12
“Can we maybe . . .” she says. “Maybe just not today?”
13
“Ah, come on,” he replies.
14
“No,” she says. “I’m being serious. Can you just . . .”
15
“But you said,” he says. “You said today. And what? You’ve changed
16
your mind?”
17
“Next time,” she says. “I promise. But my parents. They’ll be back
18
any minute.”
19
“You’re doing it with someone else, aren’t you?” he says, unprovoked.
20
“I’m not,” she replies. “I promise, I’m not.”
21
“You’re a fucking slut, that’s what you are.”
22
“I’m not! I promise I’m not,” she says. “There’s no one else. I promise.”
23
“You know that if I wanted to, I could, right? You know that, yeah?”
24
“Please, Tom. Let’s not— ”
25
“I can do whatever I want. You know that.”
26
“Stop it,” she says. “Come on, now. Don’t threaten me.”
27
“You think that’s a threat? It’s a fucking promise.”
28
She starts to cry.
29
“My parents are away next weekend,” he says, and he stands up—
30
the creak of the mattress— and he opens the door— the bristle of the
S31
weight of the wood on the carpet— and then he leaves.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
I stopped recording but I stayed crouched inside the wardrobe.
02
Marnie went to the bathroom a few minutes later and I crept back
03
out of the window and down the trellis. I sent the recording to his
04
rugby coach with an accompanying email from an anonymous address
05
and Thomas was quietly dismissed from the team. He sent some abu-
06
sive messages to Marnie but we read them together and she never saw
07
him again after that. She invited me to take some self- defense classes
08
with her, some sort of martial arts medley, and it was— it still is—
09
rewarding to know that my actions have made us stronger, tougher, less
10
vulnerable.
11
I think that she knew it was me who recorded him and sent that
12
email. But she never said anything. And I think that if she thought I’d
13
overstepped, she would have done. Still, in the months that followed
14
she would occasionally turn to me, as though about to speak, and then
15
change her mind and close her mouth.
16
Now, I suppose, I hope that she knew. I hope that, in that moment,
17
she realized that our roots were so tightly locked together— the thicker, 18
barkier skin so eroded at the tightest junctures, flesh on flesh— that we 19
were entirely inseparable. I hope that she knew that we were both all
20
in, at all costs, for always and forever.
21
22
23
The wedding was due to take place eight months after Charles’s pro-24
posal, on the first Saturday in August. I had wondered if their engage-
25
ment would change things, but thankfully the steady rhythm of our
26
everyday seemed unaffected. The intervening months passed without
27
issue. Marnie and I still talked to each other regularly, sometimes sev-
28
eral times a week. We still had dinner together every Friday evening
29
and while, admittedly, our conversations often turned to floral arrange-
30
ments, I had expected far worse. And so I had been relieved to discover
31S
that we were still very much the same people we had always been.
32N
At the beginning of her last unmarried weekend, on that Friday
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S E V E N L I E S
6 7
evening, Marnie and I were sitting together on the floor of her flat,
01
stringing silver name tags to small boxes of sugared almonds. The many
02
lists of things to do had dwindled over the previous weeks until there
03
were just these few final details, the last of the legwork that needed
04
completing.
05
“When’s Charles’s mother arriving?” I asked. “Is she staying here?” It
06
was a struggle to negotiate the thin silver thread through the small
07
paper hole, and that kind of meticulous, detailed work had never been
08
my strength.
09
“Eileen?” said Marnie. “Oh. I don’t know. I don’t think so. But
10
then . . . I don’t know where else she’d be staying. Hang on.” She went
11
into the kitchen and returned with her laptop. She sat down on the sofa
12
and lifted the screen. “I don’t know,” she said again. “I hope she isn’t
13
staying here. I’d have to make up the bed and everything.”
14
“I can help you,” I said. And then we moved on to the menus, all of
15
which needed hole punching at the top and ribbon looping through the
16
punctures to be tied in a bow.
17
Charles arrived home an hour or so later. It must have been nearly
18
nine o’clock. We knew that he was in a foul mood from the slam of the
19
door behind him, the crack of his briefcase on the wooden floor, the
20
grunt as he hung his jacket over the banister.
21
“I’ll check on him,” whispered Marnie.
22
I heard her voice in the hallway, a soft buoyant murmuring, with its
23
own tune, almost a song. And his replies, short and sharp and snapped.
24
And initially it was just the unpacking of a day, the unraveling of a rage, 25
but then her voice began to shift, too, undulating, and instead of her
26
calming him, he was riling her.
27
“I’ve literally just walked through the door,” he said, and his voice
28
was loud now, carrying in that way that a proud man’s can. “And you’re
29
asking me about wedding things. And I don’t have a clue, Marnie. I
30
couldn’t tell you anything about anything to do with the wedding.”
S31
“I asked about your mother,” she said. “She’s your mother.”
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
“It’s in hand.”
02
“She’s on the table plan.”
03
“Well, why is she on the table plan?” he replied.
04
“Because she’s your mother,” insisted Marnie. And then quieter,
05
kinder: “Isn’t she coming? We haven’t seen her in ages and— ”
06
“I’m going to have a shower,” he said, and he marched up the stairs
07
and she groaned and walked into the kitchen.
08
I heard the tap running and the clicking of the hob and her speaking
09
into the camera, melodic again. I continued cutting, threading, tying
10
ribbon, and piling the finished menus into boxes.
11
Charles came into the living room a few minutes later, wearing jeans
12
now, his hair damp, and he slumped onto the sofa beside me. He was so
13
big, so tall, over six foot and with broad shoulders and the sort of phy-
14
sique that men hone simply because they want to seem strong.
15
“You didn’t invite her,” I said as I measured lengths of ribbon be-
16
tween my fingers.
17
“What?” he said.
18
“You’re lying,” I said. “You didn’t invite her.”
19
I don’t think he wanted to confide in me— if he’d had a choice he’d
20
have chosen not to— but his pause revealed the truth. “I don’t want her
21
there, okay?” he said.
22
“I get it,” I said, and I did. “I didn’t invite my parents to my wedding.”
23
“Exactly,” he said.
24
And I think that he misunderstood, that he thought that our par-
25
ents were the same, that we were the same and we weren’t at all.
26
“Because she’s sick,” he continued. “And I don’t know that I can deal
27
with that on my wedding day, you know. If she’s there, it becomes all
28
about her. You wouldn’t believe it, the way people are around sickness.
29
I’m out with her and they want to talk, all of them, about her bloody
30
wig and her ongoing nausea and about diets that eradicate cancer. It’s
31S
absurd. I think she likes it: the attention. I think it gives her a purpose, 32N
gives the sickness a purpose. Anyway, it’s much easier to not invite her.”
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S E V E N L I E S
6 9
“But she’s your mother,” I replied.
01
“What?” He had already pulled his phone from his pocket and was
02
distracted by someone different somewhere else.
03
“You can’t not invite her because she’s sick,” I said. “Does she know
04
that it’s happening?”
05
“Maybe,” he said, and he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. “I guess my
06
sister might have said something at some point.”
07
“But isn’t she devastated?”
08
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t asked. We aren’t close.”
09
“It’s cruel,” I said.
10
He put his phone down on the side table and ran his fingers through
11
his wet hair. “I don’t think you have any right to say that,” he said, and 12
then wiped his hand dry on a cushion. “When you didn’t invite your
13
parents either. And it’s my wedding, so it’s my decision. And I don’t like 14
sick people.”
15
“You don’t like what?” said Marnie, catching only the very end of his
16
sentence as she entered the room with blue and white ceramic plates
17
and silver cutlery piled in her arms. She lowered them onto the table.
18
“I haven’t invited my mother,” he said.
19
“Because she’s sick,” I said.
20
“What?” asked Marnie, as she arranged first the knives and then the
21
forks. “Because she’s sick? Surely that’s a reason to invite her?”
22
“Exactly,” I said.
23
“No,” he said. He wasn’t angry, not like he’d been before, not like in
24
the hallway, but he was firm and determined. “It’s my choice,” he said.
25
“And I don’t want her there. I don’t like sick people.”
26
“What if I get sick?” asked Marnie as she placed the plates in their
27
positions on the table.
28
“That’ll be different,” he said.
29
She looked at me and she raised an eyebrow and a conversation
30
passed unsaid between us, one that acknowledged that it really wasn’t
S31
that different at all. And yet, while I was horrified by the sentiment, I N32
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
think Marnie was mostly frustrated. The table plan would need re-
02
drafting.
03
“As long as that’s true, then I’m just going to pretend that this
04
conversation never happened,” she said nonchalantly. “I think that’s
05
probably the best thing.” And then she went back into the kitchen and
06
Charles turned on the television and I finished the menus and then we
07
sat down for dinner as though it genuinely hadn’t happened.
08
But it stayed with me, this strange exchange. Because it confirmed
09
that he wasn’t good enough for Marnie and that he never would be,
10
never could be. I had a concrete moment that I could return to in which
11
he had vociferously reassured me that he wasn’t right for the woman he
12
was about to marry.
13
I felt smug.
14
Is that bad?
15
Because it was confirmation that he really was detestable, that my
16
hatred wasn’t unfounded or undeserved but justifiable and fair. And
17
more than that, because it proved something that I hadn’t felt confident
18
articulating before then: that I really was better than him. I took care
19
of those who needed me: I understood that it was part of the contract
20
of love, of duty, of family.
21
I could see then that he wasn’t all in— not at all costs; not at all.
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31S
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01
02
03
04
Chapter Nine
05
k
06
07
08
09
10
T
11
he day eventually arrived, the first Saturday in August, and de-
12
spite an unpromising forecast, the weather was unexpectedly
13
warm, the sky unexpectedly bright. There were hundreds of guests,
14
from every avenue of their lives— school, university, work— and some
15
they had never before met: partners of cousins, friends of their parents, 16
and new infants squalling and then giggling, seemingly without reason.
17
Guests had traveled to Windsor from all over the world: Charles’s sister
18
and her husband arrived from New York early that morning, his aunt
19
and uncle interrupted their yearlong sabbatical to join us from South
20
Africa, and Marnie’s brother, Eric, jetted back from his high- flying job 21
in New Zealand to be there for the celebrations.
22
You will think that I am lying when I say this, but I promised you the
23
whole truth and this is that: it really was one of the best days of my life.
24
Marnie and I spent the morning together at her parents’ house and we
25
ate toast layered with jam in our pajamas and she had a bath and I sat on 26
the floor beside her and stretched out across the tiles and we talked
27
about how we met in that long, thin queue and the various strings that
28
had been pulled and released and that had led to that very moment.
29
I watched her marry a man whom I hated but whom she loved and
30
it wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be. I watched her exclusively—
S31
absorbed in the way her red hair was curled into a bun at the back of
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
her head; the diamond necklace; the full white skirt; the long lace
02
veil— and I enjoyed her joy. I felt so proud to be part of such an impor-
03
tant moment in her life. I ate too much and I drank too much and I
04
danced until my feet were blistered and sore, and yet I felt wonderful.
05
His speech was quite charming, really. I’d expected it to be
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 10