01
against the cool porcelain of a toilet seat.
02
You see, no one expects their lives to pan out as ours were. I was
03
widowed and in a dead- end job and never far from misery. Marnie
04
was widowed and pregnant and in the midst of a great fall from a
05
charmed life.
06
“I need to move home,” Marnie said the following evening. “I need
07
to sort my life out. I need to see a doctor and start working again and I 08
need to move home.”
09
She called her cleaner right there at the table. She wanted the place
10
spotless, she said. And she wanted Charles’s stuff boxed up and put into
11
storage— his toothbrush, his clothes, anything that was obviously his.
12
We visited the flat a couple of days later. We were both shocked to
13
find that the cleaner had left a thick white rug with black detailing
14
stretched across the floor of the hallway. I wondered what lay beneath—
15
a dark bloodstain, or scratches on the varnished flooring, or just the
16
scent of death— but I resisted the urge to lift the edge and peer under-
17
neath. Some of Charles’s things were gone— his coat from the back of
18
the door and his shoes, which had been lined up neatly along the wall—
19
but he was still everywhere. He was in the books on the shelves and the
20
prints on the walls and his tall black umbrella still propped beside hers 21
in the hallway.
22
“Are you sure?” I said, trying to catch up with Marnie as she flitted
23
between the rooms.
24
She frowned and then began to climb the stairs.
25
“That you want to live here,” I said. “Are you sure? We could find
26
you somewhere— ”
27
“No,” she said, standing on the top step and turning to face me. “It
28
should be here. It’s right that it’s here. I want this little one”— and she 29
held her hand to her stomach— “to know at least a little of their father.
30
And this was once our home. It makes sense. It has to be here.”
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
She looked past me. “This is the spot,” she said. “Probably right here,
02
where my feet are standing now. This is where he took his last breath.
03
That’s something his child should know, don’t you think?”
04
What do you think? Is it something you’d want to know? I know I’d
05
be devastated if I received a call informing me that my father had died.
06
Not because I would miss the man he is today: a cheat and a deserter.
07
But because I would miss the man that he once was.
08
For my first decade, he was constant and unwavering and honest and
09
true. He was always there and always encouraging and, despite every-
10
thing that happened when he stopped being a good father, he was never
11
selfish before that. Instead, he was broken and flawed and determined
12
that he wouldn’t be defined by the very worst parts of who he was. And
13
then something changed. Those difficulties that had bubbled beneath
14
his skin for decades— the impatience and the uncertainty and the
15
volatility— started to seep through his pores.
16
Will I want to visit the place where he dies? I don’t think so. For me,
17
he died at the front door, suitcase in hand, smiling as he left us behind.
18
“Maybe a fresh start— ” I began.
19
“I want to be back in by Christmas,” Marnie said.
20
“That’s only a few weeks— ”
21
“I’m going to host it,” she said. “I’m going to decorate and cook— I’ll
22
need a tree and a turkey— and I’m going to make it count.”
23
“This is a lot,” I said. “Marnie, it’s a lot for me to take in and it’s a lot 24
for you to take on.”
25
“I’ve decided,” she said. “And you’re coming. And so is Emma. I’m
26
going to make this happen.”
27
“We’ll be with— ”
28
“Your mum. Yes, that makes sense. That’s the morning, isn’t it?
29
Well, after that, then.”
30
“ I— ”
31S
“This isn’t optional,” she said, her face suddenly stiff and her eyes
32N
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S E V E N L I E S
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wide. “I’m inviting you to join me for Christmas. Whether you accept
01
that invitation or not is your decision. But I am going to be living here 02
by then and I am going to do this.”
03
Marnie and I have very few shared traits. She is open and warm and
04
loving and unafraid. I am closed and cold and angry and fearful. She is
05
light and I am dark. But we are both notoriously stubborn. I know with-
06
out doubt that on some things she cannot be moved; she cannot be
07
bought or bribed or won.
08
“Then, yes,” I said. “I’d love to come.”
09
“And will you help me move back in?”
10
“Of course.”
11
“Right, then. Let’s get started. I want to measure up for a new bed.”
12
13
14
So that was what we did. We wrote down the measurements for a new
15
bed because, although she could sleep in her dead husband’s flat, she
16
couldn’t possibly imagine sleeping in his bed. She ordered a replace-
17
ment that afternoon. A small double— “it’ll only be for me,” she said—
18
with a blush pink button- backed headboard— “he’d never have gone for
19
pink”— and storage underneath— “for muslins and nappies and all the
20
other things that babies seem to need.”
21
She moved back in two weeks later, the day the bed arrived, and I
22
tried to be pragmatic but I felt like something was being taken from me
23
all over again. I packed up her suitcases and the kitchenware that had
24
overtaken my cupboards and boxed up her shoes from behind the front
&n
bsp; 25
door. We piled everything into a taxi early in the morning, bags at our
26
feet and on our laps, and then she proceeded to leave me.
27
I’m being dramatic, I know. I felt sad that she was going but I could
28
rationalize my grief because I was also pleased to see her so focused and 29
satisfied. I had enjoyed nursing her and caring for her and being her
30
strength, but it’s not a sustainable way to live.
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20 6
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
The world is full of vulnerable people. They lean on others, relying
02
always on that additional support, that additional strength. Emma, for
03
example, is incredibly vulnerable. But Marnie is not. She’d started
04
working again a few days earlier— turning on her phone and uploading
05
her videos and sharing updates and engaging with the world she had
06
built around her. She seemed stronger, somehow, with that platform
07
beneath her.
08
“You can go now,” she said, after we’d carried everything into the
09
lobby and carted it up to the flat, load by load in the lift. “I think I have 10
it from here.”
11
“But the unpacking,” I said. “Don’t you want some help with that?”
12
“No, thanks,” she said. She was standing in the doorway— her
13
doorway— with her hand against the frame and her feet squarely on the
14
wooden floor and I was in the hallway, on the other side of the entrance.
15
“I’m good now,” she continued. “But thanks.”
16
“ But— ”
17
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, and then she closed the door.
18
I felt sort of angry and sort of proud.
19
And sort of embarrassed, too. I looked left and right, but there was
20
no one else, no one there who had witnessed my eviction. I stared at the
21
spot where I’d sat nearly three months earlier. That felt like another
22
person, another time, another world. And then I went home.
23
Here’s the thing. Marnie had a family— as we all have families— but
24
it had never felt much like a family to me. As a child, I believed that a 25
family was unshakable, unbreakable, something fixed and immovable.
26
I had a sister, and she would always be my sister, and parents, who
27
would always be my parents. It wasn’t until much later— when my fa-
28
ther left and my mother disowned me— that I realized I’d been wrong.
29
It wasn’t fixed at all. But it had been throughout my formative years. I
30
didn’t realize that I’d need to build my own unit until much, much
31S
later. I didn’t realize that I’d need to become someone who others
32N
wanted to love.
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20 7
But it was a lesson that Marnie learned at a far younger age. Her
01
family had come in waves— sometimes in, sometimes out— and was
02
entirely unpredictable. She wanted this family— her new family— to be
03
different. She had the power to craft this thread of the web, to build
04
this unit as she wanted, and this was what she wanted.
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
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01
02
03
04
05
Chapter Twenty- Seven
06
07
k
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
I have always loved autumn. I like that sense of something ending but
not quite over. I like open fires and curtains drawn and thick woolen
jumpers and boots that encase your feet and cushion your toes. I like
15
winds that nip and clouds that soften the sky and that feeling of step-
16
ping out of the cold and into the warmth. The summer is too much, too
17
full of expectation, with so much pressure to be joyful and buoyant and
18
bright. And the winter is too dark, even for me.
19
But December has always been a strange month in this city, an
20
anomaly that doesn’t quite follow the pattern of the calendar. For that
21
month only, the fabric of the place feels different. There is something
22
unusual in the appearance, the atmosphere, the people who filter
23
through as the darkest days approach.
24
Some of the changes happen slowly, over the course of several
25
weeks. Strings of lights are hung between buildings, sparkling against
26
the black of a night that draws in earlier each evening. Shop windows
27
are overhauled, decorated in festive tones with ornaments and pine
28
trees and sleighs and snow. There are fewer people on the streets. As
29
the last weeks of the month draw nearer, the workers— who spend the
30
entire year on the trains and pacing the streets and flowing in and out
31S
of rotating office doors, people like me— tack annual leave onto the
32N
bank holidays and stay curled on their sofas instead. The tourists—
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20 9
wearing red hats with white bobbles and carrying shopping bags and
01
cameras and children strapped to their chests— are present in their
02
droves, filtering in and out of toy shops and ice skating on makeshift
03
rinks in otherwise underexploited venues and standing on the wrong
04
side of the escalator. But, even then, there are not enough of them to
05
balance the absences, to counteract a city half emptied,
its occupants
06
stationed instead in their homes.
07
Other changes are almost instantaneous— suddenly we are smiling
08
at our fellow commuters, and then we are making polite conversation
09
with our colleagues in the kitchen, about their plans for the break, who
10
will be cooking, and gosh, that’s an awful lot of children for two whole
11
days and aren’t you all outnumbered. And then, almost without notic-
12
ing, we are suddenly wishing a merry Christmas to everyone we pass—
13
the man at reception who always seems so curmudgeonly but is now
14
wearing a festive light- up pin on his suit jacket, the director in the lift 15
grinning in a rather unnerving way, the barista at the café where you
16
buy your morning coffee, the garbagemen, the cleaner, the woman who
17
washes up mugs in the kitchen sink. The structure of the city shifts and
18
suddenly we are all better people than we were before: kinder, happier,
19
optimistic— the very best versions of ourselves.
20
We do not register the colleague who has no partner anymore,
21
whose children will be elsewhere, whose parents are long dead. We still
22
ignore the homeless woman sitting at the side of the road, her worn
23
sleeping bag beneath her, a blanket draped over her shoulders and the
24
cold seeping into the whites of her eyes. We cannot bring ourselves to
25
acknowledge the sadness that still exists in among this festive joy.
26
At that time in my life, I could be both. I could bring the sadness
27
and the joy. I had a best friend who was hosting lunch and a beautiful
28
sister, but an absent father and a dead husband and a mother plagued by
29
dementia.
30
I suppose this year I will bring little joy; only sadness. I can’t shake
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it, you know. It has been getting worse. It is still getting worse.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
I suppose, now that I think about it, that was my last joyful year. I
02
called Emma just after midnight on Christmas Eve. We had agreed to
03
visit my mother first thing in the morning the following day. We hadn’t
04
admitted it aloud, but I knew that we both wanted to go in as early as
05
possible, so that it was done and so that we didn’t need to think about
06
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 29