The Liar's Room

by Simon Lelic

  From Adam’s reaction, Susanna can’t escape the impression that somehow, for some reason, he is pleased with her.

  “Just what I said,” he answers. “I’m guessing you and I could stay here all night if we had to. It’s your office, after all. But Emily . . .” He lets the sentence dangle, like bait.

  Despite the photo, despite the phone, Susanna has until this point been clinging to the hope that Adam is bluffing. It is not a bluff she has been willing to call but she has at least been able to reassure herself that even if Emily is in danger, she is safe while Adam remains with Susanna in this room. Abruptly, however, even that slight comfort has been ripped away from her, and with it the delusion that the worst is not really happening.

  “Susanna. Hey, Susanna!”

  It must look to Adam as though Susanna is about to fall apart because the sharpness of his words is like a slap. He claps: once, twice, each time closer to Susanna’s face.

  “Don’t go to pieces on me, Susanna.”

  All Susanna can do is shake her head, and she feels the tears jostle free as she does so. If she weren’t so wary of Adam’s anger she is sure she would already have collapsed in on herself. Physically, mentally: all she feels capable of doing is curling up into a ball.

  “Focus, Susanna. Focus on Jake. On what I asked you.”

  “But I’ve answered already!” Susanna blurts, repeating herself for what feels like the umpteenth time. “I did love him! I did!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “But that’s . . .” Not fair, she wants to yell. Like a child would. That’s so unfair! She breathes, sobs, breathes again. “You asked me a question, and I answered it,” she says. “I can’t help it if you don’t like what I say!”

  Adam considers. “Prove it, then.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The challenge sobers her.

  “Prove it. You say you loved Jake. Prove you did.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me something about him that you loved.”

  “Just . . . everything! I loved everything about him. He was my son!”

  Adam’s face shows clearly that he is growing tired of this. “Answer me this, then,” he says. “And remember, Susanna.” He holds up a finger. “Don’t lie to me. I promise you I know when you’re lying.” He pauses, then asks his question. “Do you deny you’re responsible for what Jake did? For how it all ended?”

  Susanna shakes her head. She does curl up then, briefly, until a surge of anger makes her rigid. “I lost my son,” she hisses. “Do you understand that? Whatever happened, whatever you think happened, whyever the hell you care—I’ve already been punished! It’s not possible I could have been punished any worse!”

  “Ah.” It is an argument Adam has clearly been expecting. “But you’ve been reborn, Susanna,” he says, emphasizing her name. “Is that fair, would you say?”

  “Reborn? No, I . . . My life isn’t about me anymore. Don’t you see? I’ve made it so it’s not about me!”

  Adam sneers. “Do you really believe that? You with your cats and your three-bed semi and your neat, cozy little office. Do you really, genuinely believe that?”

  She can’t win. Clearly. Whatever game Adam has her playing, it’s obvious it’s been rigged from the start. “I’m not going to sit here and defend myself,” Susanna says, before adding in barely a whisper, “Not again.”

  And Adam’s smile, this time, is triumphant.

  “Oh, but you are,” he says. “In fact, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. And I’m going to judge you, Susanna. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to judge you—and I’m going to watch as you judge yourself.”

  6.

  Jake hadn’t always been a boy of extremes.

  As a toddler, a young boy, he’d been sociable, cheerful, and so easygoing that right from the first few months he’d reminded Susanna of Neil. That laid-back nature was the very thing that had attracted Susanna to Jake’s father in the first place, when—at the age of nineteen—she’d first got talking to him in the pub. He was the one who’d come up to her, which in itself for Susanna was something new. And after the upbringing she’d had—the upbringing they’d both had, it turned out: so constricted, so controlled—Neil had seemed to Susanna like a remedy for all her ills. He’d cured himself of the discipline his parents had imposed on him—and though Susanna had gone in the other direction, winding herself tighter and tighter the older she got, she hoped Neil would be able to cure her as well. He made her laugh, made her giggle, in fact, and in that respect and others he made her feel like the teenager she’d never been allowed to be.

  So seeing that same carefree attitude in Jake had delighted her. And Jake was self-contained as well, happy just doing his thing. He would sit with his books, his coloring, his Lego, and rarely cry for Susanna to intervene. If anything the opposite was the case. If a problem presented itself, he would prove determined to solve it himself. To think, Susanna and Neil had been so proud of that once: Jake’s reluctance to ever ask for help.

  It was only as Jake grew older that this side of his personality seemed to evolve. He began to take the setbacks he encountered more personally. From Jake’s perspective, anything less than total success corresponded with abject failure. He wouldn’t rage about it, though. He would simply move on to other things.

  So football, for example, lasted half a season. At one point Jake was training four nights a week, playing both mornings on the weekend—before deciding, after a game he’d spent sitting on the substitute’s bench, that it wasn’t for him after all. And music. Every fortnight there was a new CD on repeat on his stereo, a new idol scowling down at him from his bedroom wall. When he did something, he would do it wholeheartedly, commit to it with his body and soul—but when he decided he’d failed at it, or whatever it was had failed him, he would discard it with barely a shrug.

  “It’s healthy,” Neil had declared. “It means he’s not got the same hang-ups we had, that bullshit need to always see it through.” That had been Neil’s parents’ thing: an almost self-flagellating insistence that if you started something, you finished it, no matter the personal cost. And Neil was right, Susanna decided. Far better that Jake be exposed to a variety of experiences than be railroaded into persisting with something that made him unhappy. (Susanna had another theory too: that Jake was searching; looking for meaning—a purpose—he would never find. But she never said as much to Neil. She barely said it to herself.)

  It was the same with friends.

  With Scott Saunders.

  With Peter Murray.

  With Charles Bell.

  Scott, Pete and Charlie. Strangers, one day. Blood brothers, the next.

  And girls. Girls! Though Susanna didn’t know about that until it was too late. She didn’t know about a lot of things, as it turned out, until it was too late.

  But on or off. All or nothing. The older he got, the more that was Jake in everything he did. Everything—right up until the day Susanna came home from one of her walks and found his body swinging from the banister.

  So in answer to Adam’s question, of course Susanna feels responsible for what Jake did. If she could have she would have held up her hand, bowed her head and cried for everything she should have done. The same way any parent would have. The thing is, though, Adam must know she could never have admitted the way she felt publicly, not given the way things turned out. And these things he’s been saying, his accusation that she never loved her son. It makes Susanna wonder: did Adam mean the question the way she assumed he did? Or was he alluding to something more, something there’s no earthly way he could know? A secret Susanna has kept for so long, she would deny it even to herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Scott Saunders. Peter Murray. Charles Bell.”

  He lists their names the way, a few moments ago, Susanna recalled them herself. He w
ants to start at the beginning, he says. Which is itself a curious statement because, for Susanna, by assuming it all started with them, Adam is bypassing almost fifteen years of Susanna’s failings.

  But Scott, Pete, Charlie: they were the catalyst, in one sense at least. Everything that followed sparked and ignited because of them.

  “They were friends of his, right? Because that’s one of the things I don’t get.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They denied it, for a start. Claimed they barely even knew Jake.”

  The taste this brings to Susanna’s mouth is wearyingly familiar. “Of course they’d say that. What would you expect them to have said?”

  “No, I know. But it wasn’t just them. From what I’ve read it was only Jake who seemed to think they were ever mates. The other kids, the witnesses or whatever, they all said—”

  “There weren’t any witnesses,” Susanna interrupts. “Not a single one.”

  “You know what I mean. And anyway, that’s not strictly true.”

  “It is true! It’s a fact! I thought you said you’d done your research.” It’s a reckless provocation but Susanna can’t help herself. She’s had enough of rumors, of hearsay. It’s like with the magazines out in the waiting area that these days she can’t bring herself to look at. Isn’t the truth sensational enough? How does distorting it help anyone? That’s what frustrated her with what happened more than anything: the way people grew tired of the facts so quickly that they resorted to twisting them, manipulating them, until by the end everything was back to front, upside down, inside out. The story moved on, is what they said, whereas Susanna simply couldn’t.

  “It’s not true, Susanna. There were witnesses. Scott, Pete, Charlie—they were there.”

  “You can’t be a witness if you were one of the guilty. It doesn’t work like that. It shouldn’t.”

  Adam could press the point, Susanna knows, but instead of doing so he lets it slide.

  “So are you saying they were friends of Jake’s? Right from the start?”

  “No. Not from the start. In fact they were never friends. Not real friends. They tricked him. Trapped him.”

  Although even as Susanna says these words, she knows the real trick was one she played on herself. Jake wasn’t tricked by his friends. Susanna, rather, tricked herself into believing he remained the same happy, healthy boy he’d always been. Or, perhaps, had never been. She fooled herself into ignoring the anguish that was consuming him, rendering him hollow.

  “Careful, Susanna. It’s beginning to sound like you’re trying to shirk responsibility. Like they’re the ones you think are most to blame.”

  “Of course they’re to blame! I blame myself, yes, but I blame lots of other people too.” Although actually she’s narrowed it down to five.

  Jake, naturally.

  Neil.

  Scott, Pete, Charlie.

  Six people, in fact, although she tries not to think about the sixth.

  Adam reclines in his chair, folds his hands in his lap. “I’m sure you do,” he says. “And we’ll get to that. But for the moment let’s start with those three. Shall we?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It happened one day after school had finished. The beginnings of their . . . association. Susanna wasn’t there herself, obviously, but she was by Jake’s side as he went over and over the entire story with the police. Indeed, she has read the transcript so many times and pictured the scene playing out so often, it is like a movie she has come to know frame by frame.

  Jake, not for the first time, had stayed behind after school. Whenever Susanna asked him, which she rarely did because she was so often late home herself, he would claim he had stayed behind to do his homework, to help a teacher, to finish off a kick-about he was involved in with his friends. Lies, it turned out: every one. Jake did his homework but rarely until the last minute, and only because if he didn’t he knew his parents, his teachers would start asking questions. But helping a teacher? Playing with friends? Susanna had no idea how much of a loner Jake had become. From being a boy who made friendships easily, he’d become someone who struggled to maintain them. It wasn’t that he fell out with people. It was more that he simply lost interest, the same way he lost interest with everything else. And Susanna would have seen it, if she’d looked. But it was far easier to take what he told her at face value, to believe Jake was the same sociable, self-contained kid he’d always been. And as for that day itself, Susanna doesn’t actually remember it. If the occasion hadn’t assumed the importance it did later, she wouldn’t have been able to pick it out from any other.

  So Jake was on school grounds, alone, after hours—doing, it turned out, what he often did. He was watching: on this occasion a group of boys in the year above him. Scott Saunders, Peter Murray and Charles Bell quite often hung around on school grounds as well, mainly because they knew they weren’t supposed to. Rules, to them, were like dares, and Jake had become fascinated by the sort of things they got up to.

  Today Jake saw them gathered near a bin, which at first he didn’t connect with the smell of smoke he’d noticed hanging in the air. He assumed the caretaker was burning leaves nearby. There were enough of them about at that time of year. The front section of the school grounds was thick with trees. When you entered through the main gates, they formed an honor guard along the length of the drive, and for several weeks during the autumn the driveway itself was a dense red carpet.

  But the smoke didn’t smell like leaves. And as Jake spied on Scott and the others from the shadows of the tree line, he came to see what it was that was actually burning. He saw the flames, anyway, tonguing at the air from within the litter bin. And as the fire began to lick higher, Scott, Pete and Charlie drew closer, cackling like witches round a cauldron.

  Jake had no intention of getting involved, he later told the police. Not because the older boys were troublemakers and it was clear they were up to no good, which was what would have deterred most kids. Rather, Jake didn’t know how to engineer an approach. Not only were Scott and the others a year older; they had a reputation for bullying. If they decided to pick on Jake, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Scott, the ringleader, was a good head taller than he was, and Pete two T-shirt sizes broader. Charlie was short but he was all tendons and bones, making him almost the toughest-looking of the lot.

  So, Jake just stood there, hypnotized, and might have remained in the shadows until the fire went out had events not followed the course they did.

  “Hey! What’s going on here?”

  Jake couldn’t say where the young teacher appeared from. There was a doorway from the main building close to the bike sheds, so it was possible Ms. Birch had just exited through that. She was new, barely qualified, and weighed about as much as the stack of sandwiches Pete alone would eat for lunch. But for a small woman—a girl, practically—her voice was remarkably forceful. Even Scott and the others jumped when they heard it, their shoulders only settling when they realized its source.

  “Nothing, miss,” someone said. Scott, Jake thought, because he was the one to step in front of the bin to deliberately try to block the teacher’s view.

  “Are you boys burning something?”

  “No, miss. Why would we do that, miss? I dropped my cigarette, that’s all,” Scott answered.

  “His lighter, he means, miss,” put in Charlie as he tucked into formation beside Scott. “We’re all too young to actually smoke, you see, and we’d never dream of lighting up on school grounds.” Charlie may have been small, but he was sharp. In looks, too from his gel-jagged hair to the jut of his chin.

  Pete, behind them, had made a start on trying to extinguish the fire but the flames lashed out at him each time he attempted to draw near. From where he was standing, Jake could see it all clearly. Pete looked like a lion-tamer trying to hold back a vicious animal. In fact, Jake said, the fire
looked exactly like that: like something alive. It was mesmerizing. Almost beautiful, he said. Those were the exact words Jake used.

  “You don’t smoke, but you carry a lighter. And somehow you dropped your lighter into the bin and then the bin, miraculously, caught fire. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Ms. Birch edged past Scott and Charlie to try to deal with the blaze herself. The flames were flicking so high that when she tried to move the rubbish in the bin to attempt to smother them, she was driven back in the same way Pete had been.

  “Ow! Shit!” A tongue of fire had lashed out and licked her.

  Scott, Charlie and Pete, watching on, just laughed.

  “You shouldn’t swear, miss,” Charlie said. “If you swear, we’ll have to tell a teacher.”

  Ms. Birch was too concerned with the fire to worry about the sniggering, though it was clear by this point she was unlikely to succeed in quelling either.

  “Here.”

  As Jake crossed the driveway, he stooped to gather up an armful of leaves.

  “Here,” he repeated as he carried the mound of leaves toward the bin.

  “No, wait, don’t—”

  Ms. Birch was caught unawares by Jake’s appearance. Belatedly she tried to pull him back, but before she could, he had deposited the entire armful of leaves onto the fire.

  “What are you—,” she protested, thinking at first that Jake’s actions would only make matters worse. But the leaves were damp, and the effect was as if the fire had been stifled by a sodden blanket. There was smoke, lots of it, but soon even the smoke faded into nothing.

  “Well.” For a moment that was all Ms. Birch could summon to say. But then she appeared to remember her duties, her anger, and she whipped round to address Scott. “You realize how stupid that was, don’t you? You could have burned down the entire school!”

  Rather than being cowed, Scott immediately bridled. The problem was, Scott Saunders was stupid. Susanna saw evidence of that countless times over the coming months. He was stupid and he was cruel and he was vindictive. But he had been called stupid so many times—by other kids, by his older brother, by his father—that the word itself had become a trigger. He’d once swung a chair at a staff member who’d dared to suggest he was “slow,” and had only avoided expulsion because the chair in question had missed. The incident was common knowledge among the faculty, and only a teacher as raw as Ms. Birch would have been so careless as to use the s-word in Scott’s presence.