The Liar’s Chair

by Rebecca Whitney

  ‘How are we doing, Rachel?’ David is standing behind me. I freeze. I hadn’t heard him come in. He comes up close but I don’t turn, his proximity a noose of static between us. ‘Is there a problem?’ he says. His lips brush my neck. The hand I hold the jug with starts to shake. He moves his mouth close to my ear and whispers, ‘I need you to stop this. Now.’

  His steps retreat and I turn to watch the last of him exit the room. Next door I hear him continue his conversation with Alex, and I turn off the extractor fan so I can listen more clearly.

  ‘So, it’s Bill Briggs’s land, is it?’ says David. ‘Around Blackthorn Lane? I never thought he’d sell. That farm’s been in his family for centuries.’

  Blackthorn Lane. The road where the accident happened.

  In my lower back, the parasite of pain I’ve had since the accident burns and expands into my gut. I grip my stomach.

  Alex replies, ‘Well, we’ve known the Briggs family for generations. My father tried to get a project going on the land years ago – back in the seventies he was going to build some flats – but there was too much red tape involved.’ I bend over the sink. ‘This time we’re only taking a section of the woods close to the road. It’s mostly a brownfield site, though you wouldn’t know it. The vegetation has completely swamped what buildings were there as the place has been idle so long. Bill will get to keep most of his arable land. He’s up for selling more in the future though. It could be a real money-spinner.’ The voices have relaxed again, the filter of business soothing the stilted evening. ‘My man at the council’s assured me the planning’s nearly gone through. Bit of local resistance to public rights of way and whatnot, protected species claptrap. They’re threatening to set up camp. Load of work-shy pikeys if you ask me. But we know how to get round these things – it pays to be a member of the same golf club as the councillors, if you know what I mean – and we’re about ready to start digging. There are a few transients around there, some old vagrant who lives in a caravan. A lunatic by all accounts. Dug his heels in years ago when my father was trying to develop the area, but all he does now is walk everywhere with a bloody briefcase. So there’s no one really to kick up much of a fuss, and nothing the bulldozers can’t handle.’

  A white-wine bile creeps up my throat. The walking man. I didn’t know he had a home. A caravan in the woods. He must have been on his way home to shelter from the rain when I hit him. Almost there, then never home again.

  ‘And on the subject of funding,’ Alex continues, ‘one of our investors is looking a bit shaky. We’d love to have you on board but you’ll need to step on it. I know it’s a different avenue from your normal line of business, but we’d only be asking for your investment at this stage, unless of course you wanted to be more involved. I’m sure you understand the politics of a new project, how sometimes we need to push through the formalities sharpish, and not all the paperwork ends up going through the formal channels. One or two members of the planning committee may need some guidance casting their votes in our favour.’ I hear him slurp his drink. ‘It’s impossible to get these deals passed without a bit of persuasive currency changing hands. I should know, I’ve worked on enough of them.’ A wine glass chinks. ‘No wire taps in here, are there?’ he adds with a guffaw.

  I peel off my cardigan and hold on to the edge of the sink. Freezing air blasts through the open window, but the cold does little to help the sweat. The pain is a lump in my stomach. I retch.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ Jane’s voice is close. I turn to see her holding a pile of plates. She puts them on the side and rushes forward. A knife falls from the stack and jangles on the floor. Jane’s fingers are chill against my flushed skin. ‘Good Lord, are you all right?’

  ‘Would you mind leaving me alone?’ I say. ‘Please.’

  But she continues pulling at my arm and calls out, ‘David, David, your wife! Come quick. She needs you.’

  I shudder at the thought of what it is I need from David.

  The two men join us in the kitchen. David comes up behind me and picks up my cardigan, throwing it over my shoulders while prising my fingers from the sink. Alex fills a glass with water and tries to get me to drink, but the water splashes down my front. A surge of vomit comes into my throat. I swallow it down. Jane fiddles with my arm and it’s the tickle of her touch next to the tugging and pulling that finally breaks me.

  ‘Get off me!’ I shout. Everyone pauses in their effort but no one takes their hands away. ‘All of you.’

  There’s a flurry of activity and hushed voices. Alex and Jane leave the room and David follows them with ‘sorry’ and ‘not been herself recently’.

  ‘Do get in touch if there’s anything we can do,’ I hear Jane say from the hallway. ‘Of course, of course,’ David replies. Even an emergency has its etiquette, a polite pseudo-concern, but everyone knows the most that will happen is a follow-up call. I want to rush into the hallway and punch Jane in the face, though all I can do is slide to the floor. With a clatter of footsteps and banging doors they’re gone.

  David comes back into the kitchen. From my position on the floor, I see only his feet. He stands next to me, motionless. Spotlights on the ceiling reflect elongated white shapes on the polished leather of his shoes, but the pattern is interrupted by a splash of gravy from the meal. Seconds pass. Slowly, David bends down on to his haunches with clicking knees, and uses a tissue to wipe the small imperfection from his shoe. He stays in this position to deliver the speech that I know is coming.

  ‘We have a business to run,’ he says. ‘We’re partners. There are meetings on Monday and projects that need your input.’ His voice is soft and he spreads out his words as if he’s talking to a toddler. ‘Take a good look at yourself, Rachel. What do you see? Where has my wife gone? You’ve had a week now, and I’m relying on you to pull yourself together and get back to business. If you don’t get this hysteria in check, I’ll take everything away: this house, your car, your nice clothes. You try and stand up to my army of lawyers. And as for your little detour in the woods, I won’t protect you any more.’

  ‘But what about the man?’ I say. ‘His body. If they bulldoze the area they’ll find him.’

  ‘You don’t even know if they’re building in the same part of the woods where you left him.’

  ‘How do we find out?’

  ‘There is no “we”, Rachel. You need to move on. You left no traces? All your things were accounted for?’

  ‘Yes,’ I rub the floor with my palm, ‘but it’ll be obvious he didn’t die from natural causes.’

  ‘It’s safer to leave him where he is. He was a drunk. A loser. Bad things happen to bad people. If someone discovers the body, there’s nothing to lead them to you, and no one will bother to look too closely into the death of a homeless man.’

  ‘But I’m scared.’

  ‘Deal with it.’

  ‘But, David—’

  ‘Enough.’ He pinches my nose and the force of it snaps my head back, cracking my skull against a drawer handle. My mouth opens in a silent gasp. With his other hand David pushes the dirty tissue into my mouth. The gravy is a cold slime on my tongue, and the paper hits the back of my throat. I struggle between breath and vomit.

  David stands and his shoes swivel, taking him from the room. Before he leaves, he opens the boot-room door.

  I lean forward and retch, spitting the tissue into my hand. It’s brown with the watery sauce and soaked in saliva bubbles. From the hallway I hear David’s footsteps. He whistles to the dogs. Leads jangle, barking, a door opens and shuts, then silence. I pull myself up and run the tap to swill out my mouth. It takes several goes, leaning my face into the stream, water splashing over my face and soaking the front of my dress, before my mouth is clean. My tongue holds the memory of the pressure from the tissue.

  Would Will still want me if he saw me like this? Would he chase after David and smash him to the ground? Or perhaps he’d think, like I do, that I deserve all I get.

  On the worktop
, the carcass from dinner is split and flayed. A dozy fly buzzes round the meat. I take a fresh bottle of wine from the fridge, pressing the cold glass on my forehead and cheeks before pouring myself another. With the bottle and glass in hand, I go up to our bedroom where I change into nightclothes and jump into bed, wrapping the duvet close round me to stuff up any shafts of air.

  In the ceiling above the bed is a large glass apex with no blinds or curtains to hide the stars. David and I had ideas that we’d lie here watching the turning of the heavens, and it makes me laugh that we ever had conversations like that. But there must have been a love of sorts once, or at least I believed there was; fear and control won out in the end, but for a while the fresh brilliance of being held convinced me it was love. In reality we rarely spend waking time together in here, this place which was designed as the energetic centre of the house; after David has sex with me, we turn away from each other in silence and sleep with eye-masks.

  I drink some wine and put my laptop on my knees. The battery is dead. From my bed I scan the room for the charger, looking across the furniture and mirrors carefully placed to create the maximum positive chi. David’s self-help and NLP books have their own built-in bookcase for easy bedtime reference, and some of the other shelves are given over to books on movies, art and music: 100 Books You Should Read Before You Die. Even though I’ve never seen David read any fiction, I’ve often heard him quote from Dickens or Kerouac, the text chosen depending on who he’s talking to; his ability to sum up the person in front of him and mirror back what they most want to hear has never ceased to amaze me. Currently on his bedside table is Meditation for Dummies.

  The charger isn’t here so I get up and walk into the adjacent dressing room where David and I have a wardrobe each, divided in the middle by a mirror. My work bag is on the floor next to the cupboard but the bag is empty. The drawers inside my wardrobe are open and I push them shut, checking first that the old McVitie’s biscuit tin from Mum’s house is still safe in the bottom drawer underneath my scarves and belts. Inside this tin are all my precious things: ticket stubs from a gig I went to see with a friend at uni, dried flowers from Mum’s garden, some old textbooks marked up by a teacher who was kind to me. Dad’s letters. The only other items I brought from Mum’s house were the few pieces of Dad’s clothing he left or forgot when he moved out. I kept them in a bag because they smelt, but when we moved to this house, David put them out for the bin men. ‘What are you doing carting around those old rags?’ he said. ‘You hardly knew your father anyway. Time to let go of the past, Rachel.’ I rescued the clothes and hid them in a cardboard box in the garage. There’s a shirt with a tear, some gardening trousers and a large woollen overcoat.

  All the things that matter to me are concealed. Everything of David’s is on display.

  I give up on the charger and go back to bed, taking another gulp of wine as I sit on the edge of the mattress, then deciding to finish the glass. The liquid settles my stomach, like a blanket over fire, but it doesn’t take away the pain. Lying down, the duvet tightens round me as I squirm to get more comfortable, and I drift into thoughts which cross over with dreams and back again so that I can’t tell what’s real: an endless tarmac lit by car headlights, rolling and rolling, the edges of my vision falling to black. The man in the woods, his body in time-lapse, maggots and worms eating him in frenzied circles until all that’s left are white bones.

  I raise myself from the pillow and check the time: 10.58. David is still out. Perhaps I’ve got away with it tonight, the dirty tissue message enough. Or maybe I’ll wake tomorrow, as I have before, to find the bedcovers trailed in paw marks and the bloodied end of a rabbit on my pillow. The dry-cleaners couldn’t save the antique throw that used to belong to my mother – she used it to cover our sofa at home – so now the dogs have it as their bedding. I click my mobile on to Will’s number. He’s listed as the out-of-hours doctor; that way David can’t find him. I start the call but press the end button after it rings once. As soon as I hang up I delete the call from my phone history. Will knows not to call me back.

  Again I slip into a half-sleep and see the dead man sitting on the steps of a caravan, drinking from a can. He wears the scruffy blue coat he died in and oversized trainers with the laces undone. Dressed as I remember him. I’m at the caravan too, we laugh together like old friends. My mother is inside. She collects his things into a pile and pours ink over them. I ask the man if I should let anyone know he’s dead or if, like me, he wants to disappear. He doesn’t answer but carries on drinking, watching me over the top of the can.

  Next time when I wake, I sit up and turn the light on, and rifle through my bedside drawer for some more codeine which I press out of their foil pouches. I wash the pills down with wine from the now half-full bottle. This bed is where I came the day of the accident, to this same cocoon of warmth where the universe shrinks to the clutter of my mind, like the small dark spaces I would seek out as a child when I fantasized I was a cat finding somewhere safe and secret, pretending to go through a hole the size of my whiskers. The hiding place would help to block out the noise in my head, and make the memories go away. But I’ve forgotten the old ways of fooling myself that nothing can touch me. Instead I’ve cultivated a blank space.

  I remember the smells and sounds in the bedroom the night after the accident: the smoke seeping into the room even though the windows were shut, footsteps outside on gravel, the sound of the engine firing up filtering into my dream as my car was driven away. What surprised me – apart from David involving someone else in the equation – was that he knew who to call to make something as big as a car disappear. He knew the routine in an instant: to clean everything, and burn what couldn’t be restored. No mean feat for a mere businessman. Knowing David as I do, I imagine this new avenue for his talents has yet to be exhausted.

  At the time it had been something of a relief to know that David was dealing with the aftermath of the accident, and that he approved of my hiding the body; no dysfunctional marriage exposed by an unhappy businesswoman, no messy drink-driving manslaughter case. We don’t do scandals in this house. Nothing to interfere with business.

  We have a crime number from the police after we reported the vehicle stolen. They found the car near London and informed us it had been torched. David likes certainty, he takes pride in being able to plot my mood and actions, and in the past that’s always worked; he’s set upon my emotional blips with a keen, clinical force, and I relied on his ability to give me boundaries and shut me down. It made me safe. Now something new has passed between us, a mistrust. What’s occurred is bigger than anything we’ve encountered before: a death, plus tonight’s public humiliation in front of the kind of people David cares about impressing the most. These are errors I’ve seemingly courted. He’ll be wary of me now, unable to compute the future he’s so painstakingly nurtured over the years. I’m a malfunctioning satellite spiralling away from the mother ship. If he can’t turn me around, he’ll switch off and cut me loose. I sense the looming threat of David’s distrust. If he can’t bring me into line there is nowhere I can disappear to that will be far enough away. Before, the penalties were only ever emotional, but it feels like something in me has broken and the old ways of settling things will no longer work.

  I light another cigarette and roll the burning tip up and down my arm, seeing how long I can hold it in place before it singes my skin.

  PART TWO

  6

  TEN WRAPS

  David’s supply is running low. He wouldn’t call himself an addict, that would be below someone of his stature – dirty – but he uses nearly every day, apart from the small coke holidays of a week or two here and there to prove to himself he can take it or leave it. He keeps his habit hidden, therefore tidy, therefore respectable. In his eyes, the line he snorts in the morning gets him ready for the day and sharpens his wits, and the little and often he takes until close of business maintains this tempo. The paraphernalia of his habit – mirror, vial, silver co
ke straw, fine metal razor blade – are locked in a drawer of his desk at the office, and I’ve never known him, since the days he started to dabble at university, to share his supply or to admit to anyone other than me that he uses. That would be a defeat. Drugs are not recreational, they are business.

  I buy for David. It’s always been that way, right from the early days when I knew someone in student halls who supplied, and since then we haven’t found a system that better maintains his privacy. David wouldn’t sully himself to transact with persons of a lesser financial status, but it’s OK for me. The higher up the food chain we go, the more risk I take, but if David is ever concerned, I insist the job is better done this way – with fewer levels involved in the process, it’s safer. Besides, I tell him I meet a man who knows a man. He doesn’t know I go to the source. David won’t ask for names, he wants to know as little about the process as is necessary, and that way he maintains his elevation above the grime. If I got caught in the wrong company, David’s inspector friend in the force ought to be able to pull a few strings. I suspect David has other contacts now who could easily hook him up with a regular supply, but he likes to keep his personal tastes concealed; a need is the same as a flaw, and you never know who might want to trade on that weakness at a later date. And anyway, I’ve always had a talent for sniffing out scumbags. Each time a source gets arrested, goes underground or joins NA, I slum it in the pubs of a different town: car parked round the corner, dress code trashy, hang out long enough on a bar stool – it’s amazing what you get offered. The irony is I’ve only ever tried the stuff once, and the result was a teeming paranoia instead of the expected exhilaration; an outpouring of all I keep wrapped up inside. Never again. Booze, and lots of it, is good enough for me.

  It’s a once-a-month trip to the dealer, to Will on the coast, to top up David’s supply. I’ve been buying from Will for a couple of years and sleeping with him for most of that time. Even though we usually do the deal at his house, last night was only the second time I’d stayed over, the first being the night before the accident four weeks ago. That all-nighter ended in such calamity it’s incredible I decided to chance it again, but these days I seem to attract chaos, or perhaps it’s a courtship, and since the accident a part of me has given up and is throwing itself over to fate. Plus, more recently, there are only a couple of things that settle the constant buzz of dread that circulates my body: one of them is alcohol and the other is Will.