Good Little Liars

by Sarah Clutton

  Marlee ran down the path after him. She could see him ahead through the trees. He’d come out of the thicket and was nearing his cottage. She needed to stop him before he got there – make a loud fuss, keep him talking outside, or make it seem like she was coming in so Tessa would get herself out. She ran faster, the trees thinning out and suddenly she was out of the shady grove and at the beginning of his long garden path, stones crunching under her feet. As she entered the clearing, a flicker of movement to her left caught her attention. It was a brief glimpse – a small figure in blue, running from the back of the cottage, across the oval and in behind some trees. A girl heading in the direction of the school. Was it Tessa? She wasn’t sure. It was someone in school uniform but the figure had moved too quickly for her to see. But it could only have been Tessa – this area was out of bounds, so nobody else would be down here. Her heart pounded a sick rhythm in her chest – relief mixed with adrenalin.

  ‘Marleen?’

  Mr Brownley had turned back towards her. She stopped and stared back at him, dumb. What should she say? He’d think she was stalking him after that comment in the lesson about being with a student. Think. Think.

  ‘Sir, I just wondered if I could get a copy of that sheet music for “Eight Days a Week” from you? I’d really like to play it for my mum tonight before she goes in for her next round of chemo. It’s her favourite.’

  Mr Brownley rubbed his hand over his chin then turned away from her and placed the key in the door.

  ‘Yes, alright – but just wait outside okay. You can’t come in. I won’t be a tick.’ He disappeared inside, letting the screen door bang, but leaving the main door wide open. Marleen walked closer, peering through the screen netting into the dim recesses of the tiny cottage. She let her eyes roam over the small dingy kitchenette, a battered old orange couch in the corner, the fireplace with a photo perched on the mantle – the figure of a girl staring out. A thought struck her then, disorienting and uneasy. She turned her head back to the mantelpiece to look again. Yes, she was right. The light was dim and it was across the other side of the room, but there could be no mistaking it – the girl in the photograph was naked.

  Twenty-Seven

  Emma

  Emma sat bolt upright in bed, gasping, shedding the hands that had been pulling her down under hot liquid in a dark pool of murky sludge. The clock glowed through the dim light. 6.32 a.m. The warbling calls of birds drifted through the walls, calling in the dawn.

  She looked across her bed. Rosie was huddled into a foetal position with the blankets pushed away. Emma leaned down and carefully pulled the doona up over her. Last night she had agreed to let Rosie snuggle up in the queen-size bed with her – a favourite childhood ritual every time Phillip was away at a conference or giving a talk at a university interstate.

  Rosie had become quite sick after school yesterday, and Emma had tucked her into bed with her iPad and some paracetamol.

  Emma slid back under the covers and thought about trying to get back to sleep, but it was impossible. Worries had already begun jostling for attention.

  Last night she had called Marlee to check she’d been following doctor’s orders and that there’d been no more bleeding. Then she had sat down and flicked through the 1993 yearbook, lingering over all the photographs of Tessa. She made a list of all the evidence that pointed to why Jonathan Brownley needed to be reported to the police. She wished she could talk to someone about it, but Marlee had enough to worry about with the threatened miscarriage, and the possibility that she’d be having to find another job to support a baby on her own.

  Emma lifted the list off the bedside table and squinted at it through the dim morning light.

  Harriet Andrews – Jonathan’s sister – on campus and reported the bag. She would not have had to pass that way from the carpark. Why really on campus at that time? Lawyer. For help if police came?

  JB was nearby. Was distressed, and jumped into the trench with T. An act? Remorse? In love?

  Naked hidden photo of T taken around time of death; found in cottage JB living in at the time.

  Some of T’s shirt buttons not done up under her tunic. Everyone knew T was anal about the way she dressed. In a rush?

  JB and T’s argument seen from window. T had admitted her plan to seduce him. T carried things through, whether taking up a dare, or a school work challenge.

  Emma remembered Tessa’s single-mindedness clearly. She was always the one who lost most weight on their diets. Emma had suspected a few times during Year Twelve that Tessa was vomiting to lose the weight.

  The thought struck Emma now that Tessa may have been bulimic. If that was true, she must have been more mixed up than Emma realised. It made her shift uncomfortably in the bed with the heaviness of it, as if all the wrongs of the past were now sitting on her shoulders. What had really happened to Tessa? She needed to go to the police to tell them what she knew about Jonathan Brownley – what she’d heard and seen. What they did with that information would be their decision, but she couldn’t shoulder this burden any longer.

  ‘Mum?’ Rosie’s voice was raspy with sleep.

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘I feel bad. Really cold.’ She shivered.

  Emma leaned over and put her hand across Rosie’s forehead.

  ‘Goodness. You’re boiling hot, darling. Not cold.’ She turned on her bedside light and reached into her drawer and pulled out some paracetamol.

  ‘Here take two of these, honey.’

  Rosie didn’t move. Emma hoisted herself up and walked around to the other side of the bed near the window. She pulled open the curtains to let the sun stream in.

  ‘Oww. That hurts my eyes.’ Rosie’s voice was weak and she moved her hand to cover her face.

  ‘Rosie—’

  ‘My neck,’ Rosie whimpered. ‘Mum, I think I’m going to be sick.’

  Emma felt a whisper of fear as she grabbed a towel from the end of the bed.

  Rosie’s skin looked sickly pale and her eyes lolled back in her head. She was slumped back against the bed and lay completely still. A vice-like pain gripped Emma’s chest and she registered a dull throbbing under her ribs. Her panic pain. She needed to be calm, but something was very wrong.

  ‘Honey, I need to take you to the doctor. Just sit up now.’

  Emma reached down to help her but Rosie let out a feeble cry. ‘My neck hurts so much, Mummy.’

  Emma knew then. She needed an ambulance. She needed it now. ‘We need to go to the hospital, darling.’ Her heart pounded as she picked up the phone with a shaky hand and punched the numbers.

  ‘You have dialled emergency triple zero. Which service do you require?’

  Emma paced between the bedroom and the front door, straining her ears for the sounds of a siren or a vehicle approaching on the driveway. Just as she was heading back to the bedroom, she saw the ambulance come into view across the other side of the oval. It had missed her hidden driveway at the bend in the road near the willow tree. She had told the operator about slowing down at the willow tree. Stressed it. The ambulance drove silently towards the boarding houses, its blue and red lights throwing spinning patterns into the air. Panic began to stifle Emma’s thoughts. Could she leave Rosie and go after it? Ring the operator again? Her phone was inside next to the bed. She ran out towards the ambulance. The school grounds were deserted, frost twinkling on the ground across the huge expanse of grass. The ambulance continued slowly away from her towards the main sandstone buildings.

  She began waving her hands, ‘Hey! Stop! Over here!’ She ran to the bushes that marked the edge of her cottage boundary, a line that students were never supposed to cross. ‘Shit.’

  A rustling movement from the edge of the forest to her left made her jump. The headmaster appeared from nowhere.

  ‘What’s wrong, Emma?’

  He was panting thick plumes of steam into the frosty morning, his layers of black running gear clinging to his muscular frame. For a moment Emma was confused. She looked
back towards the ambulance.

  ‘Rosie’s sick, Jon. Really sick. I think it’s meningitis.’

  The headmaster followed her gaze as the ambulance continued to meander away from them towards the road’s dead end at the staff carpark.

  ‘I’ll get it.’ He took off, pushing through the bushes and sprinting across the oval as the ambulance followed the curve of the field around at the top. Relief washed over her as she ran back inside the house.

  In the bedroom, Rosie had slumped further down the pillow. Emma leaned over and listened to her rapid, shallow breath.

  ‘It’s alright, darling. The ambulance is coming.’

  Emma needed Phillip here. Anger swept through her like a flood, so that she could barely breathe. Her daughter needed two parents. He should be here. She picked up Rosie’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Dr Brownley’s getting the ambulance, sweetie. Everything’s fine.’

  But the words felt brittle. She let her anger simmer, then flare. She needed to hold onto it. Nothing was fine. Nothing had been fine for as long as she could remember.

  Twenty-Eight

  Harriet

  Harriet flicked the switch to turn off the light in the kitchen as she walked out, leaving Clementine in the dark. She took her cup of tea into the living room and picked up a magazine on the side table before she sat.

  ‘You can’t just shut down the conversation, Mother. It’s my right to know. You of all people know that the rights of the child are always what matters in these things.’

  She sighed as she looked up at Clementine, standing in the living room doorway. Clementine was meant to be at her reunion dinner. If Harriet could remember that the invitation on the fridge specifically said 7 for 7.30 p.m., why couldn’t Clementine? It was fourteen minutes to seven and Clementine showed no sign of leaving.

  ‘The rights of the child are of paramount importance only when the child is actually a child, Clementine. At forty-two you don’t qualify. Why must you stir up trouble now? It’s never interested you before.’

  ‘Yes, exactly! I’m forty-two! And that’s not true, Mum. I was interested before. I asked you who my father was when I was in high school and you refused to talk to me for a week! Why is it stirring up trouble? I don’t even know what I’m bloody well stirring up. Just his name will do. You don’t have to see him again.’

  Clementine looked like an angry tree-frog. She was dressed in an outlandish bright green pantsuit that clung tightly to her tiny frame. She’d teamed it with dreadful thick purple boots and some startling white tassel earrings that hung like curtain ties to her shoulders. The suffragettes would turn in their graves.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to say his name, Clementine. It was a chapter from the past that should remain closed. He was not…’ Harriet paused and looked down into the murky brown swirl of her tea, ‘a nice man.’

  ‘Jesus, Mum. There are plenty of arseholes out there. Just because they treated their girlfriend badly doesn’t mean they don’t get to know about their kids. You were only eighteen for heaven’s sake! Maybe he changed.’ Clementine plonked herself down on the white linen armchair and pulled the blue and white cushion out from behind her back. Her slouch caused a tiny muscle in Harriet’s right eye to start twitching.

  Clementine folded her arms across the cushion as if it could shield her from Harriet’s glare.

  ‘I may have been almost eighteen, Clementine, but he certainly wasn’t. He was in his forties.’ Harriet noticed Clementine’s huge eyes widen, like a void that should not be crossed. Harriet could feel herself falling in. She pulled herself away before she hit rock bottom. She had to give her something.

  ‘He was a teacher at my school.’ Harriet felt the hot sting of tears at the edge of her eyes. She sniffed briefly and tensed her face, stifling the rush of shame and disgust.

  ‘Mum?’

  Clementine was looking at her with child-like confusion. Oh God. She did not want to have to do this.

  She looked down at the carpet, remembered the day it had first happened, when she’d been called to the deputy headmaster’s office, summonsed, she guessed, to explain her last exam results. That day in 1975 was still as clear and cold as ever in her mind. She’d been nervous as she waited, had glanced down at her shoes, then dipped down quickly, licking her finger and rubbing at a small mark on her right toe. They were shiny apart from that one small spot. She polished them every morning. She must have scuffed them on something. The mark almost disappeared. Still, her heart was hammering. The door remained resolutely closed. She was on time but she knew he would not appreciate her knocking. It was a well-known fact. She would just have to wait to find out if she was in trouble.

  It wasn’t that she’d failed the exams, exactly. But she’d done badly on her maths paper – only 79%. It was embarrassing. ‘Thought you were meant to be the smart one, Harriet,’ Sally Rolands had said the previous week in class, flicking Harriet’s hand off her test page to see the result. Sally pushed her paper towards Harriet in a jubilant flourish, ‘even I beat you and I hate maths!’ The 81% circled in red on the top right of Sally’s paper flashed at Harriet like a lighthouse warning beacon.

  After the class, Mr Evans had taken her aside and asked what had happened. She’d had to explain she hadn’t been feeling well for more than just the two weeks that she missed from school because of the severe flu she’d caught from her mother. She’d felt terrible, thick-headed and unable to concentrate for ages after, but it had been more than that. Her mother had ended up with pneumonia and been hospitalised so Harriet had been leaving school as soon as the bell rang to collect her little brother from school. They would get home to an empty house – she’d need to bathe and feed and read to Jonathan and then, after he was in bed, there was the washing and then finishing off her mother’s sewing for clients who needed outfits by certain dates. Mary Andrews was a good seamstress, but she was narky and replaceable. Harriet knew they couldn’t afford to lose the income. She would fall into bed at 1 or 2 a.m., having glanced at her maths revision briefly, but not having been able to go over it properly, to learn the difficult equations or memorise the strategies and steps. She’d done better than she’d hoped on her history paper – 83% – but nowhere close to the 99% she’d gotten the term before. Her other subjects had also suffered.

  Now, she supposed, there would be consequences. The scholarship was dependant on ‘obtaining the highest possible results that a student can achieve, taking into account her aptitude and circumstances.’ She’d have to explain. She couldn’t possibly lose the scholarship after all this time. Her mother would tear strips off her. It was unthinkable. All the years of relentless study; of being made to feel inferior inside and outside the classroom.

  ‘Harry, you’re such a drag! Never up for any fun – suppose you have to think about getting a good education so you can fend for yourself, because none of the St Marks boys would ever marry you, the way you go on.’

  ‘Did you say you live in Swinburne? Who’d live there? Only criminals live on that side of the bridge.’

  The bitching had settled down after the first couple of years, after she’d learned to shrug it off. She had her study, one or two friends and a strong relationship with a couple of the more progressive teachers. Her mother had no sympathy for her at all and some of the teachers thought she was lucky to be there in the first place. Complaining to anyone would only make it worse.

  The office door opened abruptly, making Harriet jump. Mr Liddle looked over his glasses at her, his hair combed neatly from one side of his head to the other, covering his bald crown in an oily lie.

  ‘Come in, Miss Andrews. Sit down over there.’ He pointed to an orange couch on the back wall of the room. Harriet sat, eyes flicking down to her shoe to check the spot. A chair had been placed across from the couch. Mr Liddle took off his glasses and put them on his desk before moving to the chair opposite Harriet. He plucked at his trousers in a small, practiced motion as he sat.

  ‘You value your scholarship, Miss And
rews.’ Mr Liddle peered at her questioningly. She wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question though, and it was imperative that she take the right approach. On balance, he appeared to be waiting for an answer.

  ‘Yes, Sir. Very much.’

  ‘I thought so. It’s just that your last exam results were well below what you are capable of and are not reflective the gratitude you should be showing for the investment that this school is making in your education.’

  He looked at her, Harriet imagined, like a displeased father might look at a child. She’d never had the experience of having a father. He had died when her mother was pregnant with her. Her brother Jonathan had been the product of a brief tryst with a married man that had left her mother even angrier at the world than she had been before. Their mother had taken her disappointment out on Jonathan since the day she brought him home from hospital, leaving Harriet in charge of dispensing the love.

  ‘No, Sir. I was sick and I didn’t keep up with my study plan. But I’ve gone back over all the work and I’m completely up to date now.’