Everything Is Lies

by Helen Callaghan

  I honestly, at the time, never thought it strange that my dad lived in a small separate building, and came into our large house to eat meals before retiring to his den in the garden for a few more hours.

  I looked through the drawers and dresser, each moment expecting my dad to appear, offering a furious scowl at my trespass. There was nothing resembling notebooks or a gun – only tools, some paperwork and, in the bottom of a dresser drawer, a small stack of soft pornography, dated no later than the early Nineties. I dropped it quickly.

  I wanted to go back into the house, in the worst way, but I had made it this far, and I wanted to be absolutely sure there was nothing I had missed. I had no interest in coming back again.

  I slumped into my dad’s overstuffed and frayed leather swivel chair, and let myself feel a little charge of daring at taking over his space.

  The chair faced the window, and beyond it the house proper, with its fusty yellow lights, appeared welcoming and safe.

  I let my head fall backwards against the headrest, my gaze wandering the walls.

  That’s when I saw them.

  Above the window was a wooden pelmet, shielding the rod that held the dark curtains up. On top of it, almost hidden but visible in the strip light, was a thin stripe of red-gold, and one of red.

  I recognized them. The red-gold line was the spine of the first notebook I’d bought her, years ago, when she’d declared she was going to write a book. She must have liked it, because the other one was similar – A5, the size that could fit in a handbag, with ruled pages.

  I couldn’t reach them, so I climbed up carefully on to the rickety dresser, aware that I wouldn’t like to break a leg and have to spend the night out here with only the poor signal on my mobile for company.

  At the top I grabbed them – two notebooks. Max had mentioned three, so one must be missing.

  I opened the one I had given her.

  I recognized my name on the very first line – ‘For my Sophia’ – and her handwriting made my heart clench with love and loss.

  ‘Everything is lies,’ she’d written, ‘and nobody is who they seem.’

  THE FIRST NOTEBOOK

  * * *

  For my Sophia

  Everything is lies, and nobody is who they seem.

  That always seems to be the lesson. It was the lesson for me, and now, if you’re reading this, it will be the lesson for you, too. I apologize, dear heart, if the lesson is a hard one, but I hope and pray it will not be as hard as my own was.

  I must have started writing this story a thousand times, only to throw it away after a few pages, burning the papers in the Aga before Jared ever saw them. In all that time I never thought to use this, the beautiful notebook you gave me, and now that I have begun here, I have a feeling I will finish – one way or another.

  I should have finished this a long, long time ago.

  I hope you will not be too angry at me, Sophia, for the choices I made. After all, you were always the bold and brave one, the adventuress, whereas my whole life has been an example of cowardice in action. Or inaction.

  But never mind, my darling girl, all of that’s about to change. I will plant my flag and issue my call to battle, and this little world will burn down around me. And as much as I long for it, and I am ready for it – dying for it, in fact – I am frightened for you. I think we will all be bruised and battered at the end, and you most of all.

  After you’ve read this, I’ll answer any questions you have, as best as I am able, but not before.

  I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.

  All of my love, for ever,

  Mum xxxxx

  Chapter Five

  Once upon a time, Sophia, long before you were born, I arrived at St Edith’s College in Cambridge, on a blustery Saturday morning in 1989. I was eighteen years old and conscious then of only two immutable truths – the first being that I would never amount to anything, and the second that the plunge-necked, shoulder-padded purple velvet dress I’d bought with Uncle Malcolm’s Christmas money made me look like a ‘common streetwalker’.

  I’d packed it anyway, and it was folded carefully in the bottom of the scratched red canvas suitcase I’d brought up with me. I remember the car journey on the way up, and the dread that my father would ask to take the suitcase back home to Oxfordshire with him once I’d unpacked it. When I emptied it, the lurid presence of this dress would be discovered. Terror, and something else, a little like excitement, threatened to smother me at the mere thought.

  We’d arrived in Cambridge and been greeted at the tottering stone gatehouse by a brace of porters who’d directed us to join the other new arrivals. Ahead of us were more students, by the look of them, some accompanied by parents, some on their own, forming a loose queue. They were freshers, like me, and they were being processed by a trio of self-confident young people seated at a trestle table with a sign saying WELCOME COMMITTEE taped to it. The wind worried at the sign with ragged teeth, and the papers on the table were all firmly pinned down with rocks, mugs and, in one instance, what looked like a pint glass half full of beer.

  Of course, I realized, I would be allowed to drink here – be expected to, in fact.

  Here, all things would be permitted.

  The thought made me giddy.

  I stole a nervous glance sideways at my father. Already he was bristling at this trivial delay, displaying his signature tic for displeasure where his upper lip compressed almost white, as the boy fronting the table chattered idly to one of the newcomers. He had asked the girl for her name, and she tossed her lush curly perm and blushed.

  Daddy did not like to queue – for anything, ever.

  My mother slipped a hand through his arm, a gesture that appeared companionable, but which I knew was secretly checking, restraining. Don’t make a scene, Thomas.

  It occurred to me in a breathtaking flash of blasphemous insight that I couldn’t wait to get rid of them both.

  Nevertheless, I made nervous conversation to skate over the building tension – ‘How old do you think these buildings are?’ ‘Do you think I’ll meet anyone famous here?’ – which my mother answered with cordial boredom, offering me no assistance, and my father ignored.

  Finally it was our turn at the desk.

  ‘Oh, hello there. Sorry to keep you waiting,’ said the boy. He had a shock of blonde gelled hair and wore a grey blazer. He was almost indecently handsome and self-assured. ‘I’m Adam, welcome to St Edith’s!’

  He offered me his hand and a gleaming white grin.

  In that instant I glimpsed the potential for a new world and all of its dazzling potential. It made me dizzy, like a sudden rush of blood to the head.

  I went to switch my bulky handbag from one shoulder to the other, in order to take his proffered hand and offer up the gift of my own name, when Daddy growled, ‘About bloody time. Would it be too much trouble to tell her where her room is? We’ve been up since dawn with all this carry-on, without having to wait for you to stop flirting with all and sundry.’

  The golden smile faltered, the hand dropped and the moment was gone. The blood burned in my cheeks, swelled my throat.

  ‘So sorry,’ said the boy, with clipped politeness but clearly angry. Unlike me, he was doubtless unused to being spoken to that way. ‘What’s the name?’

  I groped for my voice …

  ‘Nina Mackenzie,’ snapped Daddy.

  The boy’s head dipped to the list, and without another word he fished out a pale envelope that rattled metallically. The girls bookending him at the table gazed pointedly away from me as he rose. ‘Follow me please.’

  The walk through the quad and up the wooden stairs to the rooms happened in agonizing, icy silence, though it seemed to me that Daddy’s gait now had a rolling, satisfied air, as though the day was finally going his way.

  ‘This is the room,’ said the boy, as we reached a door marked thirteen. ‘If you need any help with anything, just come to the orientation desk or ask at the
Porter’s Lodge.’ He held out the envelope, waited for me to take it. ‘Enjoy your time at St Edith’s.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wanted to say something to make up for the humiliation in the courtyard, some friendly rejoinder, but nothing came to mind, and from the set, cold expression on his face it wasn’t clear how it would have been received anyway. ‘Thank you.’

  He turned on his heel and walked away quickly down the stairs. The envelope was plucked out of my hand in an instant and torn open. ‘Ah.’

  My father was opening the door, struggling with the unfamiliar mechanism, and he was smiling – that thin, satisfied smile he wore when he had, in his own words, ‘cut one of the uppity buggers down to size’ at his factory.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

  ‘Do what?’ asked Daddy, and that hard, vicious look was back in his eyes. It would be the work of seconds to cut me down to size, too, small as I was, and I knew it.

  My courage was deserting me, draining away like water down a plughole. ‘I mean,’ I back-pedalled, despising myself, ‘he didn’t do anything that bad …’

  It was not quite enough. That hectic colour was back in his face, spreading up his neck from the opening of his green Ralph Lauren shirt. ‘You might be happy to stand around being kept waiting by spoiled little trust-fund brats, but I have better things to do, my dear.’

  ‘He was just being nice,’ I mumbled, aware that the wisest course of action was to drop this, but unable to help myself. ‘Welcoming. Like he was supposed to be. We were only waiting a few minutes. I don’t understand …’

  My mother’s warning flex of eyebrows came too late.

  ‘Is that so? Well, maybe your new friends can hump your bloody cases about.’ With a theatrical gesture he dropped the little red suitcase and the grey holdall, and inside something clattered as it broke – the new mug they had bought for me.

  ‘Daddy …’

  He threw up his arms in a theatrical shrug – see what you’ve driven me to! – and stomped off down the staircase.

  My mother stepped over the bags and kissed my cheek with hard, disapproving lips. ‘Honestly, Nina. You should know better. You can call and apologize tomorrow. Try to have fun in the meantime. And behave yourself.’

  With a brisk wave, she was gone too.

  I stood alone on the landing, surrounded by my bags. From above and below came the sound of laughing voices, opening and closing doors. I could smell cooking and polished wood and dust, dust that danced in the shafts of sunlight coming in through the high thin windows.

  I should run after Daddy, I knew, and verbally prostrate myself. If I headed off the storm early, he might yet be palliated, and we could go for a pub lunch as we had planned, shop and sightsee like a normal family might.

  A normal family.

  But I would have had to pass the desk in the courtyard again, and as I peeped out of the window, I could see the boy, Adam, laughing with the two girls, their chatter vaguely audible through the glass.

  ‘What do you suppose his problem was? What a nutter.’

  The girls laughed; tinkly, cruel, ingratiating laughter.

  I stepped away from the window, picked up the red suitcase and holdall, and let myself into unlucky room thirteen.

  * * *

  ‘Where are you from?’ bayed the boy from room twenty over the electronic stutter of ‘Pump Up the Volume’.

  ‘Shelford,’ I squeaked. My mouth and glass was redolent with the sharp spice-and-vanilla taste of Southern Comfort, which was almost but not quite masking the thrilling, unfamiliar tang of alcohol. I clutched the glass tightly, revelling in it.

  I’d decided to be the sort of girl who drank Southern Comfort. A wild yet cosmopolitan creature, not afraid of hard spirits. Hard spirits that had, admittedly, been diluted liberally with lemonade. But I had to start somewhere.

  The boy frowned at me, his forehead creasing like an old man’s. ‘What?’

  ‘Shelford,’ I said, raising my voice, and it cracked against the unfamiliar exercise. At home I rarely spoke in more than a whisper. ‘It’s in Oxfordshire. In the Cotswolds.’

  The boy already looked bored, painfully so, and I was sure he was about to walk away when he suddenly shouted, ‘Are you going to the Freshers’ Fair tomorrow?’

  I had heard of the Freshers’ Fair. It was where you went to join university societies. At that point I had barely been part of society, never mind a society, and I was very excited by the prospect. I imagined a group of cool, clever people – funny girls with spiky wits but hearts of gold, intense young men with frosted hair and expensive shirts who might ask me out for coffee and a cigarette (I didn’t smoke, I would need to start) and passionately discuss books with me in their rooms until I fell into their arms.

  My life would finally begin.

  Though it didn’t seem to have begun quite yet.

  Perhaps it was because I wasn’t dancing.

  ‘I’m going to dance,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ The boy screwed up his narrow little face again, and even the coloured lights of the disco couldn’t hide his acne. He glanced into the plastic cup of beer in his hand. ‘Oh, right.’ He shrugged. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

  I smiled thinly and walked off towards the dance floor, his perceived lack of enthusiasm scalding me.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have walked away. Perhaps I should have lingered, flirted, done whatever Bright Young Things were supposed to do. This was the problem. I had no idea of what I was supposed to do.

  What I didn’t understand then was that nobody else knew what to do at that age. We were the generation before smart phones, the internet and reality TV. Our hearts were hidden from each other.

  We were innocent in ways that no one would ever be again.

  I drifted into the centre of the dance floor as the track changed to ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley – I didn’t like the song that much, but everyone around me burst into enthusiastic dancing. I tried not to notice their electric-coloured clothes and deep necklines, already inwardly contrasting these with my own minimal make-up and lavender pastel dress, and thinking how anaemic, unworldly and desperately uncool I must look compared to everyone else’s burgeoning, energetic confidence.

  Nearby, I spotted one of the girls from the matriculation dinner on the dance floor. Her name was Saffron, and she’d sat nearly opposite me at the long table in the Great Hall where we’d made passing small talk. She was bobbing away with another couple of girls I’d seen in passing. I think they’d all come up from the same school. I offered them a tentative smile as I started dancing a few feet away, but received a sharp grimace in return, and then Saffron quickly looked away. That boiling sense of humiliation moved through me again.

  I shuffled along to the music, thinking all the while that I should just go back to my room. My sense of disenchantment was growing and swelling, making my belly feel queasy, making me feel …

  Sick.

  Within moments I was running for the door, my hand to my mouth.

  * * *

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The voice was soft, tentative, and with my hair streaked with vomit and my cheek pressed to the cold tile of the toilet floor, it took me a minute or two to work out that the question was addressed to me.

  ‘Unh?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  A shadow moved over the tiles outside, at the level of my eyeline.

  ‘I … uh, I don’t know. Feel sick.’

  ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Do you want a hand up?’

  I blinked. ‘No. Um, maybe. Actually … yes.’

  There was the gentle creak of someone opening the cubicle door wider, and then soft hands carefully sliding under my armpits, gathering my back against a pillowy, ample bosom that heaved with my weight. I scrabbled to help this unknown person, my sticky hands bracing myself as I was hauled up to my feet and released.

  I was a disgusting object. My hair straggled over my face and I smelled
the re-emergent stink of Southern Comfort, making my gag reflex hitch once, twice, before it reluctantly settled.

  I would never touch that stuff again.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, letting myself totter and collapse against the cubicle wall. ‘Sorry. I’m in such an awful state, I know …’

  ‘It’s all right. Where are you from?’

  I nearly raised my hand to wipe against my mouth, but grabbed instead for the toilet roll on its holder, pulling a swatch of white tissue away. ‘Sorry … I … I’m from Shelford …’

  ‘No, I mean here. Are you a fresher?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I let my face sink into the tissue, raised a cautious eye to my good Samaritan. In the spinning, giddy-sick centre of my vision was a sallow, plump girl with thin fawn-coloured hair, clad in a tight blue top and long silky black skirt, her skin make-up remarkably pale, but giving contrast to small, light blue eyes overwhelmed with sparkly eyeshadow and thick, cloggy mascara. She was peering at me through this clumped net of make-up, and her expression was both kind and doubtful.

  I immediately recognized someone like myself, someone who found the rough and tumble of teenage sociality exceptionally hard work and who wasn’t very good at it.

  ‘Yeah,’ I repeated, attempting to gather myself. ‘I’m a fresher.’ Everything was moving, and I felt hollowed out, but at least I no longer wanted to throw up.

  ‘Well, come on. I’ll walk you back to your room. Do you want a glass of water first?’

  ‘You don’t have to walk me back. Don’t you want to stay for the disco?’

  ‘No.’ The girl replied crisply, then let out a little good-natured laugh at my surprised expression. ‘None of this is really my sort of thing. I came down with a friend and he’s already gone. I was just on my way back to my quad when I popped into the loos and …’

  ‘Found me.’

  The girl smiled then stopped, a tiny, tentative expression, as though she was perfectly happy to help out but not really interested in pursuing a friendship, and as I approached the sinks I saw why – a Hieronymus Bosch illustration of debauchery stared back at me. I was sheet-white, my mascara smeared down to my cheekbone, my fussily applied lipstick smudged to my chin. I looked as though I’d been drinking diluted blood.