The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  “Want to pick up some balls while I cool down?” he says, playfully throwing me one.

  “No, not really,” I say, throwing it back at him. “The testing wouldn’t show anything now according to Harrison, but he wasn’t very helpful. He’s ill.”

  “He’s looked rough lately,” says Dan. “Keira said he got chucked out of his last school.”

  “Keira’s a gossip,” I say. I don’t add what I know about Dr Harrison. I prefer to keep that information to myself.

  “So what’s next on the agenda of the Memory Club?” He puts his racquet back in his tennis bag and pulls out his water bottle, offering me some.

  I shake my head. “The accident that killed my mum. There’s something not right about it but I don’t know what. I replayed it so much in the Programme but it’s blurry in my head. Fragmented. Normally I see things so clearly.”

  “OK. If you agree to go to the beach with me tomorrow. The Memory Club outing.”

  That sounds like a date. Walking hand in hand along the sand, a sunset, a romantic picnic, lying together on a blanket in the dunes… “Agreed,” I say, before I can change my mind.

  “So what are we looking at today?” he asks.

  “Now?”

  “Why not? Nice bench, nice view, no one here.” Dan pulls a notebook out of his bag, sits down and pats the seat beside him.

  I stretch out my legs along the bench, leaning back against his side. I squeeze a tennis ball and toss it from one hand to the other while I think. “I learned from my trawl of documents at Coleman’s house that she was a lot richer than she looked. She was getting huge payments into her accounts from overseas banks.” I don’t mention the cash and the share I took to tide me over.

  “Lucky her.”

  “And tucked within all that she had a police report of the accident. That’s what I want to reread.”

  I close my eyes to concentrate on the relevant folder and pull out the report. I work down to the main paragraph.

  “The vehicle involved was a Range Rover Evoque, registration BA64 TYR. It was travelling at a speed estimated to be 25 mph within the 30 mph speed limit but, given the size and weight of the vehicle, the pedestrian was struck with considerable force.”

  I squeeze my eyes tighter, trying to block out the image of Mum replaying in my head.

  “The Witness Statement from Andrea Coleman, Professor of Neuroscience at Queen Elizabeth II College, University of London, confirmed that the pedestrian stepped without warning into the oncoming traffic, being distracted by looking at her phone. Professor Coleman was judged to be an extremely credible and reliable witness, who went on to give emergency first aid.

  “On examination, the nearside headlight and vehicle wing were damaged in the collision, the white paintwork being considerably scratched.

  “Despite the severity of the injuries suffered, there was no evidence of careless or reckless driving on the part of the driver, particularly given the pedestrian’s negligence in stepping into the road without warning, as witnessed by Professor Coleman. No prosecution recommended by the CPS.”

  “White paintwork?” says Dan. “You said the car was red.”

  I swing round to face him. “Yes, definitely red. It matched her lipstick in a macabre way. It’s always stuck in my head.”

  “The report must be wrong then,” he says. “The police filled out the form wrongly.”

  But I can feel that there’s something I’m missing. I look at the scene in my head, play it in slow motion. “The car was definitely red. And I really don’t remember a phone. Mum wasn’t on her phone – she was talking to Coleman.”

  “So why would Coleman lie about the phone to the police? Did she make a mistake?”

  I think of the postcards. Things are Seldom What They Seem. Someone wants me to find out what happened for sure. “Was the car red or white? Who’s right – me or the police accident report?”

  Dan drums his fingers on the arm of the bench then gets out his tablet.

  “Because if it’s not me, if the car really was white, then…”

  “Your amazing memory has made a mistake.”

  My memory doesn’t make mistakes.

  “We can check with the car licensing authority: the DVLA,” says Dan, tapping at his tablet. “I had to do all this stuff when I got Uja.”

  I watch over his shoulder as he scans through the guidance notes.

  “With the registration we can see what make and model it is, how old, petrol or diesel and what colour it is.”

  “Can we find out the name of the driver – the owner?” I ask. “Because they could tell us what happened.”

  “Not so easily,” says Dan. “To get the registered keeper of the vehicle I have to fill out a complicated form and I’m not sure we’re even entitled to the information. But you’re right, it’s a good idea to try to speak to the driver.”

  “If she’s happy to talk to us.”

  “It’s a start. Now, let’s find out the colour.”

  Dan types in the registration BA64 TYR from the accident report and the make: Range Rover. The details come up instantly and we scan down to vehicle colour.

  White.

  “White?” I run through my mind-library, down to the single-padlocked room for that day. I rip off the lock. In the centre of the room on a repeat loop is my recollection. Parts are blurred and crackling. It jumps forward, buffers. But the car is red. And again and again. “I don’t understand, Dan. We replayed it in the lab incessantly. She studied my brain and the flashbacks.” I look out at the gardens and moor beyond to calm myself. “It was a red Range Rover. It matched the lipstick. It matched the blood.”

  “Could they have changed it in the lab?” asks Dan.

  My mind flips to the postcards back in my room. Things are Seldom What They Seem. The past is not fixed. The accident is not what I thought it was. History is What We Choose to Remember.

  23

  With an aging population increasingly falling victim to Alzheimer’s, research on memory is becoming even more important.

  Principles of Memory – Professor A.E. Coleman

  The landscape gradually changes as we leave Dartmoor behind and head for the sea. We drive through quaint villages with whitewashed houses and pubs, as the lanes become narrower.

  “The beach? In this weather?” Maya had said. “It’s nearly November.” But she didn’t want to miss a chance of a brief escape from Dartmeet College, and she and Keira are joined at the hip like annoying twins you can’t shake off, so we’re all rammed into the Mini with beach mats, towels, a Frisbee, and the tiny boot full of Maya’s photographic equipment. I’d thought it was going to be me, Dan and the sunset but now I think he wanted a break from the intensity of having a memory freak for a sort-of girlfriend.

  It’s freezing and blustery. The sand’s rolling across the windswept beach. I pull up my scarf to cover my mouth and nose, glad I took it from the laundry room. It’s one of many expensive items belonging to Lena that she can’t be bothered to retrieve. We have a half-hearted game of Frisbee. We soon grow tired of chasing the spinning red disc down the beach and stopping it from going in the water.

  Maya shrieks as we run in and out of the sea. Our feet are numb in minutes. Dan drags me, laughing, back to the water and a bigger wave splashes up my rolled-up jeans before I can get out of the way. “I’ve got freezing wet jeans for the rest of the day,” I say.

  He laughs. “You can always take them off. I don’t mind.”

  “And freeze to death? No thanks.”

  Keira starts singing, “Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside,” at the top of her voice to be heard over the crashing waves. Maya and Dan join in. They dance around me, splashing and yelling.

  “You’re all terrible singers,” I shout, trying to be part of the fun. But all I can think about is the accident playing on a repeat loop. Red or white car? White or red? Did they disrupt my memories? What’s the real truth of it all?

  Dan scoops Keira up and carries
her further into the sea, pretending he’s going to chuck her in. “One, two, three.” She shrieks with laughter and hangs even tighter round his neck. Maya goes to her rescue, splashing Dan with big kicks of water and the three of them tumble into a heap on the sand.

  “Sand angels. Go!” says Maya.

  They’ve regressed to six-year-olds. They giggle, moving their arms up and down on the wet sand, making shapes. They all get to enjoy the present, just as it is. But for me the past hangs like a millstone around my neck and I find it harder some days than others to shrug the weight off. I stand to one side, making a circle in the sand with my toe, driving my hands into the warmth of my pockets.

  “I’m going to the car for a blanket,” I say. “I’m cold.”

  Dan cups his hand to his ear. “What?”

  I shout it again, over the noise of the waves.

  “We’ll see you at the top,” mouths Dan.

  I turn back towards the car park. Dan gets a proper break from the Memory Club. He can always walk away from it and play sand angels. I’m stuck in it forever.

  *

  “This way, darling.” An elderly man leads his wife down the steep steps. I stop to let them go first.

  “Are we going to make a big castle?” she asks. She’s as frail as a sparrow, spindly legs and thin arms, dressed in a flowery sundress under a thick winter coat and a woolly hat. A strong gust of wind could blow her over.

  “A castle as big as you,” he says. “And then we’ll have ice creams.”

  “Is Mummy coming? And Daddy?”

  “Er, they’re coming later,” he says. “You need to build the castle first.” He hands her a bucket and she tiptoes excitedly across the sand, twirling the handle.

  He meets my eye. “Alzheimer’s,” he says. “She thinks she’s a girl again. But at least she’s happy today. Not agitated.” And then he’s gone, hurrying after the shadow of his wife. I sit on the bottom step, drying my damp feet on a sandy towel, watching them as they make a sandcastle on the cold beach.

  I walk slowly back to the car park and get the blanket. I sit by the kiosk in the only sheltered spot, picking idly at the neat stitching on the name tape on the scarf. I think about the woman trapped in her childhood, the confusion she must feel when her parents, long dead and gone, don’t show up. The more her disease picks away at her memory, the more she vanishes. I don’t want to disappear like that. Will that happen to me too when I get old or will my memory always be ‘extraordinary’? I’ve just had a taste of what it’s like for your memory to let you down, to make mistakes. Red/white, white/red. And I don’t like it at all. I shiver and pull the blanket tighter across my shoulders.

  “Cold?” says Dan, surprising me from behind with freezing hands placed over my eyes. “I’m getting Maya’s camera stuff so she can take some wild nature shots. Then we’ll head back, now that I know you’re not going to go skinny-dipping.” He tries to slide his ice-cold hands up the back of my top but I push him off.

  “I don’t have a death wish,” I say. “I thought you’d be straight in the sea, coming from Cornwall. Don’t you all get surfboards issued by the council at birth?”

  “Ha ha. If I had my board, wetsuit and decent surf, I’d have been in, townie. You’ll see in the holidays. I’ll teach you. Get you out of that pool. That’s something where I’m going to have the edge over you, memory girl. You need some of these for starters.” Dan flexes his muscles and places my hand on his biceps. It’s not a bad place for them to be and I can feel a twinge of a smile. “That’s better,” he says, kissing my neck and grinding his cold nose into the warm patch under my chin.

  “Dan! Are you coming?” Keira’s standing there, arms crossed, ready to spoil my fun.

  He unfolds and twirls away. He has a lightness about him here. The seaside is his natural habitat. He belongs.

  Unlike me.

  *

  We squabble in the car on the way back about the choice of music. Dan whacks up the poxy heater full blast but my jeans are still damp. Maya and Keira talk about their gap-year plans. Maya wants to visit the national parks in the US and take photographs, Keira wants to teach English in Japan and I… I don’t know what I want to do, what I can do, so I keep quiet until Maya prods me from the back seat and demands to know.

  “The usual,” I say, brushing her off. “Chalet girl in the winter, backpack around Asia.” I invent a whole parallel universe for myself where Jess can be anything she wants to be. “College in the US. Somewhere sunny with old buildings and a diner. Maybe I’ll join the cheerleading team.”

  “Yeah, right. Hilarious,” says Keira. “You know you’d have to cheer people on?”

  “I can see you with pompoms and a cute little pleated skirt,” says Dan, cracking up.

  “I don’t know why you’re all laughing,” I say.

  Even my fantasy life doesn’t seem to work.

  “I need to pee, Dan,” says Maya. “Stop in Totnes, will you? My bladder can’t take any more.”

  He parks up near the castle and we pile out of the Mini, agreeing a time to meet for chips. We split off to find loos or run errands. Dan goes in search of a cash machine and I decide I need a proper coffee.

  I head down the hill towards the Italian place with bicycles attached to the walls as art. I pause on the pavement outside. A guy sitting in the window is studying me intently. He must be weighing up the haircut and colour change and allowing for the hat and scarf. But I know him, despite the nearly two years that have passed: the goatee and his baseball cap and dark glasses. My brain has instinctively looked at his earlobes, the dimple on his chin, the shape of his eyebrows, the dark curly hair escaping the hat; calculated the distance between his nose and his cheekbones, and drawn conclusions. And while my brain is busy processing, my stomach’s been churning with anxiety and circulating bile so that I want to throw up.

  I last saw him in London. I poured a can of Coke over him and his precious gadgets in the recreation room. He was annoyed but I can’t be held responsible for the phosphoric and citric acid content of a fizzy drink ruining his laptop. And then shortly afterwards I was switched to the more selective part of the Programme and I never saw him again.

  It’s Callum, the best super-recognizer on the Programme. So just what is he doing here in the middle of nowhere?

  24

  The brain has evolved to be extremely adept at processing and recognizing facial features, though undoubtedly some people are better than others at facial recognition.

  Principles of Memory – Professor A.E. Coleman

  There’s no point pretending I haven’t seen him and he hasn’t realized who I am, even though I’m tired of my life being a Jason Bourne movie. So I march right in and sit at Callum’s table.

  “You look ridiculous in that get-up,” I say. “It’s October in Devon not July in the Bahamas.”

  “Hello, Freya,” he says. “Charming as ever. Loving the new hair.”

  “Fancy seeing you here,” I say. “Is it to beg for my forgiveness in standing me up 719 days ago?”

  “Jesus, no one bears a grudge like you can. I explained at the time but you went postal about it.” He moves his coffee away from me and grips on to it. Just in case.

  Callum was always excellent at faces but crap at remembering other stuff like what time he was meant to meet me at the cinema, or whether I prefer sweet or salty popcorn (sweet). He loved that his type had a cool name: the super-recognizers. He always said it with a deep American accent, with his hands on his hips and chest thrust forward, like something from a Marvel comic or a film. Like the film he stood me up for. I can still feel the pity of the girl on the ticket desk when Callum didn’t turn up that night. I’ve replayed that evening so many times with all its emotional punch, all the more acute because I was a naïve fifteen-year-old with a dumb crush. This is what happens when you expect things from people, fall for people. They let you down.

  “The Programme’s not the same since you left,” he says. “She had to shut d
own parts of it.”

  “And yet here you are, playing the ‘Guess Who’ game with me, in glasses and a hat.”

  “You’re so patronizing, Freya,” he says. “You always did think you were so much better than the rest of us. I’m being paid now. I earn good money, I travel.”

  “To Devon? Wow! Exciting! Are you in the Met unit with the other obsessives?”

  “I’m way beyond that. There’s serious shit happening now.” He takes a mouthful of coffee as if he’s a big shot. “The things I’m asked to do: you wouldn’t believe. It’s not looking for shoplifters and football hooligans.”

  I know he wants to tell me, to show off his usefulness, especially to me, the star pupil he could never match up to.

  “I’ve been using high-tech facial-recognition software to filter images. People like me, like us, are helping to develop it,” he says. “But lately I’ve been looking through CCTV and web images for you.”

  “I’m touched,” I say, but inside I’m panicking. My last stupid hope that he just happened to be here on holiday vanishes. He is here looking for me. Finding me.

  I wiped out every photo of me that the Programme had, every piece of paper and back-up file I could locate. I’ve stayed off social media, been so careful around any cameras.

  “They said you’d change your appearance.”

  They?

  “But I knew you instantly.” He holds my gaze and puckers up his lips. I feel the heat in my cheeks and am annoyed with myself for letting him get to me, and for showing him he has. I remember kissing him, of course I do. He was the first boy I’d kissed.

  “I had a lucky break this week,” he says. “CCTV taken down here a few weeks ago. I thought it might be you, though you’ve definitely changed. Blossomed.” His eyes flick down to my chest. “So I came to have a poke around but I never expected I’d end up meeting you for a coffee. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

  I force myself to ask the question: “Why are they looking for me?”