The Lying Game Read online

  Then they turned, and were halfway up the platform before it occurred to me, I hadn’t asked which was the right half.

  I looked up at the announcement board.

  Use front seven carriages for stations to Salten, read the display, but what did ‘front’ mean? Front as in the closest to the ticket barrier, or front as in the direction of travel when the train left the station?

  There were no officials around to ask, but the clock above my head showed only moments to spare, and in the end I got onto the farther end, where the two other girls had headed for, and dragged my heavy case after me into the carriage.

  It was a compartment, just six seats, and all were empty. Almost as soon as I had slammed the door the guard’s whistle sounded, and, with a horrible feeling that I might be in the wrong part of the train completely, I sat down, the scratchy wool of the train seat harsh against my legs.

  With a clank and a screech of metal on metal, the train drew out of the dark cavern of the station, the sun flooding the compartment with a suddenness that blinded me. I put my head back on the seat, closing my eyes against the glare, and as we picked up speed I found myself imagining what would happen if I didn’t turn up in Salten, where the housemistress would be awaiting me. What if I were swept off to Brighton or Canterbury, or somewhere else entirely? Or worse – what if I ended up split down the middle when the train divided, living two lives, each diverging from the other all the time, growing further and further apart from the me I should have become.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice, and my eyes snapped open. ‘I see you made the train.’

  It was the tall girl from the platform, the one the other had called Thee. She was standing in the doorway to my compartment, leaning against the wooden frame, twirling an unlit cigarette between her fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a little resentful that she and her friend had not waited to explain which end to get. ‘At least, I hope so. This is the right end for Salten, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ the girl said laconically. She looked me up and down again, tapped her unlit cigarette against the door frame, and then said, with an air of someone about to confer a favour, ‘Look, don’t think I’m being a bitch, but I just wanted to let you know, people don’t wear their uniforms on the train.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They change into them at Hampton’s Lee. It’s … I don’t know. It’s just a thing. I thought I’d tell you. Only first years and new girls wear them for the whole journey. It kind of makes you stand out.’

  ‘So … you’re at Salten House too?’

  ‘Yup. For my sins.’

  ‘Thea got expelled,’ a voice said from behind her, and I saw that the other girl, the short-haired one, was standing in the corridor, balancing two cups of tea. ‘From three other schools. Salten’s her last-chance saloon. Nowhere else would take her.’

  ‘At least I’m not a charity case,’ Thea said, but I could tell from the way she said it that the two were friends, and this goading banter was part of their act. ‘Kate’s father is the art master,’ she told me. ‘So a free place for his daughter is all part of the deal.’

  ‘No chance of Thea qualifying for charity,’ Kate said. Silver spoon, she mouthed over the top of the teas, and winked. I tried not to smile.

  She and Thea shared a look and I felt some wordless question and answer pass between them, and then Thea spoke.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Isa,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Isa. Why don’t you come and join me and Kate?’ She raised one eyebrow. ‘We’ve got a compartment just up the corridor.’

  I took a deep breath and, with the feeling that I was about to step off a very high diving board, gave a short nod. As I picked up my case and followed Thea’s retreating back, I had no idea that that one simple action had changed my life forever.

  IT’S STRANGE BEING back at Victoria. The Salten train is new, with open-plan carriages and automatic doors, not the old-fashioned slam-door thing we used to take to school, but the platform has hardly changed, and I realise that I have spent seventeen years unconsciously avoiding this place – avoiding everything associated with that time.

  Balancing my takeaway coffee precariously in one hand, I heave Freya’s pram onto the train, dump my coffee on an empty table, and then there’s the same long struggling moment there always is, as I attempt to unclip the cot attachment – wrestling with clasps that won’t undo and catches that won’t let go. Thank God the train is quiet and the carriage almost empty, so I don’t have the usual hot embarrassment of people queueing in front or behind, or pushing past in the inadequate space. At last – just as the guard’s whistle sounds, and the train rocks and sighs and begins to heave out of the station – the final clip gives, and Freya’s cot jerks up, light in my hands. I stow her safely, still sleeping, opposite the table where I left my coffee.

  I take my cup with me when I go back to sort out my bags. There are sharp images in my head – the train jerking, the hot coffee drenching Freya. I know it’s irrational – she’s on the other side of the aisle. But this is the person I’ve become since having her. All my fears – the ones that used to flit between dividing trains, and lift doors, and strange taxi drivers, and talking to people I didn’t know – all those anxieties have settled to roost on Freya.

  At last we’re both comfortable, me with my book and my coffee, Freya asleep, with her blankie clutched to her cheek. Her face, in the bright June sunshine, is cherubic – her skin impossibly fine and clear – and I am flooded with a scalding drench of love for her, as painful and shocking as if that coffee had spilled across my heart. I sit, and for a moment I am nothing but her mother, and there is no one in the world except the two of us in this pool of sunshine and love.

  And then I realise that my phone is buzzing.

  Fatima Chaudhry says the screen. And my heart does a little jump.

  I open it up, my fingers shaking.

  I’m coming, it says. Driving down tonight when the kids are in bed. Will be with you 9/10ish.

  So it’s begun. Nothing from Thea yet, but I know it will come. The spell has broken – the illusion that it’s just me and Freya, off on a seaside holiday for two. I remember why I am really here. I remember what we did.

  I’m on the 12.05 from Victoria, I text back to the others. Pick me up from Salten, Kate?

  No reply, but I know she won’t let me down.

  I shut my eyes. I put my hand on Freya’s chest so I know she is there. And then I try to sleep.

  I wake with a shock and a belting heart to the sound of crashing and shunting, and my first instinct is to reach out for Freya. For a minute I am not sure what has woken me but then I realise: the train is dividing, we are at Hampton’s Lee. Freya is squirming grumpily in her cot, she looks like she may settle if I’m lucky – but then there’s another shunt, more violent than the first set, and her eyes fly open in offended shock, her face crumpling in a sudden wail of annoyance and hunger.

  ‘Shh …’ I croon, scooping her up, warm and struggling from the cocoon of blankets and toys. ‘Shh … it’s OK, sweetie pie, it’s all right, my poppet. Nothing to worry about.’

  She is dark-eyed and angry, bashing her cross little face against my chest as I get the buttons of my shirt undone and feel the by-now routine, yet always alien, rush of the milk letting down.

  As she feeds, there is another bang and a crunch, and then a whistle blows, and we begin to move slowly out of the station, the platforms giving way to sidings, and then to houses, and then at last to fields and telegraph poles.

  It is heart-stoppingly familiar. London, in all the years I’ve lived there, has been constantly changing. It’s like Freya, never the same from one day to the next. A shop opens here, a pub closes there. Buildings spring up – the Gherkin, the Shard – a supermarket sprawls across a piece of wasteland and apartment blocks seem to seed themselves like mushrooms, thrusting up from damp earth and broken concrete overnight.

  But this line, this jour
ney – it hasn’t changed at all.

  There’s the burnt-out elm.

  There’s the crumbling World War II pillbox.

  There’s the rickety bridge, the train’s wheels sounding hollow above the void.

  I shut my eyes, and I am back there in the compartment with Kate and Thea, laughing as they pull school skirts on over their jeans, button up shirts and ties over their summery vest tops. Thea was wearing stockings, I remember her rolling them up her impossibly long slender legs, and then reaching up beneath the regulation school skirt to fasten her suspenders. I remember the hot flush that stained my cheeks at the flash of her thigh, and looking away, out across the fields of autumn wheat, with my heart pounding as she laughed at my prudery.

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ Kate said lazily to Thea. She was dressed, and had packed her jeans and boots away in the case resting on the luggage rack. ‘We’ll be at Westridge soon, there’s always piles of beach-goers there, you don’t want to give a tourist a heart attack.’

  Thea only stuck out her tongue, but she finished hooking her suspenders and smoothed down her skirt just as we pulled into Westridge station.

  Sure enough, just as Kate had predicted, there was a scattering of tourists on the platform, and Thea let out a groan as the train drew to a halt. Our compartment door was level with a family of three beach-trippers, a mother, father and a little boy of about six with his bucket and spade in one hand, and a dripping choc ice in the other.

  ‘Room for three more?’ the father said jovially as he opened the door and they clambered in, slamming the door behind them. The little compartment felt suddenly very crowded.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Thea said, and she did sound sorry. ‘We’d love to have you, but my friend here,’ she indicated me, ‘she’s out on day release, and part of the terms of her probation is no contact with minors. The court judgement was very specific about that.’

  The man blinked and his wife gave a nervous giggle. The boy wasn’t listening, he was busy picking bits of chocolate off his T-shirt.

  ‘It’s your child I’m thinking of,’ Thea said seriously. ‘Plus of course Ariadne really doesn’t want to go back to the young offenders’ institute.’

  ‘There’s an empty compartment next door,’ Kate said, and I could see she was trying to keep her face straight. She stood and slid open the door to the corridor. ‘I’m so sorry. We don’t want to inconvenience you, but I think it’s for the best, for everyone’s safety.’

  The man shot us all a suspicious look, and then ushered his wife and little boy out into the corridor.

  Thea burst into snorts of laughter as they left, barely waiting even until the compartment door had slid shut, but Kate was shaking her head.

  ‘You do not get a point for that,’ she said. Her face was twisted with suppressed laughter. ‘They didn’t believe you.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Thea took a cigarette out of a packet in her blazer pocket and lit it, taking a deep drag in defiance of the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the window. ‘They left, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but only because they thought you were a fucking weirdo. That doesn’t count!’

  ‘Is … is this a game?’ I said uncertainly.

  There was a long pause.

  Thea and Kate looked at each other, and I saw that wordless communication pass between them again, like an electric charge flowing from one to another, as if they were deciding how to answer. And then Kate smiled, a small, almost secretive smile, and leaned forward across the gap between the bench seats, so close that I could see the dark streaks in her grey-blue eyes.

  ‘It’s not a game,’ she said. ‘It’s the game. It’s the Lying Game.’

  The Lying Game.

  It comes back to me now as sharp and vivid as the smell of the sea, and the scream of gulls over the Reach, and I can’t believe that I had almost forgotten it – forgotten the tally sheet Kate kept above her bed, covered with cryptic marks for her complex scoring system. This much for a new victim. That much for complete belief. The extras awarded for elaborate detail, or managing to rehook someone who had almost called your bluff. I haven’t thought of it for so many years, but in a way, I’ve been playing it all this time.

  I sigh, and look down at Freya’s peaceful face as she suckles, her complete absorption in the moment of it all. And I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can go back.

  What has happened, to make Kate call us so suddenly and so urgently in the middle of the night?

  I can only think of one thing … and I can’t bear to believe it.

  It is just as the train is drawing into Salten that my phone beeps for the last time, and I draw it out, thinking it will be Kate confirming my lift. But it’s not. It’s Thea.

  I’m coming.

  THE PLATFORM AT Salten is almost empty. As the sound of the train dies away, the peace of the countryside rolls back in, and I can hear the noises of Salten in summer – crickets chirping, the sound of birds, the faraway noise of a combine harvester across the fields. Always before when I arrived here there would be the Salten House minibus waiting, with its navy and ice-blue livery. Now the car park is hot dust and emptiness, and there is no one here, not even Kate.

  I wheel Freya down the platform towards the exit, my heavy bag weighing down one shoulder, and wondering what to do. Phone Kate? I should have confirmed the time with her. I’d been assuming she got my message, but what if her phone was out of charge? There’s no landline at the Mill anyway, no other number I can try.

  I put the brake on the pram, and then pull out my phone to check for text messages and find out the time. I’m just tapping in my code when I hear the roar of an engine, funnelled by the sunken lanes, and I turn to see a car pulling into the station car park. I was expecting it to be the huge disreputable Land Rover Kate drove down to Fatima’s wedding seven years ago, with its long bench seats and Shadow sticking his head out of the window, tongue flapping. But it’s not. It’s a taxi. For a minute I’m not sure if it’s her, and then I see her, struggling with the rear passenger door, and my heart does a little flip-flop, and I’m no longer a Civil Service lawyer and a mother, I’m just a girl, running down the platform towards my friend.

  ‘Kate!’

  She’s exactly the same. Same slim, bony wrists, same nut-brown hair and honey-coloured skin, her nose still tip-tilted and sprinkled with freckles. Her hair is longer now, held back in a rubber band, and there are lines in the fine skin around her eyes and mouth, but otherwise she is Kate, my Kate, and as we hug, I inhale, and her own particular scent of cigarettes and turpentine and soap is just as I remember. I hold her at arm’s length and find myself grinning, stupidly, in spite of everything.

  ‘Kate,’ I repeat, foolishly, and she pulls me into another hug, her face in my hair, squeezing me so I can feel her bones.

  And then I hear a squawk and I remember who I am, the person I’ve become – and all that’s passed since Kate and I last met.

  ‘Kate,’ I say again, the sound of her name on my tongue so perfect, ‘Kate, come and meet my daughter.’

  I pull back the sun shade, and pick up the wriggling cross little bundle, and hold her out.

  Kate takes her, with an expression full of trepidation, and then her thin, mobile face breaks into a smile.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ she says to Freya, and her voice is soft and husky just as I remember. ‘Just like your mum. She’s lovely, Isa.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ I look at Freya, staring up, bemused, into Kate’s face, blue eyes fixed on blue eyes. She reaches out a chubby hand towards Kate’s hair, but then stops, mesmerised by some quality of the light. ‘She’s got Owen’s eyes,’ I say. I always longed for blue eyes as a child.

  ‘Come on,’ Kate says at last, speaking to Freya, not me. She takes Freya’s hand, her fingers stroking the silken baby pudge, the dimpled knuckles. ‘Let’s get going.’

  ‘What happened to your car?’ I say as we walk towards the taxi, Kate holding Freya, me pushing the pram, with
the bag inside it.

  ‘Oh, it’s broken down again. I’ll get it fixed but I’ve got no money as usual.’

  ‘Oh, Kate.’

  Oh, Kate, when are you going to get a proper job? I could ask. When are you going to sell the Mill, go somewhere people appreciate your work instead of relying on the dwindling supply of tourists who want to holiday in Salten? But I know the answer. Never. Kate will never leave the Tide Mill. Never leave Salten.

  ‘Back to the Mill, ladies?’ the taxi driver calls out his window, and Kate nods.

  ‘Thanks, Rick.’

  ‘I’ll sling the pram in the back for you,’ he says, getting out. ‘Folds, does it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m struggling with the clips again, and then I realise. ‘Damn, I forgot the car seat. I brought the cot attachment instead – I was thinking she could sleep in it.’

  ‘Ah, we won’t see no police down here,’ Rick says comfortably, pushing the boot shut on the folded pram. ‘’Cept Mary’s boy, and he’s not going to arrest one of my passengers.’

  It wasn’t the police I was worried about, but the name snags at me, distracting me.

  ‘Mary’s boy?’ I look at Kate. ‘Not Mark Wren?’

  ‘The very same,’ Kate says, with a dry smile, so that her mouth creases at one side. ‘Sergeant Wren, now.’

  ‘I can’t believe he’s old enough!’

  ‘He’s only a couple of years younger than us,’ Kate points out, and I realise she’s right. Thirty is plenty old enough to be a policeman. But I can’t think of Mark Wren as a thirty-year-old man – I think of him as a fourteen-year-old kid with acne and a fluffy upper lip, stooping to try to hide his six-foot-two frame. I wonder if he still remembers us. If he remembers the Game.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kate says as we buckle in. ‘Hold her on your lap – I know it’s not ideal.’

  ‘I’ll drive careful,’ Rick says, as we bounce off out of the rutted car park and into the sunken lane. ‘And besides, it’s only a few miles.’

  ‘Less across the marsh,’ Kate says. She squeezes my hand and I know she’s thinking of all the times she and I made that trip, picking our way across the salt marsh to school and back. ‘But we couldn’t do that with the buggy.’