Everything Is Lies

by Helen Callaghan

  My mother hadn’t killed herself. My mother had fought to live, fought to tell her story of escape and rebellion and love that had ended in slavery, fought to escape this mad Eden with its controlling Adam, who had loved her too much and not at all.

  She had not been saved, ultimately, but now, at least, she would have her justice.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It had been nearly three weeks since we’d been thrown out of Morningstar.

  I took some of Rosie’s advice at least, and after the first week I wrote to the college. A fortnight later they wrote back. I opened the letter with shaking hands, standing at the kitchen counter in the little flat, while Wolf watched daytime TV and smoked.

  The college would entertain my appeal. I must write, formally, setting forth my case, by March 21st.

  I read it again, the paper trembling in my hands.

  I already had the feeling it was too late.

  ‘Summat the matter?’ barked Wolf.

  It was as though he had a sixth sense when something moved me – he could feel it from across town. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t impressive.

  ‘No, no, not at all.’

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling with its green glowing solar system, unable to stop the tears.

  Morningstar, for good or evil, was lost to me. I was adrift in a cosmic darkness, with only luminescent plastic planets to guide me.

  I tried to suppress a tiny sob.

  On the floor, in his pool of blankets, Wolf stirred.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  In the dim light, his eyes reflected tiny glints.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, but my voice broke, my tears locked in it.

  Before I knew it, he was next to me, warm like an animal, and his arms were snaking around me.

  ‘Nina … Nina, it’s gonna be all right.’

  I shouldn’t be encouraging this, I knew, but in my loneliness and misery, any contact was a comfort. I let myself cling to him for a moment.

  His lips brushed my cheek, my throat, his perpetual stubble scratching across my skin.

  ‘No …’

  I tried to move away and push him off, but his grip tightened. ‘Shh, shh, easy now …’

  ‘Wolf, stop it, I don’t want—’

  His mouth was on mine, stopping up my words, and his hands were roving over me, pushing up my T-shirt, kneading my breasts. There was the coolness of his tongue on my nipple and then the warmth as his mouth closed over it, sucked and laved me, and though I pushed, as hard as I dared, I could not detach him.

  And I wasn’t sure I wanted to detach him. I was so wretched, so alone, so frightened, that the animal flare of sex, any sex, offered up a sliver of distraction, of oblivion.

  I didn’t resist any more as he roughly pulled off my knickers and buried himself deep inside me. In his thrusting greed and enthusiasm he was a stranger to me as he moved hard against and within me, the moon dousing him in pale light, his shoulders white, his lips wet and dark. The others must be able to hear us in their room; and I thought that perhaps he wanted them to, or simply didn’t care.

  Eventually my orgasm came like an afterthought, and he let go then with a shudder and a long loud groan before sinking into me. Then all was quiet apart from our breathing and the random shouts of a few drunk students ambling back to their digs in the street below.

  ‘Wow,’ said Wolf. ‘I have wanted to do that to you since the minute I laid eyes on you.’

  I didn’t have any answer to that.

  He kissed me then, arranging us both stagily for sleep, my head against his bare chest. Part of me suspected that this was so Piers and Rosie might find us that way in the morning.

  Rosie, who’d said, ‘Just make sure you don’t sleep with him. With a fella like that, you’ll never be rid.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t. Now it was over I was more despondent than ever, more lonely. I’d just made everything worse. I was going to cry again, out of my old grief with this new ingredient of shame.

  ‘Hey, hey, what’s the tears for?’

  ‘You didn’t use a condom,’ I said, for lack of any other way of verbalizing my despair.

  ‘You didn’t argue at the time.’ He grinned, and when I didn’t answer he kissed me. ‘Don’t worry, babes. You can get that morning-after pill. It’ll be fine.’

  I still didn’t reply. Clearly there was no point.

  And it didn’t really matter that he hadn’t worn a condom, because I was quite sure, from the absence of my normally clockwork-exact period, that I was already pregnant.

  * * *

  ‘Bloody hell,’ had been Daddy’s words upon first seeing me when I arrived home with Wolf.

  Mummy was speechless. It was the first time I think I’d ever seen her cry.

  I was six months gone with you, already feeling huge and ponderous, some vast, sway-bellied grazing mammal.

  Within me you were kicking urgently, as if somehow you were able to see my mock-Georgian family home with its oversized conservatory, chintz sofas and horrified parents, and had decided you had better places to be.

  At my side, Wolf had made an effort. He’d shaved, so his chin and cheeks were pink and razor-burned, and he’d changed into relatively clean clothes that we’d purchased from a charity shop in Oxford.

  We’d been on the road for months. I’d called Rosie twice with the end of my few coins and tried to explain what had happened.

  ‘Nina, LEAVE HIM!’ Her confusion and her growing disgust with me were almost palpable.

  But I couldn’t leave him, and I dared not tell her why.

  It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried.

  We’d been in a café in Cambridge when I attempted to explain that we were not only through, we had never begun.

  Piers and Rosie had evicted him the evening before, in a storm of shouting and smashed furniture. He had urged me to meet him the next day to talk it through, and as this had been the price of him leaving without further violence, I’d agreed without hesitation.

  ‘Here you go.’ He placed the cup in front of me. ‘Drink up. That’s the end of our cash.’

  Next to us, a tired-looking family of Mum, Dad and two small children were pressing cake into their mouths.

  ‘We can get a ride from the coach station here to Manchester,’ he was saying. ‘After that, we’re sweet.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ I said, and my nerves were singing, my voice tight. ‘I just agreed to see you because you deserve to be told face to face. We’re not together and we’re not going to be. I’m going back to Rosie’s after this.’ I laced my fingers together on my lap. ‘On my own.’

  His face transformed instantly into a searing, murderous rage. I think, if we’d been alone, he would have hit me.

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ he hissed. ‘Just don’t.’

  ‘Wolf, I don’t know how else to tell you—’

  He reached forward, grabbed the lapel of my jacket and hauled me closer. It’s easy to forget what men could get away with back then. People would think we were ‘having a domestic’. If he wasn’t physically punching me, it was unlikely anyone would intervene. His face was inches from my own.

  ‘What gives you the fucking right,’ he snarled into my ear, ‘to get me in this much fucking trouble and then dump me?’

  ‘I don’t … I didn’t …’ I yelped, terrified at the change in him.

  ‘Listen, you silly cunt, you shot a man,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve been trying to fucking protect you here. If you leave me swinging, I’ll do the same to you.’

  I was stunned into silence. ‘Wha— what are you talking about?’

  ‘Peter Clay. It was you,’ he whispered coldly in my ear. ‘You were off your face when you wandered downstairs. Uncle Petey saw his opportunity with you off your tits and grabbed you. Some stupid tosser had left the gun cabinet unlocked, and boom. You shot him.’
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  ‘I …’

  ‘You’d be in a fucking cell right now if it weren’t for me,’ he muttered, his spittle flecking my cheek, his breath blazing against my skin. ‘Don’t even think about leaving me in the lurch.’

  He thrust me back into my seat.

  I blinked, a bone-deep dread and terror settling over me.

  ‘Excuse me, love,’ said the man at the next table, still chewing his food. ‘Is everything all right here?’ His wife scowled at Wolf.

  Sophia, I had no memory of the night of the ritual, except that there had been a noise, a noise like rolling thunder, and a storm of raised male voices, and then my hands had tasted of iron and salt.

  There was one other thing, and I realized it in a flash of insight. I had hated Peter Clay. Not only on his own account, the dirty, lecherous, would-be rapist, but also because I didn’t yet have the emotional machinery to hate Aaron the way he deserved. Nothing Peter did or said to me happened without Aaron’s implicit permission, but to admit this to myself would be to admit that Aaron was the bully and fraud Wolf claimed he was.

  If Peter had tried to force himself on me while I was in that subconscious state, without inhibitions, then yes, I could imagine me shooting him dead. The gun cabinets were often left unlocked, and I knew where they were.

  I started to shake.

  Across the table Wolf glared at me, his arms crossed, as though daring me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied to the man, my voice barely a whisper. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Just a difference of opinion, mate,’ said Wolf, not bothering to look at the man. He grinned at me then, and there was a hint of triumph in his face.

  * * *

  We dossed with various shady characters he knew for the next few months – squats in Preston, Manchester, briefly Leeds. I was growing and splitting my clothes – you were increasingly apparent and eager to make your entry into the world. I couldn’t understand your rush. The world didn’t seem a place I would be in a hurry to meet, at least not then.

  I realized that I would have to go back to my parents and ask them for help. There was no way I could have a baby here, living like this in filthy, freezing rooms, where Wolf smoked what joints he could muster and we eked out our dole giros with what he could steal and sell. The inquest kept being delayed and delayed. Wolf kept track of these things. I didn’t have the heart, nor the courage.

  Sometimes I wondered if prison might be better than this, and then, beneath my heart, you would stir, as though urging me to think again.

  Eventually we hitched a lift back down south. I’d considered calling my parents, warning them, but ultimately my courage deserted me.

  And now, here we were.

  ‘How long …’ sputtered Daddy, gazing at my swollen belly.

  ‘The baby’s due in September.’ I placed my hands over you, to protect you. My mother’s face contracted into a scowl as she saw my filthy, torn nails, my dry, dirty hair.

  ‘Yep,’ said Wolf, smiling at them both. ‘It’s a little girl, they tell us. Amazing what they can do in hospital nowadays.’ He slurped tea from Mummy’s bone china. ‘We couldn’t be happier.’

  * * *

  We lasted roughly eighteen hours there, even with Wolf on his best behaviour – he was Jared now, his given name.

  By breakfast, arrangements had been made that he and I would move into the Old Mill, my grandfather’s house in Suffolk, which had been standing empty for the best part of a year after he died. We could live in it ‘for a little while’. Daddy would send us a stipend until Jared got a job. This money would go to Jared, as clearly I couldn’t be trusted with it, Mummy observed, unable to look at my swelling belly.

  Daddy would drive us there now.

  I couldn’t escape the feeling that they were desperate for the neighbours not to catch sight of us. They needn’t have worried. After being back for less than a day, I had no desire ever to return. Even Wolf was a better bet.

  Once the inquest was over, I thought, as Daddy handed us the keys and left, not even consenting to enter the house – instead leaving us on the step, his disgust with me a palpable, living thing – everything would be different. I would rally my strength, consider how I might escape this relationship I didn’t want and couldn’t feel.

  But then, on an icy night on the first of October, in an overheated hospital bed, while I screamed and screamed and screamed, you happened.

  And you swept all before you.

  Until you left me, I never looked back.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  It’s a beautiful day on top of Mount Vesuvius.

  Perhaps the day is a little too beautiful – the hour-long climb to the top at its nearly forty-five-degree angle has exhausted us, and we’re drinking lukewarm Orangina under the awning at the edge of the crater, surrounded on all sides by enthusiastic teenagers taking selfies against the vertical shaft of Vesuvius’s business end. Above, the sky is a perfect cerulean blue.

  My companion’s name is Marco, and he’s an interior designer; he’s self-employed, but he occasionally contracts for Amity. He’s Italian – Veronese – but lives in London now. He is tall and gangling and usually his hands are expressive and mobile, though today they hang limp. He is as crushed by the heat as I am. In the distance, the Bay of Naples is a smear of blue and gold in the heat haze.

  I told him I had always wanted to see a volcano, so here we are.

  ‘Is it worth it?’ he asks me, his hand on the small of my back.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But there’s no lava. I thought there would be lava.’

  He laughs out loud. ‘No, no lava. But see this?’ He points to the dusty centre of the crater, with one or two small scrub brushes growing on it, as though daring the mountain’s ire. ‘This is the most dangerous volcano in the world, mia Sophia, and it’s overdue for a big eruption. If this goes off, all those people down there’ – he waved his hand towards the Bay of Naples, with its carpeting of houses, cafés and gardens – ‘they are gone. Everything they have is gone. Just because a thing is quiet and there is nothing to see, does not mean all is well. Things seethe beneath the surface. Pressure builds up. Then boom.’

  We started dating eighteen months ago, shortly after my Scottish Heritage project was picked up. Scottish Heritage loved the design, but more crucially, James did: ‘Benjamin asked my opinion on this. He had problems with it. But that’s a true Amity design.’ He had addressed me in his office, while I clung to the seat of my chair with my hands, like a little girl, expecting to be fired. ‘That’s Frank Lloyd Wright reimagined. It’s world-class work.’ He snorted. ‘Sometimes Benjamin can be a little unfocused.’

  I hadn’t known what to say, but that was fine, because James is usually happy to do all the talking.

  With James’s patronage, a number of things changed for me, and almost immediately.

  At any rate, it explained why Olympia had suddenly started being nice to me. And as James was the one who properly introduced me to Marco at the Amity summer party, I am having a hard time staying mad at him, sociopath though he is.

  He was Cleo’s crush, but by then, Cleo was gone.

  When I told James about my deleted files, he launched a full investigation, and the audit trail had led to her, of all people. They even caught her on CCTV. When confronted, she told them Benjamin had put her up to it. Why she’d gone along with it wasn’t clear, but thinking back to the morning the files went missing, I remembered her dishevelled appearance and guessed she’d been sleeping with him. Perhaps that had been the first time, or perhaps it was an on-and-off thing. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.

  Out of the mess of revelation, office backstabbing and betrayal this exposed, the only thing that really floored me was Benjamin and Cleo? No way is he her type.

  Because, of course, I think as I take the bottle from Marco and sip, I have had a crash course in revelation and betrayal. I have lost and found a mother, and I have lost and found a father.

  A father of a kind,
at least.

  The thing that makes me saddest about all this is that my mum wasted all those years. Left emotionally insecure by her selfish, self-absorbed parents, she had been easy prey for Aaron, and then, when he threw her out, rejected and damaged, she was easy prey for Wolf. It took her over a quarter-century to find the courage to move on and try again.

  And once more her incipient boldness was crushed out of her before it could begin.

  As the revelations have come out of my dad’s – Jared’s – trial, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that it wasn’t the book that killed my mum after all.

  It was that she was leaving him.

  Strange as it is, I pity him, too. Though I haven’t forgiven him, or seen him since his trial. That’s not likely to change.

  The thing I remember most clearly is the tape.

  I don’t know how they got it – Aaron must have handed it over to the police, doubtless for his own purposes. It was seven minutes of badly lit, blurry footage of one of the ritual’s aftermath, with growly, incomprehensible sound.

  It opened on a woman, more like a girl, lying in abandon on the parquet flooring. She was clad in a single long silky garment, her dark blonde hair spread around her, her eyes closed. Empty glasses and crushed flowers lay nearby.

  It could only have been Tess.

  Other than her, the room appeared empty, but there were sounds, something like footsteps, fidgeting, the sound of a lighter being ignited and the sucking in of smoke.

  This must be Wolf – Jared, my dad. I realized that he was behind the camera, sober – perhaps the only person in the house still in possession of his faculties as he was not part of the ritual.

  Minutes passed in this manner, the girl not moving, the camera not moving, and the sound of someone picking through the tapes, vaguely whistling.

  Then there was a terrible female roaring from some other room, the splintered, ancient sound still capturing with crystal clarity her terror, rage and sense of affront.

  I realized with a start that the voice was my mum’s.

  ‘GET AWAY FROM ME! GET AWAY FROM ME! DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!’