Between the Lies

by Cathy MacPhail

“You didn’t deserve this, Mum.” Jude wiped her face with the palm of her hand.

  She was landing me in so much trouble and no one was challenging her story.

  “If you were so desperate to be home, why didn’t you come back the night of the vigil – like we planned?”

  There was a dramatic pause before she answered me. “Because it was so phoney, coming back like that.” She burrowed her face into her mum’s shoulder. “‘Like the end of some Hollywood movie,’ she said. ‘It’ll be great for publicity. It would look great on television’ – that’s what she said. My return would be captured on camera. But when it came to the night, I couldn’t do it, Mum. I couldn’t make a fool of so many people, they were all doing so much for me. Especially you. I wanted to come back quietly, just me.”

  Mrs Tremayne hugged her and looked at me with such cold fury I was silenced.

  “I was going to call you… and then… she was telling everybody it was my idea, it was a hoax, and I was scared again. Scared to come back in case I’d get all the blame.” She began sobbing again, comforted by her mother.

  “If I was so scary, why were you sending me these?” I shoved my phone at her. “HELP ME. Why not send it to somebody else? Why not to your mum?”

  She looked genuinely puzzled. I’d never realised what a good actress Jude was, but boy, she deserved an Oscar for this. “I didn’t send that.” She spoke to her dad now. “I didn’t send that.”

  “And where have you been all this time?” I asked her.

  She stared at me as if I had spoken in a foreign language. “What?”

  “Where have you been?”

  That was when she dropped another bombshell. “You know where I’ve been. It was you that told me where to go.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. I’ve been at your auntie’s house in Gourock.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “What?”

  Mrs Tremayne lost it then. “You’ve known all the time where she was, and you didn’t tell us!”

  I was shaking my head, still trying to take this in. “She wasn’t at my auntie’s house. That’s another lie.”

  “No, no, it isn’t,” Jude said. “She was going to be away to Australia till February, you said. A safe place. You even gave me a key.” While she was talking she was rummaging in the pocket of her jacket. Now she held it out. A key that looked identical to the one I kept in my rucksack. Auntie Ellen’s key. “You gave it to me. You had a copy made.” She turned to her mother. “She said there was plenty of food in her auntie’s freezer.”

  She didn’t have to convince her mother. If she’d said there were two moons in the sky, Mrs Tremayne would have believed every word.

  “I’d never have let you stay in my auntie’s house. Never.”

  “Well you did. And I can prove it. You phoned me on her landline. You said it was the safest way to get in touch with me.”

  Lie upon lie. I felt like jumping on her, bashing her. I made a move forward but her dad held me back. “I never phoned you.”

  “You did. The police’ll be able to find your calls.”

  “I think you should get out of this house, now.” There was such disgust in Mrs Tremayne’s voice.

  Mr Tremayne still held my arm. “No, I think she should stay. The police are on their way. I think Abbie’s got a few questions to answer.”

  Jude began to shake. “No, Mum, no, I don’t want to talk to the police. Not yet.”

  Her mum was the soft mark. “She’s home safe. I’m going to run her a bath and then get her into bed. The police can come back later to talk to her.”

  “Well, I’m not staying,” I said it as soon as Jude and her mother made a move to go upstairs, “and you can’t make me.”

  Suddenly Sara Flynn was in my face. “Have you got anything to say about this, Abbie?” They’d been filming all the time. Invisible and unnoticed.

  I shoved her away from me. “It’s all lies. She’s made it up.” I ran past her and out into the street. Some of the neighbours were still there, and began hissing at me, as if they’d heard every word Jude said, as if they believed every word she’d said. After all, I had already been made out to be the villain, hadn’t I?

  I couldn’t go to school. I was shaking. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I ran back the way I’d come, over the waste ground, my hood up.

  All I’d wanted, all I’d thought I wanted, was Jude home, safe and well. I knew a lot of that was so that she could share the burden of guilt I’d been carrying on my own. Now here she was back, and it was even worse.

  Why was she saying these things? She was talking like she was the victim, and I was the big bad wolf.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Jude made the one o’clock news. Her return had been caught with perfect timing by Sara Flynn and her crew.

  I watched it again, Jude stumbling down the windy street, while behind her the neighbours stepped out of doorways to see, and then Mrs Tremayne was running towards her. I could hear her sobs. She folded her daughter in her arms, and the neighbours erupted in applause. Over it, Sara Flynn’s commentary: “This is an amazing moment. Judith Tremayne is home.”

  If only it had stopped there. But of course the biggest news was to come, and I was the main character.

  There was footage of Jude crying and saying sorry to her mum. Her words sounded sincere and heartfelt.

  Then there was a still picture of me looking dark and angry, my eyes wide, taken aback. Sarah Flynn was saying: “There has been yet another shocking revelation in this unfolding story: Judith Tremayne has accused St Thomas’s pupil, Abbie Kerr, of frightening her and making her stay away from home. A week ago, Abbie Kerr was celebrated for organising a campaign to find Judith, then on our news broadcast she confessed her involvement in the planned disappearance. Judith now says that Abbie Kerr has been aware of her whereabouts throughout the past weeks – knowledge Miss Kerr has persistently denied…”

  Jude’s face was tear-stained; the shot of me had such a sinister expression. Who would you have believed?

  Jude’s return was all over social media too, of course, with bumpy footage from the neighbours’ phones. And Sarah Flynn’s ‘revelation’ was hardly out of her mouth on the tv when the messages began.

  I tried not to look at them but it was hard.

  Dad came home as soon as he heard the news on the radio. “Is this true, Abbie. Was this all your idea?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I snapped at him. It hurt he could even think such a thing. “You think I could make Jude Tremayne do anything?

  That’s a joke.” I dreaded to tell him where Jude had been hiding. How had she got hold of my aunt’s key? Even I couldn’t understand it.

  Still, I had to say something before the police came. And it shocked him as much as anything else.

  “Did you give her a key?”

  “Of course I didn’t. It must be a lie,” I said while he was still trying to take it in. “She couldn’t have been there. I would never have given her Auntie Ellen’s key.”

  “Why would she lie about a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. But it has to be a lie!”

  I was almost relieved to see the police car draw up. Dad watched through the blinds. “Well, here they are back again. More publicity. Is that what you wanted all along?”

  It had been when we planned it. We had giggled that day in Kilmacolm as we talked of the tv interviews we would be asked to do, the welcome, the praise. If Jude had come back when she was meant to, it would have been a heart-warming story. But she had changed the script, and I couldn’t understand why.

  Dad sat silent, his eyes downcast, as the police questioned me. I could see that any trust he’d had left in me was shattered.

  “Judith is saying she’s scared of you,” the WPC said. I could hear the hostility in her tone.

  “Ha, that’s a lie.”

  “She says she didn’t come back because she was afraid of you.”

  “Well that’s a joke
.”

  “You have got a reputation in school as a bit of a loner.”

  “Nobody in that school’s got a good word for me now, I’m sure.”

  “Judith says she wanted to come back but you wouldn’t let her.”

  “How many times do I have to say it? That’s a lie.”

  “She was staying at your aunt’s house.”

  “There is no way she was staying there!” My last hope was that this would be proven untrue and would show Jude up for the liar she was.

  “No, it’s no lie, Abbie. We’ve been there. We used the key you gave her.”

  My dad covered his head with his hands and let out a long sigh.

  I was going crazy. “I didn’t give her any key.” I looked at Dad. “I’d never give anybody Auntie Ellen’s key!”

  “Then how did she get it?”

  I felt like pulling my hair out by the roots. I had no answers for all of this. “I don’t know. She must have made a copy.”

  The policeman raised an eyebrow as I said that. “She would have to get your key to do that. Did you give her the key at any time?”

  “No, of course I didn’t…” But my key would have been in my bag at break times, or PE, left in my locker… Could she have taken it then? It was the only explanation I could come up with.

  “And she did receive several calls while she was there, from a phone box. She says they were all from you.”

  I almost shouted ‘That’s another lie!’ but what was the use? They didn’t believe anything I said. Jude had much the better story. She had denied sending me any texts, apart from the one begging to come home. They had already decided that the others had been sent by some of my classmates winding me up, and now I realised they were probably right.

  “I never called her. How could I, when I didn’t know she was there? It wasn’t me.” But I could tell by their cold expressions they didn’t believe that either.

  They left at last, still dangling the threat of charging me with wasting police time, or perhaps something worse. I couldn’t get Dad to talk to me about it. He looked ready to cry. This was a man who was out marching for every lost cause there was, and if ever there was a lost cause it was me right now, but I couldn’t get him to listen.

  By the evening, the story of where Jude had been hiding was in the local paper, all over the Scottish news and all over social media too. Neighbours of my aunt were interviewed on tv, asked if they had seen anything suspicious. They’d noticed the lights going on in the house, they said, but my aunt had left them on timer while she was away, so they thought nothing of it.

  Finally, Dad switched off the news, and put on a DVD, some old war film where everyone got killed. He needed something to cheer him up, he said. He unplugged the phone too. Because besides requests for interviews, there were so many abusive calls, calling me names, saying the awful things that should happen to me because of this, insulting me in every horrible way they could.

  I was all over social media too. Someone posted that picture caught by Sara Flynn’s cameraman, when I had almost flown at Jude for her lies. My eyes wide with anger, my mouth open in a roar, my face white. I looked like something out of a horror movie. They wrote under it:

  I didn’t know how to defend myself. I lay in bed and listened to my heart hammering in my chest. I’d never felt so alone, or so afraid. Jude had been in my aunt’s house, with my key. How did she manage that? What was happening?

  And I still had to face tomorrow.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The next day was every bit as bad as I’d feared. Though no one said a word to me – and I mean not a word. I got the silent treatment. It was as if they had all got together and decided to freeze me out. They turned their backs on me, or pulled away in the corridors as if I was the carrier of some horrible disease.

  Mr Madden held me back at the end of class. “Abbie, we can’t make people talk to you, but we’ll try to make sure nothing happens to you in school. Please report anything that does.”

  “Yeah, then I’ll really be hated for grassing them up.”

  He sighed. “You’re hated already. You know you are. You did a terrible thing, Abbie. They trusted you and you made a fool of them. Now you’re suffering for it.”

  “The thing is, it wasn’t just me, sir. And I’m the only one who’s suffering.”

  “I know,” was all he said. Did he believe Jude was just as much to blame as me? Did he believe she was lying? I hoped so. “It’s a nine-day wonder, Abbie. Something else will happen, and it’ll be forgotten. For now, the school will do its best to shield you from the worst, but you’ll just have to ride out the storm.”

  ***

  Jude didn’t have to ride out the storm though, did she? In the next couple of days word went round that she wasn’t coming back to St Thomas’s. She was going to another school in Greenock. I had so hoped she would come and face the music, just as I had to. But I was on my own.

  Her family held a press conference, which was on tv. Sara Flynn was right up front, of course. Jude was sitting between her parents, clutching her father’s hand while her mum’s arm was draped around her shoulders. Her parents thanked everyone for their concern and their prayers, and said over and over how grateful they were that they had their daughter back.

  Then, with lowered head and her words hardly discernible, her voice low and trembling, Jude apologised to everyone. “I am so sorry for all the worry I caused, and I want to thank everyone, too, for being so kind and understanding to me in spite of… what I… we… did…” She never repeated the accusation against me; in fact, my name wasn’t mentioned, but once had been enough. She drew in a sob and her eyes welled up with tears.

  Was I the only person who could see the phoneyness behind those tears? She was acting it out!

  Later, in one of those news discussion programmes, there was another item about Jude and me, and about something called ‘folie a deux’. I had never heard of such a thing, didn’t know what that meant, but the presenter explained it as “a madness shared by two”. The medical term was ‘shared psychotic disorder’ – a bond between two people that brings out the worst in them. It’s when two people combine, who wouldn’t do anything bad on their own, but together they can do the most evil things. Like me and Jude.

  Always, the presenter said, there is a dominant personality, the one who controls and manipulates the other, weaker person – the one who “leads them down that dark path.” There was no question who she was assuming was the leader in this case. That angry photo of me filled the screen. Scowling, dark eyes, grim expression. The photo they used of Jude was smiling. She was wearing a summer dress, her shiny brown hair flowing around her shoulders, her apple-red cheeks glowing. I know who I’d suspect. Not the fresh-faced teenager, but the smoky‑eyed girl with the sinister look.

  Did everyone think I had manipulated Jude? Ha, if only they knew. If only they believed me.

  A nine-day wonder Mr Madden had said. How I prayed for those nine days to be over.

  I had been warned not to try to see Jude, not to call her. So I had no chance to confront her for the truth.

  The atmosphere at home was tense. Dad was civil, but that was all. He took my Auntie Ellen’s key off me, muttering something about closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. That hurt. Auntie Ellen had trusted me to look after her house, and I had let her down – and I didn’t even know how.

  At school still no one spoke to me.

  And the messages continued.

  I blocked the sender as soon as they came in, but the same things got posted online and sent as text messages.

  I asked Dad if I could go to a different school, like Jude.

  “I live here. I work here. I moved here for my job, I’ve just bought this house. You’ve only just started in that school. So, no, Abbie, you’re staying where you are.”

  I faced the music every day.

  I was in the school library a couple of days later when one of the messages came in.

 
I was so fed up with it I sent my phone spinning across the floor. It came to a stop at Robbie’s feet. I didn’t expect him to even pick it up for me. But he did. He came forward and handed it to me. I held it out so he could read the message.

  “That’s what I’m getting all the time. How do you think that makes me feel? Do you think Jude’s getting any messages like that?”

  Another item about Jude had been on television the night before. Just a photo and the story. She had gone and apologised to William Creen, a private apology, and it seemed William Creen had been happy with it. “Judith Tremayne has insisted that at no point had she said she was afraid of Mr Creen.” The smiling reporter said to the camera. “This was not something that came from her.” The unsaid implication: it had come from me. I had wanted to run out of the house at that point, to race down the streets toward Jude’s house. To tell her – to tell the world – it wasn’t me who had said anything about Creen, I had only passed on a message. But I had been warned to stay away from Jude’s house, hadn’t I? Once again, I was the bad one.

  William Creen was interviewed, happy to be cleared of all suspicion. “Of course I forgive her. It took a lot for the wee lassie to apologise like that,” he said. “I don’t blame her.”

  No. No one blames Jude. The her he blamed was me.

  “You still don’t realise what you’ve done, Abbie.” Robbie broke into my thoughts.

  “I do!” I snapped at him. “I apologised to the whole school. A grovelling apology, in public, and not one person said ‘It took a lot for the wee lassie to do that!’ Oh no. Well I am not going to apologise any more. And I’m not taking any more of these vicious messages.”

  “‘Still not speaking’. It’s not that vicious.”

  “You’re not getting them. You don’t understand. Nobody understands!” And I snatched the phone back from him. “Getting a taste of my own medicine, eh Robbie? Isn’t that what you said? Well, I’m not just getting a taste of it, I’m getting it poured down my throat.”