Seven Lies Read online

  It was all about Marnie.

  I had done to her what the world had done to me.

  You were meant to ask me if I regretted it. This was the moment I first felt any kind of regret.

  The fruit from the shopping bag had rolled down the corridor, toward the kitchen, and the chicken, still wrapped in plastic, was sweltering on the wooden floor, my hairpin glittering beneath the radiator. But none of that mattered. All I could think about was Marnie. The paramedics were working in my peripheral vision, doing something that was probably nothing. And we all knew that soon they would stand up and step back and clear their throats.

  Marnie was curled up on the bottom step of the stairs. Her raincoat had fallen from her shoulders and it hung around her waist, strapped around her arms. She wasn’t crying anymore. But she was trembling, shivering, almost violently, like there was something within her that needed to escape. Her jaw was slack and her eyes were swollen and red and she kept making these terrible little noises, tiny retching sounds, like an infant choking. She was small, her knees bent up against her shoulders and enveloped in her own arms.

  I had broken her. I knew then that I had broken her.

  And don’t start now with any nonsensical platitudes. Those people, the ones who say they understand when they don’t, are the worst. And you are not one of them.

  I knew then that it was all my fault. I had driven her to this moment. It was my words, my lies. And, to you, I cannot deny that I was the one who turned his head, who snapped his neck.

  The remorse was unexpected. And perhaps it would have been so intense as to make me regret my actions had it not been tempered by a seed of hope. Marnie and I had been separated by romantic love. Those openings were now empty, cracks that could be refilled and repaired, until it might seem that they had never existed. I had created that opportunity. I felt sadness for her suffering and for what she would go on to experience. But I didn’t feel guilt. I mainly felt relief.

  Things have changed substantially since that day; you know that better than anyone. It must be about a year ago now, I suppose. You make it feel so much longer.

  * * *

  Later that night—after the police and the doctor and the undertakers—we returned to my flat.

  I was very aware as we rode up in the elevator and stepped into the corridor that my building wasn’t in any way luxurious. There were none of those symbols of success here: no polished floors or spotless mirrored walls. But I had known this woman as an eleven-year-old girl, and she had never been impressed by wealth or success then. And I knew that she was still that same person. Those were the proclivities of her late husband; he liked money and indulgences and extravagance. But we both knew—had always known—that they were simply façades, trimmings that decorated but didn’t change the substance of a thing.

  Marnie had never spent much time in my flat and it was nice to have her there with me. I offered her a pair of my pajamas—my favorite pair—and she had a long bath and I made her a cup of milky, sugared tea.

  I lay in bed and waited for her and I heard the plug being pulled and the gurgle of water as it descended through the pipes. I heard the bathroom door opening as she stepped into the corridor to collect the pajamas from the radiator. The light was off, but I heard her enter my room and then she climbed into bed beside me. The sun was beginning to rise, peeping over the horizon and brightening the edges of my blinds.

  I couldn’t sleep knowing that she was there. She was on her side, facing away from me, toward the window, and her breathing was calm and steady, and I wondered if perhaps she was so exhausted that she’d fallen quickly asleep.

  I lay on my back with my hands clasped over my stomach and I felt very much in control. This wasn’t what I’d planned—remember that, yes—but I wasn’t dissatisfied with the outcome.

  “Jane?” Her voice broke in her throat.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Did you hear anything?” she whispered into her pillow. “Anything at all?”

  Still I didn’t reply.

  “Jane?” she said again, a little louder this time.

  “What?” I said sluggishly, as though already half asleep.

  “Did you hear him? Did you hear when he fell? Or anything afterwards?” she asked. “You were there, weren’t you? Perhaps there was—”

  “There was nothing,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, peering into the darkness to where I thought she was lying.

  “Nothing at all?” she asked. “All that time. And nothing at all?”

  “No,” I replied. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t hear a thing. I guess he—”

  “Was gone,” she interrupted. “Yes, I suppose he must have already gone.”

  That was the fourth lie I told Marnie.

  I didn’t have a choice, did I? How could I answer those questions honestly? I couldn’t. I knew it then and I know it now. And yet, curiously, it was my denial, my self-proclaimed innocence, that nudged us back onto our path.

  The truth would have been far more damaging for her.

  Because then she’d have had no one.

  Chapter Twenty

  A life doesn’t end when a person dies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it did? If you died and all the memories in which you existed simply evaporated from the minds of their hosts, disappearing into the ether. If you were erased—at that very moment—from everywhere and everyone.

  I wouldn’t remember Jonathan. I wouldn’t remember loving him or marrying him. I wouldn’t remember his freckles or his strong thighs or the veins that ran along the backs of his hands. I would be sad to lose those memories, certainly. But I wouldn’t know that they’d been lost, so I wouldn’t know to miss them. I would have no grief.

  I wouldn’t remember Charles. I wouldn’t remember hating him or killing him. I wouldn’t remember his firm jaw or the narrow bridge of his nose or the way he pinched his chin when he was thinking. I wouldn’t remember him begging for help.

  Marnie would never have met him. She would never have moved into that apartment, she would never have loved him, never have married him. He would have disappeared entirely.

  But that isn’t how the world works. There are no blank slates, no fresh starts, no clean cuts. There is only the messy aftermath of every decision you ever make. Because—and this is one of my greatest frustrations—life moves in only one direction. Every decision that you ever make will be written in stone, permanent, never to be undone. They are all entirely irrevocable. Even if you find a way to unwind a specific decision, to unpick those threads, that decision will always have been made.

  You chose your first job. You will never have another first job. You picked an apartment in a part of a city, and you will always have lived in that part of that city, whatever comes next, whatever else you choose. It never stops. The decisions are always binding. You pick a partner. Perhaps you marry him. Perhaps he becomes the father of your children. He will always be the father of your children, regardless of every decision you make from that point onward; whatever you might do next, that choice will always stand.

  It is overwhelming. I cannot escape from the endless suffocation of my own decisions.

  I would like it better if life were like a spiderweb, with a labyrinth of options, sprawling out from a single, central point. We would have all manner of choices, and not one would be irreversible, because there would always be another path back to the beginning. But instead we have only one straight thread, no choices at all, a relentless momentum and only one direction.

  Jonathan has gone. Charles has gone. And yet they haven’t really left us at all.

  Whenever I am working through a crossword, I think of Charles. I wonder what he might say, if he would know how to unravel the final clue, if he would know the answer that eludes me. Whenever I see a man whose toenails are slightly too long, I think of Charles. I think of his ugly feet and the way he in
sisted on wearing sandals around their apartment in the summer. Whenever I see a tie tied too tight, I think of Charles. When a man asks for the wine menu and then peruses it at length, inevitably settling on the most expensive option, I think of Charles. There are so many facets of his being that are still embedded in my memory and so he is never as far away as I would like.

  By contrast, Jonathan is never quite close enough. I cannot watch the London marathon. I cannot stand to see the joggers in their bright Lycra, their numbers pinned to their chests, their headphones and their sweatbands and their tightly laced trainers. I cannot stand to see the charity runners in their fancy dress, their madcap contraptions, the smiles across their faces and the laughter they provoke. Because it all makes me think of Jonathan, and not of Jonathan as I knew and loved him, but of Jonathan as he died.

  There are things that remind me of him in a more positive way, too. When I watch groups of men speed past on bicycles on weekends, heading out of the city and toward the suburbs, to charge up hills and fly back down, to clock the miles, and to stop for a pint and a sandwich in a pub on a country lane. That was something Jonathan loved to do. I think of him whenever I’m at Angel tube station, because that was where we parted each morning, after toasted bagels and bananas and the panicked hunt through the piles of shoes in the understair cupboard and the rush to the platform, because we were always running just a few minutes late. I think of him whenever I pour myself the dregs from an orange juice carton, because I never shake it and that last glass is always thick with pulp.

  This is what it means to have been alive. This is what it means to have ghosts.

  Marnie and I are stuck on the same single thread, living with death, never able to recover the versions of us that existed before it.

  Are you feeling sorry for me?

  Do you see a woman warped by guilt?

  Well, if so, then you shouldn’t.

  I don’t regret what I’ve done; I don’t regret any of my decisions. I just wish that they were more malleable, that I could see my life both with and without them at the very same time. I would like, for example, to see what this life might look like with Jonathan and without Charles. What would my relationship with Marnie look like under those terms? Is there a world in which women have best friends and husbands? Or is it always one at the expense of the other? I would like to manipulate my timeline to find the best possible version of my life, rather than existing within what I can only assume is the very worst of them all.

  I wish that my life had ended when Jonathan died. But it didn’t. Because that is not how grief works. You are stuck with your life for as long as you live it, even when you will it away, unless you are willing to take it away. And, unwilling as I was, I had no choice but to live without Jonathan.

  And now, Marnie had no choice but to live without Charles.

  All of which is simply to say that the story continued. I hope you don’t mind me going on; we do have the time, after all. And you wouldn’t want to be here on your own.

  The important thing to recognize is that in the days after that death I knew that I had made an irreversible decision. And I was content to live with the consequences. I felt sadness regularly, yes, when I saw Marnie’s swollen eyelids, her chapped lips, the heartbreak written there on her face. But I didn’t feel guilt. And in fact, I felt rather optimistic. I thought I had found a way to create a spiderweb. And I felt a little safer, a little steadier, too.

  I’m getting carried away.

  What you need to know is this: I wanted my best friend back. And it worked.

  But only for a while.

  The Fifth Lie

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The funeral was well attended. Charles’s colleagues—mostly men with chiseled jaws and sharp, dark suits—brought their wives, all pretty and blond in tight black dresses and patent stilettos. They were accompanied by Charles’s secretary, Debbie, the only woman in the group over 130 pounds and under five foot five. She was in her sixties, small and stout, with cropped gray hair and a smart jacket straining slightly at the buttons. I had met her once before: a couple of years earlier she had come to the flat on a Friday evening to drop off some paperwork.

  Charles’s school and university friends arrived at the same time, dark glasses propped on their foreheads and thin black ties hanging around their necks. They hovered at the gates of the church, finishing their cigarettes, stubbing them out on the railings and grinding the butts into the paving slabs beneath their feet. A couple of them were accompanied by children, hip-height boys in black trousers and white shirts, three of them playing together and laughing inappropriately loudly. I wondered if Charles, in his casket, was wearing a tie, too, tightened around his crooked neck.

  Charles’s sister, Louise, had returned from New York. Her husband had stayed behind and was taking care of their younger twins and older daughter single-handedly for the very first time. Louise veered between panicking about their welfare—would they have been fed, washed, changed?—and trying to prove that she was suffering the most, far more than anybody else. I imagined that this was probably not the case. Nonetheless, she was gallantly performing a strange exaggerated grief. She seemed to have an endless supply of tissues and was indulging in regular mascara top-ups and was constantly hiccuping tears. Charles’s mother had been planning to attend. She’d been doing a little better, Louise had said, until suddenly she wasn’t doing better at all and was too frail, too weak for the long journey. Marnie’s parents were there. We’d expected her brother would come, too, but work was chaotic, he’d said, and he couldn’t get away at such short notice and flights from New Zealand were so expensive, and he’d come over soon, he promised, when things were calmer.

  Marnie didn’t seem to mind. She had been quiet in the days before the funeral, gliding from my bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom and occasionally sitting still like a statue on the sofa in front of box sets we’d originally watched when they’d first aired many years before. She had cried very little. But she had woken in the middle of the night a number of times, sitting upright and screaming and then waking and apologizing and lying immediately back down again. She was still in the eye of the hurricane, the reality of her situation spiraling around her while she stood trapped in the center, waiting to be whipped up and spat out.

  For those first few weeks, she abandoned the internet entirely, muting her notifications and ignoring any messages that seeped through that barrier. She had tried to reply to everyone in the first day or two—to the heartbroken and the concerned and the suspicious—and it had all been too much. There were too many voices and not enough time. She disconnected not only from her work and from the world within her phone, but from the greater world around us. She simply sat and stared, as though waiting for instructions. She hadn’t left the flat in two weeks; her first outing was the funeral.

  I recognized most of the guests there from the wedding, but there were a few who were unfamiliar. I found myself drawn to a woman, probably my age, in dark trousers and heeled boots and a smart navy jumper. She was tall and slim, like a mannequin, so still that she was almost invisible. She had very short hair, blue-black, and the sharpest green eyes. Her fingers were heaped with silver rings and she had a small symbol, like a musical note, tattooed at the top of her spine. She seemed to be there alone. She stood at the back during the ceremony and at the back throughout the burial and, again, at the back during the reception. She had a black leather bag hanging from a strap over her shoulder and I noticed her retrieving a small red notebook and scribbling in it at least twice.

  “Do you know who that is?” I asked Marnie, pointing to the woman as she ducked back into the lobby. The reception was being held in a small room with large windows overlooking the river in what felt more like a conference center than a private members’ club.

  Marnie shook her head.

  She was present only in body, swaying slightly in her too-high heels,
her eyes glazed with tears. Her mind was trapped somewhere else: in the moments crouched over her husband’s dead body, in the minutes that stretched and stretched as she pretended that there might still be hope. She was like a frightened child, with trembling limbs and pursed lips and damp cheeks.

  I remember my husband’s funeral as though through a fish-eye lens. The images are distorted in my mind, curved like a balloon, uncomfortably bulbous. I can see the mourners as they swam in and out of view—their head tilts, their weak smiles, their glassy eyes—standing far too close to my face, their warm breath, the way they all squeezed my hands and my shoulders. I wonder what they saw when they looked at me. Did I look as fragile then, so dazed and distracted?

  The afternoon passed and Marnie and I sat together and watched as Charles’s school friends opened the patio doors to smoke outside and his university friends ordered an honorary round of shots and Louise wept vigorously, her head buried against the shoulder of some distant relative. I had tried to be sociable, to rekindle conversations with those I’d met earlier in the year, to offer condolences and share memories, but I sensed that all of them would rather be talking to somebody else. I felt—I have always felt—as though I am someone to whom people say, “It’s been lovely, but I must go and find my friend,” or “It’s been great to catch up, but I’m just going to pop to the bar for another drink,” or “Oh, I’ve just spotted Rebecca. Will you excuse me?” So I was relieved when Marnie gripped my forearm and stood up and ushered me toward the entrance and begged me to please take her home.

  We sat silent in the taxi. The sun was setting behind us, earlier now that autumn was drawing nearer, and there was something about the orange reflected in the side mirrors that felt profound. It was like a farewell scene in a film, and it made me feel reassured, as though the world was grateful for my intervention.