The Lying Game Read online

  ‘All right.’ She peels off her vest top, steps out of her jeans, and turns to unhook her bra and then, last, before she enters the water, she picks up the bottle of wine she has brought out onto the jetty and takes a long, gulping draught. There is something about the tilt of her head and the movement of her throat that is unbearably young and vulnerable, and just for a moment the years slip away and she is the same Kate, sitting out on the fire escape at Salten House, throwing back her head to drain the whiskey bottle.

  Then she lets the bottle drop on top of her pile of clothes, squares herself for the plunge, and I feel the ripples as she hits the water, feet away from me, and sinks beneath the moon-dappled surface.

  I wait, expecting her to come up somewhere close … but she doesn’t. There are no bubbles, and it’s impossible to see where she is, the moonlight reflecting off the water makes it hard to see anything beneath.

  ‘Kate?’ I say, treading water, feeling my anxiety rise as the seconds tick past and there is still no sign of her. And then, ‘Thea, where the hell’s Kate?’

  And then I feel something catch on my ankle, a cold, strong grip that jerks me down, deep, deep into the Reach. I catch a breath before I go under, but I am deep below before I can scream, grappling the thing that is pulling me down.

  Just as suddenly, it lets go, and I surface, gasping and raking salt water out of my eyes, to find Kate’s grinning face next to mine, her arms holding me up.

  ‘You bitch!’ I gasp, not sure if I want to hug her or drown her. ‘You could have warned me!’

  ‘That would have spoiled the point of it,’ Kate says, panting. Her eyes are bright, and laughing.

  Thea is far out in the centre of the Reach where the current is strongest and the water is deep, floating on her back in the sweep of the turning tide, swimming to keep herself in one place.

  ‘Come out,’ she calls. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

  With Fatima watching from the jetty, Kate and I swim out to where Thea floats, suspended in reflected starlight, and we turn on our backs, and I feel their hands link with mine, and float, a constellation of bodies, pale in the moonlight, limbs tangled, fingers clutching and bumping and losing hold, and then clutching again.

  ‘Come on, Fati,’ Thea calls. ‘It’s gorgeous out here.’

  And it is. Now the shock of the cold has worn off, it’s surprisingly warm, and the moon above is almost full. When I dive beneath the surface I can see it, glinting, refracted into a thousand shards that pierce the milky, muddy waters of the Reach.

  When I surface, I see that Fatima has moved closer to the side of the jetty, and is sitting right at the edge, trailing her fingers in the sea, almost wistfully.

  ‘It’s not the same without you,’ Kate pleads. ‘Come on … you know you want to …’

  Fatima shakes her head and stands, I assume to go inside. But I’m wrong. As I watch, treading water, she takes a breath, and then she leaps – clothes and all, her scarves fluttering like a bird’s wing in the night air, and she hits the surface with a smack.

  ‘No way!’ Thea crows. ‘She did it!’

  And we are scything our way through the water towards her, laughing and shivering with a kind of hysteria, and Fatima is laughing too, wringing out her scarves, and hugging us to keep afloat as the water drags on her clothes.

  We are together again.

  And for that brief instant in time, it’s all that matters.

  IT IS LATE. We have dragged ourselves from the water, laughing and cursing, scraping our shins on the splintered rotten wood, and we have towelled our hair and dried our goosebumped skin. Fatima has changed out of her wet clothes, shaking her head at her own stupidity, and now we are lying sleepily on Kate’s threadbare sofa in our pyjamas and dressing gowns, a tangle of weary limbs and soft worn throws, gossiping, reminiscing, telling the old stories – do you remember …

  Fatima’s hair is loose and damp, and with it tangling round her face she looks younger, so much closer to the girl she used to be. It’s hard to believe that she has a husband, and two children of her own. As I watch her, laughing at something Kate has said, the grandfather clock standing against the far wall gives two faint chimes, and she turns to look.

  ‘Oh blimey. I can’t believe it’s 2 a.m.! I’ve got to get some sleep.’

  ‘You lightweight,’ Thea says. She doesn’t look in the least tired, in fact she looks as if she could go on for hours – her eyes are sparkling as she knocks back the dregs of a glass of wine. ‘I didn’t even start my shift until midnight last night!’

  ‘Well, exactly. It’s all very well for you,’ Fatima says. ‘Some of us have spent years conditioning ourselves to the rigid timetable of a nine-to-five job and a couple of pre-schoolers. It’s hard to snap out of it. Look, Isa’s yawning too!’

  They all turn to look at me, and I try, unsuccessfully, to stifle the yawn that’s already halfway in motion, and then shrug and smile.

  ‘Sorry, what can I say? I lost my stamina along with my waist. But Fatima’s right … Freya will be awake at seven. I have to get a few hours in before then.’

  ‘Come on,’ Fatima says, standing up and stretching. ‘Bed.’

  ‘Wait,’ Kate says, her voice low, and I realise that out of all of us, she has been the quietest for this last part of the night. Fatima, Thea and I, we have all been telling our favourite stories, anecdotes at the expense of each other, dredged-up memories … but Kate has kept silent, guarding her thoughts. Now, her voice is a surprise, and we all turn to look. She is curled in the armchair, her hair loose and shadowing her face, and there is something in her expression that makes us all stop. My stomach flutters.

  ‘What?’ Fatima says, and there is uneasiness in her voice. She sits again, but on the edge of the sofa this time, her fingers twining around the edge of the scarf she has draped to dry on the fireguard around the stove. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I …’ Kate says, and then she stops. She drops her eyes. ‘Oh God,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I didn’t know it would be this difficult.’

  And suddenly I know what she is about to say, and I am not sure that I want to hear it.

  ‘Spit it out,’ Thea says, her voice hard. ‘Say it, Kate. We’ve skirted round it long enough, it’s time to tell us why.’

  Why what? Kate could retort. But she doesn’t need to. We all know what Thea means. Why are we here. What did that text mean, those three little words: I need you.

  Kate draws a breath, and she looks up, her face shadowed in the lamplight.

  But to my surprise, she doesn’t speak. Instead she gets up, and goes to the pile of newspapers in the scuttle by the stove, left there for lighting the logs. There is one on the top, the Salten Observer, and she holds it out, wordless, her face showing all the fear she has been hiding this long, drunken evening.

  It is dated yesterday, and the headline on the front page is very simple.

  HUMAN BONE FOUND IN REACH.

  Rule Two

  Stick to Your Story

  ‘SHIT.’ THE VOICE that breaks the silence is Fatima’s, surprising me with her vehemence. ‘Shit.’

  Kate lets the paper fall and I snatch it up, my eyes darting across the page. Police have been called to identify remains found on the north bank of the Reach at Salten…

  My hand is shaking so hard that I can hardly read, and disjointed phrases jumble together as I scan the page. Police spokesperson confirmed … human skeletal remains … unnamed witness … poor state of preservation … forensic examination … locals shocked … area closed to the public …

  ‘Have they …’ Thea falters, uncharacteristically, and starts again. ‘Do they know …’

  She stops.

  ‘Do they know who it is?’ I finish for her, my voice hard and brittle, looking at Kate who sits with her head bowed beneath the weight of our questions. The paper in my hand trembles, making a sound like leaves falling. ‘The body?’

  Kate shakes her head, but she doesn’t need to say the words I know we
are all thinking: Not yet …

  ‘It’s just a bone. It might be completely unconnected, right?’ Thea says, but then her face twists. ‘Fuck, who am I kidding? Shit!’ She slams her fist, the one holding the glass, down onto the table and the glass breaks, shards skittering everywhere.

  ‘Oh, Thee,’ Kate says, her voice very low.

  ‘Stop being a bloody drama queen, Thee,’ Fatima says angrily. She goes to the sink to get a cloth and a brush. ‘Did you cut yourself?’ she throws back over her shoulder.

  Thea shakes her head, her face white, but she lets Fatima examine her hand, wiping away the dregs of wine with a tea towel. As Fatima pushes back Thea’s sleeve I see what the moonlight outside hid – the trace of white scars on her inner arm, long-healed but still visible, and I can’t stop myself from flinching and looking away, remembering when those cuts were fresh and raw.

  ‘You idiot,’ Fatima says, but her touch, as she brushes the shards of glass from Thea’s palm, is gentle, and there is a tremor in her voice.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Thea says, shaking her head, and I realise for the first time how drunk she is, just holding it together well. ‘Not again, not now. Even rumours – casinos are fucking strict, do you guys realise that? And if the police get involved …’ There is a crack in her voice, the sound of a sob trying to rise to the surface. ‘Shit, I could lose my gaming licence. I might never work again.’

  ‘Look, we’re all in the same boat,’ Fatima says. ‘You think people want a GP with questions like that hanging over their head? Or a lawyer?’ She jerks her head at me. ‘Isa and I have got just as much to lose as you.’

  She doesn’t mention Kate. She doesn’t have to.

  ‘So what do we do?’ Thea asks at last. She looks from me, to Kate, to Fatima. ‘Shit. Why the hell did you bring us down here?’

  ‘Because you had a right to know,’ Kate says. Her voice shakes. ‘And because I couldn’t think of a safer way to tell you.’

  ‘We need to do what we should have done years ago,’ Fatima says vehemently. ‘Get our story straight before they question us.’

  ‘The story is what it always has been,’ Kate says. She pulls the newspaper away from me and folds it so she can’t see the headline, scoring the page with her nails. Her hands are trembling. ‘The story is, we know nothing. We saw nothing. There’s nothing we can do except stick to that – we can’t change our account.’

  ‘I mean what do we do now?’ Thea’s voice rises. ‘Do we stay? Go? Fatima has the car, after all. There’s nothing keeping us here.’

  ‘You stay,’ Kate says, and her voice has that quality that I remember so well – an absolute finality that was impossible to argue with. ‘You stay, because as far as everyone’s concerned, you came down for the dinner tomorrow night.’

  ‘What?’ Thea frowns, and I remember for the first time that the others don’t know about this. ‘What dinner?’

  ‘The alumnae dinner.’

  ‘But, we’re not invited,’ Fatima says. ‘Surely they wouldn’t let us back? Not after what happened?’

  Kate shrugs, and for answer, she goes to the corkboard beside the sink, and pulls out a pin securing four stiff white invitations, returning with the cards in her hand.

  ‘Apparently they would,’ she says, holding them out.

  The Salten House Old Girls’ Association invites

  …………………………………………

  to the Alumnae Summer Ball.

  In the space on each card is scrawled our names, handwritten in navy-blue fountain pen.

  Kate Atagon

  Fatima Chaudhry (née Qureshy)

  Thea West

  Isa Wilde

  Kate holds them, fanned like playing cards, as though inviting us to take one, make a bet.

  But I am not looking at the names, or the embossed gilt lettering of the text itself. I am looking at the hole, stabbed through each card by the pin holding them to the corkboard. And I am thinking that, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.

  ART WAS AN extra for most of us at Salten House, an ‘enrichment’ the school called it, unless you were studying it for an exam, which I was not, so it was some weeks into the term, when the days at Salten had become almost routine, by the time I encountered the art studios, and Ambrose Atagon.

  Like most boarding schools, Salten groups pupils in school houses, each named for a Greek goddess. Fatima and I had been put in the same house, Artemis, goddess of the hunt, so our enrichment came round at the same time, and we both found ourselves searching for the studios one frosted October morning after breakfast, walking back and forth across the quad, looking for anyone more knowledgeable than ourselves to ask.

  ‘Where the bloody hell is it?’ Fatima said again, for the tenth time, and for perhaps the eighth time I answered:

  ‘I don’t know, but we’ll find it. Stop panicking.’

  As the words left my mouth, a second year clutching a huge pad of watercolour paper shot past in the direction of the maths rooms and I called out, ‘Hey, you! Are you heading to art?’

  She turned round, her face pink with haste.

  ‘Yes, but I’m late. What is it?’

  ‘We’ve got art too, we’re lost, can we follow you?’

  ‘Yes, but hurry.’ She bolted through an archway covered with white snowberries, and through a wooden door we’d never seen before, hidden in the shadows of the snowberry bush.

  Inside there was the inevitable flight of steps – I have never been so fit, since leaving Salten – and we followed her up, and up, two or three flights at least until I began to wonder where on earth we were heading.

  At last, the stairs opened out onto a small landing with a wire-hatched glass door, which the girl flung open.

  Inside was a long vaulted gallery, the walls low, but the roof arching to a triangular point. The space above our heads was criss-crossed with supporting beams and braces, all hung with drying sketches and balanced with strange items, presumably to be used for still-life compositions – an empty birdcage, a broken lute, a stuffed marmoset, its eyes sad and wise.

  There were no windows, for the walls were too low, just skylights in the vaulted roof, and I realised that we must be in the attics above the maths classrooms. The space was flooded with winter sunlight and filled with objects and pictures, entirely unlike any of the other classrooms I had seen so far – white-painted, sterile, and painfully clean – and I stood in the doorway, blinking at the dazzling impression.

  ‘Sorry, Ambrose,’ the second year gasped, and I blinked again. Ambrose? That was another strangeness. The other teachers at Salten were routinely female, and referred to as Miss whatever their surname was, regardless of their marital status.

  No one, but no one, used first names.

  I turned, to see the person she had addressed so informally.

  And I caught my first sight of Ambrose Atagon.

  I once tried to describe Ambrose to an old boyfriend, before I met Owen, but I found it almost impossible. I have photographs, but they only show a man of middle height, with wiry dark hair, and shoulders curved from hunching perpetually over a sketch. He had Kate’s thin mobile face, and years of sketching in the sun and squinting against the bright light of the bay had worn his skin into lines that made him look somehow paradoxically younger than his forty-five years, not older. And he had Kate’s slate-blue eyes, the only remarkable feature he possessed, but even they don’t come alive in a photograph the way they do in my memory – for Ambrose was so alive – always working, laughing, loving … his hands never still, always rolling a cigarette, or sketching a drawing or throwing back a glass of the harsh red wine he kept in two-litre bottles under the sink at the Mill – too rough for anyone else to drink.

  Only an artist of the calibre of Ambrose himself could have captured all that life, the contradictions of his still concentration and restless energy, and the mysterious magnetic attraction of a man
of very ordinary appearance.

  But he never made a self-portrait. Or not that I know of. Ironic, really, when he drew anything and everything around him – the birds on the river, the girls at Salten House, the fragile marsh flowers that shivered and blew in the summer breeze, the ripple of wind on the Reach …

  He drew Kate obsessively, littering the house with sketches of her eating, swimming, sleeping, playing … and later he drew me, and Thea, and Fatima, though he always asked our permission. I remember it still, his halting, slight gravelly voice, so like Kate’s. ‘Do you, um, mind if I draw you?’

  And we never minded. Though maybe we should have.

  One long sunny afternoon he drew me, sitting at the kitchen table with the strap of my dress falling from one shoulder, my chin in my hands, and my eyes fixed on him. And I can still remember the feel of the sun on my cheek, and the heat of my gaze upon him, and the little electric shock that happened every single time he glanced up at my face from his sketch, and our eyes met.

  He gave me the drawing, but I don’t know what happened to it. I gave it to Kate, because there was nowhere to hide it at school, and it didn’t feel right to show my parents, or the girls at Salten House. They would not have understood. No one would have understood.

  After his disappearance there were whispers – his past, his drug convictions, the fact that he didn’t have a single teaching qualification to his name. That first day though, I knew none of this. I had no idea of the part that Ambrose would play in our lives, and we in his, or how the ripples of our meeting would go on reverberating down the years. I just stood, holding the strap of my bag and panting, as he straightened from his position, hunched over a pupil’s easel. He looked across at me with those blue, blue eyes, and he smiled, a smile that crinkled the skin above his beard, and at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ he said kindly, putting down the borrowed brush and wiping his hands on his painter’s apron. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ambrose.’

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. It was something about the intensity of his gaze. The way you could believe, in the moment that he looked at you, that he cared, utterly and completely. That there was no one else in the universe who mattered to him as much as you did. That you were alone, in a crowded room.