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curve of her left arm. A small bead of pink juice from a raspberry still
01
sitting in one of the dishes bled into the white of her shirt. I picked up 02
the now empty fruit bowl— she’d made it herself at a pottery class
03
a few years earlier— and the jug of cream and followed her into the
04
kitchen at the back of the flat.
05
This flat— their flat— was testament to their relationship. Charles
06
had paid the hefty deposit, as Charles paid for most things, but at Mar-
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nie’s insistence. She had known instantly that the flat was meant for
08
them, and it won’t surprise you to know that persuasion has always
09
come very naturally to Marnie.
10
When they moved in, it was little more than a hovel: small, dark,
11
filthy, damp, spread over two floors and desperately unloved. But Mar-
12
nie has always been a visionary; she sees things where others cannot.
13
She finds hope in the darkest of places— laughably, in me— and trusts
14
herself to deliver something exceptional. I have always envied that self-15
confidence. It comes, for Marnie, from a place of stubbornness. She has
16
no fear of failure, not because she has never failed, but because failure 17
has only ever been a detour, a small diversion, on a journey that has
18
ultimately led to success.
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She worked tirelessly— evenings, weekends, using all of her annual
20
leave— to build something beautiful. With her small hands, she tore
21
wallpaper, sanded doors, painted cupboards, smoothed carpet, laid floor-
22
boards, sewed blinds: everything. Until these rooms emitted the same
23
warmth that she does; a quiet confidence, a recognizable yet indefinable
24
sense of home.
25
Marnie loaded the bowls into the dishwasher, leaving a space be-
26
tween each.
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“They clean better this way,” she said.
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“I know,” I replied, because she said the same thing every week,
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because I made the same noise— a tiny grunt— every week, because it
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seemed such a waste of water to me.
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“Things are going well with Charles,” she said.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
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A prickle climbed my spine, pulling me straight, forcing air into my
02
lungs.
03
We had only talked about their relationship once before then and it
04
had been a conversation fraught with the long, twisted history of a very
05
old friendship. Ever since, we had spoken only in practical terms: their
06
plans for the weekend; the house they might someday buy far beyond
07
the outer limits of London; his mother riddled with cancer, living in
08
Scotland and dying a very slow, painful, lonely death.
09
We had not, for example, discussed the fact that they had been to-
10
gether for three years and that several months earlier I had found
11
unexpectedly— and I know I shouldn’t have been looking— a diamond
12
engagement ring hidden in the depths of Charles’s bedside table. Nor
13
had we discussed the fact that, even without that ring, they were ca-
14
reering toward a permanent commitment that would bind them eter-
15
nally, in a way that— even after almost twenty years— Marnie and I had
16
never been bound.
17
We had not discussed the fact that I hated him.
18
“Yes,” I replied, because I was afraid that a full sentence, perhaps
19
even a two- syllable word, would send our friendship hurtling into chaos.
20
“Don’t you think?” she said. “Don’t you think that things are look-
21
ing good for us?”
22
I nodded and poured the remaining cream from the jug back into its
23
plastic supermarket container.
24
“You think we’re right for each other, don’t you?” she asked.
25
I opened the fridge door and hid behind it, slowly— very slowly—
26
returning the cream to the top shelf.
27
“Jane?” she asked.
28
“Yes,” I replied. “I do.”
29
That was the first lie I told Marnie.
30
I wonder now— most days, in fact— if I hadn’t told that first lie,
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would I have told the others? I like to tell myself that the first lie was 32N
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honest that Friday evening, everything might have been— would have
01
been— different.
02
I want you to know this now. I thought I was doing the right thing.
03
Old friendships are like knotted rope, worn in some parts and thick and
04
bulbous in others. I feared that this thread of our love was too thin, too 05
frayed, to bear the weight of my truth. Because surely the truth— that
06
I had never hated anyone the way I hated him— would have destroyed
07
our friendship.
08
If I had been honest— if I had sacrificed our love for theirs— then
09
Charles would almost certainly still be alive.
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11
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01
02
03
04
05
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07
08
09
The
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Second Lie
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01
02
03
04
Chapter Two
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k
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07
08
09
10
T
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his, then, is my truth. I don’t mean to sound so dramatic, but I
12
think you deserve to know this story. I guess I think that you
13
need to know this story. It is as much yours as it is mine.
14
Charles is dead, yes, but that was never my intention. In truth, it
15
never occurred to me that he would ever be anything other than pain-
16
fully, permanently present. He was one of those overwhelming, domi-
17
nant people: the loudest voice, the grandest gestures, taller and broader 18
and stronger and better than anyone else in any room. You might have
19
said that he was larger than life, which now, of course, feels rather
20
ironic. That said, the simple fact of his being seemed evidence enough
21
that he would always be.
22
23
24
For the first years of my life— and, I suppose, this is true for the first 25
years of most lives— my family formed a framework. The big choices,
26
those that defined my everyday— where I lived, who I spent time with,
27
even what I called myself— were not mine at all. My parents were the
28
puppeteers dictating the shape of my life.
29
Eventually, I was expected to make my own choices: what to play
30
and with whom and where and when. My family had been everything,
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
the only thing, until they became but the foundations from which I
02
built an identity of my own. It was refreshing to discover that I was, in 03
fact, my own entity and yet it was a little overwhelming, too.
04
But I was lucky. I found a companion.
05
Marnie and I soon became inseparable. We looked nothing alike and
06
yet our teachers regularly called us by the other’s name. Because we
07
were never one without the other. We sat side by side in every lesson
08
and walked between classrooms together and traveled home on the
09
same bus at the end of the day.
10
I hope that one day you experience a similar friendship. You can tie
11
yourself into a teenage love in a way that feels eternal, bonded by new
12
experiences and a newfound sense of freedom. There is something so
13
enchanting about a first best friend at twelve. It is intoxicating to be so 14
needed, to crave someone so acutely, and that feeling of being so com-
15
pletely entwined. But these early bonds are unsustainable. And some-
16
day you will choose to extricate yourself from this friendship in the
17
pursuit, instead, of lovers. You will extract yourself limb by limb, bone 18
by bone, memory from memory, until you can exist independently,
19
until you are again one person where once you were two.
20
We were still two, Marnie and me, when— after university— we
21
moved into the flat in Vauxhall. It was modern, in a new build erected
22
less than a decade earlier, surrounded by other similar buildings with
23
other similar flats, all off corridors with blue carpet and behind identi-24
cal pine doors. It had plastic wood- effect flooring, sleek white kitchen 25
units, and soulless magnolia walls. There were spotlights in every
26
room— the bedrooms, too— and peach tiles on the bathroom floor. It
27
felt cold somehow, wintry, and yet it was always too warm. But it was
28
our haven from the fiercely bright lights and the never- ending noise of 29
a cosmopolitan city in which neither of us, at that time, felt entirely
30
comfortable.
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Things were different then. We discussed our diaries over cereal
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and delegated responsibilities for the day: a new bottle of shampoo, bat-
01
teries for the remote, something for dinner. We walked side by side to
02
the tube station. We boarded the same carriage. It would have made
03
sense for me to board at the other end, so that my exit was in front of
04
me when I disembarked, but our lives were so intricately woven that
05
traveling separately would have seemed ludicrous.
06
We rushed home from work to cement the gaps that had opened
07
over the course of a single day. We boiled the kettle and turned on the
08
oven and laughed at ridiculous colleagues and sobbed over terrible
09
meetings. We were intimate, cohabiting in a way that bonded us: shared
10
pints of milk in the fridge, shoes in a pile behind the front door, books 11
mingled on shelves, framed photographs perching on windowsills. We
12
were so thoroughly embedded in each other’s lives that a crack, how-
13
ever small, seemed impossible.
14
We had little money and little time and yet every few weeks we
15
ventured out to a new corner of this new world, to visit a restaurant or
16
a bar and to explore a new part of this new city. Marnie was freelancing
17
alongside her job and was always looking for something to write about.
18
She dreamed about being the first to recognize a restaurant that was
19
later granted a Michelin star. She had worked in the marketing team for
20
a chain of pubs since graduating but, just a few months in, had decided
21
that she wanted to do something more creative, more rewarding, more
22
intimate, too. She had started writing a blog about food: collating infor-23
mation and restaurant reviews and eventu
ally writing her own recipes
24
as well.
25
That was the beginning of it, the most exciting part probably. Soon,
26
her audience began to expand rapidly. At the request of her online fol-
27
lowers, she started recording her own cookery videos. She accepted
28
sponsorship from a high- end kitchenware company, who filled our flat
29
with cast- iron pans and pastel ramekins and more utensils than two
30
people could ever possibly need. She was offered a regular column in a
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
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newspaper. But at first it was just us, flicking through the free maga-
02
zines to find the latest new places to visit.
03
I think you can tell a lot about a relationship by the way two people
04
dine together in public. Marnie and I loved to watch as couples entered
05
hand in hand, groups of men in tailored suits grew louder and louder,
06
expanding to fill the available space, the illicit affair, the anniversary 07
meal, the very first date. We liked to read the room, to guess the pasts
08
and predict the futures of the other patrons, telling stories of their lives 09
that we hoped might be true.
10
If you had been one of those other customers, sitting at one of those
11
other tables, playing that same game and watching us instead, you
12
would have seen two young women, one tall and fair, one shrunken and
13
dark, entirely comfortable in each other’s company. I think you might
14
have known that we enjoyed a friendship with strong branches and
15
coiled roots. You would have seen Marnie— without thinking, without
16
asking, without needing to— reach over to take the tomatoes from my
17
plate. You might have seen me, in response, take the slithers of pickle
18
or slices of cucumber from hers.
19
But Marnie and I haven’t dined alone in three years, not since she
20
moved in with Charles. We are never so at ease now as we were back
21
then. Our worlds are no longer entwined. I am now an intermittent
22
guest in the story of her life. Our friendship is no longer its own in-
23
dependent thing, but a skin tag, a protrusion that subsists within an-
24
other love.
25
I did not think then— and I do not think now— that Marnie and
26
Charles had a love greater than ours. And yet I understood implicitly
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 2