The Liars

by Naomi Joy

  ‘I had my PA look up the details of your current rental agreement. She called the company masquerading as you – I hope you don’t mind – and terminated the contract. I’ve paid the remainder of the break clause and, well, it was all pretty straightforward, really. They’ll want you both out by the end of the week.’ He picked up his knife and fork and rolled a piece of salami until it looked like a fat cigar.

  I sat before him, shellshocked. ‘David, you really didn’t need to do all of that for me. I – I don’t know what to say.’ Everything was so much easier when money wasn’t an object. I spared a thought for other women like me who weren’t as lucky to have met a man like David Stein.

  ‘You don’t need to say anything, darling. It’s my pleasure.’ He pierced the meat with his fork and sucked it into his mouth, chewing slowly.

  *

  The waiter floated over and topped up my glass, David and I had been at The Whive together for almost two hours now, chatting and drinking and laughing together, and I could feel my guard slipping.

  ‘You’ve never really told me what happened between you and Charlie,’ he said, open-ended, taking another sip of red wine, his long fingers curling round the stem of his glass.

  I looked up at him, conflicted. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,’ he said, sensing my reluctance. I thought I detected hurt in his voice.

  ‘It’s fine, I’m sorry, it’s just difficult to explain. Things are so bad between us now, but they weren’t always, I mean, he’s always been a little bit controlling, but when we lived in Reading it wasn’t as much of an issue.’ Our old life in the little two-bed we rented in Berkshire seemed like a lifetime ago. Charlie had loved living there: he’d had a good job, a close circle of friends, an affordable local. ‘There’d been signs though. Like the Christmas he’d totalled our car on the way to my parents’ house because he thought I’d spent more money on them than him… But those kinds of incidents had been the exception, really, not the rule.’ I carried on, the words coming surprisingly easily. ‘He always says I “forced” him to move to London so I could follow my dream of working at W&SP. I told him at the time that he didn’t have to come, that we could make things work long distance. But that was out of the question. He tried everything in his power to stop me from moving but, somehow, I’d won. I found us a place, I found him a job and, for a little while, everything was OK.’ I stopped speaking, not wanting to tell David that while I’d found him a job, Charlie had found drugs and alcohol, and that his paranoia had been out of control ever since. It felt too close to home, too close to Olivia.

  ‘What changed?’

  ‘He was fired, he blamed me for pushing him to work somewhere he hadn’t chosen, and now he’s refusing to get a new job while we’re still living in London. He keeps trying to break me into moving back to Reading but I won’t, so I’ve been trying to distance myself from him so that when I end it… it’s not such a shock for him. He’s very volatile. I’m not sure how he’ll react to finding he no longer has a place to live.’ I paused to take a breath, feeling guilty for worrying about Charlie.

  ‘Well, he can move back to Reading now, just as he’s been so desperate to.’

  Talking about all of this felt cathartic, it made me realise how long I’d bottled it up for. I didn’t talk to anyone about my problems with Charlie. I supposed part of me felt like I’d brought them on myself. I cast my mind back to all the times I’d tried to cheer him up, tried to motivate and inspire him into being a better person. For his birthday a few weeks ago, I’d practically cleared my bank account buying him a set of expensive shirts and ties, hoping they’d spur him into replying to a few job ads. I’d had it in my head that if he just started working everything could be OK again. I still remember how the material had felt: rich, expensive, and so tightly woven I’d wanted to wrap myself up in one and sit, quaffing Champagne, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and eating chocolate cake.

  He hadn’t felt the same way. ‘How much did you spend on these? What a waste of money! How unoriginal are you?! I mean, really – buying me a shirt and tie for the dead-end office job you wish I had. Couldn’t you have bought me something I might have actually liked?’

  I’d left the flat crying and when I’d got back later, I’d found the shirts ripped in two, the ties streaked with toilet bleach. He’d deliberately left the spoils of his outburst in an open bin bag outside the front door for me to find. It had been the final straw. I’d spent so much money on them and he’d chosen to destroy my gift rather than letting me return it and replace it. From that day on I knew our relationship wasn’t worth fighting for.

  ‘So, while I’m working, he sits at home drinking, smoking, getting high, whatever, and inventing all the fantastical ways in which I might have betrayed him that day. He’s currently quite preoccupied with the idea that I’m having an affair.’

  ‘Do your parents know how bad things are? Your friends?’

  ‘I haven’t seen my parents for a year, and Charlie cut ties with all of our friends when we moved. Another couple of ways of testing me. I guess I’ve been in denial about the mess I’m in…’ That was a lie, I knew exactly how messy my situation was. I just hadn’t been able to get myself out of it. Until now.

  ‘Well, enough’s enough, Ava. Let’s do it tonight, shall we? Let’s break up with Charlie.’ He grinned at me, this mission exciting him, and he called the waiter over to ask for a pen and paper. ‘We can write to him. If you call, or text, it only gives him the chance to reply, and you don’t want to give him that.’

  ‘What do I say?’ I was enjoying the game, getting into it.

  ‘That you never want to see him again.’

  David’s hand lingered close to mine and I smelt the alcohol on his breath. I averted my eyes as he moved his hand closer still, until his reedy little finger touched mine, a spark of uneasy electricity running between us.

  I wrote under David’s watchful gaze – Charlie, I should have done this a long time ago – but the letter was pure fantasy. I couldn’t break up with Charlie like this, I needed to do it face to face. He wouldn’t accept it otherwise.

  ‘Where will you stay tonight?’ David asked after we’d finished writing.

  ‘At home. I’ll pack my things when I get back, then leave tomorrow morning before he wakes up. I’ll post the letter back through the box as I go.’

  David nodded, pleased with the plan, and wrapped my hand up in his.

  I swallowed hard: lying to David was becoming a habit I couldn’t seem to break.

  *

  My eyes stuttered open, the room ringing with the ear-splitting sound of my morning alarm. My head was pounding – that would be thanks to that second bottle of Rioja – and I thrust my arm sleepily out of my cotton fortress and into the world beyond to silence its scream. The temperature change was stark. I jabbed the off button then recoiled, reeling my rogue limb back into safety, not ready for the outside yet. Not ready to find out which Charlie I was going to face this morning. Sometimes he woke up still angry and drunk from the night before. I turned onto my side and my shoulder, still recovering from a past dislocation, settled at an awkward angle. I groaned and brought it back into position, I couldn’t deal with my body falling apart, not today, not as well as everything else. I took a few deep breaths, trying to push it from my mind, the delicious fibre-filled comfort enveloping me, begging me to sink back into it for a moment longer. It was still dark outside, the sun only just crowning on the horizon. I turned ninety degrees as my bed yawned with me and we sank back into sleep together. That same high-pitched ringing filled my drowsy head fifteen minutes later. I turned it off again and reluctantly pressed myself up to a seated position, resting my head back against the bed’s wooden headboard, steeling myself to face the day. I swung my feet to the floor and wrapped myself in my old dressing gown, stamped with worn-out teddies and worn-through sleeves and, as I went to unlock the bedroom door, heard th
e unmistakable symphony of Charlie rattling around in the kitchen. I pulled the handle towards me and walked barefoot to the kitchen, hanging back, watching him. His raven-coloured hair was sticking up in a number of directions and he was bobbing up and down as he moved, muttering urgently to himself. He’d finally cleared up his pasta wall-art, and I deduced he must have done a few early-morning lines to get through it. So this morning I’d face manic Charlie, trying-to-make-amends Charlie, he’d-never-do-it-again Charlie. He talked to the eggs as he cracked them against the side of the frying pan. I backed away from the door, deciding I didn’t want to interrupt him and, as I moved, a floorboard betrayed me, squealing under my weight.

  ‘Aha!’ He turned round, his eyes wired and wild, a cut across his cheek. He was wearing a half-tucked creased shirt and sweatpants. Why was he wearing a shirt? He raced towards me and gripped my arms with his hands. I stood, glued to the spot, holding my breath. ‘Take a seat next door, OK? At the dinner table.’ He let me go and turned back to the eggs. ‘Everything’s got to be absolutely perfect. Go and put on a dress or something. This is important.’ He rushed through his sentences, his apparent act of kindness foiled by the order he’d given me. In his mind this kind of gesture was all he had to do to be exonerated, days of abuse cancelled out with a plate of bacon and scrambled eggs. But these transparent displays were never for my benefit. I was merely a passenger in his path to self-forgiveness; my only job was to play along. I traipsed through to the bedroom and got ready for work, picked up last night’s clothes from the floor and placed them on the bed. I’d packed a small bag of essentials when I’d arrived home last night, but I’d be leaving the majority of my things here when I left for good today, including last night’s outfit. I could hardly pack a suitcase without Charlie realising, could I? I chose my favourite dress from the wardrobe: a simple black number my mum had given me when I’d told her I’d got the job at W&SP. She’d been proud of me that day. Then I walked through to the lounge, took a seat at the dining table and waited. ‘Here we are! Coffee, coffee, coffee!’ Charlie powered into the room where I sat at our cheap, chipped dining table. Your joint living and dining area here, the gummy estate agent had said as she’d shown me round this time last year. Perfect for one, she’d told me, assuming I was flat-hunting alone as no one had been with me. When I’d corrected her she’d simply updated the refrain. Perfect for two as well, perfect for two. I couldn’t wait to leave this life. A cup of thin brown liquid landed before me, then, shortly afterwards, a plate of insipid scrambled eggs atop a single piece of cardboard-thin toast.

  ‘Wow, thank you, what a treat,’ I said, not trying as hard as I normally would to inject enthusiasm into my voice. He sat down. His shadow covered the table.

  ‘Isn’t this perfect?’ he asked, pointing his crooked face at me, lips cracking apart, bloody, as he smiled with spiky teeth. I took a bite. The eggs were awfully dry.

  ‘Perfect,’ I agreed.

  ‘OK, Ava, I can’t pretend any more.’ His hands were shaking, cutlery firing against his plate, ringing out like a warning bell. I slowed my chewing. ‘I’m too nervous to eat. I have to get this out of the way now.’ He stood up, his body coiled like a tightly-wound spring. ‘Last night – and I don’t want to get into the whole he-said, she-said thing now.’

  I tried desperately not to roll my eyes. It was very much a he-said, he-said ‘thing’, but I knew better than to correct him.

  ‘Anyway, yesterday I realised something.’ He put the emphasis on ‘realised’ as if he’d had a life-changing epiphany. I put my knife and fork down, my appetite evaporating as he continued to speak. ‘You’re punishing me.’

  I looked at him, confused.

  ‘I realised the reason why you want to be here, in London, with a career and everything, is because we haven’t, I haven’t, taken things to the next level. It occurred to me: wait. Everything would be different, everything, if you weren’t just my girlfriend, but my wife.’ He dropped to one knee and held a ring up towards me that he’d bought, presumably, with my money. He certainly didn’t have any of his own. My stomach lurched and I felt an urgent need to be sick. He’d have maxed out my overdraft to buy it.

  ‘If you were my wife we would want to have a family, and family must come first. Don’t you agree Ava? That family must come first?’ I tried my best to keep the horror from my face, but I couldn’t hold back the tide and, as my lip wobbled, I felt tears carve trails down my cheeks.

  ‘Oh! Ava! I knew you’d be happy! I knew I was right about this.’ He’d taken them to be tears of joy – what else could I expect – and grabbed my hand, fumbling the ring onto my reluctant digit. It felt wrong, rough, uncomfortable, too loose round the base of my finger.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I managed.

  Time slowed, he kept on talking, his monologue diving into plans for our children, how soon we’d have to move away from London if we wanted to get into a decent catchment area, and that I couldn’t delay quitting my job.

  How on earth was I going to tell him I was about to leave after this? He’d be crushed. Worse. He’d be furious. Murderous.

  ‘I knew this was all that you needed. A bit of commitment. This year has just been a test, hasn’t it? You were angry I hadn’t proposed yet, so you pretended to be obsessed with your career. It’s all so clear now that I’ve worked it out. You’re very clever, Ava, but you’ve got your way now! And, well, here I am at last, ball and chain firmly attached!’ He jiggled his ankle out towards me, bruised on one side.

  ‘Charlie, I…’ For a moment, for a split-second, I thought about saying that I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want to marry him. But I managed to hold myself together. Now wasn’t the right time.

  ‘Shall we cheers to our future?’

  I lifted my coffee towards his, but he pulled his mug away at the last moment, wanting me to make eye contact with him. Come on, Ava, you know the rule: it’s bad luck if we don’t look at each other!

  I forced another smile and dragged my eyes to his. His jaw slid from side to side, front to back.

  ‘Why don’t we take a photo? We can send it to your parents: we must tell them the happy news. They’ll be thrilled we’re moving home.’

  I scowled internally at his suggestion. Mum would be thrilled. She’s been wanting me to get married ever since I left university. It was all she talked about. The idea of me growing up but not ‘getting on with things’ – her greatest grievance. I felt she deliberately hadn’t noticed how much he controlled me, how Charlie had stopped me from visiting her and dad alone almost as soon as we’d got together. She had ignored the way he insisted on muscling his way in on every Christmas, every birthday. The fact she still badgered me to marry him had turned us against each other, and it hadn’t been a particular hardship when Charlie had stopped me from seeing my parents after we moved to London. It showed how little he knew me. He thought it was a punishment. His own parents lived in Ireland, separated, and he didn’t see them often. He liked the idea that my family were his family, he called my parents ‘Mum and Dad’.

  ‘Great,’ I agreed, watching him bound through to the bedroom to retrieve my phone. The camera on his was smashed. Of course it was. I sat still in my chair, my hands trembling, trying to make sense of the situation I was in. I was leaving today. No matter what. I’d leave, stay at Olivia’s, then wait a couple of days for Charlie to calm down so we could talk. Somewhere neutral. Somewhere public. He was still in the bedroom as my mind whirred through my options, then I felt the wind change. Something wasn’t right.

  It was the silence that worried me first. Then the rustling. Then the tone of his voice.

  ‘Ava?’ he called. The way he said my name, so deliberately, made the air catch in my throat. He’d seen something on my phone he didn’t like, I was sure of it. I felt the heavy drumbeat of his footsteps as he slammed his heels into the floor on his way back through to the lounge, each one sending a shudder up my spine. ‘What the fuck is this?’ He was holding the note
I’d written with David last night in his hand. The edge bouncing up and down as fury coursed through his grip. It occurred to me what had happened: after picking up my clothes from the floor it must have fallen from my back pocket and down to the ground, ready for him to find.

  ‘Charlie, no, it’s not what you thin—’ He stepped towards me and in that moment I considered making a run for it. Would hurling myself out of our third-storey window kill me? I hesitated and reconsidered: better to believe I could talk my way out of this and pray for a miracle.

  ‘Looks like you’ve made up your mind,’ he said, his back teeth gritted together, his willpower turning in somersaults trying to keep his limbs to himself. ‘Off you go then.’ He whacked the lounge door wide open, smashing it against the wall, the handle crunching deep into the plasterboard behind. ‘Go on,’ he repeated again, louder. ‘Why are you making this difficult? It’s easy: you want to go… so fucking go,’ he hissed: a boa constrictor suffocating me with my own words. I sat silently in my seat, my heel twitching up and down in the nervous way it had grown accustomed to, listening to his breathing as it turned ragged. I knew the signs. This was only the beginning. ‘Stand up!’ he shouted, spittle flying from his mouth.

  I said nothing. I stood on his command.

  ‘Walk!’ His nostrils flared as I started towards the door and he splayed his fingers out across the frame theatrically. After you, mademoiselle, he implied, goading me. I drew level with his hot, dank breaths and felt his eyes piercing my torso. One more step would bring me out over the threshold but, as I moved my leg forward, his arm flung out like a whip across the doorframe.

  ‘No,’ he said, his head twitching in supersonic vibrations. He moved in a blur, shoving me back the way I’d come, one hand over my mouth to stop me screaming, the other against my chest. I tasted the hot, sticky sweat of his palm as he pushed me down into the chair I’d just risen from. Then he let go and the dining table, standing quite happily on all fours, spun like a merry-go-round as he flipped it up on itself, the side of the table cracking against my knee as I failed to move out of the way in time, everything moving too quickly, a deafening roar accompanying his outburst. He picked up and launched a framed photo of us, our baby-faced first year anniversary, directly above my head and I screamed as it smashed it into a thousand jagged pieces round me.