The Liar's Room

by Simon Lelic

  “Where did you get them?” Susanna asks Adam once again. What she means is, How do I know they’re real? But she does know, categorically. Apart from anything, she would recognize her son’s handwriting anywhere. The longing, the obsessiveness, all the more. And she can hear the creeping humiliation, the yearning for Alison to take him seriously. For anyone to take him seriously—Susanna included.

  “My mother’s shelf,” Adam answers. “Her stash of lies.”

  Susanna looks up. “She kept them?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Susanna isn’t sure how to answer. She thinks of her “junk” drawer in the wardrobe in her bedroom, the one containing her own stash of lies. And Emily, when she was young, rummaging through it and pulling out the photograph of her dead brother. “No one you know,” Susanna said to her when Emily asked who that little boy was. Meaning, No one you need to know. No one I will ever tell you about.

  But that’s different. Isn’t it? What Susanna did

  (is still doing)

  to Emily isn’t the same as what Adam’s parents did to him.

  Is it?

  “Why are you showing them to me?” Susanna wants to toss the letters back into Adam’s lap, but she can’t let go. Through the Braille-like imprints Jake’s Biro has left on the paper, it feels almost as though her fingertips are in contact with her son. Touching him, stroking him, the way she used to when he would sit beside her on the sofa when he was young, the reading light on and the television babbling in the background.

  Oh Jake. Oh my sweet, silly, stupid boy. What did you do?

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Adam says. “Aren’t you interested, Susanna?”

  She shakes her head, a rebuttal rather than an answer. “Here.” She thrusts out the stack of letters. “Here.”

  Adam relieves her of the letters. “Tell me about her,” he says.

  “Who?” Susanna responds, stalling. She sniffs. Almost reaches into her sleeve for a tissue before she remembers what else is up there that she might unwittingly displace.

  “Alison Birch. My mother. Tell me about her. What you remember.”

  Once again Susanna shakes her head. This time it’s a rebuttal and a refusal both: I can’t, I won’t. It’s a plea too. Don’t make me. Alison Birch is the woman Susanna cannot bring herself to think about. She is the sixth person on Susanna’s list of people she cannot help but blame.

  “Tell me about the time she came to see you,” Adam says. He taps a fingernail against the blade of his knife. It is a reminder, as though Susanna needed one, that ultimately, she has no choice.

  * * *

  • • •

  “It was late when she knocked. After dinner one night, in the middle of the week.”

  It was a Thursday, in fact. Susanna remembers because Neil was home when he shouldn’t have been. On Thursday evenings he had his “boys’ night,” which as far as Susanna had ever been able to ascertain involved Neil and three of his old schoolmates sitting around playing video games, drinking lager and smoking hash. Just as though they were still a bunch of teenagers. But that Thursday, Susanna recalls, the boys’ night was canceled. Steve, the host, was recovering from a knee operation and wasn’t up to having everyone over. Susanna remembers Neil’s imperviousness to the irony, that their adolescent get-together was canceled because one of their gang was so decrepit, bits of him were having to be replaced.

  So Neil was home. Grumpy, on his way to being pissed, it was Neil who opened the door.

  “I recognized her,” Susanna tells Adam, “but I couldn’t place her. I was watching over Neil’s shoulder. I couldn’t see my husband’s face but I could tell from the way his posture changed that he was . . . impressed, let’s say, by what he saw. He brightened immediately, as though someone had delivered her just for him.”

  Susanna recalls how a line from her favorite movie, on seeing her husband’s reaction, flashed into her head. Thin, pretty, big tits. Your basic nightmare.

  “What did you think of her?” Adam says. “You said you recognized her. Had you ever spoken to her before?”

  “Never. I thought she was . . . attractive. You couldn’t help but think she was attractive. Dainty too. And I thought she looked awfully young.”

  Alison Birch was twenty-four, as it happened. Older than Jake had assumed, going on his letters. But it was true she might have passed for eighteen. In contrast to her delicate bone structure, she had thick toffee-colored hair that she wore—that night, and every other occasion Susanna saw her—pinned up loosely in a bun. It wasn’t her fault

  (it wasn’t)

  but Alison Birch’s hairstyle was oddly, unwittingly alluring. Even Susanna could see it. Neil was practically drooling into his beer can. And to a teenage boy, that thick cushion of hair, one clip from cascading onto her shoulders, would have been as enticing as a missed button on a blouse.

  “What did she say? About Jake, I mean. How did she raise the subject?”

  Susanna blinks. “She started by asking whether he was home. I think she knew he wasn’t. And she was embarrassed, you could see. In retrospect, anyway. At the time I thought she was being snotty. The house was a mess, and there was Neil with his beer can, and her expression when she looked around the lounge . . .” Susanna shakes her head and it turns into a shiver. She isn’t cold, it’s not that. “She was worried, obviously, about broaching what she’d come to us to say. But me being me, I assumed she was passing judgment.”

  “So you didn’t like her,” Adam says.

  Susanna wriggles. He’s right, she didn’t. Not when she first walked in, not after she’d said her piece and left. And it wasn’t just because of what she told them about their son, which no parent would particularly want to hear. Admit it, Susanna, if only to yourself. You didn’t like her because she was young and she was pretty.

  “Did she spell it out for you? The extent of Jake’s feelings toward her?”

  “No. Absolutely not,” Susanna replies. “She said she was concerned, that’s all. She was worried that Jake was becoming ‘distracted.’”

  At which point Neil had coughed to conceal his laugh, Susanna recalls. She could tell exactly what he was thinking. Who can blame the lad? He’s only human! And, naturally, Boys will be boys . . .

  “It took a bit of back-and-forth before she spelled out what she meant,” Susanna says. “She said she thought Jake was ‘infatuated.’ That was the word she used. She said she thought he was lonely and that rather than cultivating friendship groups, he was focusing his attentions on her.”

  And Susanna immediately recoiled, she remembers. She saw Alison Birch try to cover her mortification with a smile and she chose to read it as self-conceit. She thought she was boasting, for pity’s sake.

  “I asked her what evidence she had,” Susanna goes on. “And all she could come up with were . . . vagaries. The way Jake looked at her, she said. His ‘behavior’ toward her. And again I asked for specifics but she became cagey, said she’d rather not go into details. She said she’d prefer it if we talked to Jake directly, that we got the full story from him.”

  “And that’s it? That’s all she said?”

  Susanna hears Adam’s question but finds herself entangled for a moment in the memories. Not of the conversation with Alison Birch so much, which can only have lasted five or ten minutes. It is after, rather, that she is thinking of. Of Neil, in particular. He laughed, Susanna recalls. “Jesus Christ,” she remembers him saying after Alison had gone. “I thought it was going to be about something serious.” And then, after another swig of lager, “Good on the lad, I say. I mean, she’s a bit out of his league but at least we know now that he’s batting for the right team.” He shook his head, drained the can he was holding, then popped open another. He was celebrating, Susanna realized.

  “Susanna? Are you with me, Susanna?”

  “What? Yes. Wh
at?”

  “I said, was that it? She said she was worried about Jake, asked you to talk to him. Did she say anything else? Did she tell you about the notes?”

  “The notes?”

  Adam rustles the pages impatiently. The flimsy paper makes an angry sound, something between a flutter and a hiss. “The notes, Susanna. The letters.”

  “I . . . no,” Susanna says. Then, more categorically, “No. She didn’t say a thing about Jake having written to her.”

  She can hear it in her tone: the urge to blame is creeping in again. Looking back, Susanna can see that Alison Birch was trying to be tactful. She didn’t want to embarrass Jake in front of his parents, hence the reason she neglected to show them the notes. Yet if she had, would Susanna’s reaction have been different? Would the outcome have changed?

  Would Jake, in other words, still be alive?

  This is Susanna’s problem, the difficulty she has with the issue of blame. It is a noxious thing, as stealthy and shadowy as a poison gas, to the extent that without anyone realizing, it is able to surround and contaminate us all. Susanna knows, for example, that it wasn’t Alison’s fault that she was pretty. She can see as well how her behavior was motivated by an instinct to be kind. And the notes . . . Maybe, probably, they would have made no difference. There would have been only a few at the time for one thing and, more important, Susanna can imagine all too easily how she and Neil would have shrugged their existence aside, just as they did every other aspect of Jake’s behavior they considered out of character.

  But still. Still. In spite of everything, Susanna can’t help wishing Alison had been uglier, more belligerent, less her. She does: Susanna blames Alison Birch. She cannot help it. And though there are worse things Susanna has kept hidden all these years, the fact she does remains one of her most shameful secrets.

  “Did she go to the headmaster, do you know?” Susanna hates herself for asking but she does it anyway. “In his letters Jake says Alison threatened to talk to the school’s headmaster, to ask him to intervene. Did she?”

  Adam appears amused. “You’re asking me?”

  “I thought you might know. That’s all. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about Jake’s letters before.”

  “There’s your answer,” Adam says. “You hadn’t, so I guess she didn’t. Or if she did, then clearly the headmaster took her about as seriously as you did.” He watches for a moment as Susanna squirms. “But anyway, what does it matter? The point isn’t who saw them back then. The point is that he wrote them at all.”

  She should have shown them to someone, though. Shouldn’t she? Twenty-seven letters. It was more than infatuation. It was an obsession. Evidence of an obsession, moreover, meaning something could have been done. Except yet again it comes back to Susanna. The blame remains thickest around her. Because what were Alison’s options? She tried talking to Susanna; Susanna opted to ignore her. And as a young, female teacher, where else was Alison supposed to go? If she’d gone to a colleague, a superior, she would have seemed weak, ineffectual, which, given her looks and her stature, is probably what most people would have assumed her to be anyway. The notes, if anything, would have counted as evidence that she’d failed to deal with things the way she was supposed to. And she would have got Jake into trouble, when in her mind Jake was just a confused adolescent. He was harmless. That’s what Alison Birch would have told herself.

  Perfectly harmless.

  “What about Jake?” Adam says.

  “Jake?”

  “She asked you to talk to him. Did you?”

  “Of course I did!”

  “And?”

  “And . . .” And there are two accounts Susanna could give. The uncensored version would probably only make Adam angrier, because Susanna recalls some of the things Jake said. That Alison Birch was a fantasist, effectively; that she was basically making it all up. What he said, actually, was that Alison Birch was a lying cow. Which Susanna had chastised him for, naturally. But she’d been more focused on what Jake was telling her. Sure, he knew Alison Birch, Jake admitted—everyone did—but she was just one of those people who insist on being the center of attention. “She thinks she’s God’s gift,” Jake said. “Always going on about how she looks like Kylie. And she flirts, Mum. Leans over the desks so you can see her cleavage, touches all the boys on the arm. I mean, how old is she? Like, thirty? Seriously, it’s embarrassing.” Which simultaneously didn’t quite ring true and chimed with everything Susanna wanted to believe herself. Hadn’t she already decided that Jake’s teacher was looking down on them? That she was as vain and self-absorbed as she was attractive? Which is another reason not to tell Adam.

  “He denied it,” is what Susanna says. “Just the way he said he did in his letters.”

  Adam responds with a knowing smile. It would seem sympathetic if it wasn’t so sly. “I suppose he was bound to,” he says.

  He thinks for a minute.

  “So that’s that, then. As far as Jake’s relationship with Alison Birch went, you didn’t hear anything more about it?”

  Relationship? The word seems offensive somehow. Obscene.

  And the way Adam is referring to his mother . . . He’s said more than once that he can barely remember her but that doesn’t explain the absence of emotion when he speaks of her—particularly given that his mother is so obviously now the reason Adam is here.

  “No,” Susanna says. “I didn’t hear anything more about it.”

  Adam rustles the letters. “But it was simmering,” he says. “Wasn’t it? All the time you say you weren’t aware. Just like their ‘plan.’ Scott’s plan. That was simmering in the background too.”

  Again, simmering doesn’t seem the right word. Susanna thinks of something on fire, a fuse lit from both ends.

  There is a pause.

  “And so we get to it,” Adam announces, leaning back in his chair. “The day itself. The seventeenth of May 1999. Let’s talk about that now, shall we?”

  16.

  It was the opportunity the boys had been waiting for: the evening of the big school performance.

  Susanna was there herself that night. Only by chance. Jake wasn’t involved in the production, of course, but Susanna was on the PTA, and she’d been a bit slack of late in terms of her participation, so she’d thought she had better show her face. The irony being that because she was caught up with the crowd at the show, she was among the last to find out what happened. She can see it all vividly as she recounts it to Adam but only because she has watched it playing so often in her dreams. And not just her dreams. It haunts her in her waking hours too, to the extent it feels almost like a memory of her own. But really, her knowledge of what actually took place came mainly from Jake himself, who, the day after his arrest, confessed with unblinking eyes every detail of what he had done.

  “This way. Quick.”

  Scott led. The way he and the others had planned it, they would be the only ones in the main building. Everyone else would be in the school’s gymnasium, which doubled as the assembly hall and stage. And it was, it was perfect. Not only would teachers’ attentions be elsewhere, there would also be so many people on the grounds, suspicion would be too thinly spread to ever narrow in on them.

  Plus, they wanted an audience, didn’t they? What would be the point of starting a fire if nobody was around to witness it? No one would be hurt. The gymnasium was in a corner of the grounds, and it was linked to the main building by a single corridor, meaning the parents, teachers and pupils would all have plenty of time to evacuate. Maybe a few would get a singed eyebrow or two but again, so much the better. At least then people would remember it. Far more than they would a shitty school production of some lame-arsed musical.

  “Hurry up! Shut the door behind you. The door!”

  They’d rigged the window in the boys’ changing room that afternoon so that it didn’t close properly, allowing them t
o enter the building undetected. But they still needed to get from the changing rooms past the gymnasium without being seen. If they were caught in the corridor, they would be able to explain their presence easily enough. But then the game would be up before it even began and, almost as bad, they’d be forced to endure two hours of smug-faced parents tapping their toes and clapping along as some little year ten homo crooned “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

  That was assuming whoever saw them didn’t also spot the matches and the can of lighter fluid sticking out of Scott’s pocket. If they did, it wouldn’t only be the game that would be up. They would be kissing their school careers good-bye as well. No bad thing in itself but their parents would go fucking mental. Scott’s old man in particular would beat him so badly, he’d be pissing blood until Christmas.

  “Shit, wait up! My shoe!”

  Scott stopped and Pete and Jake ran into the back of him. They turned and saw Charlie limping along behind them, one trainer dangling off his foot.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Scott hissed. He glanced ahead to check no one was coming, then spun round to face Charlie. “Why didn’t you just wear your own shoes?”

  Charlie caught up. “I told you why.” His foot was back in the trainer but Jake could see how both shoes, when Charlie walked, slipped almost to the bottom of his heels. “Forensics.”