The Lying Game Read online

  ‘It’s his conscience. I’d go mental if he did it in front of the kids, but aside from that, it’s between him and Allah what he does with his body.’

  ‘It’s so …’ Kate says, and then she laughs. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be weird about this. I just can’t get over it. You’re the same old Fatima, and yet …’ She waves a hand at the hijab. Fatima has taken it off her head, but it’s lying draped around her shoulders, like a reminder of how things have changed. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great. It’s just going to take me a while to … to match things up. Same with Isa and Freya, I guess.’ She smiles at me, and I see the fine lines at the corner of her mouth. ‘It was so weird when you turned up at the station, with this little person. And seeing you toting her around, wiping her face, changing a nappy like you’ve been doing it all your life … It’s hard to remember you’re a mum when you’re sitting there, in the same chair as always. You look exactly the same, it’s like nothing’s changed and yet …’

  And yet everything has changed.

  It is gone eleven when Fatima looks at her watch, and pushes her chair back from the table. We have talked and talked, about everything from Fatima’s patients to the village gossip and Owen’s work, but always skirting around the unspoken question – why has Kate summoned us back so urgently?

  ‘I’m going to have to head up,’ she says. ‘Can I use the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Kate says, without looking up. She is rolling a cigarette, her slim brown fingers prodding and shaping the tobacco with practised deftness. She raises it to her lips, licks the paper and then puts the finished roll-up on the table.

  ‘And am I out the back or …?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I should have told you.’ Kate shakes her head, admonishing herself. ‘No, Thea’s got the downstairs bedroom. I’ve put you in my old room. I’m on the top floor now.’

  Fatima nods, and heads up to the bathroom, leaving me and Kate alone. I watch as Kate picks up the cigarette and taps one end on the table.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ I say, knowing she is holding back on my account, but she shakes her head.

  ‘No, it’s not fair. I’ll go out on the jetty.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ I say, and she opens the gappy wooden door that leads out onto the jetty on the river side of the Mill, and we go out together into the warm night air.

  It is quite dark, and a beautiful moon is rising above the Reach. Kate walks to the left-hand edge of the jetty, the end that faces upriver, towards Salten village, and for a minute I don’t understand, but then I see why. The other end of the jetty, the unfenced end where we used to sit, our feet dangling in the water at high tide, is completely submerged. Kate sees my gaze, and shrugs resignedly.

  ‘It’s what happens at high tide now.’ She looks at her watch. ‘That’s as high as it’ll get though – it’ll start to ebb soon.’

  ‘But – but, Kate, I had no idea. Is this what you meant when you said the place is sinking?’

  She nods, lights up with a flare of her Bic lighter, and inhales deeply.

  ‘But, this is serious. I mean, this is really sinking.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate says. Her voice is flat as she blows a long plume of smoke into the night. I feel desire twist in my gut. I can almost taste the smoke. ‘But what can you do?’ she asks rhetorically, around the roll-up lodged in the corner of her mouth.

  Suddenly I can’t bear it any longer. The waiting.

  ‘Give me a drag.’

  ‘What?’ Kate turns to look at me, her face shadowed in the moonlight. ‘Isa, no. Come on, you’ve given up!’

  ‘You know full well, you’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while,’ I say without thinking, and then with a lurch I realise what I’ve said, and who I’m quoting, and it’s like a knife in my heart. I still think of him, even after all these years, how much worse must it be for Kate?

  ‘Oh God,’ I say, putting out my hand. ‘I’m sorry, I –’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says, though she has stopped smiling, and the lines around her month are suddenly graven deeper than before. She takes another long drag, and then puts the roll-up between my outstretched fingers. ‘I think about him all the time. One more reminder doesn’t hurt me any more or less.’

  I hold the roll-up, light as a match, between my fingers, and then with a feeling like slipping into a hot bath, I put the tip between my lips and I draw the smoke deep, deep into my lungs. Oh God, it’s so good …

  And then two things happen. Far up the Reach, towards the bridge, twin beams of light swing across the waves. A car is stopping at the end of Kate’s rutted lane.

  And from the baby monitor in my pocket there comes a thin, squawking cry that tugs at my heart, and my head goes up, jerked by the invisible line that connects me to Freya.

  ‘Here.’ Kate holds out her hand and I hastily give the cigarette back. I can’t believe what I just did. A glass of wine is one thing, but am I really going to go and hold my daughter stinking of cigarette smoke? What would Owen say? ‘You go to Freya,’ she says. ‘I’ll see who …’

  But as I run inside and up the stairs to the bedroom where I’ve left Freya, I know who. I know exactly who.

  It’s Thea, coming, just as she promised. We are all here at last.

  UPSTAIRS I ALMOST bump into Fatima on the landing, coming out of her room, Kate’s old room.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say breathlessly. ‘Freya’s …’

  She stands back, letting me pass, and I sprint into the room at the end of the corridor, where Kate has set up the bentwood cradle that once held her, as a baby.

  It’s a beautiful room – the best perhaps, except maybe the one Kate herself now occupies, a bedroom and studio combined, which is the entire top floor of the mill and used to be her father’s.

  When I pick Freya up she is hot and sticky, and I peel her out of her sleeping bag, realising how warm it is here. As I’m shushing her over my shoulder, I hear a noise behind me and turn to see Fatima in the doorway, looking wonderingly around, and I realise what I failed to notice as I hurried past her on the landing: she’s still fully dressed.

  ‘I thought you were going to bed?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I was praying.’ Her voice is low and hushed, trying not to spook Freya. ‘It’s so weird, Isa. Seeing you here, in his room.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. I settle myself on the wicker chair while Fatima steps over the threshold and takes in our surroundings: the low slanting windows, the polished dark wood floor, the leaf skeletons strung from the beams, shivering in the warm breeze from the open window. Kate has taken away most of Luc’s possessions, his music posters, the pile of unwashed clothes behind the door, the acoustic guitar propped up against the windowsill, the ancient seventies turntable that used to rest on the floor by the bed. But it is still haunted by his presence, and I can’t think of it as anything but Luc’s room, even though Kate called it the back bedroom when she took me up.

  ‘Did you keep in touch?’ Fatima asks. I shake my head.

  ‘No, you?’

  ‘No.’ She sits on the edge of the bed. ‘But you must have thought about him, right?’

  I don’t answer for a minute; I take a moment, rearrange the muslin next to Freya’s cheek.

  ‘A bit,’ I say at last. ‘Now and then.’

  But that’s a lie – and worse, it’s a lie to Fatima. That was the most important rule of the Lying Game. Lie to everyone else, yes. But to each other – never.

  I think of all the lies I have repeated and repeated over the years, until they became so engrained they felt like the truth: I left because I wanted a change. I don’t know what happened to him, he just disappeared. I did nothing wrong.

  Fatima is silent, but her bird-bright eyes are steady on me, and I let my hand drop from where I have been fiddling with my hair. When you watch people lying as often as we have, you get to know each other’s tells. Thea bites her nails. Fatima avoids eye contact.
Kate goes still and remote and unreachable. And I … I fret at my hair, twining it into knots around my fingers, weaving a web as tangled as our falsehoods, without even noticing what I’m doing.

  I worked so hard to overcome it, back then. And now I can see from Fatima’s sympathetic smile that my old quirk has betrayed me again.

  ‘That’s not true,’ I admit. ‘I did think about him … a lot. Did you?’

  She nods.

  ‘Of course.’

  There is silence, and I know we are both thinking about him … about his hands, long and narrow, with strong fingers that ran across the strings of the guitar, first slow as a lover, then faster than you could see. About his eyes, changeable as a tiger’s, and the way they flickered from copper-coloured in the sunshine to golden brown in the shadows. His face is etched into my memory, and now, I see him, so clearly that it’s almost as if he’s standing in front of me – the jutting Roman nose that made his profile so distinctive, the broad expressive mouth, the sweep of his brows and the way they winged upwards slightly at the edges, giving him the look of someone always just about to frown.

  I sigh, and Freya stirs in her light slumber.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ Fatima says quietly. ‘If I’m disturbing her …’

  ‘No, stay,’ I say. Freya’s eyes are drifting shut and then snapping open, and her limbs are becoming loose and heavy, and I know she is nearly back to sleep.

  Freya is lolling now, and I lay her gently into the cradle.

  Just in time, for below I hear the sound of footsteps, and a crash as a door is flung open, and Thea’s voice, ringing through the house above Shadow’s barking.

  ‘Honeys, I’m home!’

  Freya startles, flinging out her arms, starfish-wise, but I put a hand on her chest, and her eyes drift shut, and then I follow Fatima out of Luc’s room, and down the stairs to where Thea is waiting.

  LOOKING BACK AT Salten House, the thing that I remember most is the contrasts. The searing brightness that came off the sea on a sunny winter’s day, and the midnight black of a country night – deeper than any London dark. The quiet concentration of the art rooms, and the shrieking cacophony of the buttery, with three hundred hungry girls waiting to be fed. And, most of all, the intensity of the friendships that sprang up after only a few weeks in that hothouse atmosphere … and the enmities that went with that.

  It was the noise that struck me most, that first night. Fatima and I were unpacking when the bell went for supper, moving around the room in a silence that was already companionable and easy. When the bell shrieked out and we tumbled hastily into the corridor, the wall of sound that met us was like nothing I had heard at my day school – and it only intensified when we walked into the buttery. Lunch had been busy enough, but girls had been arriving all day, and now the hall was rammed, the din of three hundred high-pitched voices enough to make your eardrums bleed.

  Fatima and I were standing uncertainly, looking for a space to sit as girls pushed purposefully past us on all sides, heading for their own particular friends, when I saw Thea and Kate at the end of one of the long polished wood tables. They were facing each other, and there was a spare place beside each of them. I nodded at Fatima and we began to make our way over – but then another girl cut in front of us, and I realised she was aiming there too. There would not be enough space for all of us.

  ‘You take it,’ I said to Fatima, trying to sound as if I didn’t mind. ‘I’m happy going on another table.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Fatima gave me a friendly shove. ‘I’m not abandoning you! There’s got to be two seats together somewhere.’

  But she didn’t move. There was something about the way the other girl was walking towards Kate and Thea that didn’t seem quite right – there was a purpose to it, a hostility that I couldn’t quite pin down.

  ‘Looking for a seat?’ Thea said sweetly as the girl reached her. I’d later come to know her as Helen Fitzpatrick, and she was cheerful and gossipy, but now she laughed, disbelieving and bitter.

  ‘Thanks, but I’d rather sit by the toilets. Why the hell did you tell me Miss Weatherby was pregnant? I sent her a congratulations card, and she went completely mental. I’ve been gated for six weeks.’

  Thea said nothing, but I could see she was trying not to laugh, and Kate, who was sitting with her back to Helen, mouthed ten points, and held up her fingers to Thea, grinning.

  ‘Well?’ Helen demanded.

  ‘My mistake. I must have misheard.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me! You’re a filthy liar.’

  ‘It was a joke,’ Thea said. ‘I never told you it was definite – I said I’d heard on the grapevine. Next time, check your facts.’

  ‘I’ll give you facts. I heard some facts about your last school, Thea. I met a girl from there at tennis camp. She said you’re not right in the head and they had to expel you. Well, they had the right idea, if you ask me. The sooner they chuck you out of here the better as far as I’m concerned.’

  Kate stood up at that and swung round to face Helen. Her face was quite changed from the mischievous, friendly expression I’d seen on the train. It was full of a cold, hard anger that scared me a little.

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ She leaned forward, so that Helen took a step back, almost involuntarily. ‘You spend far too much time listening to rumours. If you stopped believing every nasty bit of gossip floating around, you wouldn’t have got grounded.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Helen spat, and then all the girls jumped as a voice came from behind the little group. It was Miss Farquharson, Gym.

  ‘Everything quite all right here?’

  Helen shot a look at Thea, and seemed to bite her tongue.

  ‘Yes, Miss Farquharson,’ she said, her voice sulky.

  ‘Thea? Kate?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Farquharson,’ Kate said.

  ‘Good. Look, there are two new girls hovering behind you looking for a space, and no one’s asked them to sit down. Fatima, Isa, make room for yourselves on the benches. Helen, do you need a seat?’

  ‘No, Miss Farquharson. Jess is saving me one.’

  ‘Then I suggest you go and take it.’ Miss Farquharson turned and was about to go, when she stopped, and her expression changed. She bent, and sniffed the air above Thea’s head. ‘Thea, what’s this I smell? Please don’t tell me you have been smoking on school property? Miss Weatherby made it very clear last term that if there were any further instances of this we’d be calling your father and discussing suspension.’

  There was a long pause. I saw Thea’s fingers were gripping the table edge. She exchanged a look with Kate, and then opened her mouth – but to my own surprise, I found myself speaking first.

  ‘We were stuck in a smoking carriage, Miss Farquharson. On the train. There was a man there with a cigar – poor Thea was sitting next to him.’

  ‘It was disgusting,’ Fatima put in. ‘Like, really stinky. I felt sick even though I was by the window.’

  Miss Farquharson turned to look at us, and I could see her appraising us both – me with my clear, girlish face and smile, and Fatima, her dark eyes innocent and guileless. I felt my fingers go nervously to my hair, and stopped myself, linking my fingers together behind my back, like a kind of restraint hold. Slowly, Miss Farquharson nodded.

  ‘How very unpleasant. Well, we’ll say nothing more, Thea. This time. Now sit down, girls. The prefects will start serving out in a moment.’

  We sat down, and Miss Farquharson moved away.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Thea whispered. She reached across the table to where I was sitting, and squeezed my hand, her fingers cold against mine and still shaking with spent nerves. ‘And … God, I don’t know what to say. Thank you!’

  ‘Seriously,’ Kate said. She shook her head, her expression a mix of relief and rueful admiration. The steely fury I’d seen in her expression as she faced up to Helen was gone, as if it had never existed. ‘Both of you pulled that off like pros.’

  ‘Welcome to the Ly
ing Game,’ Thea said. She glanced at Kate. ‘Right?’

  And Kate nodded.

  ‘Welcome to the Lying Game. Oh –’ her face broke into grin – ‘and ten points.’

  IT DIDN’T TAKE Fatima and me long to find out why the tower was considered to have the best rooms – in fact we worked it out that very first evening. I had returned to our room after watching a film in the common room. Fatima was already there, lying on her bed, writing what looked like a letter on thin airmail paper, her mahogany hair hanging like dark curtains of silk on either side of her face.

  She looked up as I came in and yawned, and I saw she was already in her pyjamas – a skimpy vest top and pink flannel shorts. The top rode up as she stretched, showing a strip of flat stomach.

  ‘Ready for bed?’ she asked, sitting up.

  ‘Definitely.’ I sat down on the mattress with a squeak of springs and pulled off my shoes. ‘God, I’m shattered. So many new faces …’

  ‘I know.’ Fatima shook back her hair and folded the letter into her bedside table. ‘I couldn’t face meeting more people after supper so I came back here. Was that awful of me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s probably what I should have done. I didn’t talk to anyone really anyway – it seemed to be mostly younger girls.’

  ‘What was the film?’

  ‘Clueless,’ I said, stifling a yawn of my own, and then I turned my back to start unbuttoning my shirt. I had imagined a cubicle, like in boarding-school stories, with curtains you could pull around, but it turned out that was only for the dormitories. Girls in bedrooms were expected just to give each other privacy when necessary.

  I was in my pyjamas, and rummaging in my locker for my sponge bag, when a noise made me stop and look over my shoulder. It had sounded like a knock, but it hadn’t come from the door side of the room.

  ‘Was that you?’ I asked Fatima.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I was about to ask the same thing. It sounded like it came from the window.’

  The curtains were closed, and we both stood, listening, feeling oddly tense and foolish. I was just about to shrug it off with a laugh and a comment about Rapunzel, when the sound came again, louder this time, making us both squeak and then giggle nervously.