Under Lying

by Janelle Harris

  ‘I haven’t forgotten it’s your birthday too,’ she says, reaching behind her cape to produce a sparkling, pink gift bag.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, caught off guard as she passes it to me. ‘I didn’t think anyone would remember my birthday.’

  ‘What?’ Jenny squeaks, throwing her hands in the air. ‘Of course I remembered. Open it. Open it. Open it.’

  I reach inside and pull out a rectangular grey box. Flabbergasted, I lift the lid. Inside, I find a silver locket and chain neatly presented against cream velvet.

  ‘The locket’s empty,’ Jenny says, ‘but I thought maybe you could put one of Adam’s photographs inside or maybe a photo of you both together. I dunno, just an idea . . .’ She trails off, adopting her default fidget. ‘I just thought you’d like it.’

  ‘I do. I really do,’ I say, barely able to form words. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . unexpected.’

  I lift the chain out of the box with trembling fingers. The shiny silver heart tumbles and swirls, coming to a sudden stop at the end of the chain. It swings back and forth for a few seconds, like the arm on a metronome, before it comes to a standstill.

  ‘There’s something written on the back,’ I say excitedly.

  I read the inscription aloud.

  Twenty-one years together

  Never really apart.

  Never really apart? The phrase scratches across my mind as if it’s being engraved into my brain just as it is on the locket. I feel heat in my cheeks and my chest tightens as a familiar wave of anger washes over me. Never really apart? Except that we are apart. Adam is dead and I’m here; that’s about as apart as it gets. I curl my fingers tightly around the locket until I feel the trinket dig into the fleshy part of my palm. I close my eyes for a moment and take a deep breath. Counting backwards from five, the urge to toss the locket across the road passes.

  ‘Susan?’ Jenny calls, and I open my eyes. ‘You okay? I didn’t mean to upset you. I know this is hard.’

  ‘It’s a very thoughtful gift,’ I say, calmer and more in control. ‘It’s beautiful. Thank you.’

  She shrugs. ‘It’s nothing, really.’

  ‘It’s something special. It must have been very expensive, you didn’t need to . . .’

  Jenny blushes and drags the front of her hood over her eyes, hiding. My rhapsodising is making her uncomfortable. But that’s what people do when they receive an unexpected gift, isn’t it? They gush. Even if that gift feels as if someone has pulled your heart clean out of your chest and stomped it into the floor. I stop talking, fold my arms and wait for Jenny to pull her hood back.

  A sudden gust of October wind finds its way past us and into my flat. I shiver.

  ‘C’mon in,’ I say, turning to walk inside where it’s warm.

  I smile when I hear the door close, followed by Jenny’s footsteps behind me. We’re sitting face-to-face on the couch before she finally takes the hood off her head. She crosses her legs and bobs her top foot at the ankle. The whole couch bounces as a result. Jenny can never sit still; it’s as if her body just won’t allow her any downtime.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I lie.

  ‘Really?’ She tilts her head. ‘Because I wasn’t okay on my mam’s first anniversary. I don’t believe for one second that you’re okay on your brother’s. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool. Tell me to piss off, shut up, whatever. But please don’t lie to me.’

  ‘Okay.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m not okay. Maybe I’ll never be okay again. But I still don’t want to talk about it. Now, will you help me fasten this chain, please?’ I open my hand and stare at the pretty locket again.

  ‘You don’t have to wear it,’ Jenny says. ‘If . . . if it’s too soon.’

  I want to ask her why she bought it if she thought it was too soon, but I don’t bother. She’ll just fidget or mumble or bounce around the room talking shite for twenty minutes, and I won’t get a comprehensive answer anyway. Besides, I know she didn’t mean to upset me and I should appreciate the gift. Jenny is kind.

  ‘Just put it on for me, Jenny, yeah?’ I try hard to smile and keep the emotional quiver out of my voice.

  ‘Sure,’ she says, twisting on the couch.

  I turn my back to her and slowly guide the silver chain around my neck.

  I can feel her hands shaking against my neck as she fiddles with the clasp. I forgot how difficult a task like this is for her. Her dexterity isn’t good, especially not with intricate things like fastening a delicate necklace. I once watched her struggle to get the battery back into her phone for half an hour before she finally let me do it for her. I wonder how long this is going to take.

  My neck begins to ache.

  ‘This is a tricky feckin’ thing,’ Jenny says. ‘Just there . . . almost . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, reaching up to place my hands over hers. ‘I can try it on another time.’

  ‘Just give me . . . two . . . more . . . seconds . . .’

  ‘Jenny, just leave it,’ I say, my neck actually hurting now.

  ‘Hang on, I nearly have it.’ She’s fooling herself but not me. ‘Anyway, I might as well keep trying while I tell you my news.’

  ‘Oh?’ I say, intrigued. ‘News? What news?’

  ‘Sit still,’ Jenny scolds. ‘I nearly had it and then you moved.’

  I didn’t budge. And Jenny didn’t nearly have it, but I play along. I want to know her news.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll keep still.’

  She tuts and tries again.

  ‘So, this news, then?’ I continue. ‘Sounds exciting, eh?’

  Jenny and I share news all the time. World news. Like what’s happening on CNN and what Sky is reporting. We chat about the latest TV shows and rant when our favourite characters get killed off unexpectedly. We have an insane number of text messages dedicated to our obsession with Desperate Housewives. But we never have any real news. Nothing personal or current. Because there’s never anything to tell.

  ‘I, erm.’ Jenny pauses, and I think I can hear her chewing on her lip as she concentrates on the clasp. ‘Got it,’ she announces, triumphant. ‘I got the little bugger.’

  I feel the weight of the locket dangle around my neck as Jenny lets go on her end, and my hands automatically reach for the silver heart to settle it between my collarbones.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, spinning back around to face her. ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Fabulous,’ she grins. ‘I knew it would suit you.’

  ‘I really do love it, Jenny,’ I lie. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ I take her twitching hands in mine and, as always, physical touch has a calming effect on her jitters.

  ‘So are you going to tell me your news, or keep me in suspense all night?’ I finally say.

  She pulls one of her hands free to scratch her ear. The effort is so vigorous she makes the skin on the tip of her ear turn red. I’m so used to Jenny’s oddities it takes me longer than it should to realise her agitation now is different. Something is really affecting her. She’s nervous. Whatever she’s about to tell me is huge. I swallow hard and prepare myself for bad news.

  ‘Jenny,’ I say cautiously, ‘is everything okay?’

  She clasps her hands together as if she’s rubbing invisible moisturiser into her skin. ‘I’ve started seeing someone,’ she mumbles.

  ‘No way,’ I squeak. ‘Who is he? Do I know him?’

  ‘Wow, Susan,’ she says, blushing. ‘Calm down. It’s nothing to get excited about. It’s early days.’

  ‘Oh c’mon.’ I pull up my legs and tuck them against my chest, infused with giddiness. ‘Don’t pull that “it’s early days” nonsense, this is the best news I’ve had in ages. Who is he? What’s his name? Do I know him? Oh my God . . . tell me everything. Everything.’

  ‘You do know him.’ Jenny lifts her shoulders to her ears and locks them there, embarrassed.

  ‘No way? Who, oh my God, who is it?’

  Jenny and I don�
�t have any mutual friends. And when we go out I rarely see her talking to anyone. I can’t think who it could possibly be. I immediately wonder if he’s imaginary.

  ‘Deacon,’ Jenny says, flashing her tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘O’Reilly?’ I jerk my head back. ‘Deacon O’Reilly. You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I know you don’t like him,’ Jenny says, lowering her shoulders. ‘But he’s a great guy. Honestly. He’s been through some tough shit. We connect.’

  ‘I never said I don’t like him. I just don’t know him, Jenny,’ I say. ‘A year of group sessions and he hasn’t said a word. No one knows him. It’s odd. He’s odd.’

  ‘We’ve talked,’ she says, the apples of her cheeks rounding with satisfaction. ‘I like him, I like him a lot. I think this might be the real deal.’

  I chew on a fingernail, a habit I’ve picked up in the last twelve months. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Really?’ Jenny smiles. ‘You’re okay with this?’

  ‘Sure.’ I shrug. ‘It’s not up to me who you go out with, is it? I just want you to be happy. Isn’t that what being friends is all about? Wanting each other to be happy.’

  ‘You’re really okay with this?’ she says, obviously suspecting I’m lying.

  ‘I said I am, didn’t I? Just be careful, okay,’ I say, tilting my head to one side. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘You don’t trust anyone,’ Jenny laughs.

  I don’t reply. She’s joking but her jab saddens me because she’s right.

  ‘So you just want me to be happy?’ she says, thankfully sidestepping how quiet I’ve suddenly become.

  ‘Oh God.’ I press my hands against my face. ‘What have I walked myself into?’

  ‘Try fancy dress?’ Jenny claps, way too excited. ‘Please? Dress up with me. Just because we’re a bunch of people who love dead people doesn’t mean we can’t have fun at our meetings. Halloween is all about the dead, after all. It’s like our national holiday.’

  ‘Your logic is so messed up,’ I say. ‘You do know that, right?’

  ‘You think?’ She gives me a guileless smile. ‘So, you’ll do it then? You’ll wear a costume?’

  ‘Fuck no,’ I snort. ‘But nice try.’

  ‘Please?’ she says, dragging out the e-sound as if she’s a humming bird stuck on a single note.

  ‘No, seriously, Jenny. I’m not in the mood,’ I say, losing patience. ‘Thank you for the lovely gift, but I really just want to forget it’s my birthday and forget it’s nearly Halloween.’

  ‘Why?’ She takes on a seriousness that isn’t like her. ‘Because you won’t let yourself ever have fun because of Adam? Because your brother died and you’re terrified to go on living?’

  ‘Jenny,’ I snap. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘Susan, I’m your best friend and all I know about Adam is his name, that you were twins and that he died on his twenty-first birthday. Why don’t you ever want to talk about him?’

  I look at Jenny with a mix of anger and sadness. Her desperation to feel needed is written all over her face. ‘Fine,’ I hiss. ‘What do you want to know about Adam? Ask. I won’t hold back.’

  ‘Everything, I want to know everything.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell you Adam’s story. I’ll tell you everything. And when I’m finished I have one question for you.’

  ‘But you know everything about me.’ Jenny shuffles on the couch. Her cape jars under her bum and pulls the neck so tight she baulks and has to stand up, adjust it and sit back down.

  ‘I didn’t say it was about you.’

  ‘Oooohhhh,’ she says with curious excitement. ‘Intriguing. Okay, Susan Arnold.’ She stretches her open hand towards me and it takes me a moment to realise that she wants to shake. I press my clammy palm against hers and we strike a deal. ‘You tell me what you’ve been bottling up for a year and I’ll answer any damn question you want,’ Jenny smiles.

  I let go of her hand and clasp my palm around my new silver locket. I take a deep breath, close my eyes and begin.

  Chapter Eleven

  THEN

  ‘I was napping on the couch when the call came in. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was playing in the background, and—’

  ‘Vampires?’ Jenny cuts in. ‘Really? You watched that crap?’

  ‘Jenny!’ I shake my head. ‘You asked me to open up about my dead brother, and vampires . . . vampires are what you want to talk about? Seriously?’

  ‘You’re right. Sorry, go on,’ Jenny says, twirling the string of her cape around her finger melodramatically. ‘I’m listening.’

  I close my eyes and smile, inwardly accepting that if I’m finally going to open up I’m glad it’s with Jenny.

  ‘It was our birthday,’ I begin. ‘The big Two-One. We’d been planning the party for ages. But when the big day finally rolled around the weather was shit. I mean a full-on storm. Trees blowing all over the place. Power lines down. Rivers bursting their banks. I thought about cancelling the party. But Adam was so cool about it. He was all like “It’s just a bit of rain, Sue . . . blah, blah, blah.” That was Adam all over. He was never afraid of anything.’

  ‘He sounds amazing,’ Jenny says, pulling her feet on to the couch to sit cross-legged. She slouches a little, places her elbows on her knees and lowers her head until it rests on top of her clasped hands. Her back arches like a comma and she looks uncomfortable, but she’s smiling and willing me on with her contagious enthusiasm.

  ‘He was,’ I sigh, remembering.

  ‘Tell me more,’ Jenny says. ‘Tell me it all.’

  ‘It was still raining when the call came,’ I continue. ‘But the thunder stopped as I put the receiver to my ear, as if the bloody weather was waiting with bated breath for the words my mother would whisper – the words that would change me profoundly.’

  ‘It was your mother who broke the news to you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I shudder, hearing my mother’s sobbing as clear in my head now as I did that day.

  ‘Is that why you’re not close to her?’ Jenny asks. ‘Because you blame her for breaking the news to you?’

  What kind of a fucking question is that? I think, tempted to reach across the couch and slap some sense into Jenny.

  ‘No. God, no,’ I say, calm instead. ‘That’s not it at all. I guess we just both miss him and we don’t know how to deal with it. It was always the three of us. The three amigos. And without Adam,’ I exhale roughly, ‘without Adam it’s different. It’s broken.’

  ‘Right, fuck this,’ Jenny says, hopping up off the couch as if the cushion under her has suddenly caught fire. ‘I need a drink. Do you have anything to drink in this place? You need one too, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s some beer in the fridge,’ I say. ‘It’s been open for a couple of days though. It probably tastes awful.’

  ‘It’ll do.’ She hurries away.

  I should have known not to talk about my mother in front of Jenny. I know how much she misses her own mother. She says that after being tossed out of foster care after just a year, my hot–cold relationship with my mother is a walk in the park compared to the crap she went through. Of course that pisses me off, but I let it slide because our mothers are not something either of us want to talk about. Jenny didn’t take it well when I admitted that my mother was, in fact, alive, just dead inside, and I haven’t mentioned Mam again since. Not until now.

  I can hear Jenny pottering about in the kitchenette and if I look up from staring at the carpet I’ll catch her movements out of the corner of my eye. But I don’t want to look up. I’m staring at a cigarette burn I made in the carpet less than a week after we moved in. Adam lectured me for another week about my reckless, teenage behaviour. We were eighteen. We were kids, really, but Adam had such a sensible head on his shoulders. Always. It makes me wonder what the future would have held for him. I bet it would have been amazing. But it wasn’t to be. Twenty-one years to the day was all the time Adam Arnold was granted in this life. But the bastard wh
o ran him over is still out there, living his life. It’s so unfair.

  I close my eyes and listen to the noise Jenny is creating in the kitchenette. It’s nice to have background noise, for a change, as my mind wanders towards thoughts of the day I lost my brother. Was it ironic that the rain pelted against the windows of our flat like teardrops as I listened to my mother cry over the phone?

  ‘There’s been an accident. A terrible accident,’ she’d said. ‘It’s Adam.’

  The days that followed are still a blur. Even now when I close my eyes and concentrate I only have snippets of memories from Adam’s funeral. I remember the black dress I wore. The same one I’d chosen to wear to our birthday party. It was the perfect little black dress and I’d been excited to show him. I never should have had to wear it to his funeral instead. I remember the violin solo that my cousin played as they lowered Adam’s coffin into the hole in the chalky, brown earth. Her hands shook so badly I thought she would drop her violin into the open grave after Adam. I remember countless people shaking my hand and telling me they were sorry for my loss, as if my brother was my favourite teacup that I’d dropped and shattered, or a treasured hat that had blown off my head on a windy day. But Adam wasn’t lost. He was stolen. A drunk driver snatched my brother from this world with his selfishness and irresponsibility.

  Jenny comes back from the kitchen with a bottle of beer in her hand.

  ‘Does the Grim Reaper drink?’ I joke, choking back tears as I look up at my best friend’s ridiculously distasteful costume.

  ‘If you had his job, wouldn’t you?’ Jenny presses the bottle to her lips and gulps down the last couple of mouthfuls.

  ‘Yeah. S’pose,’ I say. ‘Wonder if it pays well.’

  She laughs. ‘I’d say he’s been dying for a promotion for years.’

  I shake my head and grin. ‘That was a terrible joke.’

  ‘I tried,’ she says with a shrug. ‘Right.’ She drops the bottle into the bin next to the coffee table. ‘You’ve no more booze. And I need a drink before tonight’s meeting. If we go now we’ll make it to the pub for a quick pint before the meeting starts.’