‘You’re so beautiful,’ he says.
‘Leo, please leave me alone,’ I say. I can hear that my voice is pathetic. I’m no longer in control. I’m everything that I have fought against becoming – a victim, again.
‘I’ve called the police and the security company.’ Stacey’s voice comes from the hall. ‘They’re on their way, so I suggest you leave now, or they can arrest you when they get here.’
Leo freezes, the pressure of his hand against my throat increasing.
For a moment, we stare at each other. And then Leo turns to go.
Chapter 48
I was wrong.
Appallingly, devastatingly, wrong. Turns out that just because someone once told a lie, it doesn’t mean that everything that they say is a lie.
Stacey had come to pick up Django’s retainer, which he’d forgotten at home. She thought we’d already have left, so she let herself in. She’d opened the front door and heard what Leo was saying. She hadn’t actually called anyone, it turned out.
‘I panicked,’ she said. ‘I should have phoned for help first, but I had to stop him.’
I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t arrived at that moment.
I don’t like to think about it too much.
Steve Twala helps me sort it all out. We bring an urgent application to have April’s committal to the psychiatric hospital reversed, and we gather evidence from April’s friends and family to support it.
It was all there, if I’d looked – the people who believed in April, who knew that something was wrong in that marriage. Her friend Almari, for example. The friendship hadn’t ended in the callous way that Leo implied. It had ended when Almari confronted April about the signs of abuse, and April had backed away, not wanting Almari to know the truth. And Almari knew other people, people who Leo had forced April to block from her life. We even found a long-ago ex-girlfriend of Leo’s who had filed a charge against him for abuse. And a woman he’d had an affair with much more recently, whom he’d almost choked to death when he thought she’d flirted with a waiter.
One by one, we unpacked all the things that had led me to believe Leo, and one by one the house of cards had collapsed. Leo had been in a car accident – there was a police report, and that’s how he broke his arm. April had hospital records of all the times he had hurt her so badly that she needed medical help. A play therapist helped unpack how Leo had manipulated and lied to the children, making them believe that April had broken his arm, and that he was the good parent, despite the evidence of their own eyes. Even my Django had been a victim of that. And the medical records that Leo claimed – nothing. The scars on his hands, it turned out, were all from a car accident when he was a child, when his hands had gone through a windshield. Leo had played me. It was all lies. And I had believed him. Like a fool.
And then, when on a hunch, I spoke to the people who had cancelled my contracts, I soon found out Leo was behind that too. Trying to make me vulnerable. As he lost April, he needed a new victim, and he thought that if I was down, it would be easier to lure me in.
If I hadn’t been blinded by the lies that April had told in the past, I would have been able to find this before I did so much harm. Of course, the painful truth is that somewhere deep down the only reason that I ultimately believed him is because I had wanted to. Because of the sort of man he is. Because I was attracted to him. I lie awake at night hating myself for this.
‘It wasn’t you,’ April tells me.
But she’s wrong. It was me. I could have stopped Leo and warned her. I didn’t. I was the only person who held all the pieces to the puzzle, and I put them together wrong.
April says she doesn’t blame me for anything, that it’s her own fault for always telling little lies about inconsequential things. She can’t explain why she does it; she says it’s something her mother always did, and her grandmother, and she learnt that it was normal. She’s seeing a therapist and trying to unlearn it. She sees the harm it did.
And the incident with Suzie at school – April is the first to say that it was unacceptable. But it turns out that she definitely knew that the ledge was there – her family frequently spent holidays in the area and went on hikes. April’s cousin remembers that once April dropped a toy at that exact point, and had been heartbroken when no adult would go down and fetch it.
‘It doesn’t make it better that I pushed her, though,’ says April. ‘I just kept thinking about how she’d embarrassed me, and about how my mother lied about things, and how if I was wrong to tell little lies, it meant my mom was wrong. And suddenly we were at the part where I knew there was a ledge, and I pushed her. I never, ever should have done that. She could have been seriously injured.’
April has met with Suzie, to apologise and try to make it right. I wasn’t there, but April says that it went well. I guess I believe her.
I don’t know if April and I would go back to being friends like we were, after all this. In her place, I would never forgive me. She landed up locked in a psychiatric hospital, away from her children, scared, helpless and alone.
She says that she isn’t angry with me, that all her anger is towards Leo, but I can’t believe that’s true. I guess we won’t ever find out if our friendship can survive. April has decided that she needs to leave Johannesburg, make a new start, and I think I agree with her. There’s lots of talk about how Django and I will come to visit her and the kids in their new home in Cape Town, but I don’t know if it will happen.
‘There’ll be space,’ she says with a smile. Leo has paid her. He has given her money and sole custody in exchange for her silence. Both of us know that this isn’t right – Leo should pay properly for what he has done to her. He should lose everything. But after hours of debating it, April and Steve decided that April needed to act in her own and the kids’ best interests. I don’t love it, but I understand.
My own atonement for my mistakes will be to quietly keep tabs on Leo and warn the next woman that he gets involved with. She probably won’t believe me, but at least she’ll know where to come when it starts. And I’ll help her, unlike what I did to April. My mistake haunts me.
‘You fixed it when you realised,’ says Joshua. ‘And I was as taken in as you were. More so.’
Joshua and I speak now, but when I contacted him and told him about April, I told him everything. Including how I’d nearly fallen for Leo. I think he understands. He fell for Leo himself. But understanding is one thing – forgiveness another. But I’ve noticed that he’s slowly phoning me more and more. And he’s invited me out for dinner next week. Maybe with time, we’ll be able to start again. Maybe, despite the lies and the hurt and the mistakes, we’ll be able to start again.
After all, that’s what happened with my parents. Maybe that’s the lesson that I need to learn.
If you loved Never Tell a Lie, read on for an extract from another unforgettable novel from Gail Schimmel:
The Aftermath
PROLOGUE
We had to stop a few times, and soon it was dark . . . dark like it can only be on a narrow highway in the middle of nowhere with no street lights. There was almost no traffic, but cows or even buck could step into the road at any point, and we both knew stories about accidents like this. A cow, hit at the right speed, is surprisingly lethal.
‘Drive carefully,’ I said. ‘There’s no rush.’
‘I am driving carefully,’ Mike snapped. ‘It’s hard.’
We saw the truck approaching from a long way away. It was barely of any interest, except that we hadn’t seen much traffic on that road for a while.
Suddenly, out of the blue, as the truck drew level with us, the driver swerved. Nobody ever knew why. The truck swerved on to our side of the road; everything became loud and black and hard, and I didn’t know what was happening – it was all lights and noise and the screaming of brakes.
The truck hit the driver’s side, almost ploughing through us.
And then I looked over at Mike, and he was ve
ry still, and there was blood trickling out of his nose.
PART 1
FEBRUARY
MONDAY
Helen
I’m filling in a questionnaire on depression. It popped up while I was searching for a local plumber, and something about it caught my attention. ‘Are You Suicidal?’ screamed the headline. Well, I know the answer to that, obviously, but I still find myself clicking through to the test. It’s multiple choice, and I have to click on the answer that best describes me.
I click on ‘Always’. It feels good to own it; I spend so much time keeping up a facade, pretending to be a normal person. But I can tell this anonymous internet quiz how I feel, and nobody will be hurt by it.
This one is trickier. On one hand, I very seldom actually think about suicide. It’s just that I know that it’s my long-term plan, and has been since The Accident. So, while I seldom think about it, I also always think about it. I click on ‘Always’.
I smile. This one will confuse the algorithm. I never feel anxious. The only good thing about the very worst thing in the world happening to you is that you never feel anxious again. I click on ‘Never’. I’m not anxious because there’s only one thing left that could hurt me, and even if that happened – if something happened to Julia – in a way it would release me and I could kill myself. So, I don’t worry about anything. Worry is behind me.
It feels so good to tell the truth for once, even though it’s just to a random internet quiz, that I momentarily feel alive, but it’s just a flicker. Still, flickers are the best I get, and I try to enjoy them. When I started feeling little flickers of pleasure, about five years after The Accident, I was hopeful. Everybody had told me that all it takes to heal is time. For five years I had been in a deep, dark hole, getting up each day, functioning, pretending, and counting the minutes till I could take a sleeping pill and go back to sleep. But then, slowly, I started noticing small things – the sunlight on Julia’s hair, the taste of my food, a pleasing bird-song – and I thought that maybe I was getting better, that I might be like everybody else and be healed by time. But it never became more than those brief glimpses of pleasure. Most of the time I act like a person, but I am empty inside. Occasionally, something touches me and I remember who I used to be, before The Accident.
I finish the other questions, and then click on ‘Submit’, and wait while the computer screen says ‘Calibrating results’.
‘Suicidal,’ says the outcome. ‘Please seek professional help immediately.’ Links appear to a whole lot of resources that would be useless to me anyway, because none of them are South African. Well, it’s official then, I think. I’m officially suicidal. At least it shows the test works. Maybe it will help somebody else.
As I go back to googling plumbers, my phone rings. The caller ID says ‘Julia’. I consider not answering it. But Julia is the reason that I stay alive, so ignoring her calls doesn’t make sense. I work very hard to behave in a way that makes sense to other people. I’ve devoted the last twenty-six years to it, and I think most people are fooled.
‘Hello, darling,’ I answer.
‘Hi, Mum,’ says Julia. She doesn’t bother with any small talk. Julia and I are not ones for small talk. ‘Mum, I’ve got some news. Can I come around later?’
Julia
My mother isn’t curious about my news.
She’s not like other mothers. When I phone and tell her I have big news, she doesn’t nag me, or beg me to tell her, or insist I come around immediately. I wasn’t exactly expecting her to. But I always have a small hope that one day she will act a little bit more like a mother should.
My therapist thinks I subconsciously remember a time when she was different, and that this is the source of my hope. Everybody (including Alice, my therapist) insists that my mother is like she is because of The Accident. Everybody says it like that – like it has capital letters – even my mother. My life has been defined by something that happened to my parents when I was two, something I wasn’t even involved in.
Maybe my mother was different before. When I was a child, I came up with the theory that she was a zombie. That she’d actually died in that stupid accident, but for some reason kept walking around like an alive person. ‘My mum’s actually a zombie,’ I told some of the girls at school. They didn’t believe me, so I invited them around to play. After that they still didn’t believe me, but they also didn’t not believe me. That’s how much like a zombie my mother was. And still is. Luckily I was friends with the sort of girls who were very kind and who wouldn’t tease you, even if your mother was a zombie. The sort of girls who went home and told their mothers how worried they were about me, with a zombie mother. Pippa Lee’s mum took me aside one day and gently told me that my mother was definitely not a zombie, just a bit sad. I nodded and said yes, I understood. And I allowed her to pull me to her large soft breasts and stroke my head, because it’s true that children of zombies are starved of physical affection.
When I told Alice my childhood zombie theory, she thought it was psychologically very astute. Alice’s theory is that the reason I’m not more screwed-up is because I was a particularly astute little girl. My theory is that therapists have to say that to make you feel better. Making you feel better is a big part of their job description. As far as I’m concerned, I’m okay because I had an okay childhood. Yes, my mother is distant and cold – even her hands are cold to the touch – but she provided for me, and she was always around, and she came to all my school events, and she never hit me or even lost her temper with me. Even when I tried to make her. Even in my teens when I went out with unsuitable boys and came home late and drunk, and fought with her. She just stayed calm and told me she trusted me. People have much worse childhoods, I tell Alice. I have a lot to be grateful for. Alice says this is a very mature attitude, and I feel better about myself. As I leave the waiting room I wonder if she has different compliments for all her patients, or if she just recycles the same ones. I don’t really care – children of zombies take their compliments where they can find them.
So I’m disappointed, but not surprised, when my mother’s reaction to my announcement that I have news is to calmly arrange a visit two days from now.
I phone Daniel.
‘I told my mum I have something to tell her.’
‘Was she excited for us?’
‘I didn’t tell her about us. I just told her I have something to tell her. I’ll see her in two days and tell her then.’ I can almost feel Daniel’s confusion through the phone. ‘I’ve explained to you, Daniel,’ I say. ‘She’s not like other mums. If I announced that I’d decided to turn myself into a rhinoceros, she’d just nod and say, “That’s nice, dear.”’
‘Maybe it would help if I met her?’ says Daniel.
Daniel wants to meet my mum, and I don’t want him to – this has been an ongoing theme for the last two months. Ever since Daniel moved in.
‘If she’s so calm, she’s not going to freak out about me,’ he goes on.
‘No, she won’t. I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about you. You might not feel the same way about me after you’ve met her. She’s very . . . indifferent.’
He sighs. ‘I love you. I don’t care if your mother’s an ice statue.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘You’ll meet her in due course. Just let me tell her first.’
The problem, of course, is that Daniel isn’t thinking ahead. He isn’t thinking about having a child with me, even though he knows that’s what I want. He isn’t thinking about what sort of mother I’ll be. But if he meets my mum, he’s going to think about it. He’s going to wonder if I’ll become like her. He’s going to wonder if he’s done the wrong thing.
Alice says I won’t become like my mother. She says she can absolutely guarantee it. She says I will screw up my children in entirely different ways.
‘Maybe I just won’t have children,’ I told Alice once. ‘Maybe that’ll be better.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she answered. ‘You
’re always talking about how you want kids.’
Sometimes I wish I had the sort of therapist who just nods and says, ‘How does that make you feel?’
Alice has a lot to say about my relationship with Daniel, of course. She says I was attracted to him because he was unavailable, because that’s all I’ve ever known. She’s very worried that I won’t want him now that he’s available. She’s especially worried because Daniel’s a very warm and effusive man. He’s always telling me how much he loves me and how excited he is about our lives together. Alice says I must be careful not to feel stifled. I tell her that’s not going to happen; I’m very pleased Daniel is with me. I just don’t tell Alice how I creep out of his heavy arms at night because I’m worried I’ll suffocate.
And I don’t tell anyone that in a strange way, my mother’s phlegmatic reactions – while constantly disappointing – are also strangely comforting because they are all I know.
Helen
When I get off the phone, I can hardly breathe I am so excited. Julia says she has some news, and she sounds happy. Her news can only be one of two things, either of which could be the beginning of my plan to kill myself.
I have spent twenty-six years waiting. Feeling nothing. Going through the motions. Surviving at best, falling apart at worst. Living from sleeping pill to sleeping pill, and trying to mother Julia in-between. Waiting and waiting for the day Julia no longer needs me so I can end my pain. That day is finally coming.
What I am feeling now is more than a small flicker of life, which is the most I have come to expect. My body is fizzing with life, spilling over with it. I am so excited I can’t sit down, I can’t concentrate, I can’t do anything. I want to tell someone. But the only person I want to speak to is Mike.
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