The Liar's Promise

by Mark Tilbury

‘We all deal with things in different ways.’

  Another lapse into silence. Then, Tony said, ‘Look, what happened to Megan was a terrible tragedy. It kills me every single day. I’ve often wondered what it would’ve been like with the two of them running about. Who would be the dominant one? The studious one. The practical one. The loud one. The quiet one. I’m as heartbroken as you are about Megan. Please don’t forget that.’

  ‘I thought life was going too well. I should have known better.’

  ‘Everything will be fine. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’

  He stood up. ‘I love you. And that’s one promise I will keep for all eternity. I’m going to order a takeaway. What do you fancy?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’ve got to eat.’

  ‘I’ll have some of yours.’

  He looked about to protest, then walked to the kitchen to phone the local Tandoori. When he’d finished ordering, he called through and asked Mel if she wanted a cup of coffee.

  ‘No, I…’

  ‘Mel?’

  Mel watched Chloe shuffle trancelike down the stairs. She held Ruby to her chest, patting the stuffed toy’s back as if winding it. Her hair fell across her face in tangled strips.

  Mel rushed to the bottom of the stairs, afraid her daughter might trip and fall. ‘Chloe?’

  Chloe stopped halfway down, wobbled, and then looked at her mother.

  ‘Chloe? You all right, Pumpkin?’

  When she spoke, her voice was low and husky. ‘Can’t you two keep the noise down? Me and Grandma are trying to get Megan to sleep.’

  Mel’s heart jump-started. ‘But Megan’s not here. She’s in heaven.’

  Chloe shook her head. ‘She’s upstairs.’

  Tears stung the backs of Mel’s eyes. ‘But that imposs—’

  ‘Oh, get her,’ Chloe said, adopting that dreadful croaky voice. ‘Anyone would think she actually cared.’

  Mel walked slowly up the stairs, goosebumps hatching all over her body. ‘Wake up, Chloe! It’s Mummy. You’re dreaming.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Mel tried to tell herself it was just her daughter standing on the stairs. No one else. Just Chloe. Frightened, confused and sleepwalking. Dead people didn’t talk through rag dolls. Not in the real world.

  ‘You think you’re in control, don’t you? But you’re not. Your life is just one big accident waiting to happen.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘What the hell’s wrong with her?’ Tony said, his voice devoid of its usual mathematical certainty. ‘Why’s she talking like that?’

  ‘I told you,’ Mel said. ‘I fucking well told you.’

  ‘Wash your mouth out with soap,’ Chloe said, in her best Grandma Audrey voice.

  Mel eyed the rag doll as if it might leap from Chloe’s arms and attack her.

  ‘Chloe!’ Tony shouted. ‘Come on. Let’s get you back to bed.’

  ‘Here he is! The knight in shining armour come to rescue the damsel in distress.’

  ‘I’m your father, and I’m—’

  ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

  Tony stopped just behind Mel. ‘You stop that right now.’

  ‘Says the man with the biggest secret ever.’

  ‘Chloe! I’m warning you. Pack it in.’

  Mel glanced at Tony. He looked as pale as the moon. He pushed past her and picked up his daughter. Chloe cried out and started sobbing. She dropped the doll. It landed face down on the stairs, silent and still, no more malicious than a cushion.

  Tony walked into Chloe’s room with the sobbing child. Mel thought about following him, but she didn’t think her shattered nerves could cope with anything else. She poured a glass of wine and drained it in one go. After refilling the glass, she sat in the chair near the fire. The heat did little to stop her shivering.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Mel whispered. ‘This can’t be real.’

  Oh, it’s real, all right. How else would she know those things about Megan? About Grandma Audrey falling down the stairs? You can dismiss it all you like, call it an overactive imagination, sleepwalking, fanciful nonsense, but you can’t escape the truth: she knows things she can’t possibly know.

  Mel had never wanted a cigarette so much since she’d given up smoking five years ago. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

  The empty room had no answers. The clock above the door ticked on towards a future that terrified her more than she could have ever imagined.

  6

  Most of Saturday passed without incident. Chloe had slept until mid-morning after Tony had carried her back to bed. She’d fallen asleep after Tony had retrieved Ruby from the stairs and tucked them up together. Mel had finished the bottle of wine before going to bed. After a brief discussion, during which Mel had accused Tony of burying his head in the sand, Tony had retired to bed on his own. He was hiding something. It wasn’t lost on Mel what Chloe had said about him being ‘The man with the biggest secret in the world’.

  When the phone rang late that afternoon, Mel half-expected it to be Kerrie-Anne making up an excuse not to look after Chloe on Monday. It wasn’t. It was the duty doctor at the local hospital where her father was seeing out his final days with terminal prostate cancer. The doctor believed him to be close to death.

  Mel walked to the kitchen where Tony was marking school books at the table.

  ‘Can you mind Chloe for a while?’

  Tony didn’t look up. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘It’s Dad. He’s on his last legs. I need to go to the hospital.’

  Tony put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. ‘Shit. Sorry. Go. Where’s Chloe?’

  ‘Upstairs playing with her dolls’ house.’

  Mel grabbed her bag and coat and drove the half mile to Feelham Community Hospital in a daze. A doctor introduced himself as Harry Higgs, gave Mel’s hand a small squeeze as if administering a dose of sympathy, and assured her that her father was not in any pain. He then left Mel alone with the hollowed-out shell of her dying parent.

  She sat down in a brown leather chair next to the bed. His chest barely rose as he struggled to draw breath. His mouth hung open revealing a black cavernous hole that had once grinned, told jokes, savoured the taste of her home-baked pies, and complimented her on what a fine woman she’d turned out to be.

  His hand hung over the side of the bed. Large veins stood proud of the skin, coursing through dark brown liver spots like tiny rivers. She took it in hers and held it tight. It felt warm.

  She’d never blamed him for what had happened during her childhood at Rose Cottage. He’d just been trying to earn a living. Keep the wolf from the door. Only problem was, the wolf was already inside the door – her mother.

  Her father was a chef on nuclear submarines. Based up in Scotland, he’d had no idea of his wife’s behaviour whilst he’d been away. The days that Mel had spent locked in the basement whilst her mother had ‘entertained’ her male guests. Her mother’s alcoholism. It was as if she had two personalities: the dutiful wife, and the drunken bitch who neglected her daughter in favour of cheap booze and even cheaper men.

  Mel truly believed the only reason she was still alive was because her mother had fallen down the basement steps and broken her neck when Mel was eight years old. Because of her father’s naval career, she’d been taken into temporary care, and later went to live with her father’s brother and his wife. Uncle John and Aunt Cathy had helped Mel overcome her childhood trauma with patience and love, guiding her and supporting her through school, university and teacher training.

  Although her life had been forever tarnished by Megan’s death, it had been on the good side of bearable up until the visit to Feelham Theatre. She had a loving husband, a great job and a beautiful daughter. If she’d been offered any one of these things when she’d been a helpless child cowering in the freezing basement of Rose Cottage, she would have laughed and said she could never be that lucky.

  Just bein
g in the hospital reminded her of Megan’s short tragic life. A huge part of Mel had died with the child. She visited the grave in Feelham Cemetery once a week to lay flowers and talk to her daughter. Tell her how much she missed her and loved her. Kneeling at the grave, touching the bright purple stones as if they might somehow absorb her grief and give it back to the earth.

  Mel and Tony had almost lost their marriage as well as their daughter. She’d been aware she wasn’t being fair, that Tony was grieving in his own way, but when it came to expressing that grief, they were like chalk and cheese. Tony threw himself into work. Fought hard to get promotion to head of year. Lived by targets. Took comfort in the stable structure of his career, and sought solace in the practicalities of mathematics. Almost seemed to accept his daughter’s death as a casualty of the random law of chaos.

  Mel knew this assessment wasn’t fair. But what was fair? Every time you thought you’d found happiness, life threw a great big rock at your head. Time wasn’t a great healer, but it did take some of the sting out of the tears.

  It was almost seven years since Megan had been torn from her arms. Megan had never left the hospital. Her short life had been filled with two unsuccessful operations, medical staff testing and probing her, tubes sticking out of her tiny body, needles, unfulfilled promises, and her parents standing helplessly by as she lost her short battle for the right to live.

  Mel had never believed in God. The concept of some wise old man sitting on a throne above the clouds passing judgement was too simplistic for her. But during the three months of Megan’s brief life, Mel had prayed every day to the mystical man in the white robe. Begging Him to let her child live. Promising to be a better person. Wearing her own crown of thorns. Offering her soul, naked and torn.

  As suspected, God had confirmed what she’d already known: He didn’t exist. He was just a load of made up mumbo-jumbo to satisfy people’s need for order amongst the chaos. How could He let her beautiful tiny bundle of life just slip away before she’d even spoken her first word? Taken her first step? Given her mummy her first kiss? She hadn’t even held her. Cuddled her. Bathed her. Her only memory of Megan was watching her encased in that incubator attached to tubes and monitors, her tiny body trying to fight the insurmountable odds stacked against her. She would always remember that incubator as Megan’s coffin.

  God had gone missing once again. Just as He had when she was a child alone in the basement at Rose Cottage with the freezing cold damp air clinging to her like a second skin. Her stomach pleading for food, her heart pleading for help. But God didn’t seem to be very interested in the plight of an eight-year-old child. He’d left it up to her to risk her mother’s wrath by stealing a can opener from the kitchen drawer and secreting it behind an empty wooden beer keg in the corner of the basement. At least it gave her access to the dozens of tins of fruit her father brought home with him from his time away. Pineapple chunks were her favourite, along with pear halves. The sweetened juice was like a small taste of heaven to her parched throat. The huge, industrial tins of coffee weren’t of much use, or the massive drums of cooking oil, but her father seemed to think storing for war was a ‘necessity in uncertain times’.

  God didn’t seem too concerned about her drunken mother standing at the top of the basement steps, either, threatening Mel with The Hole for the heinous crime of knocking on the door and begging to be let out. The basement was bad enough, but nowhere near as dreadful as The Hole: an access hatch to a sewer pipe running beneath the house, reached only by a heavy iron manhole cover. The stench in there was disgusting. The darkness seemed to seep right inside your bones and paint your very soul black. There was a metal ladder running down to the pipe, and the only way to stop falling into the raw sewerage was to hold onto the ladder for all you were worth. After a few hours of this punishment, it was all she could do to prize her fingers free of the freezing cold ladder.

  The day her mother had fallen down the steps and broken her neck, Mel had wondered if God had finally answered her prayers. Prior to the fall, the old witch had been ranting and raving about something which only made sense to her pickled brain.

  For the first day, Mel had sat in the corner of the basement, paralysed by fear. Not because of the possibility her mother might be dead, but in case she wasn’t. So deep-rooted was Mel’s fear of her, she believed if she so much as twitched, the bitch would spring to life and beat her black and blue with a broom handle.

  By day two, she’d dared to get up and inspect the motionless body lying at the bottom of the steps. A pool of blood had spread out beside her head , and her eyes were staring at the ceiling, wide and unblinking. Her lips had turned blue, and her front teeth looked as if they were trying to eat her swollen bottom lip.

  Mel never left the basement of her own volition. A paperboy had noticed the front door banging in the wind three days after the fall and had called the police. A local bobby had carried her out of that basement in his arms, her legs too weak to walk, her mind too numb to think.

  Mel had never set foot in the family home again. It would be sold upon her father’s death, and good riddance. Although thirty years had passed since her mother’s death, the pain was like a festering wound that would never heal.

  Her father made a noise in the back of his throat and opened his eyes.

  ‘Dad?’

  Breath rattled in his chest. ‘Melanie.’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Shh.’

  ‘I’m… sorry.’

  ‘Please, don’t fret, Dad. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’

  He shook his head. A tear trickled from the corner of one eye. He looked at the ceiling, seemingly transfixed by the overhead fluorescent light. Mel thought he was slipping away, and then he looked back at her, eyes wide, lips peeled back, tongue clacking against his dentures as if trying to prod them into life.

  ‘Dad?’

  He gripped her hand, nails digging into the flesh.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, and your children are gone.’

  Mel was about to say something comforting, reassuring, when his grip relaxed. He slumped back against the pillows, eyes glazed over, dentures slipping from his mouth and coming to rest on his bottom lip as if to signal their life was over, too.

  7

  Peter King was in a buoyant mood. If life got any better, he would be in the company of angels and bronzed muscular men waiting to tend to his every whim. The angels were solely for the purpose of feeding him grapes and general pampering. When it came to the pleasure dome, it was strictly testicles and testosterone for him.

  Part of the reason for his good mood was a young man by the name of Nathan who was currently asleep on his king-size bed. It had cost a pretty penny to secure the boy’s services for an unlimited time, but money was no object. The occasional indulgence of a rent boy was healthy for the spirit. With Viagra added to the nation’s libido, King anticipated a long night of sexual gratification.

  He walked into the wine cellar of his large detached house. The cellar had a far more important role than just storing vintage wines. It was also home to four upright freezers, each colour-matched to their contents. Purple, orange, yellow and turquoise. A local handyman had been only too willing to spray paint the freezers for the princely sum of five hundred pounds and enough tea to cause a world shortage.

  King had been sorely tempted to shoot the swine when he’d dared to stink out the downstairs loo with the aftermath of his crude proletarian diet. The man was not worthy of life, but he’d made a decent job of the freezers, and for that alone King had paid him his due and parted company amicably.

  His trip to the wine cellar was not solely to select a vintage wine for the evening. It was more rooted in the contents of the purple freezer. Today was an important anniversary. One of nineteen pencilled in on his very busy calendar. It seemed even more appropriate to celebrate, because they were about to embark on a fresh game of One False Move on Christmas Day
.

  He opened the freezer door. In the bottom drawer, encased in clear polythene bags, the severed heads of the first two Purples King had chosen for One False Move. The first one had only lasted three months. A spineless wretch who hadn’t deserved the gift of life. The other, an ugly girl with a bad complexion, had fared slightly better; she’d lasted just shy of a year. Her poor appearance had been compensated by tenacity. She’d also sported the rather pretty name of Charlotte in her former life as a free-thinking spirit with hippy tendencies. A nice warm name, Charlotte. A pretty-flower name wasted on this unfortunate toadstool. She was much better suited to her new moniker, Purple-two.

  In the next drawer, Purples three and four sat in their icy tomb. Both unremarkable and fortunate to have a place in the trophy cabinet. But it was Purple-five who had brought King and his good mood to the wine cellar today. It was the anniversary of her death. Of all those who’d passed this way, Purple-five was his favourite by quite some distance. One or two of the others, particularly Yellow-one, had run her close, but Yellow-one lacked Purple-five’s spunk, for want of a better word. There was a fine line between arrogance and bravery; Purple-five had stood on the right side of that line.

  Not a bad looking girl. Long blonde hair. Sharp blue eyes. King sometimes thought she stood comparison with Maid Marion. Unlike the others, Purple-five had sported no ridiculous ambition to be a pop star or a film star. She’d finally succumbed to death’s waiting arms courtesy of a crude attempt to recreate a French execution with a modified guillotine.

  Purple-five had caught the train back to Oxford with him without fuss or fanfare. She might not have been so keen to take the journey had she known the ‘execution’ would turn into a disaster. The guillotine had failed to sever the head, and Purple-five had still been breathing and gurgling when he’d hacked her head off with a carving knife.

  King now had a saying to match ‘Never underestimate thine enemy’. It ran something like ‘Never underestimate how hard it is to sever a head with a knife’. Getting through the spinal cord and nerves, not to mention the thyroid gland, trachea, oesophagus, jugular veins and the carotid artery had taught King to invest in a chainsaw for future executions of this type. A lot messier, but a damn site easier than a faulty guillotine and a carving knife.