The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  “Each step down is taking you deeper and deeper.”

  I’m giving in to it. I can feel myself descending.

  “And ten.”

  I’m in a fog. A muffled fog. A clock’s ticking loudly and then it chimes.

  “We’re going back to the day of the accident: September the twenty-first last year. Picture yourself first thing in the morning. Where are you?”

  “I’m in my bedroom at Coleman’s house in Kensington. It was easier for me to stay there so I didn’t have to travel so much from Mum’s.”

  “Good,” he says. “Describe that room.”

  “Everything is white: the walls, the furniture, the bedlinen. I’m a messy splodge of colour in her clinical home.”

  “What happens next?”

  “The doorbell rings. I hear the clack of Coleman’s heels in the hallway going to answer it. Brett’s due to drive me to the testing unit at the hospital so I get my bag together.”

  “And then?” His voice sounds so far away. My chest is tightening. I begin to speak more quickly, the words tumbling out.

  “I go down the stairs. The staircase is wide and grand with a polished wooden handrail. The hall has a tiled floor and a hat stand. The door to the study is shut but I can hear voices. Coleman and Mum. I didn’t know I was seeing Mum that day. I can’t wait to see her. I place my hand on the doorknob but I stop myself bursting in because their voices are raised. They’re arguing.”

  “What about?” asks the distant voice.

  “Me? Yes, they’re arguing about me. Mum’s angry. I hear snatches. She says: ‘What have you done? She’s changed – different – colder…’

  “‘Your daughter’s crucial to the whole Programme; the linchpin,’ says Coleman. She sounds furious. ‘Her remarkable memory is at the centre of everything we do and how we test our progress. You can’t pull her out.’

  “‘You may have all these fancy qualifications and everyone who works for you wrapped around your finger but that doesn’t work with me,’ shouts Mum. ‘My daughter is leaving with me today.’

  “I draw back from the door as Mum comes out. Her face is flushed. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and holds me again. She tells me calmly to get my things. Her red lipstick leaves a sticky trace on my cheek.

  “Coleman is saying she’ll think about scaling back my involvement, I could move back home sooner than planned. She’s asking Mum to go to the department office with her, to pick up her cheque. Mum’s hesitating, but Coleman says we have to all go, now, or she won’t get the final payment. Coleman says she’ll get Brett to drop my things off later. She goes to the study to phone him. Mum powders her nose, applies red lipstick. Her warpaint, that’s what she called it.”

  I try to squeeze my fists but I can’t feel my fingers properly. My heart’s pounding. Everything is blurry but it’s slowly clearing, coming into focus.

  “We open the blue door and turn left past the stucco-fronted houses and small front gardens with shiny black railings. Mum’s ahead of me; she’s talking to Coleman. They’re arguing again. They stop on the corner. A white car is moving fast past me. Coleman looks up and her arms move forward. Mum stumbles backwards into the road, into the car. The car was white. But now it’s red with Mum’s blood. It matches her lipstick.

  “Mum didn’t stumble for no reason.

  “Coleman pushed her.”

  34

  The truth comes out like oil on water.

  Yiddish proverb

  I want to get out of here. My heart’s going to split in my chest.

  “Bring her back!” someone shouts.

  Who? Who’s shouting? They’re so far away.

  I need to get up a ladder. I must climb up but I’m fumbling. It’s not a real ladder, I know that, but it feels like one, swaying under my weight. It’s not strong enough to take me back.

  A distant, frantic counting: “Ten, nine, keep going, Jess, eight, seven.”

  It’s not real. But Coleman’s following me up the ladder. How can she do that?

  It’s not real.

  Or is it real?

  Coleman’s hand fastens on my ankle and I fall back a rung. I’m shaking my foot and gripping the wooden sides.

  “Six!”

  “What’s wrong with her? What have you done?”

  I don’t like the shouting. Who’s shouting? Is it Coleman or Mum? I recognize the voice. Who is it? If I could only open my eyes properly. They’re so heavy. I’m so heavy, all of me. I could slip back down into the quiet and curl up in a ball. Back down there.

  “Jess! Get up the ladder. NOW.” Is that…? Is it Dan?

  I flick my foot and Coleman falls back. It’s not real. It’s not real.

  “Three, two, one and open your eyes!” Dr Harrison’s face is in front of me. I try to see my face reflected in his glasses but the room’s spinning. I grip the armchair to steady myself.

  “Jesus. You gave us a scare,” says Dan, kneeling beside me.

  Is this real now? Is this room back to real life? “What did I say?” I whisper. My voice sounds strange and husky, like it belongs to someone else.

  Dr Harrison wipes his face with his handkerchief. “Thank God,” he says. “Never ask me to do that again.”

  “I thought you were having a fit or something,” says Dan. “You went from slumped in the chair to kicking out.” He hands me a glass of water and I sip slowly, running my tongue over my dry lips.

  Harrison takes my pulse. “That’s better. Much better. How do you feel now?” He makes notes like a proper doctor.

  “Groggy. Like I’ve been to an all-night party and drunk neat vodka.”

  I hold out my hand. It’s still shaking gently. “That felt like hours. I must have said a lot.” I look at the clock: 6.20 p.m., which can’t be right.

  “You were in a deep trance for fifteen minutes. That’s all,” says Dan.

  “Which was far too long,” says Harrison. He opens up his desk drawer and pours himself a whisky. “For medicinal purposes,” he says, more to himself than to us.

  My legs feel strong enough to stand now. “I’m OK,” I say. “But did it work?”

  Dan nods. “Oh yes. I recorded it all.” He places his finger on his lips and tilts his head towards Harrison, who’s on his second glass of medicine.

  “Thank you, Dr Harrison,” I say, though I’m not sure he hears me, and we slip away from the room.

  *

  Dan’s played the recording. We sneaked him into my room again and I lay back on the bed in the dark to listen while he held my hand. It’s hard to take it in. I’m shaking. I’ve now finally seen the real memory: Coleman deliberately pushed and killed my mother. Those feelings are back, being numb and broken.

  “They must have manipulated your memory on the Programme afterwards to cover it up, used the cognitive vaccine,” says Dan. “Brett drives the car, Coleman pushes her. It’s insane.” He strokes my hair softly. “We should go to someone with this. The police?”

  I shrug him off and stand up. “With what? A recovered memory from a grieving, messed-up girl? Harrison said hypnosis is notoriously unreliable. And you haven’t met Coleman. She’s so plausible. She’s a leader in her field. No one would believe me over her.” I pace up and down the room trying to see a way forward. Does Desai know all this? Is this what he was pushing me to find?

  “She must have had help somewhere along the line, covering this up,” says Dan. “Maybe she paid people off, police officers even?”

  “She has ways of getting what she wants,” I say. “All the time.”

  “But to do that – pushing a living, breathing person into traffic,” says Dan.

  “It seems she took a quick decision to do it.” Am I making excuses for her? I don’t want to believe it was meticulously planned, deliberate.

  “Or maybe she always planned to do it but brought it forward when your mum kicked off. It’s so mad,” says Dan.

  “Agreed, but it enabled her to show that she can change a traumatic memor
y. That even a mind like mine can be manipulated with her techniques. It was to get rid of a problem – Mum – and to do the ultimate experiment.”

  “Win-win,” says Dan, doing air quotes with his fingers.

  “They’d already done all that research on the way memories are laid down and how to improve or disrupt that with reconsolidation therapies. The role of sleep, spatial games, drugs. They’d observed me.”

  “Observation. You know how it works with scientific method and experiments – we’re taught to use it ourselves.” Dan sits at my desk and grabs a clean sheet of paper. “Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, Conclusion.”

  I lean over his shoulder. “Hypothesis: Can even the girl with the best memory in the world, me, the perfect photographic and hyperthymestic memory, be made to forget something traumatic?”

  “Prediction,” says Dan. “If they can do it with you, they can do it with any memory. They can do it with anyone. That’s why you were so crucial to their research.”

  And why they’re looking for me again? The super-memory girl.

  “So they stage the ‘accident’, followed by weeks of ‘treatment’ and reconsolidation therapy,” I say. “And I was too shocked or drugged up to realize. The experiment in action.”

  Dan counts off down the paper: “So Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment and…”

  “Conclusion: it worked,” I say. “They can change memories. They can remember it for you.”

  “It worked at first,” says Dan. “Their methodology is flawed. There’s no control group. There’s only one memory girl. You.”

  “And I’ve always known something wasn’t right,” I say. “That memory wasn’t stable.”

  “Your mum suspected they were giving you something which had changed your personality – so there were definite side effects.”

  “From the cognitive vaccine,” I say. “A drug combination to change memories.”

  “Maybe for it to keep working, it requires ongoing medication,” says Dan. “It’s not a literal one-off injection. It’s a more complex combination of drugs…”

  “And procedures.”

  “You running away from the Programme stopped all that.”

  “As far as they’re concerned, it worked and I still don’t know what really happened,” I say. Part of me wishes that was still the case. It’s disturbing to know that a memory that felt so convincing, which I’ve grieved and obsessed over, is unreliable. “But I don’t want to make matters worse by Harrison turning detective or asking awkward questions.”

  “He was concentrating on trying to end it once you got agitated,” says Dan. “He was freaking out that he’d harmed you. You were speaking so quickly; without the recording and knowing the background, it wouldn’t have made much sense.”

  “Maybe. But I’d feel happier if I got my file off him.”

  “He shouldn’t have been doing hypnosis in the first place,” says Dan. “So he’s not going to own up, is he? And from what I hear, he’s got enough to worry about. His wife’s chucked him out and he’s sleeping at Mandela Lodge on the couch. He hides the bedding in the cupboard, Keira saw it.”

  Keira again.

  “We’ll get his notes somehow,” I say.

  Dan pulls me on to his lap and wraps his arms around me. “Are you going to be OK? Now that you know what they did to your mum?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say, my mouth dry.

  “And now that you’re mortal?”

  “Mortal?”

  “Turns out you’re not infallible, memory girl.”

  He’s right. My super-memory isn’t perfect. If memories make us who we are, what happens when those memories turn out to be false? Who am I now?

  “At least I know Mum was fighting for me,” I say. By leaving the Programme myself, I’d granted her wish. Her last wish. I’m unsteady still; the rug has been whipped away from under me. I close my eyes and sink my head on to Dan’s shoulder. We’re discussing this too rationally, like an actual science experiment in my biology paper on the diploma.

  Whatever the truth, the result’s the same. Mum’s still dead. But they caused it and now I need to fight for the truth for Mum too. Because I know what Coleman was doing and how she used me. And used Mum.

  After everything I did for them, I was just another lab rat.

  35

  Try the following memory exercise: Read each word once. Close the book and write down as many as you can remember:

  torch

  file

  bottle

  secrets

  drugs

  photos

  cigarettes

  lies

  Work Your Memory

  I’ve given Dr Harrison a full day to write up any notes on me – before I steal them back. Dan and I lurk in the courtyard waiting for him to leave Mandela Lodge for the lecture room. As expected, he leaves his room ten minutes before the start of the briefing on orienteering and map skills for the Hanna’s Hike participants. A box overflowing with maps balances awkwardly on his thigh while he locks the door.

  “Won’t he notice we’re missing?” whispers Dan.

  “We’ll be so quick, we’ll be there before he’s handed round the compasses,” I say. I do a final check that no one’s looking then point at the window which he always leaves slightly ajar for ventilation. It’s narrow but possible. Dan makes a stirrup with his hands and I push off him to reach the edge of the window frame while he supports my bottom from beneath.

  “Hurry up, you’re heavier than you look,” says Dan, swaying slightly.

  “Thanks a lot. And you’re not as strong as you look, wimp-bag,” I whisper back.

  The top window pushes open easily. The opening is tighter than it looked from the ground and I’m regretting wearing Hanna’s ridiculously chunky jumper and a gilet for this spot of cat burgling. Now I get why they wear figure-hugging catsuits in Mission Impossible movies.

  Dan shoves me from behind and I land with an inelegant thud on the floor of the office, knocking the cushions off the window seat on my way past. I pull the torch from my gilet pocket and scan the room. I am so Mission Impossible now, taking a mental snapshot so I can return everything to its original position before leaving. Dan’s peering in through the glass, misting it with his breath and I wave at him and do the scuba divers’ OK sign with my thumb and index finger.

  The big filing cabinet is locked. Dr Harrison must be taking patient confidentiality way more seriously since Ramesh Desai’s visit. I check his desk drawers carefully, looking for any small key. In the bottom one I find the whisky bottle, cigarettes and mouth spray.

  The books on his shelf have been moved since my last visit. I pull them out one by one and a key falls out of Proust. It opens up the cabinet and I quickly thumb through the file dividers. But there’s nothing relating to me filed under ‘J–K’, ‘W–Z’ or anywhere in the drawers. I’ve seen my file often enough in the counselling sessions – and I read it that night when the files were all over the place. It’s a buff cardboard folder with my name printed on a label in the top right-hand corner of the front edge and a doodle of a spider in the bottom corner. So where’s he put it?

  I remember Harrison and his nervous twitchiness about the whole hypnosis procedure. He cast a glance at the window when talking about my notes. I’d assumed he was checking no one was outside and able to hear us. But maybe it was more than that. I shine the torch over the window seat where I knocked off the cushions and tap the wood. It’s hollow, made from tongue-and-groove cladding. As I work my way along the front, pressing the panels, I hear a click and two of them swing open, revealing a bunch of papers. The top one’s my folder and I quickly scan what’s inside. He’s taken notes on what I said under hypnosis and in all the other counselling sessions. I remove the sheets of paper, ready to burn them later, and tuck them inside my gilet.

  The second folder has no label. Inside, clipped neatly together, are photos of Hanna, smiling out at me, together with handwr
itten notes of his sessions with her. Why’s he hiding this? He should have passed it all to the coroner when she died. But there’s one more thing I don’t expect to find: Hanna’s make-up bag, which was taken from my trunk. It was Harrison rooting through my private stuff.

  I check the contents and read the scrappy notes in her file. No wonder he wanted the bag. He’s more messed-up than I realized. There’s a black-edged correspondence card and envelope tucked at the back. Just like the one he must have left at the shrine: I know you didn’t jump written with his fancy pen in some mad gesture to Hanna. The card was never anything to do with me but everything to do with Dr Harrison and Hanna. And him trying to deal with what he’d done, with how he’d let her down. With guilt.

  I replace everything else exactly as I found it. The door’s locked so I have to make an undignified exit from the window again, using the window seat to reach up. I land like a terrible dance partner in Dan’s arms, pushing him to the ground.

  “Found what you wanted?” he asks, helping me up.

  “Yes,” I say, patting my pocket. And more.

  36

  There’s a pressing need to assist sufferers of PTSD to live with the terrible things they have experienced. But could that also assist the perpetrators to live with the terrible things they have done? The emotion ‘shame’ serves a useful purpose as a moral check on our actions. Even if we could do so, should we erase it?

  Bridge, L. (2014) ‘The Moral Memory Maze’

  Cognitive Neuroscientist Review, Vol 2, no 7, p.18

  It’s late. Harrison’s briefing went on and on. I borrow Lena’s lighter and burn the pages from my ‘counselling’ file outside on the terrace while the others are sorting out hot chocolates. I slip back inside the Common Room before I’m missed.

  “I could feel the life blood draining from me,” Dan says. “That’s two hours of my life I’ll never see again.”

  “Doing bearings and trig points is not my favourite way to spend an evening,” I say.