Everything Is Lies

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m a mess. I—’

  ‘Forget about it,’ said the girl quickly. ‘It happens to us all at one time or another. Come on back to your room and get to bed.’

  * * *

  The girl led me through low stone corridors and across flagged paths spanning geometrically perfect lawns, while all around us the tall buildings of the quads loomed overhead, crowding out the night sky, giving me a queer kind of vertigo.

  My self-consciousness flooded back as my nausea retreated, and I was now far too embarrassed to speak. How many people had seen me lying there like that, puking my guts up? What would Mummy and Daddy have said?

  And then we were back at the staircase, and I was stood in front of the door marked thirteen, murmuring my thanks while my guide urged me to drink lots of fluids and wished me goodnight, before vanishing up the stairs to the floor above. She hadn’t mentioned that she lived here, too.

  I staggered into my room, exhausted and sick of myself. I grabbed my towel and soap and made my way to the little communal shower on my floor. I stood under the water for what seemed like hours, my forehead pressed to the wall tiles while various people came looking to use the bathroom, knocked on the locked door and left disappointed. I scrubbed myself raw, and only switched the limescale-encrusted knob off once my skin began to prune.

  I padded out, scalded by hot water, my teeth brushed to bleeding point, and feeling a little faint, and was startled to see the girl who had walked me back standing in front of my door. Her back was to me, and she was carefully setting down a can of Coca-Cola and a folded piece of paper on the brown carpet.

  ‘Oh, there you are!’ said the girl, embarrassed. Her own make-up was gone, and she looked a different person, somehow – her natural pinkish colouring made her small blue eyes and thin red lips more vivid and generous, more balanced. She shrugged. ‘I got you a Coke from the vending machine. I swear by Coke when I’m worse for wear. Caffeine, sugar and water, you know?’

  I gazed down at it, astounded. I wasn’t used to random acts of kindness, and didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ The girl flicked a hand, dismissing the gesture. Her eyes were red and a little wet. She had been crying, or was about to start. ‘Well, sleep well …’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, aware that something was wrong. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, you don’t have to …’

  ‘Look, I’m fine.’ I grimaced. ‘But won’t you have a cup of tea?’

  The girl’s mouth opened, as though considering what to say, and I added, ‘Because you look like you could use one.’

  The other girl blinked and the deal was sealed.

  * * *

  Her name was Rosamund, but most people called her Rosie. I never understood why – Rosamund, the ‘Rose of the World’, was a much better name, and I rather boldly said as much, and was rewarded with a wan smile.

  Rosie took her tea strong with a lot of milk and two sugars, as though fortifying herself to tell her story. She was a third-year student, reading astrophysics, and had gone to the freshers’ disco with her ‘friend’ Piers. The evening had proved to her that her definition of ‘friend’ and his were elastic and ultimately incompatible, especially after he dissolved almost immediately into the arms of a starry-eyed blonde fresher, while she retreated to the ladies’ toilets to regroup before he saw her crying – this would have proved the nail in the coffin of this ‘friendship’, for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand. It was then that she’d spotted my pale blue high-heel poking out from under the toilet cubicle door, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  I’d drunk a cup of strong tea with a Coke chaser and was now feeling much restored. In a selfish way, hearing about Rosie’s woes distracted me from my own.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ continued Rosie as she restlessly twisted her star-shaped pendant between her fingers. ‘I mean, I’ve never said anything to him.’ She sniffed. ‘He has no idea I feel this way.’

  This seemed unlikely to me.

  I tightened the belt of my flannel dressing gown, keeping my eyes carefully averted while Rosie sighed. My own romantic history comprised entirely of a mini-flirtation with Niall, the son of one of my father’s friends, who had once kissed me after a boozy wedding in the village church.

  Between that and my crush on Simon Le Bon, I was certainly no expert in matters of the heart. However, my feeling was that if Piers was ever going to get together with Rosie, he would probably have done so before today.

  ‘Maybe,’ I ventured, ‘if you saw him a bit less, he’d have a chance to miss you more.’

  Rosie raised an eyebrow. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘We hang around with the same people. We’re into the same things.’ Her hand drifted up to her throat and played with her pendant again.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ A guarded look came into Rosie’s eyes. Her hand covered it, as though shielding it.

  ‘That, around your neck.’

  ‘It’s a pentagram.’

  I peered at the necklace Rosie reluctantly revealed. It was a five-pointed star contained in a circle, wrought in slightly tarnished silver. ‘I’m a pagan.’

  ‘Really? A pagan?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Rosie with a testy air, but there was something a tiny bit smug about her now, as though we’d stumbled on to a topic close to her heart. She had enjoyed my reaction, even if she couldn’t admit it.

  ‘I … wow. What does that involve?’

  ‘It’s about being in tune with the Earth and nature,’ supplied Rosie. ‘Good things.’

  This was 1989, and there was nothing mainstream about Paganism then. I was astounded, and, as Rosie had doubtless wanted me to be, scandalized and impressed. In my family, even listening to the vicar in church was considered an unhinged ideological position. Spiritual belief existed solely as a means of cementing networking opportunities. Mummy’s sister, Aunty Yvonne, had become a Buddhist after a year of yoga classes, and was spoken about within the house in hushed tones, as though she were a lunatic.

  Mummy delighted in sneaking secret meat into the meals she served her whenever she visited, though visits had been thin on the ground since Yvonne fled to an ashram in Norfolk. My parents had been contemptuous, but I had admired her daring.

  It must be wonderful to believe in something, I’d thought at the time.

  Rosie believed in something, even though it seemed very strange to me. But you are what you do. She’d taken me under her wing and brought me gifts and asked for nothing in return.

  I could use a friend in this place.

  And, I had to admit, I was desperately curious about her beliefs, full of forbidden glamour as they seemed. Perhaps I sensed within them the tiny sparking potential for rebellion.

  Chapter Six

  So that, Sophia, is how I ended up hanging around with Rosie and her group of third-year students instead of the other freshers.

  Perhaps another part of the reason was that I was so used to being the most junior person in the room at home that taking up the same role at university seemed like a logical next step. At the time, I think I craved leadership. Somebody had to be in the driving seat and it needed to not be me. That’s the way I’ve always been.

  Well, until now, that is.

  Sometimes, when I watch you, with your seemingly boundless confidence, I wonder where you get it from. It must have turned up in some weird genetic lottery, a winning ticket in the form of a character tic. It’s not a trait you learned from watching me scurry about like a frightened mouse in the foliage at Eden Gardens, desperate to avoid exposure.

  But somehow I gravitated towards the company of Rosie and her friends, and before long it felt as though it had always been that way. We fell quickly into well-defined orbits and regular habits.

  On weekdays, for instance, we were usually to be found in the Eagle, on Bene’t Street. Lunch was largely liquid, interspersed with pac
kets of crisps, which we tore open and shared amongst ourselves.

  Piers, who had been quickly, almost carelessly, introduced to me by Rosie a few weeks ago, returned to the table in the outside courtyard with a tray full of drinks. The two boys – Piers and Tam – drank real ale, and Rosie and Meggie, our friend from Trinity who sported jangly bracelets and an elaborate blue streak in her hair, had ordered cider with a splash of blackcurrant cordial. I followed suit, too shy to request my usual of vodka and orange squash.

  Piers was a lean, spare boy with huge brown eyes and long hair that had grown into a single messy dreadlock which the college dons were always tutting over. He smelled of the spicy oil he dressed his striking coiffure with.

  He tore open a packet of smoky bacon flavour crisps and placed them in the centre of the table.

  ‘Didn’t you buy any veggie crisps?’ asked Rosie, frowning.

  ‘These are veggie crisps.’

  ‘They’re bacon.’

  ‘They’re bacon-flavoured.’ He lifted one, raised it to his mouth and crunched ostentatiously.

  ‘I’m vegetarian, Piers.’ Rosie raised an eyebrow. ‘I can’t eat bacon, as you well know.’

  ‘They’re not bacon. They contain no bacon. Nil bacon. Nada.’ He lifted the packet, careful not to drop any crisps out of the foil packaging and peered at the tiny writing on the back. ‘They’re E-number, E-number, E-number, monosodium glutamate, dried lactose powder, salt, E-number, paprika seasoning, preservatives.’ He dropped the packet again. ‘Also oil and potatoes. Probably. Hopefully.’

  I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it, but I thought he winked at me.

  ‘Well, I’m not eating them,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Oh, I give up.’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. ‘Here you go.’

  He tossed it to Rosie, who caught it gracefully.

  ‘Thank you, Piers,’ she said.

  ‘You’re most welcome, fair Rosamund.’ He offered her a courtly nod as he drew out a small tin of tobacco from his slightly tattered leather jacket. His eyes alighted on me, narrowing. ‘What about you? Do you have any crazy food fads?’

  ‘Me?’ I gulped, startled by this sudden attention. ‘Uh, no, no …’

  ‘Good.’ Piers was rolling a thin cigarette, and the smell of fresh-cut tobacco was masculine, grassy. ‘Is she bullying you to become a lettuce-lover, too?’ He laughed and shot a look at Tam; a gargantuan, stooped and largely silent figure who usually, like me, sat on the outside edges of our conversations.

  Tam worked in applied mathematics and was always complaining that his supervisor, who had just published a bestselling book, was too busy for him. The suggestion was that we should be asking more about this, but when we did, he grew red about the ears and became maddeningly vague. In fact, it wasn’t until years later, when I was stood in the kitchen and you came in with a battered copy of A Brief History of Time that I put two and two together.

  ‘Any other vices, Nina?’ Piers squinted at me.

  I froze. ‘Um …’

  ‘Tell him to piss off and mind his own business if you want,’ supplied Meggie kindly to me. ‘That’s what I do.’

  ‘Your charm is the stuff of legend, Megs.’

  ‘Just like the bollocks you talk all day, then,’ she shot back.

  Piers merely laughed. ‘What is it you’re studying again, Nina?’

  ‘English,’ I said, suddenly on safer ground. This was a subject I had strong opinions on.

  ‘I remember now. How’s it going?’

  ‘Good. I’m going to specialize in mid-twentieth-century literature, I think.’

  ‘ “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” ’ Piers grinned. ‘1984. It was the only A Level book I had any time for.’ He stuck his completed roll-up between his lips and lit it.

  ‘I love Orwell,’ I said, for once forgetting my shyness as I was borne away by enthusiasm. ‘Not just the big ideas, you know, but the tiny details, the sheer panache of it all. I—’

  ‘Does this cider taste all right to you?’ cut in Rosie loudly. She was peering into the depths of her glass.

  ‘What?’ asked Meggie. She sipped. ‘Mine’s fine.’

  ‘What about you, Nina?’ she asked. ‘Is yours all right?’

  ‘My drink?’ I sipped, though I suspected, from Rosie’s slightly raised voice, that this question was merely a way to derail my outburst, and the way it had obviously captured Piers’s attention.

  A fleeting annoyance moved through me then, followed by a wan pity. I knew the score with Rosie and her feelings. I should be more sensitive to them.

  But looking back, I felt other things too. Rosie wasn’t a bad person, but she was controlling on occasion, and like many manipulative people (and I know of what I speak, Sophia) she thought she was far cleverer than she was. Though I was almost morbidly naive, I still knew I was being undermined.

  ‘Mine’s fine,’ I said of my drink. ‘But take yours back if you think it tastes off. No point getting sick.’

  ‘No indeed,’ murmured Meggie, giving Rosie a sharp look.

  ‘Nina, you’re coming out to the Meadows tonight, right?’ Tam asked earnestly.

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Piers, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Aren’t you, Nina? It’s going to be a beautiful night.’

  I nodded happily. ‘Wouldn’t miss it.’

  It was Friday, a couple of nights before Bonfire Night. There was a plan to go out to Grantchester Meadows and join some other people with similar beliefs that Piers knew – drinking and laughing and just talking quietly amongst ourselves as we sat beneath the velvet night.

  I loved it. I made me feel alive. And though I wasn’t sure whether I believed in it, it made me feel like I belonged.

  Halloween, which I had now learned was really called Samhain, had been something of a failure for us. Tam had driven us all over Wiltshire in his creaking Mini Metro before finding Avebury. Though I was officially little more than an interested observer, my heart had been pounding with excitement, an electric frisson I’d picked up off the others.

  It had thus been all the more disappointing when, ten miles from Marlborough, the heavens opened, drenching the darkened night in unstoppable, unceasing rain. We had shivered and sneezed all the way home, our soaked clothes and close breath steaming up the windows so much Tam could barely see through them, the inadequate little heater in the car no match for the crushing, damp cold.

  The others had moaned endlessly, but to me the whole affair had been enchanting, something to which the rain had only added a patina of magic. We had stood amongst the vast grey stones in the downpour, while others who appeared to have gathered from far and wide had played drums and sang while friends held umbrellas to protect their instruments, colourful hair and bright clothes. I had peered up into the louring dark sky, and for a fleeting moment, with my newfound friends at my elbow, I’d felt that sense of connection we all talked about and pursued; connection to nature, and the world, and all the things you could see and all the things that you couldn’t.

  When Rosie had gently nudged my elbow with her own and smiled at me, offering me a smouldering joint with a tenderly conspiratorial air, I felt as though I had finally come home.

  I was looking forward to the meeting that night.

  ‘So,’ said Rosie. ‘Grantchester Meadows, near the start of the Grind, at half seven, yeah?’

  We all nodded.

  ‘Don’t be late.’

  I got up. I had to rush, I had a supervision. As I left, I could hear Piers saying, ‘Rosie, Tam was saying he was going to bring some friends …’

  ‘What friends?’ she asked.

  ‘New friends …’

  * * *

  Night fell mere hours later – the early darkness raised strange mists from the river. I cycled after Rosie, the pair of us little more than shadows as we sped over the bike path through Lammas Land in the darkness.

  Around us, the twisted shapes
of ancient trees held aloft spiky branches, and through the dying leaves early fireworks lit and fell with faraway bangs, spreading the scent of gunpowder and the colours of the rainbow, and leaving a sheath of smoke over the still air.

  I sped up, drawing abreast of Rosie, who was muffled in something she called a ‘snood’ which covered her head and neck in swathes of dark green wool. Rosie occasionally made these self-conscious fashion statements, quickly seizing upon them, then just as quickly abandoning them.

  ‘I wonder who these friends of Tam’s are?’ I said aloud. ‘The ones that are coming tonight. Did he tell you about them after I left?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘It’s his mate Gary,’ she sniffed. ‘And some people he’s met.’

  ‘You don’t know them?’

  ‘No.’ Rosie’s shadowed face flashed sideways at me. ‘Or at least I’ve never met them myself.’ She looked troubled. ‘But I hear things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just gossip.’ She sighed. ‘I wish it was just us tonight.’

  We were drawing up to the corner of Barton Road and Grantchester Street with its packed terraced houses.

  ‘So what do you know about them?’ I asked. ‘You must know something, to have heard gossip.’

  She looked quickly around, as though searching for spies. ‘Nothing much.’ She paused, sniffed again. ‘One of them used to be the singer in the Boarhounds.’

  ‘What?’ I asked sharply, dumbfounded. ‘Really? The old or the new singer?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno which one he is. I was never into the Boarhounds. He’s called Adam or Arran or some such thing …’

  ‘Aaron,’ I corrected her, astonished. ‘You mean Aaron Kessler? How does Tam know Aaron Kessler?’

  Rosie shrugged. ‘I don’t think he does. But Gary, his mate, does, and for some reason him and some of his … group are coming along tonight.’

  I laughed. ‘Wow. That’s so weird. The girls at school fancied him like mad.’