The Lies We Hide: An absolutely gripping and darkly compelling novel

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘You sold drugs?’ It’s a tale by now familiar to Richard.

  ‘I did.’ Graham presses his face into his hands, then pulls them away to the sides, stretching his features into a grotesque mask. He walks across the room like this, like a ghoul. He sits down and lets go of his face, which thankfully returns to normal. Richard wishes Graham could be still, at peace. He fights the urge to lay a hand on his arm, to try to calm him, but Graham’s leg begins to jiggle about. ‘I did something terrible.’

  Richard leans forward, but says nothing.

  ‘I hit her.’

  ‘Tracy?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I never laid a hand on Trace. It was my mum. I hit her. I cut her face with my dad’s ring. And that’s when the bottom dropped out of my world, d’you know what I mean? Everything was black like … like an abyss, you know? A black hole. That’s when I got into everything, really got into it, like. I just lost it. I was a right mess. I’d lost my job, so I suppose I lost my mind … lost everything.’ He bites his nail, spits it. ‘What really gets me is that it was just a few weeks, like. I never even sold much in the end. Barry was still showing us the ropes when we … when I … He stands up again, strides over to the bookshelves and paces up and down, studying the titles. He picks up a tatty paperback, Beyond Bars: How to Get Out and Stay Out; puts it back. With his crew cut grown out, his hands clasped behind his back, he could be a regular guy, a father or a brother, browsing in the local library, choosing a book to take home. He could, Richard thinks, be anybody.

  Graham turns to him, frowns. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he says. ‘I can’t do this today.’

  Forty-Eight

  Carol

  1987

  Carol places her shaking hands on the front-door catch. She has been expecting Jim all day. She can see his outline now through the glass, hear him clear his throat, brush his feet on the mat outside. He is here. He is here, he is here, he is here.

  She opens the door. ‘Jim.’ His name is a half sob into the damp palm of her hand.

  He drops his bag, takes one huge step towards her and smiles. His grey-blue eyes sink at the edges in the exact way she remembers. ‘My darlin’.’

  His arms are around her. She is crying into his shoulder. He smells of smoke and oil and the damp wool of his donkey jacket. She told herself she would not cry. All day she has done nothing but fret about Graham and wonder how she would feel once Jim got here, but now she realises she had a very good idea how she would feel and it is this, exactly this: relief. Love, this love, feels like relief.

  After a moment, she pushes back against his chest, so she can see him.

  ‘It’s you,’ she says.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Your hair’s longer.’

  ‘Aye well, I need a shave too. There was no time to go to the barber.’

  She leads him inside, to where Nicola and Tracy are fussing with the baby. The police brought Tracy and Jade to the house after Graham was charged. The flat is now sealed off, Graham’s clothes taken as evidence. Along with the knife, she imagines. It doesn’t bear thinking about. She can’t think about it.

  ‘Hello, ladies.’ Jim breaks into her thoughts, raising his hand in a shy wave.

  ‘Hello, Jim,’ they reply, smiling, natural, as if he’s one of the neighbours popped round for a coffee.

  They are all smiling, she thinks, smiling away as if none of them were in this thick smog of disaster. Thing about disaster, it occurs to her then, is that life has a way of carrying on. Doesn’t she already know that? The baby still kicks on her little mat. Tracy still feeds her and changes her. Nicola still does her schoolwork. She, Carol, will still make the dinner and put the hoover round. She will still go to work, swallow down guilt in place of the food she can’t eat, only to vomit it out in empty bile, in secret, in the staff toilets. They, all of them, have to carry on. There is nothing else any of them can do.

  ‘Sit down, love,’ she says to Jim.

  Jim sits heavily in the armchair. He looks so much bigger, but then she’s never seen him in this house before. She is not used to him. She never got the chance to get used to him, never had long enough. And yet his being here brings her such peace, as if all the time he hasn’t been here she has felt his absence as something not right.

  ‘How’s he holding up?’ Jim asks when she brings him some tea.

  ‘Hasn’t said much. Doesn’t say anything, really. I think he’s lost faith in words altogether, to be honest. Not like they got him anywhere fast, I suppose. Or anywhere at all.’

  ‘Have they set a date?’

  ‘First hearing will be after Christmas now. The trial will be a month or so after. They’ve told him to plead guilty to manslaughter. They reckon he’s got a good chance, what with Barry coming at him and that. They took photos of his neck. Well, both their necks, I suppose. Graham’s had finger marks on it. Barry’s neck was …’ Her eyes fill. The sight of her son, in that place. She tried one more time to persuade him to let her do the time. I’ll convince them it was me, she said. But there were coppers all around and he wouldn’t even look at her. He wouldn’t let her.

  He will go down, she knows it. They both do.

  Forty-Nine

  Richard

  1993

  Viv has just taken Richard to visit the decorating area, where he watched an inmate wallpaper a room only to have to strip it and wallpaper the whole thing again. And again. And again. Now, waiting in the chapel, it strikes him as some specially designed metaphor for the hopelessness of prison existence.

  ‘Why can’t they go out and decorate real homes for those who need help?’ he asked Viv. ‘You know, with supervision?’

  She shook her head and replied only, ‘Oh, Richard.’

  All of this has been compounded by his route back to the chapel: flight after flight of the stone steps that sometimes feel like torture to him now – Escher’s optical illusion of the endless ascending staircase.

  ‘Rickie Lee Jones!’ Graham thuds onto his chair, his energy palpable.

  ‘Graham, hello, yes, sorry. I’m great, thank you. Yes. Really well. Good to see you on such good form.’

  Seeing Graham has begun to feel like seeing an old friend, albeit a very different kind of friend than he’s used to.

  Seconds pass, reminding Richard that unless Graham digs deep and finds what he needs to talk about, then they have nothing to say to one another. He and Graham are not friends. They are here for one reason only, to help Graham pick his way through what led him to do what he did, to acknowledge what he did, to take responsibility. This task is all they have in common. To think of Graham as a friend is a mistake. And yet …

  ‘How come you never talk about yourself?’ Graham is looking at him intently, making him wonder how long he’s been silent.

  ‘I do. But these sessions are for your benefit, not mine.’

  ‘S’pose. But don’t you ever feel like saying something? About a problem or something?’ Graham squints at him, his head to one side.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘So go on then, what’s your b-biggest problem?’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about myself.’ Richard cannot hold Graham’s gaze, but even when he looks away, he can still feel it, boring into him. ‘I lost my mum recently. I can tell you that.’

  ‘Was she ill?’

  ‘Oh, frail but steady, you know? A creaking gate.’

  ‘So, what, like, old age?’

  ‘A heart attack, apparently. She was ill, but not, I thought, seriously. It appears she tried to do too much too soon. Collapsed on the way to the post office.’ Richard stands up, exhales heavily. He wanders to the window and looks out over the courtyard. The courtyard, the only external space in the place, is way too small. Cruelly so. This place! His fist lands on the sill with a bang. What would he do in here, unable to run other than on a treadmill, to enjoy a pint of bitter, to ever feel at home, breathe the air? Praying would be all he had – but then, hasn’t praying been all he’s had anyway, rece
ntly?

  ‘I was in Mexico,’ he says, still at the window. ‘For a couple of years. Teaching English with my … my partner. I got a call from my mother’s neighbour to say she’d been … she’d been taken ill and was in hospital. I got the first flight I could. An— my partner was going to come with me, but … but I went alone, in the end. When I got home, my mother was already … she’d already passed on.’

  ‘Oh, mate. Oh, mate, that’s terrible. You should have said something, you know, before, like.’

  ‘What is there to say?’ Richard turns back from the window and makes his way back to Graham.

  ‘Do you miss her then, yeah?’

  He knows he shouldn’t be talking like this, but now he’s started, he can’t help but carry on. Something about the sweetness of Graham’s expression lodged in his scrappy, grey appearance.

  ‘I’ve hardly told anyone. I haven’t really seen anyone since she … since I came back. I’ve been a bit isolated, I suppose. Can’t seem to face doing anything other than come here. I run. I pray. I keep meaning to paint my mother’s house, fix it up, but I …’ He is aware of rattling out sentences. His speech feels disjointed, odd, as if he’s lost fluency in his own language. Graham is breathing with an almost sleep-like regularity, waiting, as Richard himself has done many times. And so he continues, to fill the void. ‘I guess I wish she hadn’t died alone. I think … I wish I could’ve had one last conversation with her, you know? And known it was important.’

  Graham is silent, pensive.

  ‘It’s all important, though, isn’t it?’ he says, after a moment, one eye half shut. ‘I mean, you don’t think it is until it’s taken away, but let me tell you, it is. Even buying milk is important, bread, whatever, sitting on the sofa watching telly with someone, having a laugh.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I mean, if she was here now, what would you say to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve had conversations with her in my head, I suppose. I ask God for help. There’s nothing major. She knew who I was, I think, although we never said anything out loud. I think I’ve realised that. My parents weren’t ones for saying things out loud.’ He looks up at Graham, who is nodding steadily, his mouth pushed into a solemn pout. Richard tries to read his expression but can’t tell what he’s thinking, what he has understood, whether he is judging. If he were to guess, he would say not. This violent man is one of the kindest people he’s ever known.

  ‘Come ’ead, though, mate – what would you say?’ Graham sits up in his seat and grips his knees with his hands. ‘Come on, let’s hear it. Pretend I’m her, like. Close your eyes and pretend she’s sitting here. Talk to me. Tell me.’

  Richard closes his eyes and thinks. Say goodbye. Embrace freedom. Live. Perhaps this is what has tied him to Graham all along. Both of them must face their respective liberties. They must get to a place where they can live.

  ‘Richard,’ Graham says. ‘What is it you want to say to me, son?’

  Richard’s eyes prickle.

  ‘Just “Hello, Mum”, I suppose. “How’re you getting on?” Just that. That’s all I want to say to you.’ His voice falters. He opens his eyes and coughs into his hand. ‘And goodbye. Bye, Mum. That’s all I’d say.’

  Ten years his junior, Graham is wearing a face full of parental pride.

  ‘Well, she knows that now, doesn’t she?’ His brow furrows with sincerity. ‘You know, in your world? She’d have been listening, wouldn’t she? Upstairs, like? If you said it to me, you said it to her, didn’t you?’

  Richard takes a deep breath. His chest feels looser. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘No biggie.’

  The clock on the wall clicks. Outside, the constant cacophony of voices and machinery, the noise that has always been there, returns.

  ‘And what would you say?’ Richard asks.

  Graham wrinkles his nose. ‘Who to?’

  ‘Your father?’

  He sighs, sits back in his chair.

  ‘I can remember one time,’ he says after a moment. ‘I was in bed. I was supposed to be asleep, like. It’ll have been late, you know, one in the morning, or two, even. He’d’ve stayed for the usual lock-in at the Grapes. I could hear him through my bedroom window, swearing at lamp posts, stupid get. And then the front door opens and it was my mum opening it – she knew he’d take half an hour to get his key in; he used to scratch the paintwork, like, you know? And I heard him call her the usual, like, you know – bitch, that was the word he used, stupid bitch. And I was just lying there looking up at the ceiling and closing my eyes tight then opening them again, making stars. It was more scary being upstairs, if that makes sense, than it was being in the thick of it, like.

  ‘And I can remember just lying there thinking what a frigging coward I was, how I should go down there and kill him, you know, get a spanner and twat him on the back of the head or wait for him to pass out and do him with a pillow, you know, just smother him while he slept. But I did fuck all. I just lay there blinking my eyes open and closed like a … like a c-coward.

  ‘I haven’t even told you why I’m here, have I? Not properly. I mean, my dad was a bastard and everything, but he was ill. He was ill. He wasn’t a coward, or a junkie, or a criminal. He worked his bollocks off for us. He “functioned”, as they say – held down his job in the jelly works, crushing bones. Crushing bones.’ Graham gives a brief laugh, shakes his head. ‘Irony’s ironic, I keep telling you. I mean. Crushed bones at work, broke them at home. You should have smelt it, though, the factory. You had to wind up the car window when you drove past. I can’t even think what it must’ve been like inside – a big smelly prison.’ He presses his fingers to his eyes, mutters something that sounds like irony.

  ‘And what would you say to him?’ Richard asks. ‘If he were sitting here, where I’m sitting. Are you strong enough to imagine that I’m him, do you think? Can you talk to me? Can you talk to me, son?’

  Graham rips a strip of fingernail with his teeth and closes his eyes. His lips press together, relax, and he places a hand on each knee. The room shrinks, becomes preternaturally still. Time hovers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he half whispers into the quietness. ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

  Fifty

  Nicola

  2019

  I wake to the sound of the key rattling in the lock. Four a.m. I have fallen asleep on Mum’s bed. Hazily I pull myself up. The key scrabbles. It has lost the lock and is searching it out once more. This house is so small, I can hear every scratch and blunder. How did we ever all live here? How did I ever think it was big?

  ‘Fuck,’ I hear as I step onto the landing and smile to myself.

  That’ll be Jim, back from the lock-in at the Traveller’s Rest. The stragglers went on there after the wake – Tommy and Pauline, of course, Uncle Johnny and his partner Bernie, and the hard core of hard drinkers, red of nose and cheek now, clothes straining against their bellies. They asked me to come, but I wanted to be here, in my mother’s house, to be alone with her things. Jim went with them, one arm flung around Tommy’s shoulders, the other around Graham’s. A strong man broken is a hard thing to see. And like most truly strong men, Jim is kinder than any man I have known, including my own husband.

  ‘Will you be all right here on your own, love?’ Pauline had asked as they got themselves together to leave, a rolling, raucous shambles if ever there was one. Her eye make-up was smudged, all but gone from her eyes. At seventy-odd, her black hair is harsh against her pale face, but without it she wouldn’t be herself.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ I’d taken her hands in mine. ‘I just want to be on my own now.’

  ‘Right you are, love.’ She’d raised her shoulders briefly and given me a sad smile. ‘Come here.’

  I am small-boned, like my mother, and to be hugged by Pauline is to be swaddled in warmth, soaked in perfume, bathed in soft flesh. My love for her is old. It is the love of the child who called her Auntie P, that child become woman, become mother in her turn. My
love for Pauline has matured with each stage of my life, a companion to the love I have for my mother, a love that has redefined itself and deepened with each new nuance of understanding of my mother’s past, the past before me and the past I shared with her. When I was little, Auntie P was mad and funny and always dressed up to the nines. She was the woman whose tidy house we went to for tea sometimes, who bought a SodaStream machine so she could make us dandelion and burdock in the summer and pass it over the fence. She is the friend who never needed to ask, who understood without words, who gave my mother the number for the women’s refuge, who helped move us into what we all called ‘the terrible house’, who made dinner for us the day we moved back home, sandwiches the night Graham went to prison. She’s a bloody rock, is Pauline, my mother used to say. And the more I think of that everyday phrase, the truer it is; the geology of Pauline lies in strata laid down over years beneath my mother’s life and the life of her family.

  ‘Hey,’ Pauline had said, rubbing my arm once the monumental hug had finished. ‘No more tears, eh? I’ve told Tommy we’re coming down to London to see you. He said he’d book us a Travelodge, flash get. Trump’s got nothing on him, has he? En suite and everything.’ She was trying to make me laugh and I loved her for it. ‘So, you figure us out a restaurant, all right? None of your rubbish, somewhere decent. Somewhere that makes them Kir royales you made us last Christmas, eh? Our treat. What d’you say?’

  I’d nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s do it soon.’

  Another hug and she was on her way, off to drown the sorrow of her best friend’s passing, to give her the send-off she deserved in the pub they all used to go to.

  And now here’s Jim, at four a.m. A shuffle, a bump – the phone table possibly – another expletive, and he’s at the foot of the stairs. I see his shoes, his cream woollen socks. There was no way he would have forgone the kilt. This was Carol’s funeral, after all, and her fondness for him in traditional dress is the stuff of family legend. These days, he’s more careful with his skean-dhu.