Little Liar: A nail-biting, gripping psychological thriller

by Clare Boyd

  I glanced behind him at the stacks of newspapers lining the walls. When Sarah was alive, the hallway was always swept and clear.

  ‘At least you get a sunny Christmas every year.’

  He grimaced. ‘Anyhow, can’t be helped,’ he said handing me a tin of cat food. ‘Minxy likes this horrible stuff. And don’t forget to water the spider plants.’

  ‘I might kill them off on purpose.’

  He laughed conspiratorially. ‘Those things’ll out last us all.’

  ‘Thank you, John,’ I said, grateful to him for still living there.

  Instead of going down the steps and around and up again to my mother’s front door, I stepped over the low wall dividing their small front gardens, for old time’s sake.

  ‘Old habits die hard, eh?’ John said, winking at me as he closed his door.

  Inside, the old smells of childhood hit me in a comforting wave. Dusty books and cooking spices. Then the creak of the wobbly floorboard, third from the left, the crack that wiggled up the wall next to the radiator cover, the brush of the spider plants that dangled from the hallway table. I was home.

  When I had brought my friends back as a child I had been embarrassed by the stacks of books in corners, the mish-mash of different patterns on the copious throws and cushions, the muted light that was sucked up by the dark blue walls and jungle of plants in the window. But now I saw bohemian charm and style, unaffected by the decades of various trends of interior design that have come and gone. When I thought of the fortune I had spent on decorating our house, I cringed. There seemed so little point to it when I thought of how often I had wanted to tweak and change it since, wishing I had chosen wood panelling instead of tiles, or slatted blinds instead of curtains.

  In her kitchen, I opened her cupboards to look for provisions. I was hungry after my thwarted supper with Peter. I hadn’t stayed in the restaurant. Our waiter had passed me as I wove through the tables towards the door, and I was too embarrassed to say that I was leaving. I supposed Peter and I could never go back to that restaurant. A slump of regret weighed me down.

  It felt strange to be in a kitchen without having to think about what Rosie and Noah wanted to eat. It didn’t feel liberating to be without what I had so often considered a burden.

  I decided to make tea instead.

  Among the usual array of mismatched cups, I spotted a mug that took my breath away for a second. World’s Best Dad it said on the side. It had been a birthday present for Dad from Jacs and me, a few years before he had announced he was moving out to live with Jill – his secretary. After he left, I had hidden the offending mug under the sink in the newly painted pink bathroom, behind the loo rolls. I hadn’t wanted to break it or throw it out, I had simply wanted to get it out of my sight.

  I couldn’t believe my mother had found it and kept it. It reminded me of the other possession of my father’s that she had kept after he left.

  Urgently, I climbed the stairs two at a time to the loft room on the third floor, which had been my father’s workspace. My stomach was looping in anticipation.

  I expected the room to be different – crowded with boxes or transformed into my mother’s study – but it was almost exactly as it had been. My mother had never allowed Jacs or me to commandeer it for a television den or a bedroom, telling us that she planned to get a lodger. A lodger that had never materialised.

  The strip of oak that stretched along one wall was empty of his music books and scores and HB pencils, but his stool sat in the same place, centrally, as though he had only yesterday jumped off it, leaving it twisting around and around for Jacs and I to play on. The leather armchair was pushed into the corner, and my mother’s guitar was resting against the arm. In the eves by the window, there sat the chest that I had come up to look for.

  The smell as I opened it brought back memories of me sitting crossed legged at the spot where I now knelt, waiting for my father to choose a piece of music for me to play.

  I had never been any good at playing the guitar, unlike Jacs who had reached grade eight, but I had loved the attention and patience my father had given me when his large, calloused fingertips had prized my clumsy little fingers onto the right strings.

  When we were small, we had not been allowed to rifle through the music scores, in case we ripped something precious, and I felt a little sinful for going through it now, as though he would know somehow.

  Frets and Fingers with its brown cover picture and the dog-eared Easy Guitar Songs were still there, on the top. Flicking through them felt like shaking hands with old friends. The surge of feelings and memories gave me goosebumps. I wished Jacs were here with me to rediscover them.

  Further down into the chest, I found the music sheets covered in treble clefs, beats, note heads and stems in complex rhythms scrawled in pencil by my father’s hand. Before computers, he would handwrite all of his songs.

  I picked out a few randomly, most of them too complex for me to read. The 1970s pop songs that he had written were there, like ‘Tears of Gold’ or ‘Flower Girl’ or ‘Temptation Baby’. The latter two were the only two European hits of his forty-year songwriting career, written for a Swedish female solo artist whose name escaped me now. However, there was one score that was notably simpler. It was written in fountain pen and there were no lyrics scribbled down the side or underneath the staff, as on the other sheets. I noticed at the bottom that it was titled Helen, with love on your birthday. My heart missed a beat. I had never known that he had written her a song.

  Unable to resist, I sat down cross-legged with the guitar and tried to play it. I was more than a little rusty, but incredibly some of the notes came back to me. After a few practices, I got the gist of the song. It was melancholy, in a minor chord, but it was unquestioningly a love song. I wondered whether the whole of this room was a shrine to this very song, as though it was the sole reason she kept it as it was. I thought of how much they must have loved each other once. To write such a beautiful song was a testament to the depth of his feelings for her. It struck me that dealing with his abandonment of her must have been the hardest struggle of her life.

  At the time, this would not have been obvious. She had been practical about our weekend visits to stay with him and Jill in their messy suburban flat. There were no shouting matches. My father was efficient about paying maintenance. Jill behaved herself. Ostensibly, the split was amicable. But after playing that song, I began to replay the reality.

  I was reminded of the many times I had heard my mother being described as a stoic in the months after my father had left.

  Indeed, my mother maintained a disciplined structure in her life, mostly. However, she was detached and self-absorbed, beleaguered by migraines, which acted like full stops on the flow of our lives, and on her mothering. Outside of the periods in her darkened bedroom, she resumed business as usual by imposing exhausting academic routines for Jacs and me, stifling us with her criticism and attention. I used to smell her skirt when she was bending over my work, and wished I could cry into it, for no particular reason other than indulging the sadness that lingered inside me. There was never time for hugs. And she was no less hard on herself, by taking on an unmanageable workload that she must have pressed down on top of her inner life, trying to suffocate it perhaps.

  I put down the guitar. Strangely, I didn’t feel sad, I felt joyful, that my father had loved my mother so much. In turn, I felt loved by both of them. Their separation had been the tragedy, for my mother at least, and I suddenly wanted to understand my mother’s pain – the pain she had so efficiently hidden from us – as a way of understanding her love for my father.

  I turned the lights on as I nipped downstairs and outside onto the small patch of garden to see if John’s lights were on next door. A glow emanated from the equivalent room to my old bedroom on the first floor. This was his study, where he had always worked late into the night on his historical novels.

  John wouldn’t mind if I rang the doorbell, I thought, as long as I brought
a bottle of red wine with me.

  When he opened the door, he pressed his glasses back on his nose with a swift jab. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘I wondered if you fancied a break from the bodice ripping for ten minutes?’ I said, waggling the bottle of wine at him.

  His face relaxed. ‘A delightful idea, young lady,’ he grinned, opening the door wider for me.

  I pretended not to notice the stacks of newspapers and the squalor of the kitchen. Strange crockery covered the work surfaces. It wasn’t clear whether they were clean or dirty. When Sarah was alive, the pastel blue surfaces had sparkled. It was a struggle to hide my shock.

  If I had bumped into him in the street, I would have seen a functioning clean-shaven man, in his ironed plaid shirts and artfully threadbare slacks. How different the story was behind closed doors.

  Nevertheless, he had cleared a space on the tiny kitchen table, lit a candle, which he placed on an embroidered mat, and brought out a wine glass, a tumbler and a carton of orange juice.

  ‘I assume you’re not sharing the wine with me?’

  ‘Orange juice would be lovely, thanks.’

  We sat opposite each other on the same plastic chairs Jacs and I had sat on as children, and the chaos around me melted away. How clinical my life had become. How easy it was to feel comfortable in a home that had a heart, however dysfunctional and chaotic.

  I had wanted to launch straight in with questions about my parents, but instead we talked for over an hour about books and plays and music. It was like escaping to another world, where my cares were distant to me. My whole body seemed to steam, as though I’d turned the engine off after a long, arduous journey uphill.

  ‘Your dad thought it was funny you went into the City.’

  ‘He tells everyone I’m a banker, but I’m not.’

  ‘He thought you’d go into the arts.’

  ‘He doesn’t understand anyone who isn’t creative.’

  ‘Jill wasn’t.’

  ‘But she facilitated his creativity. She always believed in him,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Unlike your mother.’

  I laughed. ‘She told him he should get a job in Woolworths.’

  ‘I’d say that was the final nail in the coffin.’

  We laughed together and I took a large gulp of juice. ‘John...’ I began.

  He put his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, ready to listen. ‘Yes, Gemma.’

  I smiled. I was taken back to when my sister was small, sitting here at this same table, when she would tell her long rambling nonsensical stories to John, who would listen with his whole being, even adding to the story here and there, much to my sister’s delight.

  ‘Did Mum ever talk to you about Dad leaving?’

  ‘To Sarah she did.’

  ‘I found this...’ I said, unfolding the song onto the table.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he sighed. ‘He played that at her birthday party.’

  ‘Did she like it?’

  ‘They snogged in front of everyone afterwards.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  He chuckled. ‘They were so in love back then.’

  ‘I don’t understand what went so wrong.’

  ‘Your dad wore his heart on his sleeve and your mum had hers in an iron box.’

  I sighed, noticing my ragged out-breath. ‘Mum never once cried after he left. Everyone marvelled at her stoicism.’

  At the time, I had been proud of my mother for carrying on, for refusing to cry ‘poor me!’, and secretly proud that I could be as brave too.

  ‘Do you know about the Stoics of Ancient Greece?’

  ‘No,’ I smiled, ready for one of John’s special lessons.

  ‘The Stoics did not advocate the stiff-upper-lip emotional detachment that they were often mistakenly known for – qualities that lots of people seem to admire in your mother – and they certainly did not believe in suppressing or denying difficult emotions. Cultivating the right inner attitude, paying attention to your own mind, was at the heart of all they taught.’

  ‘So, you’re saying my mother is the antithesis of Stoicism.’

  ‘Kind of. But when you and Jackie were asleep, she’d come round to see Sarah.’ He paused and looked at me with a sideways glance, possibly wondering how far he could go. ‘I’d leave them to it mostly but believe me, your mother cried buckets.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. ‘I never knew.’

  ‘Sarah would fret about you and Jackie. She said Helen was too hard on you both.’

  I blinked rapidly. He’d spoken a truth that I hadn’t consciously acknowledged, not fully, and I flapped my hands around my eyes to stop the tears. ‘I don’t want to cry.’ I never cried.

  ‘Your mum never wanted to cry either but Sarah forced it out of her.’

  ‘Sarah was such a wonderful woman. I still miss her Christmas cake.’

  John’s eyes watered. ‘I miss her every minute of every day.’

  His possessions seemed to move in on us, as devastating symbols of his grief. I was overwhelmed and the tears began to stream down my face. I was crying for John’s loss, I was crying for my mother’s, and I was crying for mine. While John held me in the embrace that I had needed from my mother all those years ago, I didn’t know if I would ever be able to stop the tears from coming. The well of sadness in the pit of me felt bottomless. How I had held on to that wealth of emotion for so long, I didn’t know. As a child I must have existed with my fists permanently balled up. Now I felt like I was rolling sideways down a hill, letting the grassy hillocks and dips do their worst while I gathered speed and waited for the nasty bump at the end.

  ‘Poor Gemma,’ he soothed.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m acting like this,’ I said, trying to talk through the subsiding sobs.

  ‘You’re going through a lot.’

  ‘Did Mum tell you?’ I sniffed, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.

  ‘She tells me everything.’

  ‘I made her swear not to,’ I said, angrily, before I remembered that actually I had made Mum swear not to tell my father, rather than John.

  ‘It’s not like I’d tell anyone. I never go anywhere.’

  It was true. Somehow, it was a relief he knew.

  ‘What am I going to do, John?’

  ‘When’s the CPS thingy?’

  ‘The hearing. Fourth of December.’

  ‘What exactly happens at a hearing?’

  ‘I’d plead not guilty and then we’d all go away again to prepare my defence.’

  ‘It beggars belief,’ John said, letting out a loud sigh.

  ‘But I’m hoping it won’t come to that.’

  ‘Isn’t it inevitable now?’

  ‘The whole thing can be dropped if Rosie changes her statement.’

  ‘You need to go home.’

  ‘If I stay away, maybe she’ll come round.’

  ‘I don’t think it works like that.’

  ‘But when I’m around her I’m making it worse,’ I cried, breaking down again, into my hands, pressing away the terror, gulping into the hole that was forming in my stomach when I thought of losing my three children.

  ‘If you run away, you’ll definitely make it worse.’

  I wiped my face and stared at him wide-eyed. ‘But she hates me.’

  ‘Because you’re lying to her.’

  His words were like a slap in the face.

  ‘She doesn’t know that.’

  ‘Children pick up on much more than you think. When Sarah was dying, Imogen and I tried to fob Evie off by saying she was going to get better and Evie turned her little face up to us and said, “It’s okay, Grandad. When Grandma goes to heaven, she can look after Hammy,” who was her hamster who died. She was only three.’

  ‘Mum doesn’t think I should tell her.’

  ‘Helen’s wrong,’ John said casually, confidently, as he refilled my glass.

  I gulped thirstily, feeling a charge of courage build in my chest.

  ‘But
the timing is really bad.’

  ‘It might be why she’s lying to the police. Not consciously, obviously,’ he added, taking another sip before continuing, ‘Deep down she might know something’s not as it seems but can’t work out what.’

  It sounded right.

  ‘Today she told me she thought she was adopted,’ I said, pained by the reminder. I ached with remorse.

  ‘What does Peter think?’

  ‘Peter doesn’t think she’s lying about me slapping her.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he spluttered.

  ‘Seriously, he’s starting to doubt me. I know it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re doubting yourself.’

  I couldn’t talk for all the air that I had sucked into my lungs too quickly.

  ‘I do think I’m a good mother, you know.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I try my best.’

  ‘That’s all that matters.

  ‘It’s not like I’m trying to be perfect or anything,’ I said, tears spilling down my cheeks.

  He paused mid-sip. ‘Perfect’s a tall order.’

  ‘Impossible,’ I groaned.

  ‘Good enough is more achievable.’

  ‘Mum always told us to strive to be the best in life.’

  ‘And she was the perfect mum, was she?’

  I couldn’t answer him.

  ‘Don’t you dare believe your mother’s hype.’

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and stroked my father’s song-sheet. ‘She was so brave when he left.’

  ‘She is a formidable woman, and always has been, but she was also vulnerable and sad and angry when your dad left, as anyone would be. Her heart was broken in two.’

  ‘She protected Jacs and me from all that.’

  ‘That’s what parents do.’

  ‘Somehow I thought of her as a superwoman.’

  ‘Who you could never live up to?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘That’s her competitive spirit, Gemma. I love your mum, but, Jesus, nobody is ever better than her at anything.’

  ‘So true,’ I grinned.

  ‘If you Campbell women are all so intent on being so bloody perfect all the time, why don’t you sell Rosie the fairytale, like, um...’ He looked up to the ceiling as I imagined he would when he was writing his books. ‘Okay. Here’s one. Ready?’