The Lies We Tell Read online

  ‘Here we are, then!’ Diane declares, placing a platter of cold meats down on the table.

  ‘Mum, I said I’d prepare the rest of it,’ Katy objects.

  ‘I know,’ Diane laughs. ‘But I couldn’t resist!’

  Grateful for the distraction, Katy retreats to the kitchen where she chops mint into the new potatoes before collecting cutlery and plates and loading the rest of the main course onto a tray. As she walks back into the sitting room she sees her mum has turned her chair away from the dining table to gaze out over the shadowed contours of the park below. The sun has only just set and along the gashed horizon the clouds bleed scarlet rays.

  Putting down the tray, Katy leans across the table to light the candles.

  ‘Ta-dah!’ she says as the burning wicks flare in the thickening air with a defiant certainty she yearns to match. ‘Happy birthday Mum!’

  *

  Asleep a short while later, fitful and restless, Katy recalls how raised voices woke her early the day of the post-exam trip to Gallows Hill. Remembers, too, how she used to feel staring up at the fine cracks in the ceiling above her bed. Navigating their familiar contours, imagining a snowy mountain ridge or the delicate filigree of a parched river system viewed from space, had lulled her for as long as she could remember. Not that morning, though, as her father raged and Mum sobbed.

  Eager to block out the sound of her parents’ argument, she reached for her Walkman and a Talking Heads cassette – one of Andrew’s current favourites. Maybe he would let her borrow the tape to take with her to summer camp, she mused over the opening bars of Burning Down the House. But Andrew had another week at home before setting off on his round the world trip and was bound to take it with him. Or, perhaps, she could get him to make her a copy. She would ask him at breakfast, she decided, picking up the small tub of Astral she kept by the bed. Slowly, she began to rub a gobbet of the oily cream into her cuticles.

  The rough slam of her parent’s bedroom door a few minutes later made Kat jump. Wiping her hands on the duvet cover, she took off the headphones. Her father’s leaden footfalls as he descended the stairs were accompanied by the dull thud of an overnight bag being bounced downwards. After a moment, the front door clicked open then snapped shut. A minute later she heard a car engine roar and the angry cough of tyres on gravel as he sharply pulled away.

  Another week, another business trip. Though it was unusual for him to set off on a Thursday morning.

  Stifling a yawn, Kat rolled out of bed. The black holdall which mum had lent her sat on the floor beneath the window. It was almost full with underwear neatly rolled, shorts and T-shirts carefully ironed. A sundress, freshly washed and pressed, waited on a hanger. Over the back of a chair hung her denim jacket also freshly laundered and, Kat registered with a sinking heart, with neat creases pressed into each arm. She glanced at her alarm clock. She was due at the train station at just after nine. She hoped her parents’ argument wouldn’t make her late.

  Summer camp had been a last minute idea. The school trip was to be a post-O levels treat for the fifth years at St Mary’s and more than half of her class had signed up to five days at an outward bound centre just over the border with Hampshire in an area known as the Devil’s Punch Bowl. Yet Kat had been reluctant to go. Because of Jude.

  Friends since Jude’s abrupt arrival at the school six months earlier, they’d worked as allies during preparations for the mock O-level exams a few months earlier – revising together after school, testing each other, providing mutual encouragement and support. They shared a precocious intelligence and a mutual desire for the freedoms they knew good grades would bring: St Mary’s was that kind of school. And both had done well.

  Since spring, however, something had changed. An advancing shadow had gradually darkened their friendship and now the final exams were over Kat felt unease not excitement at the prospect of five days in her friend’s increasingly volatile company. Worse, Kat’s parents had been arguing badly for weeks. Then there was Andrew’s big trip: she so wanted to make the most of his last few days at home.

  Foolishly, Katy had confided all this to a petulant Jude who used it to twist her arm. It will be a trip to remember, she'd cooed, wooing Kat into non-resistance before dealing her coup de grace. And you know Andrew, he’ll be so busy hanging out with his mates he won’t even notice you’re not there.

  Kat knelt down on the floor to finish packing her bag with her hair dryer and brushes, moisturiser and wash bag. Opening the bottom drawer of her desk, she carefully reached to the back and pulled out the lash-thickening mascara and cherry-tinted lip balm Jude had given her for her birthday and quickly poked both down and out of sight towards the bottom of the travel bag. Unlike Jude’s mum, Diane Parker did not like her daughter wearing make-up.

  But this was only the beginning of the world of differences that divided her mum from Siobhan, as Jude's mum liked everyone – including her own daughter and her friends – to address her. Tall and slender with blonde hair which judging by the colour of her eyebrows was bottle-enhanced, Siobhan Davies was not like other mums. She was younger, unmarried – though she had a boyfriend – and worked in a dental surgery. The tops she liked to wear were low cut and fitted snugly into the triumphantly-narrow waistbands of her skinny-fit jeans and pencil skirts. And she had a magpie penchant for gaudy colours and costume jewellery.

  Visibly uncomfortable on the days she did make it to the school gate, Siobhan always seemed to be waiting for someone to cast some negative comment or put her down. Which, perhaps, explained why when collecting Jude on the days she came back to Katy's after school for tea, the woman announced her arrival only with a brief blast on the car horn as she waited outside for her daughter to gather her things. Her own home was red brick and far smaller than Charles and Diane's, though to Kat’s mind the combined effect of magnolia bubble bath and stale nicotine give its interior an exotic allure.

  It came as no surprise, then, that when the trip to Gallows Hill was first mentioned Kat’s mum hadn't wanted her to go. For despite a perennial desire to give her daughter the opportunities she never enjoyed, Diane Parker still treated her youngest like a child. She openly admitted she was over-protective, even made jokes about it. It’s how she’d been ever since a family picnic down by the canal one stifling summer afternoon a decade before when Kat almost drowned. Eventually Diane relented, of course, but not before squeezing from Kat repeated assurances that yes she would be careful, and no she would not wander the heath alone.

  Andrew, his head buried in a copy of The Times, had almost finished his breakfast when Kat entered the kitchen. He was wearing a crumpled T-shirt with yesterday’s jeans. The hair on each side of his head was gelled flat while the top was artfully spiked. And by the look of it, Kat noted with wry amusement, he was failing miserably in a vain attempt to cultivate stubble. But though she greeted him brightly, the cassette request playing on her mind, he merely grunted.

  Her brother had changed so much since going into sixth form, and now his A-levels were over he couldn’t wait to escape the stifling atmosphere and stale familiarity of home. At the local sixth form college, he quickly fell in with a new bunch of friends. He started a band, too, and frequently returned home after midnight smelling of beer and cigarettes. Yet in her brother’s aloofness, constant conviction he alone was right and increasingly short temper Kat saw only a younger version of their father rather than the rebel Andrew so clearly yearned to be.

  Taking a seat at the table Kat poured herself a mug of tea and stared at her brother who remained unmoving, his head bowed. How like dad he was becoming, she mused with a stab of satisfaction at how horrified Andrew would be at the merest suggestion. She almost grinned, but her mood quickly darkened as Diane wandered into the kitchen. Still dressed in her quilted dressing gown, the woman’s eyes looked puffy and the skin on her throat was blotchy and red.

  Kat reached for some toast. Though she was sorry for her mum she was angry, too – at the predictability of it all
. Ever since she could remember the tension in her parents’ marriage had been a smouldering backdrop to family life. Brief periods of calm were always cut short by some flare up or other and then, when tempers were at their shortest, work would call her dad away – on one occasion for six months. Life slipped into the gentle rhythms of relative normality during their father’s absences for Kat and Andrew, but both could see that Diane found these periods of separation almost as hard to deal with as times when inter-marital hostilities were in full swing.

  Secretly, Kat had always sided with her in any confrontation against her dad whose uneasy informality and frequent absences made him cold and aloof. Yet for years she’d craved Charles’s attention and praise, convinced if she could somehow change – be better at school, better at swimming, a better person – everything could be made alright.

  Andrew rose from the table and walked towards the door. Have a good trip, Shrimp, he called to Kat without turning his head as he left the room. Kat's eyes welled at the sudden realisation that when she got back from camp the following Tuesday there would be just one day left before he flew to Sydney, and that she wouldn’t then see him again for almost a year. She remembered the goodbye present she'd bought still wrapped in its plastic and tucked away from view beneath T-shirts in an upstairs drawer. A new Zippo lighter to replace the one he lost; she would wrap it when she gets back.

  They drove into town in silence. The only acknowledgement of what might or might not have happened between her parents before breakfast came when, waiting at a set of red lights just outside town, Diane reached out and gently patted her daughter’s knee. Everything will be alright, she murmured, more to reassure herself than Kat. Just you wait and see.

  As they turned into the station car park, Kat quickly located a group of her classmates standing outside the main entrance watching the drop off zone where one of their number, Ruth Creighton, was helping her dad tug an unfeasibly large, purple sports bag from the boot of his car. Here we are at last! Diane smiled, almost looking like her old self. Have a wonderful time. She handed Kat a small, knotted plastic bag containing six ten pence pieces and a folded slip of paper. Don’t forget to ring. Or the new number – I've written it down, just in case.

  The phone company had just changed their number and taken them ex-directory after a series of nuisance calls – the silent kind, there had been a dozen or so since Easter. Maybe mum would relax a bit now.

  Briefly, Kat kissed her mum then clambered out of the car. She walked round to the boot where her bag was stowed but then, as she reached for the handle, the car began to pull away. A moment later, Diane slammed on the brakes and stopped abruptly, forcing the driver of a Citroen attempting to back out of a parking space to her right to screech to a halt with only a few inches to spare. Darling, I am so, so sorry – she began. A slight tremble shook her voice. Don’t worry, Mum, Kat muttered, casting a defiant glare at the man who in between pounding his horn was shaking his fist in their direction. We’ll be back, she added, almost apologetically. Andrew, me … just you wait.

  Hurrying towards her friends, Kat resisted the urge to look back. Diane’s distress was humiliating and she didn’t need to look to know her classmates were staring. Whispering. Though a sudden laugh almost made her crack. Until she realised it was her mum. Regaining her composure, Kat readjusted the strap of the travel bag to stop it from cutting into her shoulder. Tried to ignore, too, the sense of the widening gulf between them. The sound of Mum's fingers drumming the roof of the car as she waited for her child to turn and wave.

  *

  The sound – like fingers tap-tapping a hard surface – wakes Katy at around two.

  It's only the faint rattle of the fan’s leftward sweep that’s woken her. But by the time she’s identified the cause Katy is too awake to re-settle. She is alone in bed, naked, with a parched throat. Reaching for the glass on the bedside table she finds it empty. Clasping it in one hand, she climbs out of bed. In the bathroom she fills the glass then takes a few deep gulps. Only as she turns to retrace her steps back upstairs does she hesitate, puzzled by the barely perceptible shift in the depth of darkness.

  The house is south-facing with taller houses with an extra storey overlooking it at the rear which means that at night, the main source of light comes from the two street lamps at the building’s front. But now, as she looks down towards the sitting room, she can clearly see the difference. Fumbling for the cause, she wanders downstairs into the sitting room, then just before she reaches the window, snaps to attention. There’s an unexpected sound outside like someone stamping on ice. Then the muted yet unmistakable crunch of breaking glass.

  Hurrying towards the blind, Katy peeks through two of the wooden slats just in time to see someone throwing something at the street light opposite. Glass splinters again and the darkness deepens.

  In the middle of the road where, until a few minutes earlier, two pools of light reassuringly interlocked, Katy can just make out three kids, their faces obscured by the darkness. What are they up to, she wonders. Abruptly, one turns her way then hesitates for a moment before breaking into a low run towards their house. A moment later he has disappeared from view behind the honeysuckle explosion of their front fence. She shifts position to get a clearer view but now the figure below, who must now be in their front garden, is hidden by the slope of the porch roof.

  With a pounding heart, Katy turns her attention once more to the others who are still standing in the middle of the street where one is carefully removing a handful of something from a small bag slung across the other's back. Suddenly, they look up in her direction. Have they seen her? Quickly, she ducks out of view. But before she can check, a missile explodes with a dull crack against the glass by her side closely followed by two more.

  Peering through the gap between the blind's edge and the window frame, Katy sees them, brazen and expectant. Why are they doing this, she wonders. What can they want?

  Then the first figure is back in view. Skipping out through Michael's front gate. Darting along the pavement towards a nearby parked car. Springing onto the bonnet then stepping up onto the roof to stand triumphant for a moment, arms outstretched like the king of the castle, before jumping up then down making the metal buckle. Again, and then again. Only when, at last, the figure is back on solid ground does Katy realise the car is hers.

  Torn between fear and anger, she cranes her neck to see what they will do next. But now the trio appear to be readying to leave. They are on their bikes, straddling the cross bars to exchange high fives outside the lawyer's house next door as a running figure breaks from the shadow and draws to a halt by their side. He is taller than the others – an adult, perhaps, on the return leg of a late night run. Though now they are talking in low voices and, for a split second, he wrestles something the size of a paperback from the front pocket of his hoodie and gives it to the nearest one. And then it is over. They are gone, pedalling furiously into the night, and the man, now alone, turns towards their house and walks towards it. Unlatches the front gate. Heads towards their front door.

  Katy spins back from the window, bruising her back as she slams against the wall. Her hands clench into fists then un-ball, rapidly, as she braces herself for the sound of the doorbell. But it doesn't come. Instead she can just make out what sounds like the distant scrape of a key turning in the lock. Which is impossible, of course, she thinks as she slips down onto the floor and hugs her knees to her chest. She waits for any audible clue of the stranger's advance up the stairs towards her and Michael's flat but there is none. Just the masonry murmur of the downstairs flat's front door being pushed to.

  Michael’s voice suddenly echoes in Katy’s head as she turns back to the window and stares down onto the dented roof of her car with its frosted latticework of cracked glass where once a windscreen had been. Just like living in the bloody Wild West.

  It’s what he said after a recent front page story in the Evening Standard about a drive-by shooting involving rival gangs in Sheph
erd’s Bush. But that was a mile away, the expanse of a continent in London terms, and nothing like this has ever happened to them.

  Slumped onto the sofa, she hugs a cushion to her chest. Weary and frightened, she is suddenly overwhelmed by despair. Where’s Michael now? she wonders, miserably. Why isn't he here?

  Katy reaches for the phone and dials his mobile number but the call goes straight to voicemail. As she hangs up without leaving a message the sudden and unexpected banshee wail of an emergency vehicle just a few streets away makes her flinch. Is it worth calling the police, she wonders, fleetingly, before dismissing the idea. For what would be the point? Those kids would be long gone by now and the downstairs flat is silent.

  It must be Phil's friend – the one in the garden, earlier, watering the plants – who she's just seen entering the house, Katy reasons, slipping the phone back into its cradle. For whose presence and behaviour there is, surely, a perfectly logical and innocent explanation.

  Even so, she takes Michael's camping torch – a heavy duty Maglite the size of a rolling pin – from the landing cupboard and carries it back upstairs to bed. The weight of its rugged, aluminium handle reassures Katy as she carefully positions the makeshift cosh within easy reach by her side upended on the floor. How bad is my car, she wonders. What did the stranger downstairs see? But to discover either she must wait. Only a few hours, she tells herself firmly. Until daylight. Everything will look better in the morning – it always does.

  Closing her eyes, she crosses her fingers without thinking.

  Chapter 6

  London – July 2013

  ‘Thought you might need a bit of a pick me up,’ Michael says, setting the tray down at the end of the bed.

  Sluggishly opening her eyes, Katy registers the tumbler of water on the bedside table, un-drunk. The raw pain now pounding her left temple. Then the smell of toast. Her stomach clenches and she thinks she might be sick as, through narrowed eyes, she squints at the tray in his hands. He’s brought her coffee, too; Alka Seltzer and an unopened strip of Nurofen. She reaches first for the tumbler with a sheepish smile then quickly checks the clock. For the first time in as long as she can remember, he has woken before the alarm.