Here We Lie

by Sophie McKenzie

  This truth would see her through.

  Of course it wasn’t that simple. Plenty of people told Rose that she was too young to take on a moody teen boy and a girl on the brink of adolescence. But Rose never wavered. It was what Emily and Martin wanted too. Martin – after that first cry – did not show his emotions again and only briefly, and very gruffly, said he didn’t need looking after by anyone, that he and Rose would be fine taking care of Emily on their own. Emily was, in contrast, highly emotional, telling anyone who would listen that she wanted to stay in her home with her brother and sister and that she refused to consider moving to anyone else’s house. She said so repeatedly and vociferously through floods of tears. She had turned to Rose immediately in a way that broke Rose’s heart, yet helped mend it at the same time, asking her older sister to carry out all the little things Mum had used to do for her: from baking biscuits to reading to her at night, a habit that neither Emily nor their mother had wanted to give up.

  Rose didn’t really want to read the silly friendship stories that Emily devoured. She had never been much of a reader herself. But she sensed that what would help Emily most was routine. After almost a month of turmoil and endless conversations with family friends and distant relatives she’d never met before – neither Mum nor Dad had any living parents or siblings – it was decided. The house was Rose’s – well, technically it had been left to all three of them, but Martin and Emily’s shares were held in trust by Rose as their guardian. By the time of Martin’s birthday at the very end of November, the three of them were living alone together. It was harder than Rose had expected. She had plenty of money now at least – from Dad’s life insurance – so she had dropped her waitressing job and decided to defer her university place too. She had time to shop and to clean, and various friends of her parents brought round food twice a week, while Sally was lending them her cleaner on a regular basis too.

  It wasn’t the practical stuff that bothered Rose.

  It was the guilt.

  Every day that passed, Rose replayed what she knew of her parents’ last hours over and over in her head. She had seen Dad with that woman, then she’d heard him deny the affair to Mum. And she had seen Mum sobbing because she didn’t know what to believe.

  Perhaps if Rose had spoken out and confirmed Mum’s suspicions the crash might not have happened. An eyewitness had told the police that Mum and Dad had been arguing when the other car rammed into them. What else could they possibly have been rowing over than Dad’s affair? Mum had almost certainly only got into the car in order to confront Dad – her shift hadn’t been due to start until later so he couldn’t have been giving her a lift to work or anything. Surely if Mum had known the truth already, she wouldn’t have been in the car and Dad wouldn’t have been distracted and so might have been able to avoid the crash.

  Rose’s thoughts careered from self-loathing to worry. Not over Emily, who was at least open in her grief. It was Martin. Rose couldn’t reach him. His birthday was in two days’ time and so far all he had done was bite her head off when she asked what he’d like to do to mark the occasion.

  ‘Nothing,’ he’d snapped. ‘There’s no fucking point.’

  Rose didn’t like him swearing. She knew Dad would have stopped him, but Martin seemed to think he was a law unto himself. He wasn’t doing a stroke of work for his GCSE courses – understandable perhaps – but then he hadn’t done much before the accident either. It was obvious that losing Mum and Dad would change him, but Rose was sure there was something else too, some deep anger in him that had been there long before their parents’ death. The worst of it was that Martin rebuffed all her attempts to find out. He never spoke to her, hardly ever even looked at her. The last time they’d had a proper conversation had been weeks ago, on the day he’d got into a fight at school. Even then, all he’d said was that the other guy had deserved his beating.

  Rose had no idea how to deal with him.

  Martin Campbell looked at himself in the mirror. Sometimes these days he thought he was going mad. Even before Mum and Dad died there had been this weird distance between how he felt inside and how everyone else saw him. Mum had been the only person who’d sensed it. She had asked him, straight out, if he had feelings for Ben Bartholemew. Martin had said nothing at first, embarrassed. But Mum had drawn him out and reassured him, and now she was gone there was nobody he could talk to. So there was the Mum-shaped hole in his heart, plus the strangeness of the everyday reality of her and Dad just not being there any more, plus the burning desire for not just Ben but half of his friends and a million anonymous men plus this angry feeling that never ever seemed to go away. It was all Martin felt a lot of the time. Rose made it worse, hovering around him like she was his mother. She might be able to act like that around Emily but no way was Martin taking her being all Mum-ish over him. Rose had no idea. It was hard to believe they were related. For example, Martin liked the Stone Roses while Rose played bloody Take That over and over again in her bedroom. If he had to hear ‘A Million Love Songs’ one more time he would go insane.

  Emily was the only person who didn’t spin him into a rage, the only person in the world he felt calm around. He was never going to let anything bad happen to her. Rose might get all parental and on her case over piano practice and bedtimes but Martin was going to look after the important stuff and make sure nobody ever hurt her.

  Martin ran his hand through his hair, smoothing the gel through to the ends so that it stood up in little peaks. He was too skinny and there were spots on his forehead but none of that mattered. In two days he would be sixteen and after that point he was never going to let anyone tell him what to do, ever again.

  November 2014

  The day of Dee Dee’s funeral dawns bright and clear – a crisp autumn morning at the start of November. I’m hoping that this day will bring some kind of closure on Dee Dee’s death – though obviously not her loss – so that our lives, Jed’s especially, can start to settle around the new reality of life without her.

  The funeral itself has been a long time coming. The French authorities kept the body for repeated tests, firstly for the police, then for the French government, then for the legal representatives. Jed and Zoe stayed in Corsica for nearly a month altogether, then brought Dee Dee home towards the end of September. They were just starting to plan a funeral for the following week, when yet more lawyers intervened and everything was delayed all over again.

  Jed has been busy this whole time. This is partly, of course, because he is back to work, but even when he’s at home he spends hours on the phone with Zoe or his brother, keeping them up to date with first the investigation into the manufacturers’ production methods and then the attempts to get the French government to bring a negligence case.

  Last week everything came to a head. Repeated inspections of the Benecke Tricorp factory had revealed no problem in working methods, which means the French government are unwilling to make a criminal negligence case against them. Jed, who is certain cross-contamination occurred, is determined to proceed with his civil suit.

  ‘The company that makes ExAche has a bunch of processing plants in China that share equipment,’ he tells me for the third time. ‘The place where they make the powders is also used for electroplating which – because China postponed a ban on using it in 2013 – involves potassium cyanide.’

  ‘So there’s a chance it got into the powders.’

  ‘A high chance,’ Jed says. ‘There’s just no way to prove it.’

  Matters are made worse by the fact that Benecke Tricorp have obeyed the letter of the law in everything: withdrawing stocks of ExAche all over Europe, launching a thorough internal investigation and cooperating with all the official enquiries that are thrown at them.

  I watch Jed leave for the funeral, sombre in a dark suit. I ache to be with him – I took the day off work as soon as the date was fixed. But Jed points out that Zoe will not take it well if I show up. She has understandably gone to pieces since Dee Dee’s death,
spending her time either in floods of tears or furious rages, most of which are aimed either at me or Benecke Tricorp. She also spends hours listening to Jed talk about the civil suit. I resent the way she is suddenly so present in our lives again, though I try to keep my anger under wraps. The text I’m certain she sent me often floats to the surface of my mind:

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU, WHORE.

  I’ve never told Jed. I’ve intended to do so a million times. But something has held me back. Apart from the fact I have no proof the sender was Zoe – though who else could it be? – it will only add to the burden on Jed’s shoulders. He has aged enough as it is over the past few weeks and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that Zoe would like nothing better than to drive a wedge between us. She wants me to start complaining about her, to put Jed in the impossible position of choosing between cutting all ties with the mother of his children and living with a woman openly at war with his ex.

  So I keep my counsel and trust that this time will pass. It’s still hard to see Jed head off alone to his daughter’s funeral.

  ‘Hey, baby.’ Hours later, Jed calls me from the wake at Zoe’s house.

  I’ve been on tenterhooks, my mind skittering over the Big Maths assessment sheets I’ve spent the morning trying to prepare.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ I clutch my phone. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Terrible.’ Jed’s voice trembles. ‘That is, the service was . . . was . . . like a standard thing, traditional Catholic mass. Impersonal, but it’s what Zoe wanted.’ He sighs.

  I bite back the desire to point out that Jed’s wishes should have been consulted too. ‘How many people were there?’ I ask.

  ‘Loads. The church was packed out, full of girls from Dee Dee’s school in tears.’ He pauses. ‘Zoe invited lots of our old friends too.’

  ‘That must have been nice, at least?’ I suggest. ‘All those people offering support.’

  ‘Mmn.’ Jed’s voice is low and unhappy. ‘I don’t know about that. It’s just lots of people I haven’t seen for ages. They keep coming up to me and there’s this expression on their faces that they think I’m a bastard for leaving Zoe but they can’t tell me because I’ve lost my daughter. Some of them won’t even look me in the eye.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re imagining they think you’re a bastard,’ I say softly.

  ‘I wish you were with me, baby.’ A door opens behind Jed. I can hear the low hum of subdued chatter, the clink of glasses. Zoe’s voice rises above the rest. ‘It had to be Father Jim,’ she is saying. The door shuts again. I push away the splinter of jealousy that pricks under my skin.

  ‘How long do you think it will go on?’

  ‘Not much longer, at least I hope not.’ Jed sighs. ‘I think it’ll be okay for me to go in about half an hour or so.’

  ‘I’ll come and pick you up,’ I say. Then, before Jed can make the suggestion himself, I quickly add: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait outside.’

  Jed agrees and thirty minutes later I park outside the large detached brick house where he spent almost his entire marriage. It’s a big house by London standards in a smart, leafy road; far more upmarket than the street where we live, nice though that is. I’m not going to do it, but I can’t help feeling tempted to cross the carefully tended front lawn and ring on Zoe’s doorbell. I would like Jed’s old acquaintances to see that I am not the home-wrecking monster of their imaginations and that Jed and I truly love each other. But of course I stay put and simply send Jed a text to say that I’m outside. I sit and wait, fingering the delicate gold bracelet on my wrist. It’s the one Martin and Cameron gave me on my engagement to Jed, identical to the one Dee Dee had on when she died. I’ve taken to wearing it a lot recently, it certainly seemed the right thing to do today. After a minute Jed texts back to say he needs to do a few quick goodbyes and won’t be long. I get out of the car and walk around to the passenger seat. Jed hates to be in a car and not driving it himself. As I’m getting back in, Zoe’s front door opens and a group of teenage girls tumble out. I stand by the car watching them chatter away as they cross the front lawn and turn onto the pavement. They must be Dee Dee’s friends.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say as they pass.

  They stop and look up at me with the same wary expressions that I see in the older kids at my school. There’s an entire generation we’ve brought up to fear adults and to suspect paedophiles are lurking on every corner. Their faces soften as they take in my relative youth and my gender.

  ‘Are you . . . were you friends of Dee Dee?’ I ask.

  The girls look at each other. There are four of them, all caught in the midst of adolescence. Two look a bit awkward and overweight, a third has terrible acne. Only the fourth carries herself with confidence. She is strikingly pretty too, a real Lolita with shiny blonde curls and full, Cupid’s bow lips.

  ‘I’m Emily Campbell,’ I press on. ‘I’m . . . I’m Dee Dee’s dad’s girlfriend.’

  The acne girl nods. The Lolita steps forward and offers her hand. ‘Hello Emily, I’m Georgia.’ Her accent is very upper-class, far posher than poor Dee Dee’s was. Slightly taken aback, I shake hands. Georgia introduces the other girls. The acne-faced one is called Ava.

  ‘Dee Dee was a really good friend of mine,’ she says softly. Her lips tremble and one of the other girls puts her arm solicitously around her shoulders.

  ‘We’re all terribly, terribly upset,’ Georgia says, tears welling in her eyes. ‘We loved Dee Dee so much.’

  My hand flies to my mouth, overcome by my own emotions. I stifle the sob that swells inside me. ‘It’s so nice that you came today, for Dee Dee,’ I say, my voice breaking on her name.

  The girls nod solemnly.

  ‘I know how much your friendship meant to her,’ I carry on, unable to stop a tear trickling down my cheek. ‘She told me how she had some . . . some problems at school last term and how her friends supported her. You should all be really proud of yourselves that you were there when she needed you.’

  Ava is weeping openly now; the other girls look down at the ground. I’ve embarrassed them, bless them. Behind them the house front door opens and Jed appears in the doorway. Georgia follows my gaze and spots him too.

  ‘It was nice to meet you, Emily,’ she says, holding out her hand again for a final shake.

  I give it a squeeze then raise my hand in a wave to the rest of them. ‘Nice to meet you all as well.’

  They troop off down the road, Ava being comforted by the girl next to her. I’m still watching them saunter away as Jed arrives at my side. He looks shattered.

  ‘Thank you for being here, baby,’ he says, pressing his lips swiftly against mine, then glancing back at the house as if to check no one has seen him.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Jed ignores the question and gets into the car. As he revs the engine he glances at Dee Dee’s friends, still just visible at the far end of the road.

  ‘I see you met some of the girls from Dee Dee’s class,’ he says, his voice flat with misery.

  ‘Yes.’ I stroke his arm. ‘She had some really good friends, and that’s something to take comfort from. They are lovely girls. And they really cared about her.’

  My brother’s birthday falls at the end of the month. I haven’t seen either him or Rose for weeks and I’m looking forward to the fancy do Cameron has planned in a Mayfair restaurant. It’s a swanky affair, with a private dining room, expensive champagne flowing freely and gifts for all the guests. Martin greets me with a huge hug but then he whispers in my ear.

  ‘Talk to Rosie, will you? She’s upset about something, but she won’t tell me what.’

  I’m immediately concerned. For a start it’s very unlike Rose to be down, she’s usually so steady and sensible. It’s even more peculiar that she won’t confide in Martin. They’ve always been close, since the days immediately after our parents died when Martin’s insistence that Rose should become our legal guardian made the difference to that decision. Of course it’s true that they
are very unalike: Martin is a free spirit whereas Rose likes to conform and it’s also true that whereas Martin and I seem to ‘get’ each other without effort, Rose often seems puzzled by the way we think – and act.

  I leave Jed chatting to Cameron and hurry to find my sister. She’s in the ladies, applying some lipstick in the mirror. My mouth actually falls open as I clock what she’s wearing: a short, fitted dress that shows off her long legs and high, thin stiletto heels. Her hair is different too: styled into a sweeping bob that suits her heart-shaped face rather than bundled into her usual ponytail. She’s wearing eyeliner and if I’m not mistaken, a slash of Chanel’s Rouge Noir on her lips. She might have restyled herself after her break-up with Simon but this is taking her look to a whole new level.

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘You look incredible. Really glamorous.’

  Rose smiles at me in the mirror. ‘Just wanted to make the effort for the boy’s birthday.’

  I can’t stop myself staring at her shoes. I’ve never seen Rose in anything so . . . so sexy. Normally she wears flats or court shoes. ‘Er, Mart seemed to think you were down about something. Is everything okay?’

  Rose turns. Her bright expression falters. ‘I keep thinking about Dee Dee,’ she says. ‘How she looked when I found her . . . I . . . it’s just so upsetting to imagine her alone . . . in pain . . .’

  ‘I know.’ For some reason I wasn’t expecting this to be the reason Rose is upset. A wave of grief washes over me. ‘Still, all the post-mortem reports say she probably died very quickly, so . . .’ I hesitate. ‘It’s really hard but I think nights like tonight are important for Jed to have reminders that normal life is out there.’

  Rose smoothes her hair self-consciously away from her face. ‘Sometimes one loss triggers off another, like that day reminding me of Mum and Dad.’ Her mouth trembles. ‘And right now all I can think about is that I’m here on my own.’