Seven Lies Page 8

  “About bloody time,” Emma said. “You look like shit.”

  I turned to look at myself in the small round mirror that hung from a nail on the wall in the hallway. I hadn’t removed my makeup the night before. My eyes were surrounded by smudges of black and my lipstick had bled into the folds around my mouth.

  I shrugged. “It was a good night.”

  “Good?” she asked. “Your best friend’s wedding and all you can say is good? Is that it?”

  She handed me a brown paper bag filled with pastries. I peered inside: a plain butter croissant, a pain au chocolat.

  “For you,” she said.

  She headed toward the sofa and curled herself into the cushions, her feet coiled beneath her, sinking into my furniture, very much at home. I poured myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge.

  “It was great,” I said instead. “A really great night. That better?”

  “Urgh, that’s even worse,” she groaned. “You’re rubbish at this. Tell me something interesting. Were there any arguments? Any fights? Who got to sleep with the maid of honor?”

  “No one got to sleep with the maid of honor,” I replied. “And no fights, as far as I’m aware.”

  “Charles on his best behavior, then?” she asked. “Not too much of a cunt?”

  “Not too bad,” I said. “Although there was this one thing right at the end of the evening.”

  My flat is surrounded by other flats on all sides but one and is always that little bit too warm. So whenever I have guests—which, frankly, isn’t very often—I watch them gradually undress throughout the course of their visit. At first, it’s just their coats and sweaters, then it’s their shoes and cardigans, and eventually they are sitting sockless in camisoles.

  Emma was no different. But I was frightened by what I saw that day.

  She lifted her jumper over her head. Her shoulder bones were sitting high above the flesh of her shoulders. Her collarbone protruded, pressing against her skin and stretching it, so that it looked too thin, almost translucent. Her upper arms were scrawny, like the wings of a bird, all skin and bone and no fat at all.

  I took a sharp breath, a sigh in reverse, and Emma looked up with her eyes wide and wary.

  “Don’t,” she said, reading the concern written in the crease at the center of my forehead and between my eyebrows. “I’m not interested.”

  “Em . . .” I said, but then she looked at me, fierce and unblinking, and I knew that there was nothing more to say.

  Emma was twelve when she first fell between the gaps in our concentration. I don’t remember the early days of her illness. I was so busy revising, so focused on things that would never matter to me—quadratic equations, the formula for respiration, river landscapes—that I failed to recognize the deterioration of the thing that mattered most of all.

  It was July, I think. Emma and I had both finished school for the summer—if I remember rightly Marnie was in the South of France—and our parents were busy, as ever, hacking away at their marriage with pickaxes disguised in insults and eye rolls. It was hot, too hot for England, the temperature over eighty-five degrees. We went to the open-air pool and I squeezed our towels in between the hundreds of others, the families with five children dipping and diving and running dripping across the grass, the women with their curves, the older couples sitting on folding chairs with their newspapers. I was wearing a swimsuit and I was sweating in the sun, moisture trickling between my breasts, droplets simmering on my top lip. Emma was wearing knee-length shorts and a woolen jumper, and she was shivering. I wanted her to go in the pool with me, but she wouldn’t: she said something about valuables, but we had none, just towels and clothing and one book each. I nagged, of course, because I’m an older sister and that is my right, and eventually she relented. I remember her easing her jumper over her head, and her shoulders and collarbone were so much worse then, desperate to escape her body, pushing at her thin, fair skin. She slipped her shorts over her thighs and her legs were shapeless, straight lines of bone with so little flesh, so little depth. She stared at me, challenging me to respond to her frail, frightful body, and I said nothing.

  Over the next few months I forced food onto her plate and sometimes she ate it and sometimes she didn’t. And then she was better, briefly. And then she was worse again. And the next couple of years continued in this pattern, never in the best of health, never in the worst, until I left for university when she was just fourteen. And then there were very few peaks and so many troughs. Until eventually even my parents could no longer deny the situation sitting there at their dining table and she was hospitalized and then released and then eventually hospitalized again.

  I know that this casts her as a very particular character in a very particular story. But, if you’d met Emma—I wish that you had; you’d have liked her, I think—you’d know that she wasn’t that person at all. Emma was never a victim. She was sick, yes, and for a very long time, but that was such a small part of her narrative.

  Her sickness existed somewhere within her, a strange plague that she couldn’t control, there in her mind and in her bones and in the very tissue of her being. It was a significant part of her life, but think of it as a path that she didn’t choose, didn’t want, but that she learned to travel in her own way. She eventually chose not to be treated anymore and I did my very best to respect that decision.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” she said, curling up on my sofa, shielding herself, hiding behind her jumper. “Like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I raised an eyebrow; I couldn’t help it.

  For years—for almost my entire time at university—I had nightmares about Emma’s corpse. I would be dreaming of something else when, in the middle of whatever I was envisaging—holidays, lecture halls, Marnie—I would discover Emma’s dead body, her limbs stiff and blue, eyes clouded and open wide. I would wake gasping for air, sweating and shaking in cold, damp sheets.

  “Fuck’s sake,” she said eventually, pulling her jumper back over her head. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  And I had no choice but to let it go. There was nothing to be gained in an argument and everything to be lost.

  “Charles,” she said, patting the space beside her on the sofa. “You were saying.”

  I sat down and recalled the events of the previous evening. I told her about his slurring, the endless bottles of champagne, the relentless top-ups. I talked about his arm draped over my shoulder, the coarse fabric of his starchy white shirt at the back of my neck. I closed my eyes; I knew that I was blushing as I described his palm falling over my breast, his fingertips over my nipple. I explained the space that expanded between us, the bright white of Marnie’s dress as she approached and sat beside us, and that sense of something being sucked back into its box.

  Emma was wide-eyed, openmouthed. “And what did she say?” Emma whispered.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t see anything.”

  “She didn’t see anything at all?” Emma looked down at the cushion clutched to her chest.

  “Are you quite sure?” she asked. “Definitely sure? This definitely happened exactly like that? He wasn’t just drunk and loose-limbed and a little bit handsy without really meaning to be?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Although it’s not very Charles to be anything other than exactly what he means to be really, is it? That’s not really him at all.”

  I smiled. Emma had never met Charles. So the only version of him that she knew was mine.

  Here, then, is something that I’ve thought about regularly over the last few months. Emma didn’t know Charles. She had no reason to doubt my experience, no reason not to believe that he really was a depraved pervert who would grope the maid of honor at his own wedding and in front of his beautiful wife. And yet Emma’s instinctive response was to question not Charles’s cha
racter but my version of events. What does that say about me? About my capacity for truth? About my ability to accurately read a situation?

  Does it, in fact, suggest that Charles was innocent of all wrongdoing that evening? That the error of judgment was mine and mine alone? I don’t think so, but it’s worth your consideration. This is my truth, after all. And that is not the same as the truth.

  “Are you going to tell Marnie?” she asked. “That her new husband groped you? Because I really think that would be a bad idea.”

  I shook my head.

  “Still creepy, though,” she continued. “Definitely odd.” She rotated the cushion in front of her chest, pinching it at the corners, spinning it like a wheel. “Were you scared?” she asked.

  “Of Charles?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like, did it frighten you?”

  “No,” I said instinctively. “No. Not really.”

  And as soon as I’d said the words, I realized that they weren’t true. I had been scared. Not terrified. It wasn’t like that. But unnerved and uneasy and suddenly very aware of myself as something much smaller stuck in the presence of something much bigger. And it was more than the small fear that I often feel in situations that I cannot predict. It was more than the walk home from the tube station late at night and a man’s footsteps behind me, and more than someone standing too close at a pedestrian crossing, and more than a group huddled up ahead in the tunnel beneath the railway tracks. Because this was calculated. It had purpose, an objective—and if it was to make me feel frightened, then it had succeeded.

  “How was Mum?” I asked.

  Emma looked down at the floor and fiddled with a strand of wool hanging loose from her jumper. “I didn’t go,” she replied. “I just . . . I couldn’t.”

  I exhaled slowly, trying very hard not to sigh. I had explained several times to my mother—I’d even written it on her calendar—that I wouldn’t be coming that Saturday, because of the wedding, but that Emma would be there instead.

  “Don’t tell me off,” said Emma. “Please don’t. I called. I told the receptionist. I just couldn’t do it. Okay? I just couldn’t.”

  When we were younger, still children, my mother and my sister were incredibly close. It looked quite disgusting to me, to be fused so snugly to somebody else. And yet while Emma sometimes struggled with feeling so stifled—and would briefly escape to spend time with me elsewhere in the house—she needed my mother in a myriad of ways: emotionally, practically, for comfort and company. She was a worrier, like my mother, even then, and was uncomfortable and uneasy around new people. She hid behind my mother’s legs in strange places, peering between her thighs. At home, she followed my mother between rooms, wanting to help in the kitchen, with the cleaning, with whatever it was that our mother was doing. In the evenings, she liked to be cuddled and read to and bathed. Emma needed my mother and my mother needed to be needed.

  But when Emma really needed my mother—when she really needed support and love and strength—she received nothing. Her anchor slipped away, embarrassed at the very nature of the need. I look back now, and I know that my mother was simply frightened. She was never idealistic, and she must have known what was happening and how difficult—impossible, perhaps—it would be to untangle. So she ignored it, pretending that her daughter was fine and scraping food into the bin without question and washing up cutlery that hadn’t been used.

  Emma’s need grew and grew and my mother’s avoidance intensified, until Emma was so angry and isolated and my mother so afraid for her future that there was really no path to recovery. Emma never truly forgave her. She moved out as soon as she was well enough.

  I thought that she blamed our mother for her illness: not for how it began, but for how it survived. I thought that their bond had been dismantled, that they were held together, in the end, not by love but by blood, a single filament stretching between them that could never be snapped. I was wrong. There were other threads, thicker threads, ones that held them together and that I simply couldn’t see.

  “Jane, please,” said Emma. “Come on now. I really did try.”

  I didn’t reply. I wanted to ask her to think about how her actions affected other people, to explain that her decision made me feel guilty for not attending myself, that our mother likely felt incredibly lonely. But Emma had so many feelings that she found it almost impossible to negotiate the world from anyone’s hill but her own.

  Instead, I asked her about her volunteer projects and her flat and a book I’d recommended about a dysfunctional family, which it turned out she still hadn’t read. I had a shower and put on a clean pair of pajamas and we spent the day on the sofa, watching DVDs that had once belonged to our father—action films with male heroes and laughably incompetent women—and which I’d taken as my own when he left. We had watched them together, and he had pulled me onto his lap and let me curl against him and fall asleep with my head to his chest, while my mother was fretting elsewhere.

  Emma took a few with her when she went home that evening. She said that they’d always been hers and I knew that it wasn’t true, but I didn’t really mind. There were so many things that we couldn’t talk about, never said, and so this felt like a comparatively minor transgression. I watched as she left with them tucked in her rucksack, and I tried to focus only on the sharp cut of her hair just above the bag, and not on her matchstick legs poking from beneath it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Marnie and Charles were leaving on the Monday after their wedding to spend two and a half weeks honeymooning in Italy. Charles had planned everything: outlining their course across the country, booking their flights, reserving the most luxurious rooms in the most extravagant hotels. He wanted it to be a surprise, he’d said, and so he had harassed me with every minute detail and with his eagerness in the preceding months. He’d rented a car in her favorite color, a classic convertible. He’d opted for hotels adorned with plush velvets and ornate chandeliers, rather than the sparse monotone palette that he’d have preferred. He’d tracked a route through culinary favorites, places he thought she’d enjoy.

  “How would she feel about a cooking class?” he’d asked, earlier in the year.

  “What do you think of this?” he’d said as he scrolled through the website of a swish new restaurant. “Do you think she’d like this sort of food? And what about the view?”

  “What about Rome?” he’d quickly whispered one evening while she was still in the kitchen. “Has she been there before?”

  She hadn’t, and I said so, and as a result of these incessant exchanges, I became well acquainted with their itinerary. And so, that morning, I pictured them arriving at the airport, in the departure lounge, sitting side by side on their flight, and then waiting at the carousel for their luggage. I could see them laughing together as they bundled their things into the tiny boot of their car, the way his hand would sit on her thigh throughout the drive. I could see the entrance to their first hotel, the purple sofa in their suite, the infinity pool surrounded by hammocks and overlooking vineyards. I knew every step that they’d take and I had an ache in my stomach for the duration and I knew that I was jealous. I loved her and I wanted her to be enjoying the most wonderful honeymoon and yet I wished that I could be part of it, too.

  We had traveled together, once or twice, visiting trashy beach destinations where we had overindulged in garishly bright cocktails with sugar sediment in each sip, and I had bronzed in the sun and she had grown paler by comparison. We had shared a bed at night and thought nothing of it, and held hands on turbulent flights, and negotiated passport control together. But it was more than that. We had laughed and gossiped and confessed our secrets. We had enmeshed ourselves into one, with private jokes and joint suitcases and tacky threadbare bracelets that cost nothing but meant something.

  But we hadn’t traveled together since she had met Charles.

  All of those things she now shared with
him: a bed, a suitcase, her secrets.

  I thought of them over those two weeks, intermittently, but always with a tight dread across my chest. I felt that our roots were loosening and that seemed shocking and unacceptable simply because before then I hadn’t thought that it was possible.

  * * *

  Marnie called me late in the evening, just after she’d arrived home from her honeymoon, when I was already almost asleep. She wanted to hear my thoughts about her wedding day, the things that stood out most, the things that I remembered. I told her about Ella, her six-year-old niece, who was wearing only socks and underwear by the end of the first dance and had beads of sweat glistening on her forehead as she jumped and twirled. I told her about her brother, who napped drunk beneath a table during the speeches. I told her about the registrar, who was caught in traffic and running late and sending panicked text messages ahead of the ceremony.

  She laughed when I told her that the cheese tower had collapsed moments after it was cut. She sighed, and I could hear that she was smiling, when I told her that her parents were still dancing, her mother’s head turned sideways against her father’s shoulder, long after the band had finished, as the staff cleared the room around them.

  “It’s so lovely to hear these things,” she said. “I feel like I missed so much on the day. I planned everything so perfectly, but then I could only be in one place. I’m waiting for the rest of the photographs. We’ve got a few already. Only a dozen or so, some of the favorites, but there are some lovely ones of you. Are you coming on Friday? I’ll show you them then.”

  “Will you send them over?” I asked.

  We had been angled around a floral archway, the two of them, and then all of us together, and then smaller groups—parents, siblings, friends. We were ushered into position, told to pose, then pushed quickly out of frame. I didn’t know if there was a photograph of the two of us alone, but I hoped so.