The Liar's Room

by Simon Lelic

  It was actually kind of smart, Jake thought, at least in theory. Rather than wearing his own trainers, Charlie had “borrowed” a pair of his older brother’s. That way, he’d maintained, if they left any footprints, the police would be looking for someone with feet two sizes bigger. Pete had thought it pretty smart too—and, looking at Jake’s feet, had suggested to him that the two of them swap shoes for the same reason. Jake’s shoes were bigger, Pete’s smaller, meaning the police would be confused in exactly the same way. Right?

  Jake had simply stared back at him, waiting for Pete to spot the flaw in his plan.

  But Charlie’s idea, it made sense. Or it would have, if on a dry May day, indoors, there was any chance they would actually leave any footprints at all. And if wearing shoes two sizes too big didn’t mean Charlie was left struggling to walk, let alone to run should it get to the point they might need to.

  “Forensics,” Scott scoffed. “Maybe you should of hopped all the way instead. That way, the cops’ll concentrate on looking for a suspect with only one leg.”

  Jake laughed. Charlie scowled. Pete, looking at his feet, seemed to be genuinely thinking it over.

  “Come on,” said Jake, “let’s go.” He was eager to get on with things, he told the police, though he didn’t fully explain why. Susanna understood, though. She pieced it together, and it is all the clearer now that she has seen Jake’s letters. Jake, that night, was running mainly on rage. His feelings of frustration, of self-loathing, of humiliation—they were all bubbling below the surface, fueling him in everything he did.

  Susanna recalls how markedly Jake’s behavior had deteriorated in the month or so before. At home he had become so moody, so monosyllabic, that Susanna had begun to question whether Jake wasn’t suffering from something more than severe adolescence. Only to question it, mind you. Nothing more.

  Needless to say, Susanna had no inkling at that point about Jake’s obsession. So blind was she, so self-involved, that even those letters wouldn’t have revealed to her the depth of her son’s despair. Love for a time had filled the hole in him, if love indeed was what it was. Maybe Jake thought it was that but even love, Susanna suspects, had in her son’s mind morphed into something darker. An infection, almost. Something else to eat away at his insides—all the more so when he realized his love was unrequited. Unacknowledged, in fact. Belittled rather than offered back.

  “Shhh. Don’t move.”

  There were the sounds of people heading toward them. The corridor connecting the gymnasium area to the main building was just around the corner, and if whoever was drawing near came their way, they would be caught in the no-man’s-land between the gym and the changing rooms. It sounded like kids rather than grown-ups but nevertheless they would be seen. And the idea was that nobody would even know they’d been in the building that night at all.

  “. . . See what she was wearing? Apparently her mum made it for her. Out of tinsel?”

  “I know. It was so gorgeous. I wish my . . .”

  They heard snatches of the approaching conversation but it faded then cut off completely, meaning whoever had been talking had entered the staging area behind the gymnasium rather than continuing toward them. There’d been a brief burst of noise as the doors backstage had cracked open.

  Scott had been pressing Jake against the wall. His arm slackened, then fell away.

  “Are you sure this is the best way to go?” asked Pete from behind them.

  “It’s the only way to go,” Scott muttered back, leaning forward to peer around the corner. “It was come in this way or through the main entrance, and you can bet the headmaster will be standing at the door, just waiting to kiss everyone’s arse.”

  Charlie sniggered in Jake’s ear. When Jake turned to look at him, he saw how broad and black his friend’s pupils were. It was the coke, probably. Charlie, Pete and Scott had each done a railroad track before they’d set off: a line in each nostril, from the gram filched by Scott from his old man’s stash. He’d get a beating for that no doubt too but at least that one would be worth it. They needed some Dutch courage, Scott had insisted, and unlike weed, coke wouldn’t dull their senses. Just the opposite, in fact.

  They’d offered Jake some as well, tried to taunt him into snorting at least a line, but Jake wasn’t interested. He’d tried it before. He’d tried everything they’d offered him before. Coke, weed, pills, acid. He didn’t mind pills, except for the comedown. Acid he never wanted to experience again, and as for coke and weed . . . Weed just made him paranoid, to the extent that one time he’d locked himself in the toilet and wouldn’t come out again, for fear of what was waiting behind the door. And coke was the worst of all. It made him agitated, angry, when most of the time these days he was agitated and angry enough.

  Besides, he wanted to keep his head clear. Tonight, this thing they were doing: he wanted to be able to enjoy it.

  “Anyway,” Scott was saying, “Jakey-boy here insisted we start the fire in Miss Bitch’s room. I was all up for setting it beneath the stage.”

  That was bullshit and Jake knew it. None of them would have risked starting the fire where there was a chance someone might actually get hurt—and, more important, where they might very easily get caught. Scott was only saying that now because they’d already settled on a plan, and he was free at this stage to say anything. To claim anything. Probably the coke was a factor in that too.

  It was true, however, that Jake had been the one to push for starting the fire in Ms. Birch’s room. Again, he hadn’t told the others why. They knew nothing about his fixation with her, nor about the way Alison Birch had rejected him. Although in fact she hadn’t even had the guts to do that. She’d teased him is what she’d done. Led him on. Made him think she liked him when all along she was just pretending. Faking, just like everyone else, practically, Jake had ever met. As far as he was concerned, setting the fire from her desk was the least she deserved. And Scott was never going to argue. Technically it had been his idea in the first place, and in Scott’s mind he still owed Alison Birch for having given him that week’s detention.

  “Ready? Make sure those shoes are laced up tight, Charlie.”

  Scott was on point again, his hand raised to give the signal for them to move. The babble of the audience was dying down, meaning the show was about to start. This too was part of their plan. If there was ever going to be a time when the corridor was completely empty, it would be right at the beginning of act one. After that, there was no telling who they might bump into. A teacher rushing to some backstage emergency, some parent taking a little brat for a piss . . .

  There was applause and Scott gestured for them to go. Walk, he’d briefed them before, don’t run. But don’t go slow. You know? Move like you’ve got somewhere you need to be.

  But as they started along the corridor, they couldn’t help but break into a sprint. It was the buzz of it. The fear, the thrill, the sheer fuck you of what they were contemplating. And not just contemplating, not anymore. They were doing it. Actually fucking doing it. That was why Scott and the others, in Jake’s opinion, were so cool. They talked a lot of crap, sure, but they followed up on a lot of it as well. Other people were full of so much bullshit. Like his mum and dad, for example. Dad was constantly like, yeah sure, son, just as soon as I have time, which he did, always, just none he was willing to offer Jake. Mum was no better. She had her work and her book group and the PTA and yoga and something going on every night of the week—which, actually, suited Jake these days just fine. If they didn’t care about him, why should he give a toss about them?

  And there was Alison, of course. Ms. Birch. Miss Bitch. Jake had thought she was different but it had turned out she was just like all the others. Worse, because as well as being a fake she was a coward. A prick-tease, in fact. A slut.

  As they hurtled along the corridor they could hear the headmaster droning away on stage. Jake caught a glimpse of him through
a window as they flashed past, a phony welcome grin plastered across his face. Go on, keep smiling, Jake found himself thinking, and he realized he was grinning himself. Not only at the prospect of the headmaster’s face when it was half-illuminated by flames but at his own impending sense of triumph. They were all grinning: Charlie, Pete, even Scott. They were bouncing off one another as they ran, bouncing off the corridor’s walls, and by the time they’d bypassed the entrance hall and veered deeper into the main building their grins had burst into outright laughter.

  “Stop!” Pete was laughing so much he couldn’t breathe, and as he stumbled to a halt he clutched his stomach. “Ow,” he gasped, still battling laughter. “Fucking ow.”

  The others came to a standstill beside him, panting for air and hinging toward their knees. “Fucking A, you mean,” Charlie managed, and this creased them up all the more.

  Pete sniffed and swiped at his nose, and slowly his laughter sputtered to a halt. “I’m bleeding,” he said, and then he laughed again. Nervously, though.

  “Huh?” Scott got ahold of himself and stood up straight. He turned Pete toward the light, then grinned and pushed him playfully away. “It’s just a nosebleed. From the coke I ’spect. Wipe it on your sleeve.” Scott peered along the corridor, back the way they’d come. “You’ve probably left a spatter trail as long as my old man’s rap sheet. So much for Charlie’s forensics.”

  They all looked at Charlie, who was in his socks now and wearing his brother’s shoes like gloves. Charlie smiled at them and shrugged, and the sight of him was all it took. They were off again, laughing again, until Jake could barely see through his tears.

  “Come on, you homos.”

  Scott shoved Jake until he started forward. The others followed, and after a few steps they were moving in silence. Without anyone having to say it, they understood that the time for laughing was at an end.

  It didn’t take them long after that to get to where they were going. Ms. Birch’s form room was down a short flight of stairs, midway along the corridor that dissected the main wing. That was another reason Ms. Birch’s room was so perfect: it was slap bang in the middle of the building. The fire, once lit, might spread anywhere, everywhere.

  They gathered around the young teacher’s desk, one of the boys standing at each corner. A reading light had been left on in the classroom, and the four of them could see one another’s expressions quite clearly. This was the moment from which there’d be no turning back. Once they struck that match (those four matches, for again this was part of the plan: a match each, so that no one, afterward, could claim they’d only been along for the ride) they would cross the line into being fully fledged criminals. And it wasn’t like possession or shoplifting or anything. Arson was serious. As in, life-sentence-level serious. Which they wouldn’t get because they were minors and more to the point they had no intention of getting caught . . . but even still.

  It was Jake who started spraying lighter fluid first. He admitted it, never tried to deny it. The can was in Scott’s hand and Jake reached out and snatched it from him. It was just a squirt, initially, but that squirt led to another, and then a spray, and soon Jake was upending the can all over Alison Birch’s chair, across the surface of her desk, on the jumper she kept there for the days it turned cold, which was stained on the sleeve by spilled coffee. The others watched, waited, and then the four boys simultaneously struck their matches. And this part . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  . . . this part Susanna cannot help but view from Alison Birch’s perspective. Partly it’s because Susanna doesn’t want to see it from Jake’s standpoint. That she can’t, in fact. She simply cannot put herself, at this point in the story, in Jake’s mindset. It would be like trying to use reason to explain madness, heaven to extrapolate hell. Her empathy doesn’t extend that far.

  But Alison . . .

  This is the paradox Susanna has never been able to reconcile. She blames Alison Birch but at the same time there is no one in the world for whom Susanna feels more sympathy. Because she can imagine what happened next from Alison’s point of view all too clearly. She can literally see it through her eyes. The moment she came through her classroom doorway and saw those four shadowy figures gathered around her desk, their features warped by the flames from their matches. And Jake’s face, as it occurred to him why the reading light had been on, that they weren’t alone, that rather than triumph, this was his moment of utmost shame. The others turning, seeing it too, and realizing they’d been caught red-handed.

  As one the matches were extinguished.

  “What’s going on here? What on earth do you boys think you’re doing?”

  It was an echo of the first time the lives of Jake, Alison, Scott, Pete and Charlie had collided, and Susanna wonders whether, for Jake, it registered.

  “What’s that smell?” The tang of lighter fluid would have been thick in the air. (Susanna, ever since, cannot fill her car up at the petrol station without first wrapping a scarf across her face.) “Is that petrol? Lighter fluid? Are those matches you’re holding?”

  The boys looked at one another. Apart from Jake, who didn’t take his gaze from Alison.

  “Answer me. One of you. Explain to me what the devil’s going on.”

  It was at this point Alison switched on the overhead light. Susanna wishes that she hadn’t because that one simple action, as Susanna understands the sequence of events, had the effect of firing a starting gun.

  “Switch that off!” Scott moved with astonishing speed. He moved so quickly that Alison had no time to get out of his way, and he had to shove her bodily aside to reach the light switch.

  “Hey! Turn that back—”

  Alison got as far as grabbing Scott’s shoulder before, perhaps meaning only to shake her off, Scott’s hand whipped out and hit her jaw.

  She staggered and stumbled on a chair. She tripped, the clatter of her fall drowned out by Scott’s curse.

  “Shit!”

  When Alison focused her eyes she could see Scott looking down at what he’d done. She saw him turn to the others, who were gaping, immobile, back at him—other than Jake, who hadn’t looked anywhere but at Alison since she’d entered the room. He was staring at her legs now, and Alison couldn’t work out at first what he was looking at. But then she saw her skirt had ridden up when she’d fallen, exposing the bare length of her thighs. She tried to wriggle her skirt down, but her movement released a jarring pain in her jaw. It pinned her.

  “Shit,” said Scott again. He looked over at the shortest one—Charles, was it? Charlie? “Don’t just fucking stand there!” Scott barked. “Shut the door or something! And Pete, switch off that fucking desk light!” He glared down at Alison. He appeared afraid, a bit, but mostly just angry. “Why the fuck did you have to stick your nose in?” he said. “Why do you always have to stick your nose in!”

  Alison swallowed, wincing once again at the pain this caused. She propped herself up, tried tugging her skirt toward her knees.

  “What were you doing in here?” she said. She was trying to sound firm, authoritative, but to her ear she sounded exactly how she felt. She sounded scared.

  She tried again. “Jake? Tell me what it was you were doing in here.”

  Jake’s eyes were locked on Alison’s legs. His gaze crawled higher.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Alison,” he said.

  Alison was so outraged she almost missed it: he’d called her by her Christian name. She caught the others noticing it too.

  “I shouldn’t be here?” she heard herself saying. “This is my classroom! I was working!” Her choice had been either to do her marking here, taking advantage of the fact the school was open this evening, or cart thirty sets of schoolbooks all the way out to her car and then back again. And schoolbooks were heavy, particularly for someone of her size and strength. “You’re the ones who need to explain yoursel
ves,” she insisted. The anger was helping, she found. She felt like she was regaining control, at least of herself.

  She focused again on Susanna’s son.

  “This has to stop, Jake. This fixation. This obsession. You’ve crossed a line. You crossed it a long time ago and I should have taken action sooner but this, setting fire to my desk, as—what? Retribution? Punishment? Don’t you understand that I’m your teacher? That you and I can never be more than friends?”

  Pete stopped short of the desk light, which was still casting its ashen glow across the room. Charlie turned, the door into the classroom now closed behind him. He took a step back toward the others. “What’s she talking about, Jakey-boy?”

  Alison looked at Jake, who was blooming red.

  Charlie repeated his question. “Jakey-boy? What’s she going on about? And why did you call her Alison? Just now. Have you two got, like, a thing?”

  Alison saw Jake swallow. She saw the redness of his cheeks turn puce.

  “No, we don’t have a thing,” Alison said. She was still afraid. Not of Jake, not at that stage, nor even of Pete or Charlie. It was Scott, rather, who most frightened her. She could see his mind was racing, scrabbling to find a way out of this mess he’d blundered into.

  But as well as afraid, Alison was also furious. Here she was, lying on the floor, her jaw throbbing and her skirt stuck halfway up her belly, while four pupils—pupils!—stood menacingly over her. She was a grown woman. A teacher, for heaven’s sake. This shouldn’t be happening! “Jake thinks there’s something between us, but there’s not,” she said. “He doesn’t understand that it’s entirely inappropriate for a boy his age to—”

  “Shut up!”

  Jake, if it was possible, moved quicker than Scott had. In the time it took Alison to turn her head, he had crossed the ground between them and was leaning over her, forcing her back toward the floor. “Just shut your mouth!” he yelled, his finger raised in warning. “Do you hear me? Just stop!” He grabbed Alison’s jaw, squeezing so Alison couldn’t swallow.