It was 08
more than the walk home from the tube station late at night and a
09
man’s footsteps behind me,
and more than someone standing too close
10
at a pedestrian crossing, and more than a group huddled up ahead in
11
the tunnel beneath the railway tracks. Because this was calculated. It
12
had purpose, an objective— and if it was to make me feel frightened,
13
then it had succeeded.
14
“How was Mum?” I asked.
15
Emma looked down at the floor and fiddled with a strand of wool
16
hanging loose from her jumper. “I didn’t go,” she replied. “I just . . . I 17
couldn’t.”
18
I exhaled slowly, trying very hard not to sigh. I had explained sev-
19
eral times to my mother— I’d even written it on her calendar— that I
20
wouldn’t be coming that Saturday, because of the wedding, but that
21
Emma would be there instead.
22
“Don’t tell me off,” said Emma. “Please don’t. I called. I told the re-
23
ceptionist. I just couldn’t do it. Okay? I just couldn’t.”
24
When we were younger, still children, my mother and my sister
25
were incredibly close. It looked quite disgusting to me, to be fused so
26
snugly to somebody else. And yet while Emma sometimes struggled
27
with feeling so stifled— and would briefly escape to spend time with
28
me elsewhere in the house— she needed my mother in a myriad of
29
ways: emotionally, practically, for comfort and company. She was a
30
worrier, like my mother, even then, and was uncomfortable and uneasy
S31
around new people. She hid behind my mother’s legs in strange places,
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
peering between her thighs. At home, she followed my mother between
02
rooms, wanting to help in the kitchen, with the cleaning, with what-
03
ever it was that our mother was doing. In the evenings, she liked to be
04
cuddled and read to and bathed. Emma needed my mother and my
05
mother needed to be needed.
06
But when Emma really needed my mother— when she really needed
07
support and love and strength— she received nothing. Her anchor
08
slipped away, embarrassed at the very nature of the need. I look back
09
now, and I know that my mother was simply frightened. She was never
10
idealistic, and she must have known what was happening and how
11
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 12
