The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  “Steady on,” he says quietly. “Isn’t this a PDA?”

  Keira’s watching us, looking even paler. I guess her evening isn’t going to go the way she planned it.

  “Tart alert,” says Maya. Lena totters towards us in a very short and tight witch costume. Her legs go on and on and her bare shoulders and cleavage are dusted with glitter to catch the light. Makoto swallows as she taps him with her broomstick.

  “Boo!” Lena looks as if she’s going to eat him alive. “Do you like it? I got it from the Internet.”

  “Where, SluttyWitches.com?” says Maya.

  Lena finds this hilarious. But only Lena could make a cheap witch outfit look quite so Russian porn star. She’s had it customized, spelling out ‘Lena’ in crystals sparkling on the hem. A small mask covers her eyes and nose but leaves her pouty red lips on show. The clientele at the Fox and Badger won’t know what’s hit them. “I’m going to cast spells, yes, like Harry Potter.”

  “You have much better legs than Harry Potter,” says Keira. “And tits.”

  “Keira!” says Makoto.

  Lena bats at her with her broomstick.

  “What? We were all thinking it,” says Keira.

  “Now everyone’s finally here, I want to take photos,” says Maya and starts bossing us about into different poses. She’s in her element. I relax. You can’t actually tell it’s me. Even Callum wouldn’t know. And I don’t think even he inspects exam board art portfolios.

  I run in and out of the arches in the cloisters, wafting my veil, and scaring any passing students. I like flaunting my new earrings and bizarrely attractive zombie look to annoy Keira.

  “Trick or treat?” says Dan, pulling me behind a pillar and kissing me.

  “Was that a trick or a treat? I’m not sure,” I tease, kissing him again. I want to store it up, soak up the experiences, build happy memories. Laughter, desire, friendship, fun. Maybe life can take a different path for me. I’m not going to let some cheap postcards ruin tonight.

  Maya rallies us for a group photo and arranges us like an album cover for an indie group of misfits. She takes shot after shot. Flash-click. Flash-click.

  “I’d be happy messing about here all evening,” says Makoto.

  “Nonsense,” says Maya. “You need to experience a genuine English pub and a proper party. We’re all leaving at seven.”

  The others go back inside to have last trips to the loo or to get their coats and car keys but I stay outside in the darkness and walk towards the gatehouse. It’s a typical late autumn evening on Dartmoor with a chill in the air and the beginnings of a swirling mist. This place is made for Halloween. I can even hear footsteps running across the courtyard and the tawny owl adding to the atmosphere.

  The staff at the gatehouse are in a good mood with bags of fun-size sweets and foil-wrapped chocolate pumpkins to hand out to any callers. I sign us all out ready to go to the Fox and Badger, promising to be back by eleven, and not to drink any alcohol. As long as we all pretend that’s what’s going to happen, everything is fine.

  I head back through the gate and towards the courtyard to find the others. I can hear distant music – it must be coming from the Common Room. As I near the corner, I see a glow of light. Every candle at Hanna’s vigil is lit. There are many more than earlier, flickering in rows. So bright. The music’s coming from a portable CD player by the wall. I recognize it as one of the Scandi bands Hanna loved – haunting acoustic music sung in a mix of Swedish and English. It’s the “Missing Me Already” track on repeat play. Over and over.

  As I step back slowly, trying to put more distance between me and the shrine, I realize the new tea-light holders form a word: TRICK?

  Fairy lights are strung around a new framed photo of Hanna propped up against the wall. Hanna on stage in the play before I joined. Great Expectations. She looks so beautifully fragile, playing Miss Havisham. I didn’t know. I’m wearing her costume, now ragged and smeared with fake blood and cobwebs.

  Keira put me in Hanna’s costume.

  The photo of her creeps me out. The way it’s lit. She’s trapped in that frame looking out at me. I don’t want to look at her but I can’t take my eyes away. Keira taps me on the arm and I jump.

  “Gosh, Jess,” she says. “Who did this?”

  I shake my head in silence.

  Maya joins us, all staring at the spectacle, made brighter by the darkness all around. She steps through the candles carefully to switch off the music. She slips an arm round my waist. “Ignore it. It’s some peabrain’s idea of a ghoulish Halloween trick,” she says. “We’d better go before Barker thinks we’re anything to do with it and says we can’t go out. Come on. Don’t let it spoil your evening.”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” whispers Keira. “It’s like Hanna’s joining in tonight.”

  And I shiver in the cold air.

  27

  Sometimes our past comes back to haunt us.

  Principles of Memory – Professor A.E. Coleman

  We head off in the two cars, once Makoto has managed to remove his cumbersome scissor-hands gloves to drive. Maya and Keira complain as usual about the lack of space in the back of Uja, and Maya’s spooky sound-effects machine is getting on my nerves before we even reach the main road. She insists on using it at the end of every sentence. She’s in complete hyper-party mode. “Wait until you see my surprise tonight,” she says, pressing the scream sound again. It’s like seeing the shrine decked out has made her try too hard to have a good time and pretend we didn’t see it.

  *

  The Fox and Badger is plastered with tacky decorations but the carved pumpkins in the windows are pretty good. It’s the kind of eighteenth-century pub with inglenook fireplaces and low ceilings that does gloom and candlelight well. We take up position in the snug with our complimentary glass of a noxious green punch with floating jelly eyeballs, and a bowl of Monster Munch.

  “There’s a horror-movie quiz, a buffet at nine and then the disco,” says Maya.

  Dan squeezes on to the bench beside me with his soft drink. “Jess is an amazing dancer,” he says, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Ha ha. Very funny,” I say, but I actually do want to dance tonight. Whatever’s in this punch is loosening me up and I want to let my hair down, cut loose after what happened at the shrine.

  We send Lena, her ID and her generous allowance to the bar to get the first round. She’s causing a stir among the usual customers. Sherlock Holmes is hanging off her every word. A bunch of locals have come as the Scooby-Doo gang, and Daphne and Velma are shooting dirty looks at Lena, who’s lapping up the attention from Shaggy and Scooby.

  “He’s not made much effort, has he?” says Maya. A muscly guy in jeans and leather jacket wearing a skull mask is talking to the barmaid, showing her his ugly tattoos. She’s dressed as a black cat with painted-on whiskers and twirls her tail around from time to time. It feels strange that we’re out in the real world away from college; the adult world of pubs and nights out and chatting up strangers. Hanna’s never coming along. She’s not going to be a part of it; forever stuck at seventeen.

  Keira hands round the pens and paper and we get ready for the quiz. “I’m expecting you to be amazing at this,” Dan whispers to me. “I’ll write your answers down.”

  Lena and Makoto soon get bored of the questions and slope off for the kind of activity it’s hard to get away with back at the Dartmeet Common Room. We come second and win a plastic spider. An amazing photographic memory only works in a movie quiz if you’ve seen the movie in the first place and then hung around to read the credits.

  Dan fetches us more drinks. “Lena’s black-magic reputation has spread to the gents’ toilets. The Sherlock character was saying to a bloke in a skull mask that even Lena’s name is sexy as hell. I told them to back off, she’s got a boyfriend.”

  “She should be careful or she’s going to get Velma and Daphne chucking a pumpkin at her by the end of the night,” says Maya.

  �
��Lena’s used to tougher competition than those two,” says Keira. “Her dad’s Russian mafia, for sure.”

  *

  The buffet’s served on a trestle table near the fire. Hot dogs, burgers and chips, followed by red jelly or spidery cupcakes. It’s like a kids’ tea party but we’re hungry and I need to eat something to soak up the disgusting punch swilling around in my stomach. Makoto takes three of everything.

  “No toilet paper left in the ladies,” says Keira. “Someone’s used it all up as a mummy outfit.”

  “Was Lena in there?” I ask. “She’s missing the food.” She likes to eat. Lena’s one of those annoying people who can eat anything and still be a size eight.

  “Nope, but ‘Sherlock’ was all over a middle-aged woman dressed as the Hound of the Baskervilles. Gross.”

  “Where is she, then? It can’t take this long to put on more mascara.” I have an uneasy feeling. I look round the pub. Definitely not here. The old guys who were drinking pints seated at the bar have gone and there’s no sign of Scooby and co.

  I leave the others to their greasy burgers. “Back in a minute,” I say. “Leave some processed fat and E numbers for me.”

  I go outside to the beer garden and smoking shelter where the Scooby gang is huddled under the outside heater making roll-ups. “Have you seen my friend dressed as a witch?” I ask. “You were talking to her earlier.”

  “Perhaps she’s flown off on her broomstick,” says Velma, who’s sitting on Shaggy’s knee.

  Daphne laughs and takes a drag on her cigarette. “When you find her, tell her from me that she can clear off back to wherever she’s come from.”

  I’m outnumbered so I resist the temptation to argue with her and walk round to the front of the pub and the car park. Someone is shouting, shouting in Russian.

  “Lena? Hey?” I call. Two figures are grappling by the cars near the road. Our cars. And I start to run, tripping over my hem, shouting, “I’m coming!” in Russian.

  Lena’s screaming obscenities, whacking the other figure with her broomstick. He runs away as I get nearer, jumping into his big four-wheel drive, which has the engine running, and driving off with a screech of wheels as I reach her.

  She leans on her car, breathing heavily.

  “Lena? What the hell was that?”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I went to the car to get my mascara. Some guy grabs me from behind. He’s strong but I know what to do. Papa sent me on anti-kidnap training. I stamped on his foot with my stiletto heel, then elbow in the groin and fist up to the chin. One, two, three.” She re-enacts it for me, her eyes blazing. “Then while he’s bent double I smacked him on the head with this.” She holds out the two halves to show me. “He broke my new broomstick.”

  I’ve always dismissed Lena as a selfish, rich airhead but she’s much cooler than I thought. In the event of any trouble, I’d want her on my side.

  Lena takes off her shoe and inspects her heel for any damage. “I tried to gouge out his eye too with my false nails but he had a mask.”

  “A skull mask?” I ask.

  “Yes, like a skeleton. Should I tell the barman or maybe the police?”

  I remember the guy in the jeans and leather jacket who was sitting at the bar earlier. I don’t want the police here, questioning us all, taking names and addresses, working out that my Jess Wilson details don’t match up. “He’s gone now,” I say. “You taught him a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.”

  “I agree,” she says. “I think he thought I was someone else – an old girlfriend maybe. And look at me. If I complain no one takes a girl dressed like this seriously.”

  “That’s not true,” I say, but it probably is. I don’t want skull-mask guy to get away with it, but still less do I want the police involved. Could it be to do with me somehow, with Callum? But why would they target Lena?

  “I’m not reporting it,” says Lena, to my relief. “If Barker gets to know, she’ll tell my family, and they’ll freak.” She laughs. “He looked up and saw a scary Russian zombie bride coming to my rescue. He ran away like a coward. Lowlife scumbag. It’s nothing.”

  She readjusts her mask and dress, and arranges her boobs for maximum impact. “Don’t tell the others – I don’t want to ruin everything. Makoto’s a sweet old-fashioned guy and he’ll be upset he didn’t save me himself. But we have girl power.” She high-fives me. She leans on my shoulder to refasten her impossibly high-heeled shoe, which I now know is a useful defensive weapon, and takes my arm as she totters back towards the pub. “I didn’t even put my mascara on after all that.”

  I squeeze her arm. “Lena, you are my new feminist icon with or without it.”

  *

  The others are dancing already. Maya’s rooted to the spot in her fishtail dress but managing to sway in time to the music while Keira’s wasted no time in taking over the middle of the floor with her full vamp act. Makoto’s face lights up when he sees Lena and she leads him to the dance floor.

  Dan grabs my hand and twirls me around. “You missed the “Time Warp”. Where’ve you been?”

  “Nowhere,” I say. “Just getting Lena.”

  “I thought you’d forgotten me,” he teases, moving in closer to be heard over the music.

  “You know I’d never do that.”

  Lena blows me a kiss. “Let’s party.”

  28

  Because I’m not gonna let you forget

  I know how things used to be

  Are you missing me, missing me, missing me already?

  ‘Missing Me Already’ – Silent Fjords

  “Shush,” says Maya loudly. “Are you ready for my secret surprise?” She’s had way too much vodka to speak quietly. She stumbles on the cobbles and Keira takes her arm. “The pavement’s gone all wibbly wobbly,” she says. “It’s this way, come on.” She presses the sound-effects machine: ‘Duh duh duh duh duuuuuh’ followed by a wolf howl.

  She opens the door to A-Block and shoos us all up the stairs. The third floor.

  I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that we’re heading for room thirty-one.

  The room I shared with Hanna.

  Maya opens the door and switches on the lights. It looks like an ordinary room waiting for its occupants. Two beds, two desks and chairs, a shared bookcase and two wardrobes. Two little bedside lockers next to each other like twins. No belongings. Bare duvets rolled up on a bare mattress with two plain pillows.

  The room is symmetrical – you could slice it down the middle between the lockers. But there are differences: sticky marks on the walls where Hanna used to have posters of her favourite bands; dents on her desk where she dropped her hairdryer; scratches on her bedside locker where she kept her many pills and potions.

  There’s a shiny new lock on both windows, so they can’t be opened more than a couple of inches. So that no one can fling the window wide open, sit on the sill and talk about flying, and then crash three floors down.

  I lean on the doorframe. I can remember the smell of her – the verbena shower gel, the deodorant, the liquorice sweets her parents sent her from home. I can hear her breathing at night, throwing up and running the taps to hide it, speaking in Danish on the phone to her family. A thousand memories crowd in, playing rapidly on top of each other.

  Maya pulls out a wooden board from under Hanna’s old bed. “Surprise!” she says in a loud whisper.

  “What is it? A game?” asks Makoto.

  The One Who Remembers Most Wins the Game.

  “A Ouija board,” says Maya, like she’s uncovered a treasure chest from under the bed.

  “It’s to contact the spirit world and get messages from the other side,” says Keira.

  “This is the perfect place to do it if we want to talk to Hanna.” Maya drags a bedside locker into the centre of the room and places the board on top of it.

  “On the perfect night,” adds Keira.

  “Is this…?” Dan looks at me. “Is this Hanna’s room? Your old room?”

 
; I nod. I feel sick. I might actually puke.

  Maya and Keira kneel on the floor on opposite sides of the board. “This is the pointer or planchette,” says Maya. She’s holding it up as if she’s in the board game café in Exeter explaining how to play Settlers of Catan. “It can point to any of the letters of the alphabet written across the board, or the numbers, or the words ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in the corners.”

  “Or ‘Goodbye’ at the bottom,” adds Keira. She sets the torch function on her phone and switches off the lights. Makoto takes the pillows from ‘my’ bed and puts them on the floor for him and Lena.

  “Are you mad?” asks Dan, his eyes flashing. “Ouija boards are not to be messed with.”

  “Chill, Dan,” says Lena. “It’s a bit of fun – scary fun for Halloween.”

  “Hanna would have been the first in the queue to play it, wouldn’t she, Jess?” says Keira.

  I nod. That’s true. In fact, she’d have loved this whole evening with the costumes and fog and a seance.

  “Play? It’s not a game,” says Dan. “I’m not staying. Jess?” He opens the door and waits for me.

  But something stops me from joining him. I owe it to Hanna somehow to stick around for whatever happens, and not abandon her to Keira and Maya’s game. Maybe I need to play it, try to win the game, whatever it is.

  “It’s my old room,” I say, kneeling down next to Maya. “I’m staying.”

  The five of us rest a finger each on the planchette.

  “It’s a big mistake,” says Dan. He waits at the door for another minute, still expecting me to join him, but I don’t, and he leaves. His footsteps fade away down the corridor. Should I have gone with him?

  I tell Maya to get started.

  “First we need some more of this,” she says, handing round the vodka bottle. “I should have made cocktails, like Hanna used to do.”