Seven Lies Page 4

  I didn’t look at him; I stared forward and down the road ahead. I always hoped that, one day, I would ask that question and someone would turn to me and smile and say instead, “Absolute wanker, right?”

  Because that was entirely true of the man that I knew. He was simply unbearable.

  “But do you really think that, Jane?” Charles would say to me, whenever I expressed an opinion that in any way contradicted his own. “Because I really think that we’re on the same page here,” he would continue, “and what you meant to say was—”

  And then he’d launch into a lecture on the housing crisis, or understaffing in hospitals, or the economics of inheritance tax, as though he was an authority on the subject. And then later, when we had nearly moved on, when the conversation was almost forgotten, he would say, “I’m really glad we’re in agreement on that, Jane.” Even though my position hadn’t been altered at all but simply silenced by his volume and his posturing and his overweening confidence.

  He would tap twice and in quick succession on the thin rim of his wineglass when it wanted refilling, but only when the bottle was at my end of the table, because I was seemingly unworthy of actual words. He would sometimes pick up my hand and unfurl my fingers and say, “You should really stop biting these, Jane.” And then later, toward the end of the evening, when everyone’s eyes were shot with blood and alcohol and slipping shut with tiredness, he would say these things, vulgar things—always aimed elsewhere but always meant for me—like, “Probably time for you to be getting Jane home, isn’t it?” and then he’d wink and say, “If you get my drift. Do you get my drift?” And we all did, and so we smiled and laughed. And yet every time something would sink lower within me. Because I hadn’t slept with anyone in three years, not since Jonathan, and the thought of another man’s hands on my skin made me bristle and wince.

  You see, the version of Charles that talked to everyone else, that charmed them, that laughed at their jokes? He was simply a disguise, a costume worn to conceal the truth. And he deceived them all: the men, in particular, but most of the women, too, who thought him handsome and carefree and charismatic.

  “So,” said Stanley, as we arrived at the bus stop. I stepped away from him and pretended to read the bus times printed against the concrete post. “So,” he repeated. “The plans?”

  I looked pointedly at my watch—it had been a present from Marnie— and still I said nothing.

  “We’re probably nearer yours, don’t you think?” he said.

  “Are we?” I replied. I ran my finger along the time sheet, the numbers printed black on white paper, fixed between two panels of plastic. I tried to look relaxed and natural, as though this was something people often did and not a bygone act from a previous decade.

  “I reckon so,” he said. “Not much in it, but a bit closer to yours.”

  I continued pretending to read.

  I heard his footsteps against the concrete paving slabs, the weight of him approaching. His breathing was loud behind me, thick and steaming and scorched with alcohol, and I knew he was about to touch me.

  “Jane?” he said. He took another step toward me until he was standing right behind me, and then he snaked his arms around my waist. He kissed the back of my head, wet and noisy, and I solidified myself, drilling my heels into the ground beneath me, fixing my breath and holding my body firm so that I didn’t flinch. He squeezed me—not particularly forcefully—but still I felt that my entire body was being strangled, that I was suffocating.

  “How are—” He cleared his throat. “Your place?” He stroked his right palm up and down over my stomach, the upward brushes climbing higher and higher with each movement until I could feel his fingers skimming the stiff wire at the base of my bra, until I could feel them reaching the smooth fabric above. “Jane, you and me . . .” He breathed into my ear, his words slurred and warm and moist.

  “Stanley,” I said, and I moved sideways, away from him, away from the concrete post. “Stanley, I’m afraid I’m not sure that there really is a you and me.”

  “Oh,” he replied, slightly affronted but more confused than anything else. “But I—”

  “It’s not you,” I said.

  He nodded solemnly. “Is this about your late husband?” he asked. He was confident again, sure that he had found the answer to some unasked question, sure that he knew the very ointment to ease this wound. “Marnie said—”

  She would have warned him to be gentle, to be careful.

  “No, Stanley,” I said. “This isn’t about Jonathan.” Which was true. “And it’s not about you.” Which was also true, I suppose. “This really is just about me.”

  A red double-decker rounded the corner, its lights bright against the night sky and, for once, entirely on schedule.

  “Do you think that maybe what you’re feeling is—”

  “This has been lovely,” I interrupted, although I don’t know why I bothered because it was very clearly not even the slightest bit true. “And do feel free to keep in touch with Charles if that makes you happy. But I think this is probably it for now. In terms of a you and me. Sorry,” I said. “And goodbye.”

  I put out my left hand and the bus slowed, stopping beside me. I climbed aboard and, as the doors juddered shut, I offered Stanley an unnecessarily enthusiastic wave. He was still frowning as we pulled away.

  I have dated too many men in the years since Jonathan. I didn’t speak to another man for over a year. But everyone started to fret, to worry that I was being overwhelmed by my grief, and it felt important to reassure them that I was still an active participant in my own life. Because—and this is something else that we all learn eventually—everyone knows that a single woman who is not at the very least in pursuit of romantic love is almost certainly entirely miserable.

  That’s a joke. You could smile.

  The truth is that I wasn’t looking for another love; it was too much to expect to find another great love in my otherwise underachieving life. I’d had Jonathan, and I couldn’t begin to imagine that another love could ever come close to that one. And I had Marnie. And it made her happy to think that I was still looking, that I had faith, that I believed in the goodness of the world.

  And yet I tried not to date any man for too long, hence my swift departure. Partly because I found them all—and that’s the truth: every single one—suffocatingly smug and wholly insufferable.

  And also because a very small part of me worried that they might actually start to like me.

  Does that sound conceited? It isn’t meant to. Before Jonathan, I didn’t think that it was possible for someone to feel that way about me. I couldn’t believe that anyone would find that sort of love in someone so cheerless and so insecure. But Jonathan found things to like, things to love. He admired my competitive nature. He was impressed that I’d never lost a pub quiz. He thought it right that I was always early. He was amazed when I read a novel in a day. He loved that I was meticulous, a perfectionist, that I wanted to hang our pictures myself. And, eventually, I began to love those things, too.

  I didn’t want these men to fall in love with me because I knew that I could never fall in love with them. And I knew then—I still know—that rejection is a blister beneath the skin, a small hurt that can swell into something far more significant.

  Is that an exaggeration?

  I don’t think it is.

  But this isn’t the time.

  I wish I could tell you that this would be an easy story to hear, but I don’t for a moment think that it will. There will be a lot of death this evening and I wish it were any other way, but I have promised the truth and this, finally, is a promise on which I can deliver.

  I am still unsure where this story really started—and I have no idea where it will end—but how to begin?

  A couple of years ago, Marnie and Charles were living together in their flat and I was dating men who were not
my husband and my family life was complicated but manageable. Those are the foundations on which this story started. This is the story of how he died.

  Chapter Six

  Most women in their late twenties and early thirties like variety, spontaneity, the chance to meet new people and do new things. That was never me. I have always been that eleven-year-old girl cowering in a school corridor and anticipating rejection. I have never actively looked for friendships, and so I find myself with very few, but those that I do have really do matter.

  Because, you see, I had a friend. And none of the others—the pretty blondes in tight denim shorts that cut above the creases of their bums, the guys in loose jeans and hoodies nestled together around a spliff, the sports stars in their tracksuits and trainers, the library girls in their glasses and blouses, the posh boys in their chinos and jackets—none of them compared. I didn’t need them and so I didn’t pursue them.

  I knew what I liked. I liked routine and repetition. I still do.

  And so the morning after I axed Stanley from my life, I went to visit my mother. She was living in a residential home in the suburbs and it always took at least an hour to get there. And, because I liked to arrive no later than nine o’clock, so that I could be there for the beginning of visiting hours, I would set an alarm before I went to sleep and then leave home early to catch one of the first trains of the day.

  The carriages were always quiet on a Saturday morning. There was normally a man in a suit, hungover from a Friday night that had rolled unexpectedly into a Saturday morning. There was often a woman with a pram, a new mother trying to fill the hours between wake and sleep and sleep and wake, hours that hadn’t existed a few months earlier. There were sometimes security guards, cleaners, nurses, all traveling home from night shifts. And there was always me.

  I saw Marnie every Friday evening and I went to visit my mother every Saturday morning.

  * * *

  The dayroom was at the front of the building and I passed it on my way to my mother’s room. I tried not to peer inside, to focus only on her door at the end of the corridor, but it always pulled my gaze. It had an otherworldliness that was strangely magnetic. It was full of old people in armchairs, some in wheelchairs, all with blankets draped over their legs. The carpet was every color, ornate and fiercely patterned. It reminded me of the carpets in fancy hotels, where the managers were afraid of food stains and mud and makeup.

  Here, the patterns were similarly effective. They disguised dirt and vomit and, yes, food stains, but not from raucous three-course meals with laughter and gossip and wine, but from sticky, thick mashed potato flung deliberately onto the floor.

  Other than the multicolored carpet, the room itself was rather bland: empty beige walls, no photographs or pictures, no paintings or posters, and dark leather armchairs, easy to wipe clean. I suppose the decor itself was really rather unimportant. This room was compelling not because of its specifics, but because of its inhabitants. It served as a backdrop for a scene that depicted life and death and the thin periphery that existed between the two. Those people were half in and half out. Their hearts were beating and blood was trickling through their veins, but their souls were slipping, their minds melting, their bodies crumpled and broken. It was an eerie, uncanny place, a room full of people who were barely still people, of life that was almost not life, of death that was not quite death. My mother never wanted to spend time in there and the nurses had long given up insisting.

  She was in her room instead and was sitting upright in bed when I arrived.

  I stood in the doorway and watched her, just briefly, as she fiddled with the bobbles sewn onto the blue woolen blanket draped over her duvet. She pulled the bedding up toward her chin and knotted her hands together and they bulged beneath the covers. The window was wide open and a cool breeze lifted the fabric of the curtains so that they fluttered and cast a shadow against the wall.

  At sixty-two, my mother suffered from early-onset dementia. The doctors at her facility—when they visited, once a week; we rarely overlapped—had pointed out that she was at the older end of early onset, as though that was a revelation that should provide some comfort. What they meant, of course, was that others had it far worse. I understood. But broken arms didn’t ease my splinters.

  I knocked, then stepped inside. She looked up and I smiled, hoping that she would remember me. Her face was static, creases etched deep into her forehead and her lips permanently pinched. I could see her hands moving beneath the duvet and I knew that she was using the index finger of one hand to pick at the dry, ragged skin around the nail beds of the other.

  Sometimes it took her a few minutes to recognize me. She was staring and I knew that she was flicking through the box files buried deep in the alcoves of her mind, trying to process my entrance, to place my face, my outfit, desperate to decipher this new arrival.

  Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that she had been living there for eighteen months. It always felt temporary, a sort of limbo. I didn’t think it then, although it sounds impossible now, that of course nursing homes are temporary. They are the midpoint, not between two moments in this life, but at the fringe of life itself.

  She had been diagnosed at sixty but, by then, she’d been living alone for a year, her divorce finalized, and my father long gone. I had known for several months that there was something wrong; I thought at the time that she might be depressed. She was short-tempered in a way she’d never been before, sniping at me for little inconveniences—too much milk in her tea, mud on the soles of my shoes.

  She started swearing. In the first twenty-five years of my life, she had never once—certainly not in front of me—said “shit” or “fuck.” She opted instead for “sugar” or “fudge,” muttered very quietly beneath her breath. And yet suddenly the most flamboyant profanities were part of her everyday language. All I wanted was a pinch of shitting milk. You’re getting fucking mud fucking everywhere.

  Sometimes she’d forget when I was due to visit, despite my steadfast routine. I would ring the doorbell early on a Saturday morning. I would hear her slippers padding against the carpet as she approached the front door. I would hear a tinkling as she secured the chain. She would pull the door back, just a couple of inches, and poke her nose through the small gap. She would scan me, sliding her eyes up to my face and down to my feet, and say, “Oh. Is it today?”

  I wondered if she was drinking too much. I took her to see a doctor. He nodded while I explained the situation and I felt sure that he understood. I felt sure that he knew exactly the cause of this shift in her personality, that he knew the answers I’d failed to find online, the medication or therapy or advice that would put an end to this.

  “Menopause,” he said, when I’d finished describing my mother’s symptoms. He nodded solemnly. “Definitely the menopause.”

  The following morning my mother fell down the stairs. I received a call from her neighbor. He’d heard a strange noise and, thankfully, had let himself in with a spare key. My father had given it to him years earlier, to water the plants and feed the fish while we were all in Cornwall.

  By the time I arrived, my mother was sitting on the sofa, her dressing gown secured tightly around her waist, clutching a cold cup of tea and arguing with her neighbor, who was really rather keen that she go to the hospital, just for a quick once-over, purely to be on the safe side.

  “Oh, not you, too,” she said when she saw me. “I missed the step. I wasn’t concentrating. I’d have righted myself in a minute or two, but this busybody couldn’t keep himself to himself, could he, letting himself in as though he lives here, too, the bloody cheek of it.”

  He was a kind man—far too nice and far more patient than I’d have been in the presence of such a rude and ungrateful neighbor—and he promised that he would keep an eye on things. He worked from home, he said, so he was always nearby. The walls were thin, he said, so he’d keep his music turned down, ju
st in case she ever needed help again.

  I wondered how many arguments he’d heard over the years.

  She fell again two weeks later. He heard the crash and called an ambulance. She had a cut on her forehead where she’d ricocheted off the banister. She said it was fine, not too deep, just a graze, but he insisted that she go to the hospital. It was still bleeding when I met her there nearly two hours later.

  We were seen by a doctor, a woman not much older than me, who frowned when I knowingly nodded and said confidently, “Menopause.”

  “Do you think it’s the menopause, Mrs. Baxter?” asked the doctor, and my mother scowled. “I’m not saying it isn’t the menopause,” the doctor continued, “but is that what you think this is?”

  My mother raised her nonbloodied eyebrow in response and then sighed and shook her head.

  “In that case I’d like to run a few more tests. Would that be okay?”

  My mother nodded.

  She was diagnosed with suspected dementia that afternoon. She lived alone at home for a little longer, getting progressively worse. But when her diagnosis was confirmed six months later, she moved into the residential home, with the support and the nursing and the care that, even living with her, I wouldn’t have been able to provide.

  * * *

  I sat down in the armchair, laying my coat across my lap. I opened my mouth to speak, but my mother shook her head. She wanted to find the right file; she didn’t want my help.

  “You’re late,” she said eventually.

  “Only a few minutes,” I replied, twisting to see the clock hanging above my head.

  “The train?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She was there. Her eyes were focused and warm. Sometimes I feared that she’d given up, that she was willing the dementia to sprawl across her brain like a fungus, to seep in and destroy the final shreds of her humanity. But, on days like that one, I felt sure that she was still fighting, pushing back in her own small ways, refusing to be indoctrinated by the emptiness any sooner than was absolutely necessary.