The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  Sergeant Major Hates Eating Onions

  FACE

  All Cows Eat Grass

  Every Good Boy Deserves Fun

  Good Boys Deserve Fun Always

  Father Christmas Gave Dad An Electric Blanket

  My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets

  How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics

  Did Mary Ever Visit Brighton Beach?

  I’m saddled with Maya, who turns out to be more useful than I thought as she has Grade 7 piano and whizzes through the music-reading ones.

  “FACE and All Cows Eat Grass. You must have learned the recorder, right?” she says, sketching out a set of music staves.

  “I gave up,” I say. “I was terrible.”

  “In the treble clef – the higher notes – FACE gives you the names of the notes in the spaces between the lines. All Cows Eat Grass gives the notes between the lines on the bass clef – the lower notes.” She fills in the letter names. “Now for the notes on the lines: Every Good Boy Deserves Fun are the notes in the treble clef then Good Boys Deserve Fun Always are the notes in the bass clef. My music teacher taught me Good Boys Don’t Fool Around. There are loads of ruder versions.

  “Then Father Christmas Gave Dad An Electric Blanket is the order in which sharps are entered in the key signature like this. F sharp, C sharp etc.” She adds seven sharps to the lines of music. “Easy if you know how. I guess I have a better memory than I thought.”

  She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I was pretty surprised about you and Danny Boy,” she says.

  “There is no me and Danny Boy,” I say, picking up the sheet again. It’s none of her business. She is not my best buddy, whatever she likes to pretend. She is not Hanna. What she really means, she and her effortless beauty, is that Dan is out of my league.

  “Think about what makes a phrase memorable and what makes it work for you,” says Mr Desai, “as your homework will be to design some of your own to help with your revision in other subjects.”

  Everyone agrees My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets works best because it tells you what it’s about; the new phrase relates to the original meaning. I make an educated guess that Sergeant Major Hates Eating Onions lists the Great Lakes in the US, west-to-east, of Lake Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario.

  “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics is a code for pi in maths,” I say. “The number of letters in each word match the digits of pi.”

  “Say what?” says Maya.

  “The word ‘How’ has three letters, then ‘I’ has one, ‘want’ has four letters. It’s basically a substitution code so 3.1415926535979, etc.”

  The only one we don’t get is Did Mary Ever Visit Brighton Beach? – it turns out to be the order of hereditary titles, which I will never need again. If you were in a Jane Austen novel it could come in handy when selecting a husband. Apparently a Duke’s better than a Marquis, who beats an Earl, then a Viscount, Baron and lastly a Baronet.

  Maya’s thrilled when we’re the joint winners and get to split the chocolates.

  “Well spotted for the pi one. There are a few alternatives for this to give even more digits,” says Mr Desai. “And take a look at the number-rhyme system in the book which can help with learning long numbers.”

  “So it’s all a trick?” says Maya, already chewing a gooey chocolate.

  “I prefer to say technique,” says Mr Desai.

  “Though it’s odd that to remember one thing you have to remember something else as well,” says Maya.

  “I guess some things are easier to remember than others,” I say.

  “The memory men who appear on stage are full of these tricks, then?” says Maya.

  “It’s an illusion, like the magician who saws a lady in half,” says Keira.

  “So you don’t believe that some people have an innate ability, a power, Mr Desai?” asks Dan, glancing at me.

  “I do believe that. Some people have an amazing memory – maybe they use basic mnemonics as part of their natural brain function, without even being aware of it.” Mr Desai lingers at our table, peering at our notes again.

  If I were a paranoid person, which let’s face it, I am, I would wonder what this whole elaborate memory project is all about. I know memory is on the TOK syllabus – I’d been looking forward to hearing Ms Mac stutter her way through it – but I can’t shake the feeling that Mr Desai is testing us. Is he testing me?

  As soon as the bell goes I want to get out of there. I don’t want Mr Desai asking me any more questions, plus I don’t want Dan coming over and expecting me to behave in a certain way and Maya and Keira staring like it’s impossible anyone could be interested in me. I ignore the social niceties of waiting for the others and barge my way towards the door.

  “Hey!” says Dan, as my bag catches him on the arm. “Watch where you’re going.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m in a rush.”

  “To get away from me?”

  “No! I, er…”

  “It’s pretty shitty of you – ignoring me since Saturday. If I did that to a girl, you’d say I was a complete thoughtless jerk.” Dan’s face looks like a PSHE lesson: Guys have feelings too. This whole exchange is feeling like a low-budget educational video we’re shown to get the message.

  He’s right of course that I’ve behaved badly. But then I’m messed up. I’m a complete emotional wreck. Part of me wants to tell him this. Tell him that sometimes I’m tired of being me. I ran away from the Programme but it’s harder to run away from myself.

  “I don’t want any complications at the moment,” I say, which sounds lame, even as I’m saying it. The sort of cowardly line that I’d go nuts about if anyone said it to me. “I’ve got a lot on.”

  As I leave, he says under his breath: “What? Two pieces of homework and a secret swim session?”

  Stuff him. I’ve got enough to worry about and I do have a lot on. I stop at the Hanna shrine. It needs some major tidying after all the rain today. I tip out the jars of soggy tea lights and relight them. The laminated photo of her has seen better days. I should replace it. I can see Dr Harrison out of the corner of my eye. He’s watching me from his doorway. No doubt he’ll be writing it all down in his case notes. He’ll be working through the five stages of grief with me again, giving me another leaflet; as if I can’t remember the last one.

  If anything happened to me, would I get any of the attention Hanna’s had? There’d be no relatives dashing here with hankies. Would Barker even find out who I really am? I certainly wouldn’t want a commemorative hike in my honour or a mawkish church service. Maybe I should leave instructions. But who would care?

  I make my way to the office for a word with the administrator. She’s bashing away at the keyboard as though it’s offended her. I wait patiently until she’s ready to acknowledge me. In her own time she stops and looks over her glasses at me. “Do you want to see the Principal?”

  “Actually, I was hoping I could send a card to Ms Mac,” I say. “To wish her a speedy recovery. Should I give it to you?”

  “Ms Mac isn’t ill.”

  “But I thought that was why she wasn’t here and we had Mr Desai on supply,” I say, innocence personified.

  “No, no. A last-minute sabbatical.” She looks around, checking the door to Principal Barker’s office is still shut and lowers her voice. “She’s off on a Caribbean cruise. Funny sort of sabbatical. Not many opportunities for Theory of Knowledge doing the limbo with a rum punch in one hand. But there we are. Some of us have a proper job to do.”

  So Ms Mac isn’t ill. Then why was she taken off the timetable unexpectedly like that? So that Mr Desai could fulfil a burning ambition to teach us lot? At the same time as I start to get weird messages. They say that thirty-four per cent of paranoid delusionals have a legitimate basis for their paranoia. I’m beginning to think I’m in the thirty-four per cent.


  In fact, I know I am. Because when I walk into the college library I see Principles of Memory by Professor A.E. Coleman propped up on the New Books shelf. There’s a reservation slip poking out of the top: ‘Reserved for Jess Wilson’.

  13

  Patients exhibiting hyperthymesia have difficulty overcoming the mental strain of bad memories and constantly living in the past. The rest of us have an inbuilt survival mechanism: the ability to forget.

  Principles of Memory – Professor A.E. Coleman

  “You haven’t got a poster up for Hanna’s Hike,” says Maya. She pulls one out of her bag and reorganizes my noticeboard to make room for it. She’s tagged along back to my room after supper to show me the Hanna’s Hike T-shirt design, as if I care, and generally ruin my evening.

  “Only I’m going to see it in here, and I know about it, don’t I? I’m on the committee.” I slump into the chair and kick off my shoes.

  “Ah, but from what I hear, you might not be the only person in here at nights lately. Care to spill?” She looks expectantly at me, her eyebrows raised and a conspiratorial smile on her lips. “Well? The delectable Dan? Things are moving quickly. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Not again. Can Maya be any more annoying? Pretending to be concerned when she just wants the gossip. Now she’s in here, it’s going to be hard to get her out. I may have to play the Hanna-grief card. Again.

  “What’s this?” Maya takes something from my noticeboard. “Is it your phrase for Mr Desai?” It’s a postcard of Buckfast Abbey from the pack on sale at the post office. A new one. I can feel the thud, thud of my heart. The card has a line printed in familiar black handwriting:

  BODIES ESPECIALLY AFTER DEATH GO COLD, FREYA

  “Yuk! Couldn’t you come up with a less grisly mnemonic?” asks Maya. “It’s the order of flats in music, B flat, E flat, etc., right? I think the original one’s nicer. Blanket Explodes And Dad Gets Cold Feet.”

  My actual name. Calm down, it’s just a mnemonic. Like choosing Richard for red in the rainbow colours. Freya for the note F. Is it just a coincidence?

  Maya has moved on to picking up the books on my bedside table. “Blimey. This isn’t light reading, is it? Principles of Memory.”

  “It’s for biology,” I lie, taking it off her. “I’m doing an extended project on the brain.” Why’s she picking up that book? Did she plant the postcard herself? Is all this friendliness an act, and she’s reporting back to Coleman?

  Bodies Especially After Death Go Cold, Freya.

  I saw Hanna’s smashed-up brain and body. When it was still warm to the touch. Before it was cold. I know because I touched her hand. I held her hand. Until Barker prised me off after they’d checked her for vital signs. Harrison was flapping and he threw up at the sight of her. He’s got medical training for Christ’s sake. Or so he claims. The chaplain was more use. She kneeled beside me and was so calm. She held her cross with one hand and said, “Let God take her now, Jess.” Just like that. But God didn’t take her. The paramedics took her – the main bit of her. The blood and flesh and brain on the cobbles were photographed and looked at and eventually washed off with a pressure hose by the groundsman. As if he was cleaning off the decking by the Common Room. Tiny, microscopic elements of Hanna splashed against the walls of A-Block and all around the quad, swirling down the drains.

  “Jess?”

  I look at Maya. What was she saying? Order. Get your head in order.

  “So can I borrow it?” She’s holding up the bandana from the charity shop. “It’s so retro.”

  “Sure.” I don’t want it any more. It reminds me of old clothes and the dead people they belonged to and dancing round a stack of rails before I got back to reality.

  “What do you think?” Maya shows me a picture of a lime-green T-shirt with a hiking-boot design containing black lettering: ‘Hanna’s Hike. Walking together to remember.’ “I thought we could repeat it every year,” she says. “I mean, I know we’ll have left by the summer but some people who knew her have got another year and we could come back for it. An annual reunion.”

  This hike idea is bad enough once, but twice, three times? An annual event in the school calendar? Piling memory upon memory of Hanna. These people have the ability to forget and yet they want to keep remembering. I don’t get it.

  “The design’s great,” I say. Maya’s good at art, much better than me. I know what I want to draw but I don’t seem able to communicate that to my hand. Coleman took me to an exhibition by an autistic artist who can draw detailed cityscapes from memory. A true photographic memory coupled with the artistic talent to reproduce it. Something I could never do.

  “If you’re sure you’re OK with the T-shirts?” she asks again. She’s so needy. ‘I’ll order them now.”

  “Yes, good idea,” I say, sensing a chance to wrap this up and get her out of here. All I can focus on is the postcard, as if it’s written in ten-foot-high characters on a billboard, surrounded by flashing lights and arrows.

  Bodies Especially After Death Go Cold, Freya.

  After Maya leaves, I lock the door and wedge the desk chair up under the handle. I sit on my bed, hugging my knees, staring at the door, jumping at any footsteps in the corridor.

  Someone has been in my room. Someone wants to creep me out.

  And it’s working.

  14

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad

  ‘Remember’ – Christina Rossetti

  The mnemonic message is still staring at me from the noticeboard in the morning. I didn’t sleep well, half-listening for an intruder. Trying not to freak out. Lena didn’t help by scaring me half to death fumbling with my lock at three a.m., instead of her own one on the floor above.

  I look again at all the cards. The one I found at the shrine addressed to Hanna is plainly different from the ones given directly to me. Smart envelope, crisp cream card, sprawling cursive handwriting. I recall the creepy message signed HCC in the Book of Condolence and try to compare the styles in my head. One is a slanting italic written with an ink pen, one was written with the biro provided by the chaplain. They could be written by the same person in different ways, but then again… The bottom line is I can’t tell.

  I turn my attention to the postcards. Sent by somebody working their way through the pack of five, with neat, printed handwriting. Purchased in town, hand-delivered secretly, to my own room. Someone who can come and go unchallenged at college. Students here don’t tend to lock their doors, especially as many rooms are shared. It’s not that sort of place. ‘Holistic, caring, international.’ There’s security at the porters’ lodge at the gatehouse and a keypad at each accommodation block. But it’d be easy to walk in behind someone else, or watch them type the code. Could it be one of my so-called friends? Are Keira and Maya not as dopey as they seem? Have they been playing with my emotions all this time? Or is new-boy Dan too good to be true? And what about Mr Desai and his memory lessons? If Coleman’s doing it and knows I’m here, why is she putting up Missing Person fliers? She and Brett always liked to play games, but with a purpose. Is this them? I’m sick of all the questions with no answers. I curl up on the bed.

  Bodies Especially After Death Go Cold, Freya is the freakiest message yet. It refers to my past, Freya’s past. I’ve tried so hard to leave it all behind.

  Because Hanna’s wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen.

  The first one was my mum’s.

  I put what happened to Mum in the deepest locked room in the deepest basement of my mind-library. It has a different feel to my other memories – blurrier, harder to watch. Even so, it’s all too easy for it to seep out and be replayed in multicoloured detail over and over. I put my hands over my eyes but I know it doesn’t make a difference. I can still see it. I’ve replayed that scene a thousand times under lab conditions, describing it again and again. I see it every day. Mum talking with Coleman, stepping into the road. There was noth
ing the elderly driver could do. It was a red Range Rover. It matched Mum’s lipstick.

  At first I didn’t want to see Mum’s body in the hospital. The accident was bad enough to witness. I didn’t want another terrible memory that would last forever. Coleman broke the news that they couldn’t save her then she took me back to her smart house in Kensington. Even Brett was nice to me, helping me upstairs and laying me on the bed like an invalid. They gave me something to help me sleep.

  When I woke, I asked to see Mum’s body. Coleman was adamant it was a bad idea, too traumatizing. “Don’t put yourself through it, Freya,” she’d said. “You don’t want to remember her forever as a broken body on a hospital slab. Think of her as she was, with her fashionable clothes and her beautiful hair and her lipstick.”

  But I insisted. I didn’t want to think of Mum alone, on a pull-out drawer in a fridge in the hospital basement somewhere. I’ve seen the movies. We rowed about it. I said if I couldn’t see her one last time, I’d walk out of the house and go to the hospital and scream in the foyer until someone took me to her. Coleman said she’d pull some strings, arrange something at the hospital.

  She drove us there the next day. We took the lift from the underground car park. Coleman held my hand tightly, which was unlike her, but I guess even she has a heart at times. She took me down a grey corridor through double fire doors clicking shut behind us. Her lanyard and security card were magic keys opening locked doors while she walked briskly on, dragging me with her.

  I was expecting a chapel, called something dumb to make you feel better like the Chapel of Eternal Rest or the Chapel of Sweet Remembrance. But it turned out to be a depressing grey room with a chair and a window. A window into another, smaller, depressing grey room. Mum was lying in there. I could see her through the glass. I hadn’t seen a dead body, a dead person before. If you stare at them long enough you can swear they’re breathing, see things when there’s nothing to see. She had a sheet over her, pulled up to her chin, as though someone had tucked her in for the night. Although no one sleeps like that, do they? Fully clothed and lying flat on their back on a cold trolley.