Little Liar

by Lisa Ballantyne

  She dried her eyes, inched away so that she no longer felt his heat, and tried to find sleep.

  That had been nearly two years ago, and since then, Donna had been brimming with self-loathing. They were in a strange place now – not quite friends but not enemies either. Were it not for Angela – this difficult young person they had created together – she doubted they would speak at all.

  Donna had no energy to make dinner and so put a slice of toast into the toaster. It was the last piece – the heel.

  She staggered slightly as she left the kitchen, then went upstairs and changed out of her work clothes into a tracksuit. Habitually, absently, she picked up dirty laundry that was scattered in the hall outside Angela’s room, stray socks and a vest-top. She sighed as she went into Angela’s room to throw the clothes in the laundry bin. She would do washing tomorrow; tonight she was going to do her best to forget the past few weeks.

  On top of Angela’s bedspread was her tablet with the bright red cover. Donna cursed lightly. Not only would her daughter miss it but also there was a good chance they would come back for it. Donna sank down onto the bed and opened the iPad to reveal the familiar picture of Angela licking an ice-cream – white tongue and closed eyes. Unsure if she was dizzy from the drink or bending to pick up the laundry, Donna curled onto her daughter’s bed with the iPad until her light-headedness passed. She opened up YouTube.

  Nicholas Dean’s face appeared on the screen. All of the suggested videos were clips of the TV series Scuttlers. Donna had not seen any of this. Head still resting on her daughter’s pillow, Donna tapped on a video billed as ‘Max’s torture in Scuttlers season 3’.

  It was a ten-minute video of Nicholas Dean, strapped into a chair, being repeatedly punched in the face until he was beyond recognition, then forced to sign a confession – the dark ink of the fountain pen mixing with his own blood as, blinded by eyes punched closed, he tried to sign his name.

  Feeling thirsty, her head throbbing from the wine, Donna watched until the end. She saw the first blood and swelling, the nose crack and jaw dislocation, the blood trailing from Dean’s mouth as he tried to sign his name with startled, unfamiliar hands. It turned Donna’s stomach. She turned down the sound, but as she watched reminded herself that Angela must have seen this repeatedly for it to be recommended viewing.

  When the video ended, Donna rolled the flap over her daughter’s tablet and rocked herself off the bed. She looked down at her feet, still trying to steady herself. There was something sticking out from the frill of the valance around the bed – it looked like a scrapbook.

  After two attempts because she was tipsy, Donna finally liberated the book. It was a sketchpad that Stephen had bought for Angela’s Christmas the year before. She lay back on the bed, propped on an elbow.

  Donna opened the book with nostalgia for the happy, creative little girl her daughter had once been. Angela had loved drawing since she’d been small and then it had turned into something more. The teachers had said she had a precocious talent. That was the word: precocious. True, Angela’s pictures had looked different from the other kids’ pictures, which were just stick figures and rainbows, but if Donna had been honest, she hadn’t seen what was supposed to be special about them.

  On the first page there was a sketch, which, although rudimentary and childish, was recognisable as a portrait of Stephen. Donna stared at the picture until the pencil marks started to distort. Stephen’s brows began to lower and his mouth pinched – the expression Donna was most used to confronting.

  Just then there was a sudden screaming noise; an undulating pulsing sound ripped through the house. Donna jolted and got to her feet.

  At the top of the stairs she saw smoke in the hall and realised that the toast was burning.

  She ran downstairs, knifed the thick charred toast from the toaster and binned it, then stood on a chair in the hall waving Angela’s sketchpad in front of the smoke sensor until the noise relented.

  Exhausted, fingers trembling, parched, Donna opened the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke.

  She coughed lightly, finding her empty wine glass and pouring another. As the smoke cleared, there on the kitchen tiles, she saw several pictures of Nicholas Dean.

  The same picture from the Wikipedia page and then another picture of him and his wife attending a function. She was beautiful, too – as dark as he was blond – Italian or something. A still of Dean on the set of Scuttlers in Victorian dress. There were fifteen or more pictures, blown up, printed onto paper and cut out. There was a shiny real photograph of him, hand-signed in black marker.

  Donna stood, fingertips chilling on her wine glass as she gazed at the pictures on the floor. She realised the pictures had fallen from the sketchbook, which she still had cast onto the floor. A strip of photographs protruded from the pad and so Donna bent and flipped it open, to reveal an old-fashioned photo booth strip, Nicholas Dean and Angela together, faces pressed up against each other. Donna pressed a hand to her mouth. She turned the photo strip over and on the back, in Angela’s favourite purple glitter Sharpie, was:

  A.F loves N.D

  Donna squatted down and sifted among the pages that had spilled on the floor. There was a thick page from the sketchpad face down. Donna turned it over and held it up – a portrait of Nicholas Dean’s face – obviously sketched from his Wikipedia profile, the same angle and smile. It was not a perfect likeness – Dean’s eyes were far too large and his nose strangely misshaped, but Donna could tell that it was him and that Angela had spent some time on it.

  The smoke from the toaster cleared and Donna stood staring at the photographs of her child with the man who had molested her. She wiped a hand over her mouth as sweat broke at her hairline. She wished she hadn’t drunk the wine. Her brain was cloudy and she needed to understand what this meant.

  14

  Marina

  Marina had cleared her calendar for the afternoon and so decided to go home early and work there. She thought about calling her motherin-law to say she could pick up Luca and Ava from the childminder – save her the trip – but decided to do that from home.

  She called Nick when she got on the train at Waterloo but he didn’t pick up and so she left him a message:

  Hey, I’m on my way home. Can u pick me up? I get in at 14:38 xx

  The fear that he would be charged had driven them both into avoidance tactics. Even when they were alone, the unspoken hung between them.

  He didn’t reply to her text, and when she arrived at Farnham, Nick was not there so she walked home from the station, her bag straining the muscles on her shoulder: handbag stuffed with statistics on the vulnerability of child refugees, and the old-fashioned work laptop, heavy as a brick. As she walked, thoughts blizzarded in her mind.

  Would her boss see the references to Nick in the press and consider it incompatible with her role as director of Child International? What did it mean that her husband, her lover, masturbated to images of women being tied up, choked and raped?

  Sex between them was now was predictable, repetitive. Friday nights were almost a certainty, probably once during the week or maybe Sunday morning if the children had slept through and they woke up in time. Underneath the duvet, alert for tiny intruders. Quick and furtive. It was good sex, she thought. Marina loved him and his body. She had thought he felt the same.

  After Luca was born, Nick had described her vagina as a familiar room with all the furniture taken out. She had always remembered that.

  Had he always been secretly desiring something else? Something harsher, darker.

  A French friend from university had once said to her: one cannot desire what one already has. That was it, she supposed. Desire was the chase, the ungraspable now, a craving and existence forever out of reach, glimpsed but never realised.

  Luca had been a long but straightforward birth, but Ava had been quicker with more long-term consequences. Marina had needed stitches and the wound had granulated, creating a lump of flesh inside her tha
t had made sex painful for them both. It was nearly two years after Ava was born before their sex life had got back to normal again.

  Marina knew that the porn had started then. Had he become addicted because her own, real body was unavailable? Was it because they were having less sex, or had she by then ceased to be his object of desire? Object. She didn’t want to be his object. She wanted to be his lover.

  He had been at the delivery of both their children. He had cut the cords. He had left fingerprints of uterine blood on her abdomen.

  These children were born of sex, but had procreation killed desire?

  Despite the cold, Marina felt too warm. She walked faster and faster, as if to outrun her thoughts. Sex and love – how did the two come together?

  She had been attracted to him from the minute they met, and the sex had been good right from the start, but they had fallen hard in love at the same time. After they’d been together for a year, she had gone back to Spain to visit her sick father. The separation had been brutal. She had lost weight and suffered insomnia just pining for him. Then they had got married and soon she was pregnant, but she had never felt him lose interest. She had always felt loved and desired. It had always felt real.

  But he was an actor. Had he been pretending?

  That time he pushed her down and pinned her – had he been acting out his fantasies of what he wanted to do, to her or other women? What would have happened if she had not managed to push him off the bed?

  The clouds were pressing down on the red roofs of the houses along Firgrove Hill and Marina’s head ached. With each footstep the right side of her skull seemed to throb. It wasn’t just him. She had fantasies that she had not shared with him and had no need to – she didn’t want to act them out. But they seemed so innocuous in comparison to the list that Faldane had produced in his office.

  Was it the same for Nick? Was it possible to judge fantasies?

  Rape and violence – did his fantasies have the same innocence at their core?

  Fantasies were just that, after all, private dreams. In another time, they would have stayed private.

  The car was in the drive when she arrived home. She turned the key in the lock, shook off her coat and put down her bags in the hall. She pressed the heel of her hand against her temple. She just needed a drink of water – she hadn’t stopped since morning and had allowed herself to get dehydrated.

  There was an unusual eerie silence. ‘Nick?’ she called, kicking off her shoes.

  A sudden slam from the kitchen.

  Marina frowned. Nick met her in the hall, still wearing his tracksuit bottoms as if he had not gone further all day than around the block with Rusty. There was something over-eager about his smile. She tilted her head to kiss his lips but he kissed her cheek instead.

  ‘You’re home early.’

  ‘I left you a message.’

  ‘Oh really? Dunno where my phone is.’

  In the kitchen, he snapped the kettle on, avoiding her eyes. The room was cold despite the heating being on.

  ‘I got a shitty email from Harriet.’

  ‘Oh yeah, what?’ Marina put her suit jacket over the back of one of the dining room chairs.

  ‘She doesn’t want me to go for the advert – or any advert – or any other job – until this,’ he made sarcastic quotation marks with his fingers, ‘is all cleared up. I’m officially grounded.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart …’

  ‘Yup. What kind of day did you have?’ he said, his eyes lowered guiltily.

  ‘It was all right. I had a meeting cancelled this afternoon and just took the chance to escape.’ She leaned back against the kitchen table, rubbing her shoulder where the heavy bag had strained it. ‘I’ve still got work to do, but I was going to call your mum and say I can pick up the kids. Save her the journey.’

  He nodded, dropping a peppermint tea bag into a cup and adding water. When he handed the cup to her, their eyes met. The pupils of his dark eyes were dilated, eyelids thick and low.

  ‘Are you … stoned?’ said Marina, her voice sounding sharper than she had intended.

  He ran a hand through his hair, caught out, embarrassed. Marina cast her eyes over the kitchen. The bag of grass was by the window, next to the new iPad that Melissa had donated for the children. It was cold because he had been smoking out of the window. Anger cut with disgust flashed through her.

  ‘Patetico,’ she said under her breath, tugging her blouse out from her waistband and leaving the room, walking upstairs as she undid the buttons.

  She heard his feet behind her. ‘Oh, come on, you’re the one that’s always suggesting we have a joint once the kids are in bed …’

  ‘When was the last time I sat around all day and got stoned at two in the afternoon? I have a job, you know? I pay the mortgage.’ In the bedroom she took off her blouse, tugging at the sleeves, and tossed it onto the bed. She unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall to the floor. As he came into the room she was sitting on the bed, taking off her tights. The anger had cleared her mind and the pain in her head was gone.

  ‘I’m not stoned. It’s just been a rough few days and every time I pick up a paper or turn on the TV there’s some other celebrity being hauled over the coals.’

  ‘So you’re a celebrity now? Get a grip. You were in the Evening Standard and probably no one even noticed …’ She was bristling with temper now. She pulled on a sweater and her navy sweatpants.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ he looked away, frustrated.

  She noticed a sheen of tears in his eyes and it made her catch her breath for a moment, but she was tired and thirsty and still hurting from the revelations in Faldane’s office. She still hadn’t processed it – wasn’t sure what to believe.

  ‘You can’t blame me for wanting to escape. I can’t work. I’m stuck here.’

  ‘So what?’ Marina pulled on her woollen socks, ‘I’m at work and your mother is looking after your children, and so you think you have nothing better to do than smoke a joint and what … maybe check out some porn?’

  Nick exhaled, hands on his hips, chin down.

  ‘Well what am I supposed to think? You were watching that stuff on our daughter’s iPad. I have no idea any more how your decision-making works. I mean … on your four-year-old daughter’s iPad.’

  ‘I know how old she is.’ The tawny flecks in his brown eyes now flashed with anger, as if lit from within.

  They had been shouting and now Marina took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what to think about this. I don’t know what it means. I was trying to understand and be understanding, but I can’t. I don’t get it. I thought I turned you on and now I find out that violence turns you on.’

  ‘Violence doesn’t turn me on,’ he said, lowering his voice.

  ‘Rape is violence, you know that?’

  ‘YOU turn me on, no one else, nothing else,’ he said, taking a step towards her and putting his hands around her waist, letting his head fall to her shoulder. ‘I told you already. You click on things and you get led places. I’m not proud of it.’

  She pulled back from him a little, watching his face up close, the pupils still dilated from the drugs, but his eyes also earnest and full of pain.

  ‘I’m ashamed of myself. I don’t know what else to say to you.’ He leaned in and kissed her cheek. He smelled of salt and smoke. ‘Forgive me for this afternoon? I just needed …’ He pulled away from her gently and shrugged.

  ‘What did you need?’ she pressed.

  ‘I dunno, to forget about it all. I can’t do anything. I’m just stuck waiting and everywhere you look something reminds me of it. Pop stars, football coaches … it’s like every guy on the planet has to be Jimmy Savile.’

  Marina straightened her shoulders. ‘I don’t think it’s like that.’

  ‘Well it feels like it. I didn’t lay a finger on Angela Furness. But it seems like any girl can say whatever the hell she likes and the guy gets hauled over the coals without question. It’s not fair. It’s like the witch tri
als.’

  ‘That’s hysterical.’

  ‘Is it? It’s never the woman’s fault.’

  ‘It’s always the woman’s fault,’ she said, her chest heaving as she tried to control her breath, trying not to feel polarised from him.

  She turned to leave the room. There was a small stack of hardback books on the chest of drawers next to him. He swept them to the floor and when she turned round at the thud, he was wiping a tear from his cheek.

  ‘Can we stop this? I said I was sorry. I can’t get through this without you.’

  His face had the wounded pique of Luca when he was upset.

  ‘I know,’ she said, smiling at him with closed lips. ‘I just need time to think this through.’ The sound of the toilet flushing caused Marina to open the bedroom door a little.

  ‘Shit, your mum’s here already,’ she said, covering her eyes with her hand.

  15

  Betty

  Betty parked her hatchback in the drive and turned off the engine. The grating, repetitive CD that the kids were singing along to suddenly cut out and Betty felt relief but then apprehension, glancing in the mirror at Ava, who had begun to pout as soon as the music stopped. Betty’s head hurt and she needed a cigarette but she feared that there would be tears if she didn’t get them into the house quickly. The children were both tired after long days at school and nursery.

  ‘I’m too old for this,’ she muttered, as she slid her aching hip out of the car, by which time both children had freed themselves from their car seats. She followed them into the house carrying a bag of groceries that she had noticed were missing from the kitchen. When she had called to pick up her grandchildren in the morning, the milk had been sour and there had been no coffee. It was as if, amid this crisis, Nick and Marina were putting all of their energy into the children and had lost sight of their own needs.

  Betty called out to Nick as the kids tumbled into the living room. She put the groceries down on the table. There was no answer. She took the milk from the fridge and poured it down the sink before replacing it with the fresh milk she had just bought.